Charting a New Reformation, Part XV –The Fourth Thesis: The Virgin Birth, Understood as Literal History, Makes Christ’s Deity, as Traditionally Understood, Impossible!

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 31 March 2016 83 Comments
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Question

Thank you for the many years of enlightenment I’ve received from reading your newsletter. I have a question that I haven’t seen addressed in your Q&As. Long ago, there was a young person sitting with my family in the Hope Moravian Church during the weekly sermon. I was bored so I picked up the prayer book and began looking at the fine print in the back where I had never looked before. It contained a table that showed when Easter would fall each year for the foreseeable future. I wondered how they could know that and then I read the formula. Easter is the first Sunday after the full moon after the vernal equinox. My, that sounded pagan to me. I have amazed many people over the years by relating this data, but still have no idea how it originated. Reading your series on Easter recently has brought this question to my mind again. Do you know the explanation?

Answer

Dear Lori,

It is not pagan so much as it is Jewish. The Jews operated on a year of twelve lunar months. This would normally give you a year of 360 days. This meant that they lost 5 ¼ days a year. So, unless they made an adjustment to their calendar, the harvest festival of Sukkoth would no longer come at the time of the harvest. Dedication or Hanukkah, the festival of lights, would no longer come in the dead of winter and Passover would no longer come in the spring of the year. So in approximately seven out of every nineteen years, the Jewish calendars would add a leap month called Adar II to the end of their calendars. So they fixed Passover to come on the 15th day of Nisan, but that meant that it would come at a different date each year. Since Jews started the day at sundown rather than at midnight on our calendars we say Passover is on the 14th and 15th days of Nisan. Christianity built the crucifixion onto Passover and so we fixed Easter to come at the time of Passover, which was on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the 21st of March. This coming year 2016, Easter will be on March 27 one of the earliest of all possible dates.

Thanks for asking.

~John Shelby Spong

 

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83 thoughts on “Charting a New Reformation, Part XV –The Fourth Thesis: The Virgin Birth, Understood as Literal History, Makes Christ’s Deity, as Traditionally Understood, Impossible!

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