ABSTRACT
It has been stated for centuries that Pilate crucified Jesus in 32 AD. Why? The date is absolutely impossible because, by comparing events in the Gospels with known events in Rome, a very revealing timeline unfolds. This is because there is a direct relationship between the death of John the Baptist and the date of the death of the Emperor Tiberius.
INTRODUCTION
Tiberius came to power in the year 14 AD and died in March 37 AD. Towards the end of his reign in the year 32 or 33, it is alleged by the Church and accepted by most academics that Pontius Pilate crucified Jesus. Luke’s Gospel offers us another useful date.
‘In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea… the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. He went into all the country around the Jordan, preaching a baptism of repentance.’ (Luke 3:1)
From this one can calculate that John the Baptist came preaching 15 years after Tiberius began his reign, which gives us the year AD 29. It also offers us the names of two of the sons of Herod the Great, Philip and Herod. Philip was married to Herodias, who later married this same brother, Herod, and the Bible tells how:
‘Herod had arrested John the Baptist and bound him and put him in prison because of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, for John had been saying to him, “It is not lawful for you to have her.” Herod wanted to kill John, but he was afraid of the people, because they considered John a prophet. On Herod’s birthday the daughter of Herodias danced for the guests and pleased Herod so much that he promised on oath to give her whatever she asked. Prompted by her mother, she said, “Give me here on a platter the head of John the Baptist.” The king was distressed, but because of his oaths, he ordered that her request be granted and had John beheaded in the prison. His head was brought in on a platter and given to the girl, who carried it to her mother. John’s disciples came and took his body and buried it. Then they went and told Jesus.’ (Matthew 14:1)
THE TIMELINE
At no time in the Gospels are we given the name of the dance, which has now become so famous. But we do learn the name of Herodias’ daughter from Josephus, who was actually writing a few years after these events. In one of his books, we find out that Herodias’ daughter was called Salome.
It is after the death of John the Baptist that Jesus begins his ministry by addressing the multitude. Just two to three years later, according to accepted belief, Jesus is arrested and then crucified by Pontius Pilate. If one puts all these events together, the first thing that must strike you is the short time John was baptising in the desert; surely too short a time to have become so famous.
29 – John starts baptising.
29 – John baptizes Jesus
30 – John is arrested
30 – John is beheaded
30 – Jesus begins his mission
32/33 – Jesus is crucified.
If you find these dates unlikely, it actually becomes impossible if you read these same events in the works of Josephus. Although his two books have been heavily edited by Christians so as not to contradict the Bible, they contain information that has slipped through because of its convoluted nature. Here we will unravel one such event, the death of John the Baptist, by cross-referencing known Roman history with Josephus’ writings. It is complex, but stick with me as we follow Josephus’ description of the death of John the Baptist.
Firstly, he describes the death of Philip in 34 AD! Then he tells us that to marry Philip’s wife, Herod divorced his first wife, who was the daughter of King Aretas of Petra. Herod then married Herodias, as is mentioned in the Bible. But what is not in the Bible is the fact that King Aretas’ daughter went home crying to her father, who raised an army and attacked Israel. Herod sent his army into battle, but they were completely wiped out. Distraught, Herod complained to the Emperor Tiberius, who sent a message to the legate of Syria, Vitellius, to either capture King Aretas and bring him to Rome or bring his head. Vitellius set out, but before he could attack, news came that Tiberius had died, and he retreated to await instruction from the new Emperor, Caligula. Josephus also gives us the information that when this same Vitellius arrived in Syria in 36 AD, he sacked Pontius Pilate.
These events described by Josephus are almost impossible to fit into the Biblical timeline as presented above.
29 John the Baptist starts baptizing.
34 Philip dies.
35 Herod divorces his first wife and marries Herodias.
35 John the Baptist complains about this marriage.
35/36 John the Baptist is arrested and beheaded.
36 Vitellius becomes Legate of Syria and fires Pilate.
36 King Aretas destroys Herod’s army.
37 Tiberius orders Vitellius into battle.
37 (March) Tiberius dies.
37 (April) Vitellius stops the attack after news from Rome.
37 Jesus dies?
Given that Jesus’ mission was for two years after the Baptist’s death in 35 AD, this scenario has Jesus alive till at least 37 AD! The only way to solve the problem is to advance the divorce of Herod and his marriage to Herodias to before Philip died and before John began baptising in 29 AD. That, of course, has the problem that King Aretas attacks Herod eight years after the rejection of his daughter, which is surely too long a time before taking revenge. But in a later paragraph in Josephus, we do have an attempt to create just such a possibility.
‘Herodias took it upon herself to confound the laws of our country, and divorced herself from her husband while he was alive, and was married to Herod, her husband’s brother.’ (Josephus Antiquities.)
So, although chronologically Josephus writes firstly of Philip’s death in 34 AD, followed by Herod’s divorce, this later addition clearly states the divorce was before Philip died, so the date could be anywhere from 28 to 34.
As mentioned, if the divorce was in 28 AD, then this makes King Areta’s revenge attack happen eight to nine years after the insult, which does appear unlikely. Furthermore, I would suggest that ‘divorced her husband while he was alive’ looks very much like an insertion because you cannot divorce your husband if he is dead. Have you ever heard anyone say Elizabeth Taylor divorced Richard Burton while he was alive? Of course not; it is ridiculous. So, this emphasis on ‘alive’ seems to be because it had been noticed that if Philip had died before Herodias took up with Herod, then the Baptist would still be alive after 34 AD, and so Jesus could not have been crucified in 32 or 33 AD. This laughable insertion, ‘divorced her husband while he was alive’, almost suggests the opposite is true and even presents us with the clear possibility that the authorities knew very well that Josephus was right when he placed Philips death before the marriage and had blatantly tried to change the facts.
Perhaps you believe that it was just Josephus’ bad structuring, putting Philip’s death before Herodias’ marriage to Herod, but there is more evidence to consider. Just look how Josephus begins the second paragraph after he reports Philip’s death:
‘Now some of the Jews thought that the destruction of Herod’s army came from God as a just punishment of what Herod had done against John, who was called the Baptist. For Herod had killed this good man…’ (Joseph ‘Antiq’)
Now if the Baptist had been killed nine years before the destruction of Herod’s army, surely nobody would link the two events. The destruction of the army in or around 36 AD must have been no more than six months to a year after the Baptist’s death for them to be linked, which again places the death around 35 AD, three to four years after the supposed date of Jesus’ crucifixion.
Also consider this: I have been quoting from Josephus’ ‘The Antiquity of the Jews’ book, which was written around the year 93 AD and describes the whole history of the Jews since Abraham migrated from Mesopotamia. But his first book, ‘The Jewish War’, written around 75 AD, covers just the hundred-year period that leads to the war which Josephus participated in. Now clearly the ‘Antiquities’ book can only mention Philip’s death and the Baptist’s arrest in passing, but the ‘War’ book will obviously cover them more fully. So, if we turn to the ‘War’ book and see what it says about the death of Philip, the divorce of Herod’s first wife, the marriage to Herodias and the total destruction of Herod’s army, we get this:
NOTHING! Not a word about any of it. No destruction of Herod’s army, no John the Baptist and not even a mention of the important Legate of Syria, Vitellius, in the whole book. Did he forget this most important person who sacked Pilate and played a major part in bringing a degree of peace to Israel (and whose son became Emperor)? Surely that is not credible, nor is the absence of the total destruction of Herod’s army, who must have policed Galilee for the Romans. If omission can be classed as evidence, we have the most telling evidence ever that these events had to be cut because they contradicted the Gospel story by giving us a more detailed and telling account of the Baptist’s death than the ‘Antiquities’ book does.
But it does not end there. All our earliest versions of Josephus’ books come from copies made by Christian monks, around the eleventh century. There is, though, one version discovered in Russia in 1886, which is a translation from the original Greek into Old Russian. And if the Baptist was cut from our version of the ‘War’ book, guess what; he is still in the Slavonic version. And after Philip dies comes this:
‘And Herod, his brother, took his wife Herodias. And because of her, all the doctors of the Law abhorred him but durst not accuse him before his face. But only that one, whom they called a wild man, came to him in anger and spake: “Why hast thou taken the wife of thy brother? As thy brother hath died a death void of pity, thou too wilt be reaped off by the heavenly sickle…. Now when Herod heard [this], he was filled with wrath and commanded that they should beat him and drive him away. But he accused Herod incessantly wherever he found him, and right up to the time when Herod put him under arrest and gave orders to slay him.’ (Slavonic Josephus)
So clearly the marriage between Herod and Herodias is after Philip’s death. And this statement by the Baptist, ‘Thy brother hath died a death void of pity’, clearly makes the Baptist alive after the death of Philip in 34. Furthermore, if we take the word ‘incessantly’ at face value, we have the Baptist giving Herod a hard time for several years, or at least quite a bit after Phillip’s death. Even after Herod decides to deal with John, in all versions of the story, he does not kill him right away but imprisons him.
So, I think we can be pretty sure that John the Baptist was alive and kicking well past the supposed date of Jesus’ crucifixion in 32 AD. All we need to do now is prove the Bible is correct and that Jesus did not start his ministry till after the Baptist’s death, in 35.
‘King Herod heard about this, for Jesus’ name had become well known. Some were saying, ‘John the Baptist has been raised from the dead, and that is why miraculous powers are at work in him….’ But when Herod heard this, he said, ‘John, whom I beheaded, has been raised from the dead!’ (Mk 6:14)
So, Herod thinks Jesus is the resurrected John, which clearly makes Jesus alive after the Baptist’s death. There are many other quotes that say the same, one even by Jesus himself:
“From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has been subjected to violence.” (Mat 11:12)
Here Jesus is clearly talking about a person who died some time ago. But why was the kingdom of heaven subjected to violence? (That is something that you will find in my book about Judas the Galilean.)
So, if Jesus preached for a couple of years after the death of John, it would take us to around 38 AD, well after the date Pontius Pilate left Judea. This creates a new timeline where many of my dates are confirmed, while others can only be out by, at the most, six months to a year.
34 AD Philip dies. [confirmed]
34 AD Herod divorces his first wife. [confirmed]
She returns to her father, King Aretas. [confirmed]
34/35 AD Herod marries Herodias.
34/35 AD The Baptist complains about the marriage.
34/35 AD Herod arrests the Baptist.
35 AD Lucius Vitellius becomes legate of Syria.
[confirmed]
A35 AD Herod kills the Baptist.
(Could be before the above)
35/36 AD Aretas goes to war and wins. [confirmed]
(Now within a year of the divorce)
35/36 AD Vitellius sacks Pontius Pilate. [confirmed]
37 AD Tiberius dies (March) [confirmed]
37 AD Vitellius goes to arrest King Aretas but stops when
news of Tiberius arrives. [confirmed]
37 AD Vitellius arrives back in Jerusalem to be welcomed
by cheering crowds. He then cancels certain taxes
and allows the Judean Priests custody over their
own vestments. [confirmed]
37-38 AD In this period of peace created by Vitellius, Jesus
preaches and performs miraculous cures.
38 AD Jesus dies?
Could this date of 38 AD for Jesus’ death be true? If you read old texts carefully, every now and then some truth slips through the Christian censors. In this case they missed editing a statement by church father Epiphanius, who wrote that Jesus’ brother, James, died in 62 AD after having been head of the church for twenty-four years. It looks like an innocent enough statement in itself, which is why it has slipped through the editing process. But take twenty-four from sixty-two, and it gives you the key date of 38 AD. It is accepted that James took over the leadership after Jesus’ death, but now it appears that that date is 38 AD.
OTHER ACADEMICS
It seems so obvious that I tried to find academics who have unravelled this before me. I finally discovered Dr Robert Eisler, who died in 1945 and could translate from original documents, as he could read Aramaic, ancient Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. Eisler became famous for sifting through all the various versions of Josephus, in all the different languages, and thereby piecing together a picture of what Jesus must have been like. He also was an expert on the Josippon, which is a shortened rewrite of Josephus, but it has been translated in many forms, which are not so standardised by Christians. Eisler kept finding edited sections that imply the date of 38 AD. This one relates to a version of Josephus in the Bibliothèque Nationale (MS Hebr.1280 written by Juda b. Shelomo)
The archetype of this redaction no longer contained anything about the crucifixion under Pilate, and the copyist thus had to mention it in a different context, notwithstanding the risk of creating a false impression to the effect that Jesus had been executed in the reign of Caligula.
Caligula ruled from 37 AD to 41 AD. You can see Eisler thinks this is a mistake of the copyist, but of course it is exactly as I am presenting the case, that Jesus died in 38 AD.
My timeline virtually confirms that Pontius Pilate had nothing at all to do with the death of Jesus. But it does not tell us whether Jesus was or was not crucified (that you can find in my books), but it certainly contradicts the accepted story. It also makes the date 32 AD pretty impossible. Why not a more likely date like 36 AD while Pilate was still in Judea? Did something happen in 32 AD that this date has been presented to us over the centuries as the date of the crucifixion? The answer is yes to that.
An academic who does suggest 36 AD is Prof. Robert Eisenman. But even though at one point he writes:
“For Epiphanius, James reigned in Jerusalem for twenty-four years after the Assumption of Jesus, which, if Josephus is correct, would place Jesus’ crucifixion in 38 CE.” (Eisenman – ‘James the Brother of Jesus’)
He obviously cannot quite believe his own calculations, as he firstly agrees with me:
“Josephus’ reference to John the Baptist is perhaps the most complete… one of the things the notice clears up is the year of John’s death, approximately 35-36 CE, which is, of course, totally at odds with how it is presented in the Gospels.”
But then sadly follows this with:
“If John died in 35-36 CE, that means that Jesus must have died later in 36 CE.”
Why 36? Surely Jesus’ mission was not just for a couple of months after John’s death? Why have those who have accepted my reasoning and even noted the date of 38 AD concluded that Jesus’ death was so soon after John’s death? Clearly after realising the impossibility of a date of 32 or 33, they have gone to the latest date Pontius Pilate was in Judea, 36 AD. They clearly cannot accept the idea that Pontius Pilate had nothing to do with the death of Jesus. Probably because they are misreading Tacitus, which was never quoted for a thousand years till it had been doctored. But you can discover the full story of Tacitus and the crucifixion in my book, The Monumental Secret: – https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1986085694