"Biblical History" Article Items

Paul’s conversion date has been a topic of intense academic study for many decades. As a result, a historical narrative has been painstakingly assembled to include many important historical events relevant to ancient Christianity.  These include Herod’s death date, Christ’s birth date, John the Baptist’s ministry, Christ’s Crucifixion date, and Paul’s conversion date and death date. Remarkably, these dates can be determined with some reliability and interrelate with each other in a smooth historical narrative. Of course, the dates are certainly still a manner of considerable controversy and some speculation, and certainly, there is no consensus of agreement among historians… Read More »

When Did Herod the Great Die – The Eclipse and The Eagle The death date of Herod the Great is important because we know Herod was alive when Christ was born. Therefore, knowing Herod the Great’s death date will help determine the birth year of Christ. Ultimately, the death date depends upon understanding astronomy because it provides the data necessary to pinpoint the dates ascribed by Josephus.  Modern astronomy can determine the exact dates of many astronomical events such as lunar eclipses due to the orderly m movement of planets and their moons.  There is a historical event described by… Read More »

I have discussed several ancient secular references to Jesus in another post evaluating the historicity of Scripture from a broad perspective.  In this article, I am going to concentrate on the evidence substantiating the historicity of Christ. The historicity of Christ is after all the most important question that must be answered regarding all of Scripture for as Paul said, if the Resurrection of Christ did not happen, then Christians are deluded and above all to be pitied.  If Christ did not exist, then neither did the Resurrection. I am only going to evaluate secular, extra-Biblical sources for the historicity… Read More »