[TruthTalk] The passion of Christ

[Judy Taylor]

OK Blaine, I read your first message and you claim the Jewish Calender goes by the moon right?  Only there are problems with this and the calender they use presently is more Babylonian than it is Jewish and involves the sun as well as the moon.  I doubt Mel Gibson was consulting Jewish/Babylonian calenders.   Keeping up with both Sun and Moon If the Jewish calendar only followed the Moon, it would get quickly out of step with the seasons, which follow the cycle of the Sun--the holidays would migrate and you might get Passover in the fall, Rosh Hashanah in the spring, Chanukkah in mid-summer. That is what happens in the Moslem calendar, which only follows the moon. Consider the month of Ramadan, when observant Moslems fast from sunrise to sundown. Ramadan this year was in early winter--the best time, because days are short, nights are long, your fasts are short too and you do not get too thirsty from heat. But wait 15 years! Then Ramadan will have migrated to mid-summer, when days are at their longest, the heat makes you quite thirsty (especially in countries like Arabia and Egypt), and fasting all day long is a much greater ordeal. But the ancient Babylonians found a way to keep up with both the moon and the sun. Their priests were excellent astronomers--helped, no doubt, by the clear skies in a country perched at the edge of the desert. (By the way, the Jewish Talmudic sage Mar Shmuel, who lived in Babylonia in the 3rd century, was also experienced in astronomy. He used to say "I am familiar with the pathways of the heavens as I am familiar with the pathways of [my home town] Nehard'a--except for the comet-star, I don't know what it is.") By the 9th century BCE, after centuries of observations, Babylonian astronomers concluded that in a cycle of 19 years of 12 lunar months each, if you added 7 more months, you returned almost exactly to the same season. Today this system is known as the Metonic cycle, because the Greek astronomer Meton introduced it in Athens in the year 432 BCE. However, the Babylonians already knew this   From: "Blaine Borrowman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Good guess, Judy, but as I have shown in a recent post, the moon is always full on Passover.  Blaine