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Ernest L. Martin (The Birth of Christ Recalculated, 1981, The Star of Bethlehem: the Star that Astonished the world, 2nd ed. 1996), claimed to have calculated the exact date of Jesus as September 11th, 3 B.C., based partly on the information supplied in Luke about the courses of priests connected to the date of John the Baptist and of Jesus about 6 months later, and partly on some rather esoteric astronomical observations about conjunctions of planets and movements of the zodiac that occurred about that time.

Martin's conclusion about the exact date hasn't been widely accepted, but he did make a convincing case that the date on which consideration of Christ's birth have often depended, the death of Herod the Great, occurred in 1 B.C. and not as historians have often concluded, in 4 B.C. The earlier date, which Martin determined from secular sources, clears up a number of difficulties in chronology of the period, as well as being a much better fit with the chronology of the Gospel texts. This makes it more credible that Jesus was actually born in 3 or 2 B.C. as Matthew and Luke imply.

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12y ago

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