C2: John 1:14 | Gospelofcreation1

Commentary #2: John 1:14, Zechariah 14:16 & Luke 1:5

The following is a copy of a letter I recently sent to a friend who had argued in favor of the belief that Jesus was born on the first day of the Festival of Tabenacles. It has been amended slightly to adjust the content to this format and to address a wider audience. (And for any who are interested, links for the "sources" that are mentioned in the first paragraph of this commentary can be found at the end).

PART 1: Why Luke 1:5 does not support the 1 Sukkot / Nativity Hypothesis

Mary-Frances

First let me thank you for the sources you provided, But having now reviewed them, I’m afraid I am going to have to continue to respectfully disagree with your position that Jesus was born on the first day of Sukkot. And if I misstate that position in explaining why, please correct me, but this is my understanding. It seems to me to be based primarily on two Scriptures along with what some assert is supporting evidence from a third. Those Scriptures are …

John 1:14, which, when literally translated, reads, “the Word became flesh and tabernacled [not dwelt] amongst us.”
And Zechariah 14:16, which prophesies that the Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkot) will one day be celebrated by people of faith all over the world.

And the alleged support comes from Luke 1:5-38, in conjunction with 1 Chronicles 24:3-19, which tell us …

that John the Baptist was born 6 months prior to Jesus,
that John the Baptist’s father, Zechariah, was a Levite priest of the ancestral House of Abijah,
that on the 8th week of a cyclic 24-week service schedule established during the time of King David, a priest from the House of Abijah was chosen by lot to service the Tabernacle of the Temple,
and that the angel Gabriel announced John’s miraculous conception to his father, during his service week in the Temple for the House of Abijah.

The Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus, also adds that a typical service week started and ended at noon on the Sabbath (Antiq. 7,14,7). Presumedly then all one would have to do to figure out the approximate day John, and his cousin, Jesus, were born, is find one piece of solid evidence telling us the exact week any of the 24 Houses served in the Temple and then back calculate. So for Christians this is an intriguing riddle, because it makes little sense to people of faith that the Holy Spirit would have inspired Luke to include that bit about Abijah if it wasn’t to be treated as some sort of a clue.

What I am seeing, though, from all the claims being made by those who’ve dug into this, is that it’s being used rather to corroborate dates they’ve already determined by other means. And this appears to me to be what the advocates for the 1 Sukkot / Nativity hypothesis are doing. Building on the solid scriptural foundation just laid out together with Exodus 23:14, which mandated that everyone make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem 3 times per year to observe the 3 annual harvest cycle festivals; Pesach (aka the Feast of First Fruits or Passover), Shavuot (aka the Feast of Weeks or Pentecost) and Sukkot, they have added the following assumptions …

that since the Law required they be there anyway, priests from each of the 24 ancestral Houses served in the Temple during the 3 harvest cycle festivals,
that this caused an interruption in the regular Temple service schedule and necessitated the addition of 3 special weeks of Temple service each year,
and with each new liturgical year (commencing on 1 Nisan) the Temple service schedule rebooted, with the 1st Course taking the 1st week, the 2nd Course taking the 2nd week, and so on.

But I've not been able to find ancient corroboration for any of these assumptions (in your sources or elsewhere). And the only justification I've seen is what many might regard as coincidental, that 2 cycles + 3 holiday weeks = 1 standard 51-week Hebrew calendar year. Nevertheless, assuming for the moment they are true, it does seem to support the hypothesis. It purports that, if 1 Sukkot was Jesus’s birthday, since it is always celebrated on the 15th day of the 7th month (Tishri), it places Mary’s assent to be His mother (assuming a roughly 9-month gestation) at somewhere around the middle of the 10th month (Tevet). And with John the Baptist being 6 months older than Jesus, that places his conception somewhere around the middle of the 4th month (Tammuz).

But in looking at the Temple schedule (and adding in the 2 holiday weeks that seem to fall in between the 1st and 8th Courses) that fixes the angel’s announcement of John’s birth to the 10th week after 1 Nisan, which would put it in the middle of the 3rd month (Sivan), and roughly 1-month shy of the target in the middle of the 4th month. So to close that gap, I see 3 more assumptions being made.

Jesus’s gestation period is slightly inflated, by about 1 week, to 280 days.
6 solar calendar months (at 183 days) are used rather than 6 Hebrew calendar months (at 177 days) as the age difference between Jesus and John.
And after being informed (by an angel from heaven, no less), that their prayers for a child were, at long last, going to be answered, John the Baptist’s parents are assumed to have waited another 2 weeks to get around to doing their part.

And viola, it now fits perfectly with the proposition that Jesus was born on 1 Sukkot! The timeline, Figure C2.1 linked below, provides, I think, a better idea of how it shakes out.

And the first thing that might jump out at you when reviewing this timeline is that, although it was claimed there are two holiday weeks between the 1st and 8th Courses, closer scrutiny shows there would more likely be one. So there’s a hint of some deception at play. But either way, whether there’s a gap of 3 weeks or 2, there is a lot of assuming and massaging of data going on to get it to conform to a pet theory. And from my experience working with numbers, authentic mathematical corroborations do not need to be tortured, like this one, into existence. When done right, with no interference from expectation of outcome, they simply appear naturally. And this lack of acuity seems to be the main reason this solution is not universally accepted. But if that is not enough there are also some very big problems with the initial assumptions.

A standard Hebrew calendar year is not 51 weeks long. It is actually more like 50 weeks and 3 days. This suggests that priests from the 24th House would serve on average 4 fewer days per year than all the others. And that is not a fair distribution.
And on leap years, where another 4 weeks (approximately) are added to the calendar, it becomes even less fair, suggesting that the first 4 Houses would each be taxed to serve an extra week on those years.
As to the holidays, even if a priest from all 24 Houses was required to serve in the Temple on those days (which the Bible does not specifically say) Pesach is the only holiday that is exactly 7 days. Sukkot is 7+1 days when its closing ceremony, Shmini Atzeret, is included. And Shavuot is only 1-day duration. Without Scripture to corroborate, it again seems very unlikely that all the priests, but one, would be dismissed after 7 Sukkot, or that all would have to serve 6 additional days for Shavuot.
And the holidays start on Saturdays only about once every 7 years. The same goes for the 1st day of the year (1 Nisan). That would have the effect, I think, of really messing things up.

In summary, then, of the 1 Sukkot / Nativity hypothesis, I can definitely see how someone might be persuaded to believe, from Scripture, that Jesus was born on 1 Sukkot. And I can also see how in taking that position someone (myself included) might even feel that the calculations made regarding the Temple service schedule support the hypothesis. In stepping back, however, to where there is no preconception as to when Jesus was born, I really cannot see, anyone arriving at that date independently, except maybe by chance. There are just too many uncorroborated assumptions that needed to be made to get there. And I’d wager from just the research I’ve done, that using the same number of uncorroborated assumptions and fudge factors one could bend the data to support pretty much any hypothetical date for Jesus’s birth. In other words, the solution seems kind of worthless.

PART 2: What a real corroboration from Luke 1:5 should look like

But as you know, it has been my contention that it is John the Baptist, not Jesus, who was born on 1 Sukkot. So I was overjoyed when you reminded me of Luke's Abijah statement, because it provided me another opportunity to test my theory. I did not know where it would lead, but from what I’d learned in studying the solution you were advocating for, I now, at least, had a very good idea how not to proceed. That is to say, there would have to be far less reliance on assumptions if there was going to be any confidence in the outcome. And in taking that approach I felt that the simplest, and therefore most logical, system for determining when each of the Houses would serve is one that was not forced to start over every new year and one where the holidays had no influence on the schedule. That would eliminate all the issues just listed and all the corresponding assumptions, as well.

More importantly, though, I soon found out that there actually is an ancient tradition in support of this being the way they did it. It purports that a priest from the House of Jehoiarib (the 1st Course) was on duty when the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 AD. And since we know from the Talmud the exact date the Temple was destroyed and that there is no way of reconciling that date with the calculation method just described in Part 1, it is a pretty safe bet, I think, that the Temple service schedule did not start over every new year, as had been conjectured. But this also leaves us with what has to be considered the most objective and least controversial means of finding the date of the Nativity from Luke’s Abijah statement. All that is needed is a simple back calculation from 70 AD. And if it leads nowhere, so be it, too. There is no point, or benefit, in looking further to a convoluted solution given the credibility issues.

To begin though, the Talmud speaks of, not one, but two significant dates associated with the Temple’s destruction. The first is 17 Tammuz (July 13-14), 70 AD (the date the walls of Jerusalem fell to the Romans and Temple sacrifice ended). That date, observed on the Hebrew calendar as the Fast of the 4th Month, marked the beginning of the end for the Temple, which finally fell, 3 weeks later, on 9 Av (Aug. 3-4), 70 AD. And that date, considered the saddest of the Hebrew year, is observed annually as the Fast of the 5th Month, with the entire span in between observed as the 3 Weeks of Mourning, aka Bein Ha-Metzarim (literally: between the straits).

So we have two potential targets occurring in the summer of 70 AD. And we have my position (already stated at an earlier meeting) that John the Baptist was conceived on the Fast of the 10th Month, or rather 10 Tevet (Jan. 5), 9 BC. Putting it all together (with the help of a calendar to pinpoint the new moons and Sabbaths for those years) Zechariah’s Temple service week is found to have run from Dec. 30, 10 BC to Jan. 6, 9 BC. And since Zechariah’s was the 8th Course in the cycle, it sets the start of the 1st Course, that of Jehoiarib, to Nov. 11, 10 BC. Now at 24 weeks per cycle it can be easily shown that there are 171 complete cycles (27,278 days) from that date to the summer of 70 AD. More precisely, the 172nd Course of Jehoiarib, after Nov. 11, 10 BC, would have begun on July 7 (10 Tammuz), 70 AD. And the last day of that Course is guess what? 17 Tammuz! Figure C2.2, linked below, presents this calculation graphically to make it a little easier, I hope, to follow.

Would I have preferred it to have landed on 9 Av? At first blush, sure. But as I’ve found many times with this discovery, when it throws out a screwball like this one it is a call to look deeper into the source materials. And in so doing, I traced the tradition of the Temple being destroyed during the 1st Course back to the Talmud where Jehoiarib is derided for having “delivered his House to the enemies” (Ta’anit 4.5). And it is only in the later writings, apparently drawing on this firsthand account, that Jehoiarib became associated specifically with the Temple's destruction on 9 Av. Josephus, however, adds a very important detail that seems to run counter to that later tradition. In his own eye-witness testimony of the Temple’s destruction, where he tells of the Temple sacrifice ending on 17 Tammuz, it is not because they had run out of sacrificial offerings. It ended, he says, because there were no longer any priests to offer sacrifice (Wars 6,2,1).

So what happened to the priests? Were they all killed? Or in light of the insanity Josephus reports that had engulfed the city, did they, more likely, all desert their posts (escaping to the Romans once the city walls were breeched) and in effect reduced the Holy Temple to a simple armed citadel for the last three weeks of its existence? That is very much in keeping with the way Josephus describes the Temple in its final hours. And it also makes sense of the Talmud's derision toward Jehoiarib, treating him more like a coward and a traitor than as a hero who went down with the ship. But either way, 17 Tammuz turns out to be the last possible day the House of Jehoiarib could have served in the Temple for both eye-witness accounts to be true.

And this is a stunning revelation. The odds against it are high. For starters there was already only 1 chance in 12 of that specific date showing up, by this calculation method, during the Course of Jehoiarib in 70 AD. But the odds against it also occurring on the last day of that Course, as the Talmud and Josephus both seem to imply, is 1 chance in 365. And that is a 99.73% probability that this outcome should not have occurred merely by chance!

So thanks in large part to the counterarguments you've raised, once again my claims have been put to the test and once again they have passed. As impressive and elegant as this confirmation turned out to be, however, there is admittedly still some room for doubt, so it is not conclusive. It is only when these results are combined with the passing grades this discovery has gotten for all the other tests it’s taken, that the issue becomes settled. And unlike the solution promoted for the 1 Sukkot / Nativity hypothesis, there are no fudge factors and a great deal fewer assumptions being relied on (as one might expect of a solution to a riddle given us by God). The only mystery remaining (for me anyway) is how many tests does it have to take (and pass) before someone, anyone, recognizes and acknowledges that this really might be the way God did it?

PART 3: A better understanding of John 1:14 and Zechariah 14:16

As to the two other Scriptures cited that inspired the 1 Sukkot / Nativity hypothesis (Zechariah’s prophecy and the 4th Gospel’s supposed allusion to the Feast of Tabernacles), I’ve already addressed both at a prior meeting. But I know I left some things out, so I will provide a more comprehensive treatment here.

Starting with Zechariah’s prophecy, that the holiday of Sukkot will one day be universally celebrated by believers throughout the world, consider the following. When you combine the formula I’ve discovered in Genesis 1:1-2:3 with the conclusion it leads to, that Jesus rose from the tomb on His 40th Julian calendar birthday, all kinds of New Testament connections to the holiday of Sukkot bubble to the surface. It not only shows that John the Baptist was born on 1 Sukkot, it also insists that he was ordained at the age of 25 on that date and began his ministry at the age of 36 on that date, too. His circumcision and Bar Mitzvah are also associated with the holiday. Turning to Jesus, it confirms what many theologians have speculated, that the Transfiguration occurred on 1 Sukkot. And it even shows that the Miracle at Cana occurred, 2 years earlier, on that day, as well. In all there are so many New Testament reasons for Christians to celebrate Sukkot by this divine formula (at last count 7) it is hard to see how this prophecy would not be realized once the validity of this discovery is recognized.

As regards John’s mysterious statement about the Word tabernacling among us in the 1st chapter of his Gospel, it needs to merely be restated that that is what I’ve been saying all along. Jesus did walk among us for the same number of years the Israelites lived in tabernacles in the wilderness. And by Mathew 8:20, we can see He was no stranger to their pain in doing it. Psalm 95:10-11 can also be interpretted as applying to both timespans. But images, often being much better at making a point, I would ask that you prayerfully consider the timeline (Figure C2.3) linked below. In it you’ll see all the marvelous parallels that are exposed between Jesus and the wandering Israelites when it is accepted that Easter and Christmas occurred on the same day, 40 years apart.

And there is not really much more I can say on the subject. The timelines alone make such a strong case. But there is still one tiny thing to add. Since Scripture has told us there is one half of a year difference in age between Jesus and John, if you are going to place Jesus’s birth in the middle of the 7th month (Tishri) to coincide with the time of Sukkot, it forces you to place John’s birth in the middle of the 1st month (Nisan) and right around the time of the Passover. But by my argument it is the other way around. So which way would God, in your opinion, have done it? Does it not make a great deal more sense that John (the prophet known as the voice of one crying in the wilderness) should be born during Sukkot? And similarly, is it not immensely more appropriate that Jesus, not John, be born during the time of Passover? Food for thought. And, pro or con, I am looking forward to hearing what yours are.

Note: And as promised, for any who may be interested, the following five sites are the sources Mary-Frances cited in defense of the 1 Sukkot / Nativity hypothesis. These are the primary sources I was referring to in my counterargument.

https://pursiful.com/2006/12/18/when-was-jesus-born-zechariahs-priestly-service/
http://www.thejoshlink.com/article112.htm
https://hebrew4christians.com/Articles/Christmas/christmas.html#loaded
http://www.betemunah.org/birth.html
http://www.marieslibrary.com/PDF_Articles/JesusBornCourseOfAbijah.pdf

Posted: November 20, 2022

Last Update: Commentary, 03/04/23

Figure 1, 11/28/22

Figure 2, 11/28/22

Figure 3, 01/17/23

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Figure C2.1

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