Since it IS Christmas time......

But I'm not seeing this in the chapter of Luke that you cite.It's a trivial point, but I do like to be accurate.The most I've gleaned from the Bible is that Jesus was "about thirty" when he started his ministry (Luke 3:23), and that he celebrated at least three Passovers between then and his crucifixion (John 2:13, 6:4 and 11:55).Perhaps your scriptural knowledge or historical knowledge allows you to fix the date more precisely, but you haven't made yourself clear.If you know something that I don't, then I should be grateful for any further information.

Well there's that "about", you see. But this is not necessarily so, is it? I mean, on the one hand, if God had said to John --- "go baptize people", then John wouldn't have said: "No, push off, God, I'm not thirty yet". On the other hand, even if that's the youngest he could have been, there's no reason why God would have started ordering him about bang on his thirtieth birthday --- he waited until Noah was 600 before he started telling him what to do. Oops, it seems I missed one.But this only gives us a lower bound for the length of his ministry.I think you're being a little more precise tahn can be justified from scripture, but perhaps I'm missing something.But thanks, your post was most informative.

But this requires one to believe that the prophecy, and your interpretation of it, are accurate, which would require us to know the date independently of the prophecy, otherwise you're just indulging in circular reasoning.As far as the prophecy goes, can you show me any Jewish scholar who identified these dates as corresponding to the birth and death of the Messiah before people decided that Jesus was the Messiah and started performing retrodiction on what is, let's face it, one of the obscurest bits of the Bible?