When is... Are you sure?

A frequent question leveled against the Bible Time project involves asking when something happened in history. Usually the answer is rejected out of hand because it seems different than something someone has learned before. In this FAQ we tour some of the common historical dates and then look at Jesus’ dates suggested by the same system. What we show here is a thin slice of potentially thousands of dates that all work together consistently. On the witness of Jesus and his life we assert the system is trustworthy.

Bible Time Methodology

Throughout the rest of this website you will find a series of articles dealing with time in the Bible. Those articles cover in detail the following points:

• There is a special calendar used to write the Bible. That calendar is not any known modern calendar. Surprising to many it is not the Jewish calendar. The Bible’s calendar uses a strict 30 day month, 12 months to the common year, 13 months in leap years. Sabbath and Jubilee years are the leap years. See the Calendar Specifications index for details on how this and other calendars are structured. Explore the Theory section for details on how the calendar can be discovered through Bible study.

• The chronology is there in the Bible, waiting to be figured out. The biggest puzzle, in terms of impact on overall history, is the end-to-end reckoning of most of Genesis 5 and 11. End-to-end reckoning is the only interpretation that uses all the clues in Genesis. It is also the only one that explains riddles from the chronology of the time of the captivity in Egypt. The History section of the website explores the Bible chronology in intricate detail, explaining each textual clue needed to unravel the Bible’s historical chronology.

• The Bible’s history is day accurate From dates at Noah’s flood, all the way out to the present era, the historical and modern predicted eras are all given day accurately. Before the flood, we have a year-by-year account, with no day-accurate details. The assumption, though, is the writer of the Bible states time for readers on the same system as the post-flood world, so it too has a day-accurate framework.

• Crossing Bible Dates to Modern dates is possible even with day-accurate precision. The Online Tools section provides computerized tools for doing this with any known date on (almost) any known calendar. (A separate, extensive, study, establishes how to cross between Bible Time and the modern calendar. That study underlies all the computerized tools.)

Of course it takes over 100 articles to do each of these things, which is why the Bible Time website is as large as it is.

Sources of Material

The source material for this entire project is remarkably small. The only external references needed to reconstruct the entire exercise are 1) A Bible, for the original chronology and the predicted stories 2) a good, up to date modern almanac for an authoritative definition of modern calendars 3) a source of modern headline records a microfilm bank of back issues of major city newspapers works well. For certain events across the past 2000 years a Time Table of History book comes in quite handy, though you should know enough about history for this exercise if you graduated from the equivalent of an American High School.

Date Reports

The rest of this article uses Date Reports. These tables inserted into this page provide 9 pieces of information about the day in question. The date labeled NS is the modern new style Gregorian calendar date, computed with a year 0, and is the modern name for the date labeled in 8 other ways. The date labeled AA is years measured from Adam.

This website is hosted on a server located in the greater Seattle area of Washington State in the United States. The local time zone is the Pacific Time Zone which defines exactly when the dates transition from one day to the next. According to the clock on our server, the following is the date right now.

The fields in this table are color coded. Green indicates the dates are current. Blue indicates the date is stated on some other historical calendar, a calendar no longer used. As we go back in time these blue dates become green since they were current, then turn red as they indicate dates before the adoption of the specific calendar.

For the purposes of this article, if you haven’t read much of the rest of this web site, you only need to pay attention to the NS date and the AA date. The NS date is stated on the calendar you know, the modern New Style (NS) Gregorian calendar. The AA date is the date measured using the Bible’s 30 day/month calendar, as measured with Adam’s first year being year 1. The other dates given in the report are needed when studying other historical periods.

Adam’s first year

We have no day-accurate details of the start of Adam’s life. What we know is the Bible starts measuring time from the first year of his life, something we state as 1/1/1 AA, or the first year, first month, first day, of the first year in Adam’s race. That date has the following date report:

Notice the report has labeled the NS date in red because this is long before the adoption of the modern Gregorian Calendar. But, if the calendar were to be run back to this date it would be the 17 of November, -10,975.

Notice how the date is given with a negative year number and no BC suffix. The negative year number is used instead of BC. This is a sporadically adopted industry convention that indicates there is a year 0 used to compute this date. If you wanted a non-year zero, BC, style date you could covert this by hand if you needed.

This report indicates that 2025 will be 13,000 modern, solar, Gregorian, years from the first day of the first year of Adam’s life. We are not told anything else about Adam’s life in any day accurate way so this is in some respects artificial.

Without going into specifics here, there is substantial evidence from the physical sciences that this period at least was a major time of change in planetary history. Most of the evidence suggests the planet got substantially warmer at this time. The ice caps receded dramatically. Studies of the ice layers in Greenland suggest that within 500 years of this point the entire planet had warmed up dramatically. Most likely the planet was made warmer so Adam and the rest of the race could live on Earth relatively comfortably.

Noah’s Flood

The following is the first Bible verse that states the date of an event with day-accuracy:

By inspection on the charts we can see that this year in Noah’s life was 6020 from Adam. Knowing Adam’s year is enough to call up the Date Report for the flood date. (Which you could do yourself using the Bible Calendar in the online cross calendar tools.

The report indicates this was 17 August, -4963 NS. At this point is is interesting to look at another date on this table. Find the date with the "BC" suffix. This date is stated with many of the Roman calendar assumptions factored in. This is how a historian trying to accurately use the Roman historical records might state the date. The number here is 5843 BC, almost 1000 years higher. Stating dates in this period MUST ALWAYS include the calendar used. When the calendar is omitted, the potential error is dramatic.

Evidence from the Physical sciences also confirms this flood date, at least to the general period. Recent headlines have been covering the discovery that the Black Sea was apparently filled in about 5000 BC. Though the investigators think it was a localized flood, the dating process is roughly correct.

The Exodus

The next place in Bible history when dates are given day-accurately is at the time of the Exodus. The key date in this period is the 15th day of the 1st month of the 1st year out of Egypt. This date is the date of the Exodus.

By inspection on the Master Charts we can see that this was 9501 from Adam. The following is the date report.

There are many reasons why the Exodus event is also an important epoch and the Bible dates labeled FE are simply restatements of dates from Adam’s calendar corrected for the 9500 year difference.

The report indicates the Exodus was the 29th of May, -1486 NS. The modern, NS, calendar is synchronized with the sun and is therefore an accurate indicator of the time of year for any dates in these reports. This report shows that this was the start of summer when God took the ancient Israelites out of Egypt. This helps explain the grumbling over water. It was hot.

There have been headlines recently of a so called 12th planet that makes an orbit every 3600 years. These headlines indicate the last time this planet passed was at the time of the Exodus and that it is about to pass again. This report indicates it was about 3488 modern solar years ago when the Exodus happened, not 3600 as these headlines indicate. If that so called 12th planet had anything to do with the Exodus, it would need to be on a 3500 year cycle in order to matter now.

Notice in the report the differences in dates. Many people like to use Ussher’s chronology for establishing the history of the Bible. Of course we don’t use Ussher’s chronology here, for many good reasons. One can be seen with this Exodus date. This event happened 9500 years from Adam, as close as can be measured. This is exactly the middle of the 10th day, when days are 1000 years long. These are of course God’s days, what we call millenniums.

Pharaoh’s Egypt was destroyed at the end of the 10th Jubilee in the middle of the 10th millennium. This mid-day event is alluded to in the story of the selection of the Passover. In the middle of day 10 in the ancient Bible calendar year the Passover Lamb is to be selected by the Israelites. Of course Jesus is our Passover Lamb, but for all those not under the blood of the Lamb, like Pharaoh, their own blood is used to atone for sin. This is what happened to Pharaoh. Of course Pharaoh, the entire pagan world he represents was selected for slaughter in the middle of day 10, just as the holiday calendar suggests. Only the firstborn died in history at the Exodus. The rest of the pagan world remains, held in reserve, until twilight on day 14.

John chapter 1, includes a story of going to visit Jesus, seeing where he was located, in the 10th hour. Not given explicitly, but easily inferred from John chapter 1 is that 10th hour was in the 10th day. Moses and the elders went to visit God at the Exodus, in the middle of God’s day 10. Again, like so many other Bible stories, the overall chronology of God’s dealing with mankind is seen.

Fall of Jerusalem

Jerusalem fell to Nebuchadnezzar’s armies across a period of 19 years. The Bible records various parts of this invasion, siege, and eventually breaching the walls and burning down the city. It was on 11/4/9 in the reign of Zedekiah that walls were breached and the war lost. By inspection on the Master Charts this was 10409/4/9 from Adam. The following is the date report.

This shows several things, the first is that this was a Saturday. There is no Bible text that says this was a Saturday, but Jewish tradition has always held that Jerusalem has fallen to outside invaders on Saturday, so this report confirms that tradition.

This report also establishes the modern date as 7 July, -579 NS, as the date when this happened. This is slightly closer to the modern period that suggested in many study Bibles, though the assumptions behind the date given here are very tight, while most study Bibles don’t footnote their calendar assumptions. Most study Bibles place this between 580 BC and 590 BC. A restatement of this date without year 0, but remaining on the NS calendar and the year goes to -580 NS instead.

Jewish return to Modern Israel

The Jews recaptured the ancient city of Jerusalem in the 6 days war in 1967. The UN brokered cease fire landed at the Saturday at the end of the fighting. The following is the date report.

This report shows the same Bible month/day pair as the fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar’s armies 2549 years before. These two reports are one of the clues that suggest all of world history is day-accurate. Curious in this case is the year number difference. This is 1 year short of what the predictions for this interval would indicate. Either the Jews were granted a year of favor, quite possible, or there still remains a year where control of the old city will be lost. Only future headlines will determine.

Jesus’ dates

There is an entire section on this website dealing with the subject of Jesus’ dates. All the dates can be established and verified from at least two different Bible stories, most from more than two stories. They all link together forming an intricate web of confirming date stories. The conclusion of that study is that Jesus was born on the Roman holiday of Quirinus, February 17, 754 AUC. This was why the Governor of Syria, Quirinius, was involved in the census, and why only his name is given in scripture. Quirinius set the date when Joseph and Mary had to be in Bethlehem. The following is the report:

The report indicates the AUC date at this point in green so this date was current calendar, in use in the Roman world at the time. The 1 NS date indicates this happened in the year 1, suggesting strongly that the historical witness of our current year counting AD years is accurate and a valid witness to the time Jesus was born.

That Jesus was born on Quirinus explains something else. The holiday was a tribute to the Roman God of War. Herod would try and kill baby Jesus, not because Herod was Jewish and believed what to him was Jewish mythology. Herod tried to kill baby Jesus because his own, pagan, Roman religion indicated this baby was to be a "God of War."

The same section on Jesus’ dates indicates the date of the Crucifixion:

This was on a Thursday. They raced to get Jesus off the Cross in order to avoid a Shabbaton Sabbath, a special, non-Saturday Sabbath. Three days later, March 25, 31 AD, is resurrection Sunday. That day, March 25, was used across the Christian world as New Years day until supplanted by the Gregorian calendar introduction. March 25 only lands on Sunday in the year 31 as indicated here and is the only possible Resurrection Sunday date given this historical witness.

This date is 30 Bible years plus 40 days from Jesus’ birth, a difference of 10989 days. (Use either of the day-numbering systems given in the date reports to see: 4019618 - 4008629 = 10989 days). This 30 shows up in several Bible stories, including the price for which Judas betrayed Jesus. 1 piece of silver for each year in this interval. (Exactly, it turns out, from Jesus’ first being presented in the temple at his 40th day.) The 10989 shows up in another place.

10989 days or is it years?

Go back to the date report for the birth of Jesus and inspect the Bible date from Adam of Jesus’ birth. The year number is also the same number of days Jesus lived on earth, 10989.

We know that all of Scripture points at Jesus in different ways. The match in year number at Jesus’ birth to the number of days at his death has about a 1 in 11,000 chance of being equal through random chance alone. It indicates that the ancient historical chronology that we used to establish all the other dates covered here was itself a descriptor of Jesus and his life, exactly.

The match between Jesus’ life length and the story of the age to the point of Jesus’ birth indicates something else that is very important. Jesus’ life was a day-for-a-year repetition of the chronology given in the rest of Scripture.

Within the framework of day-for-a-year repetition in Jesus’ life, Jesus’ birth prophetically replayed Adam’s first year. Jesus’ birth replayed Adam’s fall. Remember the glory Jesus’ had with the father at the beginning of time? He gave up that glory to become a man in order to rescue Adam’s race from sin. Jesus’ loss of glory to become a man was somehow the same as Adam’s loss at the fall.

The year of Jesus’ birth, 10989, replayed in Jesus’ life at day 10989, the day Jesus was crucified. That loss of glory was to Jesus at his birth the same as death on the cross.

We know from study of general theology that Jesus was the substitute for Adam’s sin. Jesus had to become a man in order to take on the sins of Adam’s race. Jesus had to die in order to take on the sins of Adam’s race.

What this 10989 day interval indicates is that Jesus’ life landed in historical time where it did so it could replay Adam’s fall exactly, chronologically.

Closing Thoughts

There is allot of debate within the Christian world about when things in the Bible actually happened in history. It is possible to know this with some precision. This article has surveyed some of those dates. The problem is proving the answer in a way that other people stand up an take notice.

The best proof lives in the way this chronology points at Jesus and his life, something all of scripture is known to do already. In the case of Jesus’ life alone there is a 1 in about 11,000 chance of it landing as it does by random chance. We could take many of the other dates given in the Bible, historical and modern, and run up the odds much higher than 1 in 11,000. But, as they say, if they won’t believe this they won’t believe even if someone raises from the dead.