Historical Data on the Public Life of Jesus

Salton Maria Valtorta, the public life of Jesus lasted three years and three months. It is described in 651 episodes, that is one day out of every two of the 1278 days of its duration. These visions are so precisely transcribed that it has been possible to map his routes, establish the calendar of this public life "day by day," and then determine the dating of this life.

Measurement and mapping of routes

The measurement and mapping of this public life was carried out by Carlos Martinez, a Spanish reader, who patiently reported on geographic maps all the routes followed by Jesus throughout the 1,278 days of his public life. From the synthesis he established, it appears that in his years of evangelization, Jesus and the Apostles walked nearly 2,000 km per year, more than 6,112 km in total. These figures, impressive at first glance, are quite realistic since the daily average is 6.5 km, with travel prohibited on the Sabbath.

Carlos Martinez also recorded the color of the clothes that Jesus (and Mary) wore since Maria Valtorta notes them. The devotional imagery ultimately conveys a representation close to reality. Clothes and cloaks come in shades of blue and red with white. Linen in the summer, wool in the winter. The Covenant of colors sometimes called for a monochrome palette, especially during the time of his Passion when the cloak of purple color covers a bright red garment. A cloak used to wipe the sweat of blood at Gethsemane and garments shared by the tormentors of Calvary.

Calendar and dating of the life of Jesus

It is not surprising, under these conditions, that all these details attracted readers' attention to the dating of Christ's life, a question widely debated since its origin. To date, historians have not succeeded in establishing it exactly, each advancing their interpretation within a range of seven years. The month and day of his birth also vary according to partial data.

In the 1980s, Jean Aulagnier, a polytechnic engineer, was the first to reconstruct the three years and four months of Jesus' public life "day by day" using the so-called "railway" method, which involves identifying chronological segments and then gradually aggregating them into a single timeline. This was possible given the calendar data contained in the Work: the next day, a week ago, the Sabbath, etc. Jean Aulagnier analyzed around 4,000 data for five years.

He thus created a theoretical daily calendar of Jesus' public life. Only the placement in time remained: in what year did it occur and consequently, when was Jesus born and when did he die? Because Maria Valtorta's Work contains no explicit dates, which attests to its authenticity since a character from Jesus' time taking care to mention what everyone knew would have been incongruous.

To try to fix this dating, Jean Aulagnier enlisted the collaboration of a CNRS researcher specializing in Hebrew calendars, Annie Gaubert. The Jewish and Roman calendars are indeed complex to harmonize.

Jewish calendars

This study thus took into account the specifics of the Jewish calendar, a lunisolar calendar in which the 12 months alternately have 29 and 30 days, thus accumulating a delay of about 11 days relative to the solar year (365.25 days). To catch up this discrepancy, approximately every three years, a thirteenth month is added, the new Adar (Ve Adar): this is the embolismic year. The first day of the month coincides with the appearance of the new moon (new moon phase).

The starting clue

The anchoring of both calendars in the march of time was made possible thanks to an apparently trivial information found in a letter from Syntyche to Jesus, called the "letter from Antioch":

"Master, John (of Endor) died on the sixth day before the nones of June according to the Romans, at the new moon of Tammuz according to the Hebrews."

When did the new moon (new moon phase) of Tammuz fall on the sixth day before the nones of June, that is May 31? Such a conjunction only occurs every 19 years. Astronomy gives only three possible dates at the beginning of the first century: year 10, year 29, and year 48. During Jesus' life, it was therefore surely May 31, year 29. From there it became possible to date everything step by step. Jean Aulagnier established a first dating: Christ died on Friday, April 5, 30. Then he marvelled that the calendar thus established perfectly coincided with the approximately 230 lunar descriptions contained in the Work.

This starting clue has been contested with some historical foundations (nonexistence of the sixth day before the nones and inaccuracy of the new moon date of Tammuz), but this has been the subject of a reasoned response.

The dating by Jean-François Lavère

Methodological diagram

These works took on a new dimension when, twenty years later, engineer Jean-François Lavère took them up to verify Jean Aulagnier's study. He was able, notably with the help of the powerful astronomy software Redshift, to analyze additional calendar information, raising the number of data considered to 5,000. This allowed him to refine, marginally, the dating. But above all, he rooted this dating in a historical critical study, from the markers contained in the four Gospels:

• The reign of Tiberius.
• The census of Quirinius.
• The death of Herod the Great.
• The construction of the Temple.
• etc.

He thus established the following quadruple validation which he presented in a booklet.

Alternatives under debate

One could have therefore considered the question closed. But recently, Liberato Di Caro, an Italian researcher, resumed and developed a different hypothesis, which follows a theory mentioned in the 18th century in the Anglo-Saxon world. It dates Jesus' death to year 34. He has been supported by professors Emilio Matricciani and Fernando La Greca as well as by American researchers.

The other clue

This hypothesis is based on another casual information contained in the work of Maria Valtorta, called "the vision of Gadara". In this episode the interest centers on the controversy between Jesus and the Pharisees regarding divorce (Matthew 19:1-12 and Mark 10:1-12). Incidentally Maria Valtorta describes the night sky that she sees. She observes, besides the usual stars of late winter, the simultaneous presence of Mars, Venus, and Jupiter.

At the end of the 1980s, Professor Van Zandt of Purdue University (Indiana) noted that such a celestial configuration could only have occurred on Sunday, March 13, 33. He then extrapolated a new dating of Christ's life, placing the Passion in year 34. He reevaluated the events cited in the Gospel according to this new chronological anchor and called upon existing theses justifying the hypothesis. This discovery quickly gained traction among Anglo-Saxon readers and was theorized by Liberato Di Caro, a professor at the University of Bari (PYeslles). He expanded its foundations in four successive works.

The state of the dossier

The second hypothesis has not yet been scrutinized against the validation of the 651 chapters of The Gospel as It Was Revealed to Me and the explanation has not been given to the "letter from Antioch" anchoring the first hypothesis (cf. above, page 88). In his time Jean Aulagnier did not ignore the vision of Gadara, and Jean-François Lavère commented on it thus:

"For my part I find that it suffices that Maria Valtorta may have confused Jupiter with Saturn, and the morning star (Venus) with the brightest star of the winter sky (Sirius) for her description to become entirely consistent with the appearance of the sky on the evening of Sunday 25 to Monday 26 February 29, and only that night!"

Notes and references

Article written from Meeting Maria Valtorta - her work, volume 2, pp. 143-148, ed. CEV, 2020.

The Gospel as it was revealed to me (Maria Valtorta).