
SIDE BAR NOTES
[1] Rashey Chadashim is the plural of Rosh Chodesh.
[2] Data, formerly posted on the NASA website, is now available at Espenak 2014. [3] This is accomplished by adding two hours to the Universal Times tabulated by Espenak.
[4] Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 11b.
[5] One interesting conse-quence of the Julian calendar being off for fifty years is that it gives a possible explanation why the Gospels make no mention of the Holy Family, or John, the Baptist. departing our world on their Julian calendar birthdays. St. Joseph’s birth would, of course, have been prior to the employment of the calendar. But for the others, even if they followed the Julian calendar, due to the error they could have easily been unaware of it.


[1]
The tables provided in this appendix list all the new moons from New Testament times pertaining to the years discussed in this book. The first days (or Rashey Chadashim) of the Hebrew months that were initiated by those new moons are also listed to assist the reader in calculating the dates of the Jewish holidays for those years on their own. And the months that contain those holidays are highlighted. The dates and times listed for the new moons are taken from a catalogue generated by NASA. [2] and adjusted for Jerusalem’s time zone. [3] However, owing to the idiosyncrasies of both the Hebrew and Julian calendars, as they were used and understood back then, there are a few things, for clarity, that need to be pointed out.
Since days on the Hebrew calendar begin and end at dusk, the listed Julian calendar dates that define each Hebrew Rosh Chodesh consist of two consecutive but truncated days. The first Julian calendar date listed covers only the initial evening hours of the Hebrew date, from dusk to midnight. So the second Julian calendar date, covering the latter half of the night and the entirety of the following daylight hours, is the Julian date primarily associated with the Rosh Chodesh.
But given the necessity of human witnesses seeing the first sliver of the new moon before a Rosh Chodesh could be declared, not all would have been declared on the same day that the new moons would have first occurred. This is because the first sliver of any new moon is not easily seen in the night sky on its first day, thus the Rosh Chodesh declaration might easily be delayed. This rationale seems to fit best with the data and it is, therefore, the convention used in making these tables.
Modern scholarship estimates the majority of the new moons that occurred back then would have been missed on the first day of their appearance. This was discussed in detail in chapter 3. But it is an opinion corroborated by only one data point, the date of the Crucifixion. And that corroboration is not conclusive. It merely favors that position. It does not prove it. This study, however, uncovers many other data points. And they all firmly oppose that position, reminding us that the Jewish Temple priests had centuries of experience in determining the true date for the Rosh Chodesh. So given, too, how important it was to them that they get it right, it suggests that their competency in this matter has been grossly underestimated.
That is the conclusion reached by this book, anyway, which sets the cutoff for discerning the correct date of the new moon to the time of 2:30 PM. This allows for somewhere between 2.0% and 0.5% of the new moon to be exposed at dusk. And that exposure seems more than sufficient to be discernable by experienced eyes. But more than that, it is the cutoff time that seems to fit best with the data, making it, without apology, the standard adopted for this book. Suffice it to say, then, that every date listed in the attached tables abides by that standard. If the new moon occurs before 2:30 PM, it is assumed to have been discerned at dusk and sets the Rosh Chodesh to that precise day. If, however, the new moon does not occur until after 2:30 PM, it is assumed that the Rosh Chodesh would not have been declared until the following day.
Another aspect of the ancient Hebrew calendar requiring explanation is the method used in designating leap years. These declarations were made every two or three years to bring the year back in sync with the seasons and ensure Passover was always observed on, or after, the vernal equinox. Therefore, after the Rosh Chodesh for the month following Adar was determined, if it came too early in the season to satisfy the Passover requirements, it is assumed that this would have been the motivation for declaring a second month of Adar (designated Adar II). And this is also the rationale used in these tables for designating leap years.
The Talmud reports that leap years might also be declared (in years of flooding or drought) to ensure that an adequate yield will be available for the year's various harvest festivals. [4] Such situations are, however, virtually impossible to reconstruct from our vantage point some 2,000 years after the fact. So these leap years are assumed to have played no role in the dates discerned in this book. And given that every Julian calendar date discerned already has a Hebrew calendar connection without the need of arbitrarily changing the month to make it so, the point is moot, anyway.
As to the Julian calendar, even though it was introduced in 46 BC, mistakes were made in designating leap years for the first thirty-six years of its existence. They were being declared every 3 years rather than every 4, so too many were observed. And once that error was recognized it took another fourteen years of skipping leap years (until 4 AD) to bring the calendar back in sync with the seasons. So the Julian dates listed in this table designated BC are as they would have been if the leap years had been calculated correctly from the beginning (the justification for this being that our interest is in the year as it truly was and not in the way it was perceived at the time). [5]
That said, the linked PDF below lists the day, date and time in Jerusalem for every new moon (and subsequentially every Rosh Chodesh) of every year of relevance to this book. All told, 24 calendars are displayed covering years that span from St. Joseph's conception in 63 BC to the Angers, France apparition of 431 AD.
REFERENCES
Espenak, Fred. December 21, 2014. "Six Millennium Catalog of the Phases of the Moon."
Astropixels.com. Accessed September 17, 2017. http://astropixels.com/ephemeris/phasescat
/phasescat.html.
ENDNOTES
[1] Rashey Chadashim is the plural of Rosh Chodesh.
[2] Data, formerly posted on the NASA website, is now available at Espenak 2014.
[3] This is accomplished by adding two hours to the Universal Times tabulated by Espenak.
[4] Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 11b.
[5] One interesting consequence of the Julian calendar being off for fifty years is that it gives
a possible explanation why the Gospels make no mention of the Holy Family, or John, the
Baptist. departing our world on their Julian calendar birthdays. St. Joseph’s birth would, of
course, have been prior to the employment of the calendar. But for the others, even if they
followed the Julian calendar, due to the error they could have easily been unaware of it.
Published: May 11, 2025
Last Update: May 11, 2025