VIDEO DAVE
When was year one —? Besides the gospels and the account of Josephus, there are no contemporary accounts of the birth or existence of Jesus Christ. There is no clear date, or record of his birth or death. If the Gospels were written as propaganda to promote the Christian message, it would be the message that would be of importance and not necessarily the validity of the events. Since there is no clear evidence of a date of birth, it would therefore be suspect to believe that Jesus Christ was born in year one, or that he was the person exactly as described.
Today, theologians have built a hypothetical collection of primary Jesus’ sayings they call the Q Gospel. Q may have been the original Christ from which all the other Gospels come from, which would have been dated prior to what we understand to be the life of Christ. The idea of the Q Gospel presents the possibility that there was an unknown individual that existed prior to what we today consider to be Christ.
Nonetheless, for anyone living today Jesus Christ was the most important event of those years, as the account has transformed western civilization for these past two millennia. Yet, when compared to the other events that occurred at the time of Christ your perspective may change.
If there is no record of the precise date of the birth of Jesus Christ, how did we come to this date for our calendar?
For me, it is most likely that it comes from the Cult of Mithra, a secretive group of men who studied astrology, understood the procession of the equinox, and decided that the new age of Pisces had begun with the reign of Augustus Caesar. An Astrological determination by a Zoroastrian cult, represented at the birth of Christ by the Three Wise Men, or Magi.
For the uninitiated, and later codified by the Church, we have the common understanding that it is the birth of Christ.
The clearest Biblical account says Christ was 30 years old at the time of his baptism, in the fifteenth year of the reign of Claudius — (Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus).
“In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the wilderness. And he went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” Luke 3:1 .. Now Jesus himself was about thirty years old when he began his ministry. He was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph, (Luke 3:1–23)
The following is the best reference for why our calendar starts as it does.
This dating system was created by Dionysius Exiguus in 525 A.D., who lived in Rome and wrote guides on Church administration, and mathematical works. Dionysius chose to start the new calendar with the year he believed to be the year of Jesus’ birth, which he calculated based on various historical sources available to him at the time. He arrived at the year 1 AD as the year of Jesus’ birth, although modern scholars generally believe that Jesus was born a few years earlier, between 6 and 4 BC. He lived 200 years after Constantine’s Council of Nicaea and only 95 years after Rome had been sacked by the Christian Visigoths (410 A.D.).
In the fifth century Rome is still in a period of conversion into Christianity, which will be the symbolic message given to the conquering Arian Christian Visigoths, through the early Catholic Church.
The Latin term Anno Domini (A.D.) translates to “Anno” as year, and “Domini” which was the title given to the deified Roman Emperors. For the Emperor as the Lord of his people, has dominion over them. For the Romans as for most civilizations, religion and its priest class is the political means of popular dominion, and Rome sees its emperors as Gods. Anyone living anywhere in the empire, after year one, Augustus Caesar is the undisputed Lord God, whereas Jesus Christ is mostly unknown.
This dating system was not fully accepted until the 1400’s. Spain and Portugal continued to date by the Era of the Caesars or Spanish Era, which began counting from 38 B.C. In 1422, Portugal became the last Catholic country to adopt the Anno Domini system. It is believed that the Spanish Era was set up by Caesar Augustus when he first levied a general tax and mapped the Roman world in 38 BC.
In any case both calendars were based on a calculation for Easter, relative to a mathematical approximation of the first astronomical full moon, on or after 21 March. Before the Julian calendar, several different calendars were used by various civilizations and cultures around the world.
The Roman calendar was reformed by Julius Caesar in 45 BC. Called the Julian calendar, it is not dependent on the observation of the new moon but is an algorithm which introduces a leap day every four years. The oldest calendar still in use is the Jewish calendar, which has been around since the 9th century BC. It is based on biblical calculations that place the creation at 3761 BC. For the Romans under Augustus Caesar who had control of the known world, it was his calendar the empire would use, and for the Catholics of the 6th century it would be the Anno Domini system.
What we all use today is the Gregorian calendar, a refined Julian calendar which was introduced in 1582, and is the “de facto” calendar for secular purposes. The Gregorian calendar is currently used by most of the world. It was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 as a reform of the previous Julian calendar. The Gregorian calendar is a solar calendar that is based on the Earth’s orbit around the sun and includes rules for leap years to keep the calendar in alignment with the seasons.
Regardless if the Christian epoch starts in 38 B.C or year one as it is today, that period in history has several very important events that are rarely mentioned in Bible study.
1. 47 BC, a child is born between a Roman God and an Egyptian Goddess, who is later said to be missing or killed.
2. 44 BC Julius Caesar is assassinated and is posthumously granted the title Divus Iulius (the divine/deified Julius) by decree of the Roman Senate on 1 January 42 BC.
3. 32 BC The final battles of a World War are in Israel against the Jews.
4. 30 BC Two divine rulers, Cleopatra commits suicide, and her co-ruler son and Pharoh Caesarian is presumed dead.
5. 27 BCE The end of the Roman Republic, it was this year that the senate conferred on Octavian the title of Augustus (The “Revered one”). “Divi filius” a Latin phrase meaning “son of god” was a title used by Augustus who was the grand-nephew and adopted son of Julius Caesar.
The Roman God Julius Caesar was assassinated, Cleopatra the Goddess and Queen of Egypt commits suicide, and their 17-year-old son, Caesarian, a Pharaoh is presumed killed.
This young boy was the eldest son of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar and had been declared by Caesar to be the next emperor of Rome. As a child, he was the personification of the God Horus, he ruled Egypt jointly with his mother Cleopatra, from September 2, 44 BC to August, 30 BC. The royal family of Cleopatra would have married with the Jewish Kings to maintain alliances; therefore, this child would also be a descendant of King David. I could imagine that some mystics of those times might consider Cleopatra not only a Macedonian, but also Jewish.
This 17-year-old Pharaoh was allegedly killed by Octavian, who would become the next Roman Emperor, and change his name to Augustus Caesar.
It could be said that the following historical events were triggered by the birth of Caesarean.
— The assassination of his own father Julius Caesar in 44 B.C.
— A Roman civil war that would become a World War stretching from Greece, through the old Persian empire, Egypt, and ending in Israel.
— The suicide of his own mother, goddess of the Egyptians, and a Greek Macedonian Queen.
– The destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, and the Jewish dispersal from the promised land.
These very important events would have never occurred, were it not for the birth of this child.
Caesarion is omitted in the religious account we are told, but for the Egyptian cult of Isis and Horus, these events would have been critical. The cult of Isis, in particular, continued to be practiced in various parts of the Roman Empire, including Rome itself, well into the 4th century CE and would have been well known to those attending the Council of Nicaea. So, what happened to this child?
As told by the victors, the Romans who won this world war, this child was killed. Yet, there are accounts that the child was taken to India, as his mother Cleopatra had ordered.
The murder and suicides of these individuals, whom would have been seen as Gods to the people of this era, would certainly have affected things. These events, if included into the Christian message, would have had great significance to the Greek and Egyptian Gnostic people to whom the apostles were evangelizing.
From the supposed death or disappearance of this child in 30 BC to the final battles for Israel in 135 AD, we will see the Jewish Temple destroyed, Israelites sold into slavery, and dispersed throughout the Roman empire, as well as the life of Jesus Christ and his Apostles.
For the people of Israel, these times must have been of biblical proportions. All major world religions would have seen this as a great message of some sort. The most secretive cults of the Roman Rulers, the Egyptian Priests, Zoroastrian Magi of Persia, Greek Platonists, Druids, the Cynics, Pythagoreans, Stoics and so on… these events would certainly affect all religions of the empire. I would say particularly affected would be the ruling class of Roman Mithridatic cults in Tarsus, from where the Apostle Paul would come from. These Mithridatic cults had many Christian similarities of worship which would later be incorporated into the Catholic Catechism.
The Egyptians had lost their God Pharaoh and would never be re-established… and the Jewish people had lost their Temple and promised land. Certainly, we should mention this history when we discuss Jesus Christ, but strangely we overlook it.
These historical events, when placed in the context of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, present a different perspective on the history and intent of our religion.
So what reason would there be to omit these historical events from the Christian account? I would say it is because the Christian account we have today is based on the Old Testament, it has Jewish foundations and propagated by Jewish Apostles. Although the Gnostic versions of this salvation story rejected the God of the Old Testament, this would not be the story that would be promoted by Rome. In fact, it was critical for the Roman Church to make this new religion centered on the God of the Jews. Consider this story of Christianity not as isolated to the First Century but as a story that continues up to today. From the act of Flavius Josephus of coming to the side of the new Caesar Vespasian, through the tax collectors of Matthew and Paul, Jews who worked as administrators and tax collectors for Polish feudal lords, or Israel today as the military arm of the West. You may consider the Diaspora as more of a relocation of administrators throughout the empire. Then in 312 AD, Constantine declared “In hoc signo vinces” (Latin phrase conventionally translated into English as “In this sign thou shalt conquer”) as a declaration of the full adoption of this administrative style. Consider the obvious: Christianity will make your servants docile, while the “chosen people” administer your realm, all well overseen by the Roman Catholic Priest class.
‘History is a set of lies agreed upon’ Napoleon Bonaparte (maybe)
If history is a lie, then our history should at least make sense, its parts should fit, in context Caesar should be as important as Christ, a world war should be included, and human motivations for power must be accounted for.
So, let's make up a new story, and to properly tell this story we must start with the creation account of Genesis.