Corrupted Chronology Clues Us Into Caligula as the Historical Jesus Christ

In one of the more “anti Semitic” motifs of Christianity, the Jews cry out “his blood be upon us and our children” after they insist on the crucifixion of Jesus Christ (Matthew 27:25). This exclamation is their way of saying that they would nail Christ to the cross over and over again for the things he has said and done: they take full responsibility for the death sentence against him. Philo reveals the exact same attitude toward Caligula in his Embassy to Gaius, saying that anyone who would dare put a statue of themselves in the Jewish temple deserves to be executed.

The basic narrative arc is identical: the Jews reject both Jesus Christ and Caligula as a god and as king. Better yet, their lives overlap for more than 20 years on the official timeline. According to Eusebius, Jesus died at age 33, and according to official history, Caligula died a few years later in 41 AD at the age of 29. Although these numbers are not exactly aligned, evidence shows that Eusebius was fiddling with dates in his church history, and relying upon—if not inventing—a nearly 14 year discrepancy in the history of the Roman Empire that pops up between Josephus and Philo.

Josephus says Augustus, the first Roman emperor, reigned for 57 years, but Philo says he only reigned for 43. According to official interpretation, these authors are simply counting from different dates; Josephus from the formation of the second triumvirate in 43 BC, and Philo from the later Battle of Actium. But if in fact they are ending Augustus’ reign in different years, it opens a can of worms: a mystery made no less tantalizing by John and Irenaeus’ insistence that Jesus was nearing 50 when he died.

One possible interpretation of the 14 extra years added to Josephus and the Christian chroniclers is that the time has been removed from the reign of Caligula and added to that of Augustus. This would allow the total time between the dawn of Augustus’s reign and the end of Caligula’s reign to stay the same, but 14 years would be removed from the latter and given to the former. If we assume Caligula’s death date is correct, this would push the beginning of his reign back to 24 AD. This puts the beginning of Tiberius’ reign right in 1 AD. And using Philo’s reign lengths, it puts the beginning of Augustus’ reign in 43 BC (the Second Triumvirate, not the Battle of Actium).

The assassination of Julius Caesar appears to be a phantom event based on Caligula and Christianity. Suggestively, Britannica notes that Julius Caesar held every office 2 years before he was legally allowed; the Christian chronicler Bede also felt there was a 2 year error in the Christian calendar. Thus we might also move 43 BC back to 45 BC, which is the very first year of the Julian calendar. We might need to count Augustus’ reign from January 1, 45 BC, and forget about Julius Caesar. But for now we’ll stick to Augustus reigning from 43 BC for, as Philo says, 43 years:

45 BC: Julian Calendar introduced
44 BC [Julius Caesar assassinated]
43 BC: Augustus joins Second Triumvirate
[2 BC: Jesus born in 41st or 42nd year of Augustus]
1 AD: Tiberius becomes Emperor after Augustus reigns 43 years
[12 AD: Official birth of Caligula]
[15 AD: Christ begins preaching in the 15th year of Tiberius]
[18 AD: indicated by Eusebius for death of Christ based on Jewish priest tenures]
24 AD: Caligula becomes Emperor after Tiberius reigns 23 years
[32 AD: indicated by Eusebius for death of Christ based on Roman Emperor tenures]
41 AD: Assassination of Caligula

In the above timeline, you can see the same difference of 14 years exists between 1) the births of Christ and Caligula and 2) the conflicting years of Christ’s crucifixion indicated by Eusebius. If we subtract the same 14 year discrepancy shown by the conflicting dates in Eusebius from the birth year of Caligula, it falls right on Christ’s birth year, right where it should be, two years before Tiberius becomes emperor. The reign of Tiberius becomes the true marker of Anno Domini.

It’s telling that Eusebius tries to place the death of Christ in 18 AD based on the tenures of Annas and Caiaphas, because according to Eusebius’ other assertions, this puts the beginning of Augustus’ reign in 59 BC, way too early for anything. This proves that Eusebius was employing a corrupted chronology. He’s already suspected of inserting the Flavian Testimony into Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews. Therefore it would come as no surprise to see him changing regnal lengths in Josephus’ War of the Jews in order to serve his own historicizing interests. Eusebius writes:

The Divine Scripture says, moreover, that he passed the entire time of his ministry under the high priests Annas and Caiaphas, showing that in the time which belonged to the priesthood of those two men the whole period of his teaching was completed. Since he began his work during the high priesthood of Annas and taught until Caiaphas held the office, the entire time does not comprise quite four years” -Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 1.10.2

Wikipedia tells us that that last year of Annas was 15 AD and the first year of Caiaphas was 18 AD. This is the exact <4 year date range and context for Christ’s ministry claimed by Eusebius. Since Eusebius also explicitly claims Jesus died 75-76 years after the beginning of Augustus’ reign, he puts the beginning of Augustus’ reign in 59 BC, which puts the birth of Christ around 17 BC. This proves that the 57 year reign length for Augustus is erroneous, no matter where you start counting from.

Furthermore, the numbers show that Eusebius altered dates in such a way that he could create a Calippic cycle relating the beginning of Augustus’ reign to the death of Christ. The length of this interval is 76 years minus one day. Likewise, the reign lengths in Josephus compared to Philo are lengthened by 14 years minus one day. It appears Eusebius did this in order to co opt Easter worship. Because Easter worship was originally about a martyred Roman emperor and not an itinerant preacher from Galilee.

In other words, we might say that Eusebius intended the years we think of as 18 AD and 32 AD to be the same year. A date of 18 AD would still allow Christ to die before the beginning of Caligula’s reign on our reimagined timeline. If we use Christ’s birth year and Caligula’s death year for the same person, then John and Ireneaus become correct about “Jesus” being over 40 when he died. Christ and Caligula become one.

Important chronological cues come from the gospel of Luke, which says that John began baptizing in the 15th year of Tiberius (the same year commonly accepted as the beginning of Christ’s ministry). Luke drew this figure from Marcion, who explicitly says “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, {Pontius Pilatus being the Governor of Judaea,} Jesus came down to Capernaum, a city in Galilee, and was teaching on the sabbath days” (Marcion 1:1-3). Luke also says that Jesus was 30 years old when he started preaching, another number cited by Eusebius.

However, we must keep in mind that Luke was literary and historical fraud and the numbers he gives should not be trusted. It is good that we get the 15th year of Tiberius straight from Marcion, but did anybody before Luke give Jesus’ age as thirty? Luke’s chronological unreliability is shown by the fact that, like Mark and Matthew, Luke places the birth of Christ in the time of Herod, but also claims it was during the census of Quirinius, which occurred in 6/7 AD, several years after Herod’s death.

Meanwhile the gospel of John insinuates a very different age for Christ, as the Jews exclaim “‘You are not yet fifty years old,’ they said to [Jesus], ‘and you have seen Abraham!’” (John 8:56). John also indicates a longer ministry than do the synoptic gospels, and indeed Eusebius draws his evidence about Annas and Caiaphas and the <4 year ministry from John. The synoptics present a short ministry of less than a year.

It turns out the best of all possible Easter Sundays fell only a year later than the official death of Caligula. In Anno Domini, Georges Declercq explains that several chroniclers placed the death of Christ in 42 AD, due to its highly desirable Easter attributes. Easter calculations—depending as they do on the unrelated cycles of the Moon and Sun, Passover, the seven day week, and numbers from the New Testament—were an incredibly thorny issue for the early church that required dedicated mathematicians to settle disputes. Tertullian claimed the historical Easter Sunday date of March 25, which was also the date of the spring equinox in the Julian calendar.

Declercq writes: “A rival date, showing a perfect synchronism with the synoptic chronology, was presumably for that reason proposed in 412 AD by Annianos, an Alexandrian monk. He dated the crucifixion on Friday 23 March in the year corresponding to AD 42”. Likewise, “In the medieval West, some computists (Heriger of Lobbes and Gerland of Besancon) will later, to conform to ‘gospel truth’, likewise opt for AD 42 as the most probable date for the crucifixion of Christ” Bede also points to this year. It is a true chronological landmark in the ways that Easter conforms to the synoptic gospels. So if the gospels point to 42 AD, why does Eusebius point to 18?

The early Western tradition (until the time of Bede) placed the resurrection of Christ in the Roman consulship of Rufius and Rubellius Gemini on March 25, 29 AD. Declercq says, “[Eusebius] maintains the fifteenth year of Tiberius to mark the beginning of Jesus’ public life, but dates the passion and Resurrection to the 18th regnal year of this emperor (AD 31/32)”. According to Philo’s chronology the 18th regnal year of Tiberius is 18 AD, which then agrees with Eusebius’ argument about Annas and Caiaphas! Thus there is no doubt that Eusebius tried to place the death of Christ in 18 AD. The question becomes, is John conveying useful or relevant information when he lengthens the ministry of Christ and implies he is older than 40?

Declercq mainly concerns himself with the work of Dionysius Exiguus, the monk who invented the Anno Domini system. The strange thing about Dionysius is that he located the birth of Christ by extending history backwards by 532 years, an amount of time known as a Paschal cycle. This is the amount of time needed for Easter Sunday dates to recur in a leap year system while observing the fullness of the moon. It is a multiple of the 19 year Metonic cycle, which roughly correlates the lunar and solar calendars. 532 years is the least common multiple of the 19 year Metonic cycle, the 4 year leap cycle, and the 7 days of the week. So was Dionysius (who died in 544 AD) simply lucky to have lived a full Paschal cycle after Jesus? Or is it too good to be true?

Before Dionysius, chroniclers placed the birth of Christ in the year we think of as 2 or 3 BC, but Dionysius redefined his birth year as 1 AD. Declercq writes “Dionysius located the Resurrection of Christ on Sunday 25th March in AD 31. That is indeed the conventional date for the historic Easter in the Byzantine tradition.” By moving the year of Christ’s birth forward by 3 years compared to the West, Dionysius actually combines the date of resurrection from the long ministry with the lifespan of the short ministry. This means he shortened the life of Jesus compared to Eusebius.

Dionysius could not actually explain the Paschal cycle as a product of the lunar and solar cycles. The cycle was not explained in the west until the century after Dionysius. Declercq says “The demonstrable ignorance of the solar cycle of 28 years, and thus of the fact that the lunar and solar data coincide every 532 years, shows that Dionysius, despite his eastern background and skills in Greek, had no knowledge of the work of Annianos.” If he had followed Annianos’ death date of 42 AD, he would have placed the birth year of Christ in what we call 12 AD: the official birth year of Caligula.

If all this seems far fetched to you, please keep in mind that Caligula was subject to the “damnatio memoriae”, the intentional destruction of his very memory. We have been given a clear motive for his assassination or execution, and a clear motive for rewriting his history in such a way that it becomes unrecognizable. Caligula was born Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus and Jesus is not his only twin - so is Julius Caesar. In fact it is Caesar’s funeral rite that most resembles the Easter liturgy. Somewhere between these figures the truth is lost. But the exact chronological overlap of Christ and Caligula, as justified by the error shown in Eusebius, shows that Caligula was the closest to the real thing, and the letters of Philo could be more or less accurate.

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