what Casus 31 and Dating the Birth of Jesus have delivered, and what this book takes over from them
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In-depth:
1 · What this chapter takes over
The year 31 is not argued afresh in this book. The case has been made in Three Days and Three Nights (hereafter Casus 31), and the birth year that belongs with it in Dating the Birth of Jesus. This chapter summarises the results of those two books, with at each point the chapter where the evidence stands, and adds nothing to them. What stands here is the anchor; the chapters that follow weigh what hangs from it.
2 · The day: the sign as measure
Asked for a sign, Jesus gives no miracle but a clock: "For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matthew 12:40). The words are those of Jonah 2:1 in the Septuagint (Eng. 1:17). The New Testament designates the time between cross and resurrection in 19 places with a loose form, mostly "on the third day", and once with this double construction, which counts the nights as well. The loose forms bend towards a Friday; the double one does not. In the Hebrew Bible "N days and N nights" stands in 13 places, and wherever the duration can be checked it counts full twenty-four-hour days; an inclusive reading of the double construction is nowhere attested in the corpus searched, not even in the Talmud passages designated beforehand as the test (Casus 31, ch. 3, appendix B). The onah rule, "a part of the day counts as the whole", exists and is Jewish, but it dwells with the bare form; it does not reach the nights, and a Jewish polemicist of about 1260 says so himself: even with that rule the Friday comes out at "three days and two nights" (Nizzachon Vetus §201; ch. 3).
Whoever reads the sign as a measure counts three nights between burial and resurrection and arrives at Wednesday: three full twenty-four-hour days, resurrection at the close of the weekly sabbath, the tomb empty before the dawn of the first day (John 20:1). The week carries that, for it had two days of rest. Mark has the women buy spices "when the sabbath was past" (16:1); Luke has them prepare spices and then rest "according to the commandment" (23:56). Two sabbaths with a working day between them, the feast day of 15 Nisan on Thursday and the weekly sabbath on Saturday, make one sequence of those two sentences. They ask for that working day; they do not compel it, for the reading within one sabbath exists and is not refuted (ch. 4, ch. 11). Leviticus 23:7 does not call 15 Nisan a shabbaton; "festival sabbath" is a word of this book's own, not a quotation from the law (ch. 4).
The heaviest verse against the Wednesday is Luke 24:21, "it is now the third day since these things happened", said on Sunday. From a Friday that holds; from a Wednesday it does not, and no reading of the verb makes three out of five. Casus 31 does not resolve the verse but carries it: of the seven third-day constructions one favours the Wednesday, one the Friday, and five allow both. The trade falls to the Wednesday, because a deliberately given sign weighs more than a passing lament (ch. 13). That is the softest link of the day axis, and so it stands labelled.
3 · The year: the funnel
The sky does not deliver the Wednesday; it delivers a two-horse race and a funnel (Casus 31, ch. 7). In the window 26–36, 14 Nisan, recalculated on the visible crescent above Jerusalem, falls on a Wednesday two of the 11 times: in 28 and in 31. In 31 the March moon stood nine days before the spring equinox; the crescent of 11 April puts 1 Nisan on 12 April and 14 Nisan on Wednesday 25 April. With the March option of 34 under the other equinox rule there are three; under one rule there remain two (ch. 7, appendix A). The year 28 falls outside the ministry window (ch. 9). Whoever arrives at a Wednesday on textual grounds therefore has one address. In 30, 14 Nisan is Friday 7 April under every observational rule; in 33 the Good Friday of 3 April exists only under the lenient rule, for Parker and Dubberstein put 14 Nisan of 33 on Saturday 2 May (ch. 15). In 31 the choice of rule decides which midweek day it becomes, Wednesday 25 April or Tuesday 27 March; in 33 whether there is a Friday.
The price stands beside it. The Wednesday of 31 requires a thirteenth month, an Adar II, and that is not documented: it rests on the assumption that Jerusalem followed the late, Babylonian placement of Nisan and that the barley was not yet ripe at the end of March (ch. 8). The measure holds in both directions: Parker and Dubberstein reconstruct the Babylonian calendar, their 2 May of 33 does not prove what Judea did, and on the same ground the 25 April of 31 cannot rest on their table (ch. 8, ch. 15). The weekday too hangs on a choice: the temple watched the crescent and did not compute, and under the later molad calendar the Wednesday of 31 moves to 30 (ch. 14). The second assumption is the baptism in the autumn of 27, on an autumn-inclusive count of Tiberius' fifteenth year (Luke 3:1) which for Tiberius is attested by no document and refuted by no document (ch. 9). Four Passovers in the ministry carry as support and not as compulsion: on this axis 30 and 31 are both admissible and neither is indicated (ch. 9, ch. 14, appendix E). The real rival is therefore not 33 but 30 (ch. 14).
4 · The week
Arrival in Bethany on Thursday 19 April, 8 Nisan; the entry and the cleansing of the temple on Friday 20 April, 9 Nisan (Matthew 21:12; Luke 19:45); the sabbath of 10 Nisan as a day of rest. The entry on that sabbath itself, as the previous version of this book read it, does not hold: Bethany lies 15 stadia from the city (John 11:18), well over twice the sabbath limit of 2,000 cubits. The typology of 10 Nisan, the lamb set apart (Exodus 12:3), remains; the coupling to the calendar day lapses. Then the last supper on Tuesday evening, the beginning of 14 Nisan (ch. 5); the cross on Wednesday 25 April, the burial before the feast day; Thursday 26 April the feast day of 15 Nisan; Friday 27 April the working day of the spices; Saturday 28 April the weekly sabbath, towards evening the resurrection; Sunday 29 April, before dawn, the empty tomb (Casus 31, ch. 11). The lunar eclipse of that night is image, not argument, just like the eclipse of 33 on the other side (ch. 7, ch. 15).
5 · The weighing
The scoring model stands only in Casus 31 (ch. 16 and appendix F, version 4); this book takes over the result without recomputing it. That result is not a compound probability, for the axes share assumptions: one measured base rate (the double construction, p between roughly 0.008 and 0.0005), one named premise (the Adar II), roughly two and a half effective axes (ch. 16). Under the four weightings of appendix F the ranking lies thus. Exact fulfilment and default, the sign as measure: 31 > 30 > 33, with 93.3 and 88.0 for 31. Academic and sceptical, the sign as idiom: 30 > 33 > 31, with 31 in the sceptical weighting 1.1 points behind 33. Nowhere, under no weighting, does 33 win clearly; where the sign becomes idiom, 30 leads. One cell stands open: C3, the ministry window, gives 31 a point above the ground that has lain beneath it since the four-Passover test; lowering it costs 2.7 to 3.4 points and overturns no ranking (appendix F.3).
6 · The two breaking points
The register of assumptions of Casus 31 (appendix D) enters per axis every assumption with its label and with the find that would break it. Two are sharp, for the same reason: each carries a whole axis, and each breaks on a find, not on a reading.
Workbenchthe two breaking points
breaking point
what falls
where the evidence stands
a source that excludes a Jewish Adar II in 31
the Wednesday of 25 April, and with it the date; the day axis remains standing
Casus 31, ch. 8; appendix D.2
one clear pre-modern use of "three days and three nights", in the corpus of the idiom itself and not in a later exposition of it, for demonstrably less than three full twenty-four-hour days
the sign, and with it the Wednesday; the field returns to the Friday of 30 or 33
Casus 31, ch. 3; appendix B §B.3c; appendix D.1
The measure on the other side: 33 requires that that year had no leap month and that the March moon became Nisan with a 1 Nisan before the equinox; 30 requires exactly three Passovers and a weekday that depends on the crescent criterion. Whoever holds these rows against 31 and lets them pass for 30 and 33 measures by two standards (appendix D.4). [DOCUMENTED]
Why these two, and not Luke 24:21, which weighs heaviest against the thesis? Because that verse has already been weighed and waits on no find: it is absorbable, not resolvable (ch. 13). And why not the Babylonian series, which gives no leap month in 31 but an Ululu II in the autumn of 30? Because it burdens the row and does not break it: the Babylonian intercalation is not the Jewish one (appendix D.2). What the previous version of this book advanced as support lapses: the patristic cluster around 29–31 computes the year from an assumed length of ministry and does not remember it (ch. 6); the Amadon controversy and the earthquake in Bithynia carry nothing; and the chronology of Paul measures, by the self-binding of Casus 31, for no one (ch. 16).
7 · The earth, in three sentences
Williams, Schwab and Brauer in 2012 counted the annual layers of the Dead Sea at Ein Gedi back from the earthquake of 31 BC and placed a second quake layer "in the 62 years counted from 31 BC to 31 AD", with an accuracy of five years: AD 31 or 32, depending on whether one counts with or without a year 0, a window that largely covers the term of office of Pilate. An anchorless radiocarbon dating of the same layer (Kagan et al. 2011) gives a wider window, AD 12–91 at one sigma, which contains it; Kagan afterwards couples the layer to the catalogue earthquake of 33. With roughly one correlated earthquake per half-century, the chance of at least one earthquake in a window of 11 years is one in four to five, so that the layer colours and does not carry (Casus 31, ch. 12). [DOCUMENTED · INTERPRETED]
8 · The birth
Herod dies in the spring of 4 BC; the winter of 4/3 remains possible, but is less likely (Dating the Birth of Jesus, ch. 6). What separates the two is the count of days from the eclipse to the Passover of Antiquities 17.213: 30 days against 414. The birth window that follows from it is 6–4 BC, a band of years without a season. Freestanding, without the baptism axis, the band runs from 8 to 4 (run A); with the baptism axis from 6 to 4 (run B), and that axis removes only the two softest cells at the early edge; the core 6-5-4 stands on Matthew 2 (ch. 8, ch. 9). Within the band 5 BC survives the most clamps, both seasons of death and the baptism years 27 and 28; 6 BC leans on baptism 27 alone, 4 BC on the winter death alone; Sukkot within it is a working expectation, not a result (ch. 10). The age band is Plummer's, ±2, so 28 to 32 years at the baptism; on Hoehner's ±3 the early edge runs to 7 BC (ch. 9).
For the line of ages that means: with a baptism in 27 the child is 30 to 32 across the whole window, and the row "about thirty" is consistent, not load-bearing. The clamp on a baptism in 29, and thus on the year 33, stands under two conditions, the season of death and the band: under spring 4 and ±2 there is no birth cell for baptism 29, under winter 4/3 one narrow one (4 BC), and on ±3 5 BC is added. Chapter 2, "The convergence, honestly counted", works that out.
9 · What the anchor carries
The anchor carries four things. A weekday, from the text: Wednesday, or the sign does not speak. A year, from that weekday times the funnel: 31, under two named assumptions, the Adar II and the baptism of 27. A ministry window that admits 31 without compelling it. And a birth in 6–4 BC that fits it without strain. Each of the four stands in Casus 31 or Dating the Birth of Jesus with its label; the sign as measure, the Adar II and the baptism of 27 are INTERPRETED, and so this book takes them over.
The anchor does not carry four things. No proof. Not the seventy weeks: they come as a witness beside the measurement, not beneath it, and that 457 + 483 gives the year 27 is the subject of chapter 3, "The decree", not a support beneath the Wednesday. Not the six thousand years and the terminus: "the two golden pins — 457 and the year 31 — do not hang on the six thousand", as chapter 5 puts it, and they remain standing even if 2034 passes. And not the rings: the quake layer, the eclipse, the church fathers and the Talmud colour the year and do not carry it. A ring may cite the core, the core never a ring (Casus 31, ch. 16). From that follows the test for the rest of this book: think Casus 31 and Dating the Birth of Jesus away, and see what remains standing of a link. If it hangs after all on the day or on the birth year, it belongs in Casus 31, or out.
With that the anchor lies, and the chain begins: the decree of Nisan 458, counted from the sabbatical boundary of Tishri 457; the anointing in 27; the anchor in 31; the epoch in 3967 BC; the terminus in 2034. God's Algorithm builds that clock. This book weighs it, link by link, with the label each link deserves.
HeartHEART
An anchor is no proof that the ship lies well. It is a weight from which a chain hangs, and the question is whether it holds when there is pulling. That is why the two places where it would come loose stand here, out loud. Whoever believes that God delivers to the day will find the Wednesday weighs heavily; whoever does not believe that may pull on the chain too. A God who counts asks no trust without a measure. He gives the measure with it.
Colophon to Chapter 1
Verification status. This chapter contains no measurement of its own. The results are taken over from Three Days and Three Nights (ch. 3–5, 7–9, 11–16; appendices A, B, D, E and F) and from Dating the Birth of Jesus (ch. 3, 6, 8–10), with the labels the source books themselves give. The seismite follows Williams, Schwab & Brauer (2012) and Kagan et al. (2011), both read in the source: the 62 are counted annual layers, read as years, and the sum 31 + 31 presupposes a year 0; Kagan's window is anchorless and is coupled to the catalogue afterwards.
Decisions incorporated. The entry on Friday 9 Nisan (20 April 31), as in Casus 31, ch. 11; the typology of 10 Nisan remains, the calendar coupling does not. Herod's season of death in the formula of the oeuvre: "spring 4 BC; the winter of 4/3 remains possible, but is less likely". The scoring model stands only in Casus 31; this book names the ranking and refers. Lapsed as support: the shabbaton reading of Leviticus 23:7, "with one sabbath it cannot be both", the weekday funnel with three years under two rules, the patristic cluster, the Amadon controversy, the earthquake in Bithynia and m. Pesachim 9:5.
Style. Main text summarising and referring; the apparatus in the Workbench and Heart boxes. Quotation marks " " for citations, italics for phrases under discussion. No claim of proof; load-bearing word anchor.
1 · What this chapter takes over
The year 31 is not argued afresh in this book. The case has been made in Three Days and Three Nights (hereafter Casus 31), and the birth year that belongs with it in Dating the Birth of Jesus. This chapter summarises the results of those two books, with at each point the chapter where the evidence stands, and adds nothing to them. What stands here is the anchor; the chapters that follow weigh what hangs from it.
2 · The day: the sign as measure
Asked for a sign, Jesus gives no miracle but a clock: "For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matthew 12:40). The words are those of Jonah 2:1 in the Septuagint (Eng. 1:17). The New Testament designates the time between cross and resurrection in 19 places with a loose form, mostly "on the third day", and once with this double construction, which counts the nights as well. The loose forms bend towards a Friday; the double one does not. In the Hebrew Bible "N days and N nights" stands in 13 places, and wherever the duration can be checked it counts full twenty-four-hour days; an inclusive reading of the double construction is nowhere attested in the corpus searched, not even in the Talmud passages designated beforehand as the test (Casus 31, ch. 3, appendix B). The onah rule, "a part of the day counts as the whole", exists and is Jewish, but it dwells with the bare form; it does not reach the nights, and a Jewish polemicist of about 1260 says so himself: even with that rule the Friday comes out at "three days and two nights" (Nizzachon Vetus §201; ch. 3).
Whoever reads the sign as a measure counts three nights between burial and resurrection and arrives at Wednesday: three full twenty-four-hour days, resurrection at the close of the weekly sabbath, the tomb empty before the dawn of the first day (John 20:1). The week carries that, for it had two days of rest. Mark has the women buy spices "when the sabbath was past" (16:1); Luke has them prepare spices and then rest "according to the commandment" (23:56). Two sabbaths with a working day between them, the feast day of 15 Nisan on Thursday and the weekly sabbath on Saturday, make one sequence of those two sentences. They ask for that working day; they do not compel it, for the reading within one sabbath exists and is not refuted (ch. 4, ch. 11). Leviticus 23:7 does not call 15 Nisan a shabbaton; "festival sabbath" is a word of this book's own, not a quotation from the law (ch. 4).
The heaviest verse against the Wednesday is Luke 24:21, "it is now the third day since these things happened", said on Sunday. From a Friday that holds; from a Wednesday it does not, and no reading of the verb makes three out of five. Casus 31 does not resolve the verse but carries it: of the seven third-day constructions one favours the Wednesday, one the Friday, and five allow both. The trade falls to the Wednesday, because a deliberately given sign weighs more than a passing lament (ch. 13). That is the softest link of the day axis, and so it stands labelled.
3 · The year: the funnel
The sky does not deliver the Wednesday; it delivers a two-horse race and a funnel (Casus 31, ch. 7). In the window 26–36, 14 Nisan, recalculated on the visible crescent above Jerusalem, falls on a Wednesday two of the 11 times: in 28 and in 31. In 31 the March moon stood nine days before the spring equinox; the crescent of 11 April puts 1 Nisan on 12 April and 14 Nisan on Wednesday 25 April. With the March option of 34 under the other equinox rule there are three; under one rule there remain two (ch. 7, appendix A). The year 28 falls outside the ministry window (ch. 9). Whoever arrives at a Wednesday on textual grounds therefore has one address. In 30, 14 Nisan is Friday 7 April under every observational rule; in 33 the Good Friday of 3 April exists only under the lenient rule, for Parker and Dubberstein put 14 Nisan of 33 on Saturday 2 May (ch. 15). In 31 the choice of rule decides which midweek day it becomes, Wednesday 25 April or Tuesday 27 March; in 33 whether there is a Friday.
The price stands beside it. The Wednesday of 31 requires a thirteenth month, an Adar II, and that is not documented: it rests on the assumption that Jerusalem followed the late, Babylonian placement of Nisan and that the barley was not yet ripe at the end of March (ch. 8). The measure holds in both directions: Parker and Dubberstein reconstruct the Babylonian calendar, their 2 May of 33 does not prove what Judea did, and on the same ground the 25 April of 31 cannot rest on their table (ch. 8, ch. 15). The weekday too hangs on a choice: the temple watched the crescent and did not compute, and under the later molad calendar the Wednesday of 31 moves to 30 (ch. 14). The second assumption is the baptism in the autumn of 27, on an autumn-inclusive count of Tiberius' fifteenth year (Luke 3:1) which for Tiberius is attested by no document and refuted by no document (ch. 9). Four Passovers in the ministry carry as support and not as compulsion: on this axis 30 and 31 are both admissible and neither is indicated (ch. 9, ch. 14, appendix E). The real rival is therefore not 33 but 30 (ch. 14).
4 · The week
Arrival in Bethany on Thursday 19 April, 8 Nisan; the entry and the cleansing of the temple on Friday 20 April, 9 Nisan (Matthew 21:12; Luke 19:45); the sabbath of 10 Nisan as a day of rest. The entry on that sabbath itself, as the previous version of this book read it, does not hold: Bethany lies 15 stadia from the city (John 11:18), well over twice the sabbath limit of 2,000 cubits. The typology of 10 Nisan, the lamb set apart (Exodus 12:3), remains; the coupling to the calendar day lapses. Then the last supper on Tuesday evening, the beginning of 14 Nisan (ch. 5); the cross on Wednesday 25 April, the burial before the feast day; Thursday 26 April the feast day of 15 Nisan; Friday 27 April the working day of the spices; Saturday 28 April the weekly sabbath, towards evening the resurrection; Sunday 29 April, before dawn, the empty tomb (Casus 31, ch. 11). The lunar eclipse of that night is image, not argument, just like the eclipse of 33 on the other side (ch. 7, ch. 15).
5 · The weighing
The scoring model stands only in Casus 31 (ch. 16 and appendix F, version 4); this book takes over the result without recomputing it. That result is not a compound probability, for the axes share assumptions: one measured base rate (the double construction, p between roughly 0.008 and 0.0005), one named premise (the Adar II), roughly two and a half effective axes (ch. 16). Under the four weightings of appendix F the ranking lies thus. Exact fulfilment and default, the sign as measure: 31 > 30 > 33, with 93.3 and 88.0 for 31. Academic and sceptical, the sign as idiom: 30 > 33 > 31, with 31 in the sceptical weighting 1.1 points behind 33. Nowhere, under no weighting, does 33 win clearly; where the sign becomes idiom, 30 leads. One cell stands open: C3, the ministry window, gives 31 a point above the ground that has lain beneath it since the four-Passover test; lowering it costs 2.7 to 3.4 points and overturns no ranking (appendix F.3).
6 · The two breaking points
The register of assumptions of Casus 31 (appendix D) enters per axis every assumption with its label and with the find that would break it. Two are sharp, for the same reason: each carries a whole axis, and each breaks on a find, not on a reading.
Workbenchthe two breaking points
The measure on the other side: 33 requires that that year had no leap month and that the March moon became Nisan with a 1 Nisan before the equinox; 30 requires exactly three Passovers and a weekday that depends on the crescent criterion. Whoever holds these rows against 31 and lets them pass for 30 and 33 measures by two standards (appendix D.4). [DOCUMENTED]
Why these two, and not Luke 24:21, which weighs heaviest against the thesis? Because that verse has already been weighed and waits on no find: it is absorbable, not resolvable (ch. 13). And why not the Babylonian series, which gives no leap month in 31 but an Ululu II in the autumn of 30? Because it burdens the row and does not break it: the Babylonian intercalation is not the Jewish one (appendix D.2). What the previous version of this book advanced as support lapses: the patristic cluster around 29–31 computes the year from an assumed length of ministry and does not remember it (ch. 6); the Amadon controversy and the earthquake in Bithynia carry nothing; and the chronology of Paul measures, by the self-binding of Casus 31, for no one (ch. 16).
7 · The earth, in three sentences
Williams, Schwab and Brauer in 2012 counted the annual layers of the Dead Sea at Ein Gedi back from the earthquake of 31 BC and placed a second quake layer "in the 62 years counted from 31 BC to 31 AD", with an accuracy of five years: AD 31 or 32, depending on whether one counts with or without a year 0, a window that largely covers the term of office of Pilate. An anchorless radiocarbon dating of the same layer (Kagan et al. 2011) gives a wider window, AD 12–91 at one sigma, which contains it; Kagan afterwards couples the layer to the catalogue earthquake of 33. With roughly one correlated earthquake per half-century, the chance of at least one earthquake in a window of 11 years is one in four to five, so that the layer colours and does not carry (Casus 31, ch. 12). [DOCUMENTED · INTERPRETED]
8 · The birth
Herod dies in the spring of 4 BC; the winter of 4/3 remains possible, but is less likely (Dating the Birth of Jesus, ch. 6). What separates the two is the count of days from the eclipse to the Passover of Antiquities 17.213: 30 days against 414. The birth window that follows from it is 6–4 BC, a band of years without a season. Freestanding, without the baptism axis, the band runs from 8 to 4 (run A); with the baptism axis from 6 to 4 (run B), and that axis removes only the two softest cells at the early edge; the core 6-5-4 stands on Matthew 2 (ch. 8, ch. 9). Within the band 5 BC survives the most clamps, both seasons of death and the baptism years 27 and 28; 6 BC leans on baptism 27 alone, 4 BC on the winter death alone; Sukkot within it is a working expectation, not a result (ch. 10). The age band is Plummer's, ±2, so 28 to 32 years at the baptism; on Hoehner's ±3 the early edge runs to 7 BC (ch. 9).
For the line of ages that means: with a baptism in 27 the child is 30 to 32 across the whole window, and the row "about thirty" is consistent, not load-bearing. The clamp on a baptism in 29, and thus on the year 33, stands under two conditions, the season of death and the band: under spring 4 and ±2 there is no birth cell for baptism 29, under winter 4/3 one narrow one (4 BC), and on ±3 5 BC is added. Chapter 2, "The convergence, honestly counted", works that out.
9 · What the anchor carries
The anchor carries four things. A weekday, from the text: Wednesday, or the sign does not speak. A year, from that weekday times the funnel: 31, under two named assumptions, the Adar II and the baptism of 27. A ministry window that admits 31 without compelling it. And a birth in 6–4 BC that fits it without strain. Each of the four stands in Casus 31 or Dating the Birth of Jesus with its label; the sign as measure, the Adar II and the baptism of 27 are INTERPRETED, and so this book takes them over.
The anchor does not carry four things. No proof. Not the seventy weeks: they come as a witness beside the measurement, not beneath it, and that 457 + 483 gives the year 27 is the subject of chapter 3, "The decree", not a support beneath the Wednesday. Not the six thousand years and the terminus: "the two golden pins — 457 and the year 31 — do not hang on the six thousand", as chapter 5 puts it, and they remain standing even if 2034 passes. And not the rings: the quake layer, the eclipse, the church fathers and the Talmud colour the year and do not carry it. A ring may cite the core, the core never a ring (Casus 31, ch. 16). From that follows the test for the rest of this book: think Casus 31 and Dating the Birth of Jesus away, and see what remains standing of a link. If it hangs after all on the day or on the birth year, it belongs in Casus 31, or out.
With that the anchor lies, and the chain begins: the decree of Nisan 458, counted from the sabbatical boundary of Tishri 457; the anointing in 27; the anchor in 31; the epoch in 3967 BC; the terminus in 2034. God's Algorithm builds that clock. This book weighs it, link by link, with the label each link deserves.
HeartHEART
An anchor is no proof that the ship lies well. It is a weight from which a chain hangs, and the question is whether it holds when there is pulling. That is why the two places where it would come loose stand here, out loud. Whoever believes that God delivers to the day will find the Wednesday weighs heavily; whoever does not believe that may pull on the chain too. A God who counts asks no trust without a measure. He gives the measure with it.
Colophon to Chapter 1
Verification status. This chapter contains no measurement of its own. The results are taken over from Three Days and Three Nights (ch. 3–5, 7–9, 11–16; appendices A, B, D, E and F) and from Dating the Birth of Jesus (ch. 3, 6, 8–10), with the labels the source books themselves give. The seismite follows Williams, Schwab & Brauer (2012) and Kagan et al. (2011), both read in the source: the 62 are counted annual layers, read as years, and the sum 31 + 31 presupposes a year 0; Kagan's window is anchorless and is coupled to the catalogue afterwards.
Decisions incorporated. The entry on Friday 9 Nisan (20 April 31), as in Casus 31, ch. 11; the typology of 10 Nisan remains, the calendar coupling does not. Herod's season of death in the formula of the oeuvre: "spring 4 BC; the winter of 4/3 remains possible, but is less likely". The scoring model stands only in Casus 31; this book names the ranking and refers. Lapsed as support: the shabbaton reading of Leviticus 23:7, "with one sabbath it cannot be both", the weekday funnel with three years under two rules, the patristic cluster, the Amadon controversy, the earthquake in Bithynia and m. Pesachim 9:5.
Style. Main text summarising and referring; the apparatus in the Workbench and Heart boxes. Quotation marks " " for citations, italics for phrases under discussion. No claim of proof; load-bearing word anchor.