In your article on Daniel’s 70 weeks, the bit that bothers me a little is the timing of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. In your article on the second page, you state that the decree by Artaxerxes was made in March 445 BC, then “exactly 483 years after that the Lord Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey …” Putting these two figures together would make the year of our Lord’s death as 38 AD.
If Jesus was born around 2 BC, that would make him 40 years old. How does that figure with the usual age of 33 years at His death?
Thank you very much for your articles which I find relevant and thrilling. I live in Zambia and do quite a lot of Bible teaching myself in the local church. But if someone asked me about the missing 7 years and I didn’t have an answer, it would undermine the truth of the rest of the teaching, hence my question above.
According to Sir Robert Anderson of Scotland Yard, and the London Royal Observatory, there were exactly 173,880 days from the issuing of the decree by Artaxerxes on March 14, 445 BC to the first Palm Sunday on April 6, 32AD. You have to know some bits of esoteric information to arrive at this number.
First you have to add a day for every four years but subtract one for every hundred.
Second there’s no year zero. It goes from 1BC to 1AD.
Then you have to subtract the days from Jan 1 to Mar 14 of the year 445 and the days from April 6 to Dec. 31 in the year 32.
Finally, there’s strong evidence that God’s way of counting years never varied from the original 360 days, the way he created them. When you divide 173,880 by 360 you get exactly 483 years. You can find all the math in Anderson’s book, The Coming Prince, a commentary on Daniel 9:24-27.