Stirring Astronomy into Theology: Sir Isaac Newton on the Date of the Passion of Christ

Details Stirring Astronomy into Theology: Sir Isaac Newton on the Date of the Passion of Christ Stirring Astronomy into Theology: Sir Isaac Newton on the Date of the Passion of Christ

Aug 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007jena.confe.114b&link_type=abstract

"JENAM-2007, "Our non-stable Universe", held 20-25 August 2007 in Yerevan, Armenia. Abstract book, p. 114-114"

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Scientific paper

It is known that Sir Isaac Newton suggested a date for the Passion of Christ in the posthumously published Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John (1733). [This fact was revived recently in Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, 32, Sept 1991]. What was not known is that the first attempts to find that date were made during the early period of his life. The Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem contains two drafts in Latin, grouped as Yahuda MS 24E under the same title, Rules for the Determination of Easter, which cast some light on Newton's life in the late 1660s - early 1670s. The earlier draft contains multiple references to the virtually forgotten De Annis Christi (1649), written by Villem Lange, the 17th century Danish astronomer and theologian, who might have been Newton's first mentor on the Jewish calendar tradition. The second draft shows not only Newton's close acquaintance with Maimonides' theory of lunar visibility, but also his attempts to simplify the latter's criteria by introducing different parameters. These “astronomical exercises”, announced in a 1673 book, were intended to appear as an appendix to Nicholas Mercator's 1676 book. Both of Yahuda 24E's drafts carry an astronomical table with the solar and lunar positions for the years 30-37 AD, which Newton used to decide on the date of the Passion. The Ordinary Least Squares regression method sends a dubious message; applied to the table's lunar data, OLS strongly suggests a pre-Tychonic origin. The table shows little correlation with solar data coming from Ptolemy, al-Battani, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Philip van Lansbergen, Thomas Streete, John Flamsteed, or Newton's own 1702 lunar theory; however, its lunar positions display very high correlations with the Prutenic tables, which were based on Copernicus' De Revolutionibus. Surprisingly, the solar table comes from either 1651 Harmonicon Coeleste or 1669 Astronomia Britannica by Vincent Wing, another semi-forgotten astronomer of the 17th century. This makes Yahuda 24E one of the earliest of Newton's drafts. A comparison of the two drafts of Yahuda 24E shows that in the later one, Newton changed his allegiance from St John's chronology of the Passion to that shown in the synoptic gospels. This mindset was dramatically reversed in his later years, as can be seen from his posthumously published Observations Upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John which he supported by his forced, somewhat unexpected interpretation of the Jewish calendar tradition

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