Sermon Tone Analysis

Summary - Rev 12

On what day was Jesus actually born?

What year?

Does the timing matter?

Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus on December 25, but virtually all Christians know that day isn’t the real birth date of the messiah.

While that is certainly the case, has the birth date of Jesus been lost to time, or can it be reckoned?

This episode of the podcast explores these questions and provides a solution draw from Scripture, backed by both Jewish messianic tradition and astronomy.

Messianic Profile and the Birth

Consider the title—this idea of the biblical theology of reversing the effect of the transgression of Genesis 6.

That was part of the Messianic profile.

This whole birth issue and the timing and the calendar and all that is actually part of that.

I've said before that if you ask the average Christian, "Hey, why is the world the way it is?

Why is it such a mess?

Why do we have all this problem with depravity?" the answer you're going to get is, "The Fall—Genesis 3." But if you asked a first century Jew the same question, that is not the answer you'd get.

The Fall would be one of three elements.

But we're taught only one because we ignore Genesis 6.

We demythologize it and pretend it doesn't say what it says.

And then we are completely oblivious to the Babel event in Genesis 11, and how Deuteronomy 32:8-9 parses that for us.

Again, most people in most churches really for centuries (maybe millennia) have never even heard of Babel talked about in the context of Deuteronomy 32:8-9, but there it is in the text.

So that's going to sound a little bit familiar, but what does the birth of Jesus have to do with the biblical/theological theme of reversing the effect of the transgression of Genesis 6? Well, actually a lot!

And that's what we're going to talk about today.

That's going to be our focus.

Now, that is part of a wider area in scholarship, for lack of a better term called "astral theology" or "astro-theology."

It's this notion that the ancients (Jews and Christians included) looked at the heavens and considered what was going on in the heavens as signs of God working out his will or God about to do something.

It has sort of a prophetic flavor.

We see that generally in the Gospels, like with the Second Coming there will be the sign of the Son of Man or the signs in the heavens.

We saw it in the book of Acts with things that have already happened.

So that's part of eschatology in biblical thinking.

Astronomy not astrology

That's different, though, than what we think of as astrology.

They're two things that are sort of conceptually related, but they're actually distinct.

Christians and Jews had negative views of astrology like we would think of it, and you say, "Well, how could they be thinking about something the way we think of it?"

The answer is actually pretty simple.

What offended them in terms of astral religion were a couple of things.

The foreign gods element, obviously is going to be offensive to Christians and Jews, but specifically the notion that the movements of the objects in the heavens controlled individualdestiny, individual fate.

That was theologically offensive because (understandably) they would say, "Only God does that.

Only God determines someone's fate, not stuff moving around in the sky."

So that was a very pagan notion of astronomy or astrology, and in the ancient world those two things (astronomy and astrology) were pretty well blended.

They were distinguishable, obviously, because we have a lot of data for that in ancient records going all the way back into Mesopotamia and, of course, Egypt.

People knew what they were doing with astronomy and math and whatnot to a limited degree, to the naked-eye degree.

But all of it had a very deep religious flavor, so that it sort of blended with what we would think of as astrological thinking.

But Christians and Jews had boundaries here.

They rejected the idea that this determined individual fate.

So we're not talking about horoscopes and zodiacs and astrology the way astrologers today do.

"Look at the heavens and who am I going to marry, what kind of job am I going to have, should I do this or that?"

That's not what we're talking about here.

We're talking about the notion among Jews and Christians that "Hey, it was the God of Israel who created the things that we see in the sky and he created them (according to Genesis) to mark times and seasons, days, the passage of time—which, of course, they knew meant the flow of human history, what happened on earth... this "as in heaven, so on earth" thing going on, as well.

That's what we're talking about.

Let's be clear right up front with the context of what I'm going to be saying and the context that isn't there, which is this modern, silly notion of astrology (as we think of it).

Legitimate Scholars

There have been Christian writers and thinkers that have been into this heavily.

They're going to go places that I don't... people like Seiss and Bullinger and even more recently, D. James Kennedy thought that you could sort of map out the Romans Road—the whole plan of salvation—in the stars, in the zodiac constellations.

I don't believe that.

But what we're going to be talking about is related to that.

I will mention three articles in our episode today.

Two of them specifically address criticisms of the view that I'm going to articulate, which is tied to dating the death of Herod in 1 B.C.

A lot of New Testament scholars would say that's impossible and that it can't be right because Josephus puts it at 4 B.C. and that's why we have Jesus born in 6 B.C. None of that is valid.

There's been a good deal of research establishing that there were different dating systems and you can have a 1 B.C. date for Herod.

Critics of the view that I'll articulate don't seem to have found these sources, or maybe don't want to find them!

So you will get those.

They're not publicly available.

They're not on the internet.

But I will put them in a protected folder, and I'll give the link to that folder in the newsletter.

So if you're a newsletter subscriber, you'll get that stuff.

If you're not, you won't.

So let's jump in here to the content of the episode, the guts of it.

I think people are going to be fascinated by it, certainly if you haven’t heard it.

Even if you have, there are going to be other details here so you're going to get a bonus.

For me, I began to take this seriously after two things: I read Earnest L. Martin's book The Star That Astonished the World and I found it pretty compelling.

I knew there were problems, and you go out and you look for other research to sort of solve the problems, so you follow Martin's rabbit trail as far as you can.

In my case, I was fortunate enough to have an astronomer (somebody who had their head into all this) to help.

There are still issues that need to be worked on and looked at a little more carefully, but I think it's fair to say that the fundamental issues have been resolved.

But there are other things.

Like anything else, you tweak it as you go.

Martin's book was sort of the first entry pint, but the second thing that really drew me in as a scholar was Paul's use of the Old Testament in Romans 10.

This is where I'm going to start.

So if we go to Romans 10, this is a familiar passage to most Bible students.

A lot of people have even memorized parts of this passage.

This is the chapter that talks about "whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved" (Romans 10:13), but if you start in verse 5 you get the context for that.

It's actually quite interesting and takes us into (believe it or not) this topic of astral prophecy.

So Romans 10:5:

I'll just stop there before I read the next verse, which is the springboard verse (18).

Paul talks about the necessity of calling on the name of the Lord to be saved.

Then he says, "How are they going to do that if they've never heard?

For them to hear it, you've got to have someone preaching" and so on and so forth.

The problem is that not everybody knows this—or so we think.

Not everybody knows what's going on here.

And so when Paul sets this up, you think that's just kind of it.

Paul is going to say, "Look, this is why we're here, this is why we preach, we've got to get people out there, we've got to evangelize..." And he does all that and he says all that, but then he asks this question.

This is the kicker for me.

This is what drew me in.

Verse 18: And you expect Paul to say, "Of course they haven't heard!

That's why I'm saying we gotta be preachers."

But that isn't what he says.

Paul quotes an Old Testament passage as his proof text that people everywhere have indeed heard about Jesus.

You think, "What in the world?"

And here's the passage he quotes:

…for “Their voice has gone out to all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world.”

Now Paul is clearly describing the necessity of believing in Jesus for salvation.

That's easy from Romans 10.