Jennifer Rae Vliet
The exact day Jesus died is not noted in the scriptures, and even though here at The Plain Truth we believe that dates shared and also not shared in the Bible were done so for a reason, we still have gone in depth and used logic with our research and believe that we know the date, the month, and the year of Christ’s death.
Bob Barney: “Back in the summer of 1984, I was very interested in trying to figure out the date in which Jesus died and was keen on the time frame between 26 and 36 AD. As you will read below, many scholars have also since considered this decade. During my deep dive into dates, I wondered if there ever was an April 3rd that fell on a Wednesday with the Jewish Passover falling on the Thursday of April 4th! I remember the first time I found a calendar converter link about ten years ago and I started playing with my researched details and dates. Eureka! Much to my amazement, the rare occurrence was confirmed during the decade of my interest…in 30 AD! The Bible was matched!
Not only did it prove the date that He died on today’s modern-day calendar, but it confirms that they were following a DIFFERENT calendar then the Jews of that time. Yes, you heard that right! The author of ancient Israel said that the Essenes, the Pharisees, and the Sadducees all follow a different calendar, and that the Essene calendar was the one that most correlated with the one that Moses followed. An interesting read I will leave here of Roland Devaux, the number one expert of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Ancient Israel who will confirm with scripture what I am telling you about the calendars”.
Let’s look at how we have come to believe April 2, 30 AD is the date, and we are not alone.
The way to approach figuring this out we must understand the following:
- The Jubilee Calendar Jesus and those of His time, followed.
- When Pontious Pilate was in Judea and Samaria (between 26 and 36 AD) You can study this here.
- Proving a Wednesday Crucifixion with Century Old documentation
The Calendar
In the beginning, the year consisted of 360 days in a solar year. Each day was 24 hours long (today at day is actually 24 hours and some 20 seconds hours long). Originally every month had exactly 30 days, to the second, and the year contained exactly 12 months!
Then something happened. The earth slowed down. The moon’s orbit fell out of whack and all the ancients recognized this fact that their calendars were no longer in sink. As the earth slowed, so did the moon orbit (see Fig 2). Some ancient cultures that followed a lunar year, found out that they needed to add an extra month every three years. “Modern” agrarian empires like Egypt that needed an EXACT calendar, simply added 5-6 days at the end of each year. The calendar was calculated based on the sun cycle and is one of the first calendars known to mankind and the most accurate in terms of climate conditions and agriculture during the year, where the Egyptian farmer has been relying on it to determine the seasons of agriculture and crop yielding for thousands of years.
When God reinstituted the revised 365-day calendar to Moses in Exodus 12:1-3. “Now the LORD (Jesus) spoke to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying, 2 “This month shall be your beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year to you. 3 Speak to all the congregation of Israel, saying: ‘On the tenth of this month every man shall take for himself a lamb, according to the house of his father, a lamb for a household.”
Obviously, any well study of the Bible will bring to light the fact that to GOD, the year is 360 days long.
The fact that the prophets understood a year as 360 days is well attested. God created the sun to mark the seasons and years. He made the moon to mark the days. There are 354.37 days in a lunar year (of 12 moons/months), and 365.24 days in a solar year; together they average 360 days. In fact, many historians, scholars, and scientists, along with a few popular authors, have claimed that ancient civilizations used a 360-day annual calendar. Why is this? The Plain Truth is that when God created the earth, this planet rotated perfectly on a 360-day year, with 12 lunar months of exactly 30 days. God creates in perfection, but when sin enters the realm of the earth, perfection is altered. In this case, the great flood of Noah added water weight to this planet, whereas it slowed down from the perfect 360-day year to an imperfect 365 1/4-day year, thus messing up the calendar for ever more.
The calendar used by Abraham, Moses and Jesus was purely solar. Throughout Scripture we see that all years were said to have only 12 months. The Egyptians were the first people to recognize that the year had changed from 360 days to 365 days. God’s Calendar
When the day begins according to God’s Word
We believe that a full day starts at dawn and is complete when night ends the next following dawn. Here is a snippet of a great study on the topic for your further consideration.
In Jesus’ time, the Jewish nation, after years of captivity, began to adopt Babylonian ways. They took on the Babylonian calendar and “lost” God’s true perfect one, and at the same time began the truly pagan observance of “evening days.” This simply means that, like the Babylonians, they began to start their day at sunset rather than sunrise. Like everything else, the theologians of the day twisted a few scriptures which may imply evening days and ignored hundreds of scriptures that proved that God’s Day starts in the morning. Most Sabbath keeping churches to this day follow this pagan start of the day and continue the practice of those lawless religious leaders that killed Christ! The Day Begins at Sunrise
Convert a Date Calendar
This is an excellent resource and the calendar Bob used to find the match up in calendar to God’s Word. Here the info was put in that corresponds properly and the calculations are, April 2, 30 AD!
Wednesday Crucifixion
It is such a significant, detailed process that God the Father and Jesus, His Son, orchestrated and accomplished. When you see the beauty of Him being raised before the dawn of the first day as scripture reveals, ON THE SABBATH, it highlights the importance of why Jesus is Lord of The Sabbath! (Mark 2:28)
Jesus Christ was in the tomb for three days and three nights as Jonah was in the belly of the whale. Matthew 12:40 NLT ~ For as Jonah was in the belly of the great fish for three days and three nights, so will the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights.
Anyone who says anything differently (Christians and Catholics both do with the Friday to Sunday bit) is saying that Jesus Himself was lying or bad at math and that their math trumps God’s mathematical skills! Our Savior meant what He said and said what He meant.
Mary Magdelene went to the tomb at the start of the first day and Jesus was already gone. We see this confirmed in Matthew 28:1 NKJ ~ Now after the Sabbath, as the first day of the week began to dawn, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to see the tomb.
Even both Jerry Fallwell, The Pope, and Hal Lindsey state that they have come to believe that the scriptures show a Wednesday crucifixion. There is clear, concrete evidence in the scriptures for a Wednesday crucifixion as you have seen displayed here today.
In Conclusion:
As a result of all of this research, that is why we see fit that He died on Wednesday afternoon, April 3 between the time of 3 to 6pm and rose from the dead anywhere after 3 o’clock on the Sabbath in the year 30 AD.
We hope this study has not only inspired you to do your own research on this topic but to also see how amazing our God is in how He reveals Himself to His Children and points us to and confirms His Truths! We firmly believe He expects us to use the noggins He gave us!