Biblical Hebrew Forum

[James Read <J.Read-2 AT sms.ed.ac.uk>]

Hi,

Quoting Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>:

> On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 10:40 AM, James Read wrote:
>
> > However, I keep calling to mind that Jesus was executed on the Preparation
> > of that year, which was a Friday, and asking myself whether that was a day 6
> > of the week because it just fell that way that year or whether it fell that
> > way every year. Could it possibly be that we have no primary source evidence
> > from that period in Jewish history?
>
> We actually have a lot of primary source evidence in the DSS.  Coming by
> texts that specifically describe the calendar system in use is rare.  
>   But in the
> DSS we find all kinds of texts dealing with calendar systems.  Because of
> the need to justify their system against others in use we find discussions of
> competing systems (such as the lunisolar and the 360 day = 12 x 30 day
> calendar).  Also, even the wiki page you quoted (really, wiki is not  
>  dependable
> at all!), references the source document for the particular sentence  
>  you quoted
> -- Tosefta Sanhedrin 2:2.  And it provides another book reference:
> Sacha Stern's "Calendar and Community."  The Tosefta along with the Mishna
> is a 3rd century compilation of traditions from the 1st and 2nd centuries CE.
> (Very rarely do these traditions go back to the early 1st century   
> CE, though).

Now, that's interesting to know. Thanks for that.

> Regarding the date of Jesus' death, I would suggest taking your question here
> over to a different list such as Biblicalist or Biblical-Studies, both
> yahoo groups.
> (And may I suggest, be concise and focused in your question and let the
> discussion develop from there).  I personally would doubt that the   
> NT's author
> actually knew Jesus' date of death.  It seems to me more likely that the
> author was working from an early tradition that commemorated the death,
> and had no direct information on the actual date.

That's a good suggestion but the problem there is that it then becomes  
a debate over the date that Jesus died which is not my original  
intention. My intention is to understand the calendar/s used  
throughout Jewish history from Genesis onwards and the consideration  
of the various authors' opinion of when Jesus died was just one line  
of evidence I thought worthy of consideration. It was a 'means' rather  
than an 'end'.

Who wrote the four accounts of his death, when an why are not all that  
relevant (in my view). What is relevant is that they all report the  
day after the passover as being the Sabbath of that 7 day week.  
Another item of relevance is that both the author of Colossians and  
the author of Isaiah saw a definite link between new moons, sabbaths  
and feast days. At the very least this would imply that the 'new moon'  
is explicitly viewed as some kind of holy day by these authors. In  
fact, the agenda of the author of Colossians is to prevent the  
Judaizing of his disciples. So this would show that those who were  
doing the Judaizing viewed the new moon as a holy day for some reason  
and were trying to force the gentile Christians to respect and observe  
such a tradition. By extension, it would be a logical conclusion that  
in the first century and maybe even in the second century the new moon  
was considered, by mainstream Jews, as a holy day.

Your consideration of Noah's calendar is something I need to look into  
a bit further, though.

James Christian

> Yitzhak Sapir
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