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Re: Mocking religion

Posted: Wed Jan 05, 2022 1:31 pm
by El Pollo Diablo
shpalman wrote:
Wed Jan 05, 2022 11:16 am
So what are the poetic lessons about how to go about living your life to be found in Genesis?

Or is it the implicit christian position that we should mostly ignore the old testament now?
It's not exactly implicit - much of the book of Acts deals with the widening of God's grace to Gentiles, and whether they should be expected to follow Jewish law or not. For the most part, they weren't.

Re: Mocking religion

Posted: Wed Jan 05, 2022 3:06 pm
by warumich
alright, this is all much more interesting than the earlier discussions....

Generally though, religion is never a static thing (despite of what some people will have you think), but always changes along with societal changes, which may include advances in science, but will also involve changes in a society's moral, economic and other cultural values. And the influence goes both ways, i.e. religion influences society, but society influences religion too.

The contentious point argued over above that Protestantism is about literal bible reading and Catholicism about allegorical reading is definitely not the case anymore (and probably never really was), but the perception has clear historical roots, and the Protestant reformation certainly came about (at least partly) because Bible translations became more available at the time and lay people started to be able to read scripture rather than having to rely on clerical intermediaries. There never was just one protestant reformation, there were several going on at the same time all derived from similar roots, but with different theological and social drivers - Lutheranism and Calvinism are really quite different from each other, doctrinally, and they both included a variety of various disagreeing voices. Anglicanism of course came about more as a political venture to limit foreign interference in England, so that had always been more about changing line management structures rather than any clear theological points. But again, within the new church many different voices fought over what this means and some of the continental lutheran/calvinist/assorted other influences added their views into the mix over time as well. Anyway, just to say there is some truth in the point, but it's very much a historical one and even within the depth of history there always have been a mixture of voices. Lutherism these days is very "catholic" in its more allegorical interpretation of scripture, and even the successor churches of the Calvinists and Puritans have mellowed out to a very extreme extent and are now more comparable to wet-handshake Anglicanism than the doctrines they started off with (e.g. the Congregationalists in New England).
Taking a more general macro-sociological point of view, there seems to be a progression in how fundamentally a doctrine gets interpreted based on the age and social status of a faith group, as it moves along the cult-sect-denomination-religion spectrum. Any faith that becomes part of the wider social hierarchical set up will either mellow out and find ways of incorporating wider sets of voices and viewpoints, or it will crash and burn (this is not just a traditionally religious thing but can also be seen with things like political ideologies - communism only survived in places like China by being so adaptable that it's almost unrecognisable from the original set of ideas. This change only took about 50 years, so imagine what 300 years of evolution (in the non-scientific sense of the word before anyone here gets an aneurism) of religious worldviews does). Once an erstwhile firebrand religion becomes the societal norm and part of the established social hierarchy, a gap in the market as it where opens up for new fundamentalism to rail against the corruption of the powers that be, which, if they are successful, will grow and either disappear or adept themselves, and the circle starts again....

So the "literal reading of the bible" idea started and was abandoned several times, first as part of the original protestant reformation, and then again in the 19th century US where these protestant churches have become part of the mainstream and mellowed out. US religious history scholars have named this period the "Second Great Awakening", the first one having happened in the 17th-18th century when the original puritan churches established themselves. Now some people write about the current flowering of evangelical churches gaining influence in the US as the third great awakening.

It's all constantly in flux, so very often it doesn't make sense to make pronouncements about a particular faith's views or doctrines unless we're very specific on who we are talking about and which time period.

Re: Mocking religion

Posted: Wed Jan 05, 2022 3:18 pm
by Woodchopper
warumich wrote:
Wed Jan 05, 2022 3:06 pm
It's all constantly in flux, so very often it doesn't make sense to make pronouncements about a particular faith's views or doctrines unless we're very specific on who we are talking about and which time period.
Amen

Re: Mocking religion

Posted: Wed Jan 05, 2022 3:26 pm
by shpalman
Yeah I mean that stuff about god existing and all that, nobody believes that bit anymore.

Re: Mocking religion

Posted: Wed Jan 05, 2022 4:00 pm
by Grumble
Woodchopper wrote:
Wed Jan 05, 2022 3:18 pm
warumich wrote:
Wed Jan 05, 2022 3:06 pm
It's all constantly in flux, so very often it doesn't make sense to make pronouncements about a particular faith's views or doctrines unless we're very specific on who we are talking about and which time period.
Amen
Hence my hand waving

Re: Mocking religion

Posted: Wed Jan 05, 2022 4:24 pm
by warumich
shpalman wrote:
Wed Jan 05, 2022 3:26 pm
Yeah I mean that stuff about god existing and all that, nobody believes that bit anymore.
Well fair enough, there'll be some fundamentals that most Christian denominations would agree on. Though I have my doubts about the Quakers

Re: Mocking religion

Posted: Wed Jan 05, 2022 5:35 pm
by Woodchopper
warumich wrote:
Wed Jan 05, 2022 4:24 pm
shpalman wrote:
Wed Jan 05, 2022 3:26 pm
Yeah I mean that stuff about god existing and all that, nobody believes that bit anymore.
Well fair enough, there'll be some fundamentals that most Christian denominations would agree on. Though I have my doubts about the Quakers
There's also the question of what individual members of churches actually believe. At least when people are surveyed fairly large proportions of Northern European Protestants don't appear to believe in god (for example among churchgoers and clergy in the Netherlands).

Re: Mocking religion

Posted: Wed Jan 05, 2022 7:10 pm
by IvanV
warumich wrote:
Wed Jan 05, 2022 3:06 pm
...
The contentious point argued over above that Protestantism is about literal bible reading and Catholicism about allegorical reading is definitely not the case anymore (and probably never really was), but the perception has clear historical roots, and the Protestant reformation certainly came about (at least partly) because Bible translations became more available at the time and lay people started to be able to read scripture rather than having to rely on clerical intermediaries.

...communism only survived in places like China by being so adaptable that it's almost unrecognisable from the original set of ideas.
What all of these changes were really about was Being In Control.

Constantine adopted Christianity because that particular form of Christianity, which was in the ascendancy at the start of the 4th Century, was just the kind that was suited to ruling empires. (At least, that is a claim in Ehrman's book "Lost Christianties". And because he adopted it, the other very diverse forms of very early Christianity largely dropped away.)

China has Communism with Chinese Characteristics, first with added Mao Ze Dong Thought for better control of his personal empire, then varied to give economic growth, now with new added Xi Jin Ping Thought to strengthen the personal empire again now that economic pressures are reduced. Similarly, Rome re-established its situation following the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and the Eastern Church was weakened by the expansion of Islam, so the Roman church has developed Christianity with Roman Characteristics over the centuries, better to achieve its mediaeval aim of ruling the world. The Romans argued that their doctrines as recorded in the "tradition" of the Roman Catholic church were the developed interpretation of centuries of knowledge. And just to make sure the ordinary people didn't notice how the bible was rather different, they tried to keep it exclusive, by keeping it in Latin.

The reformation was really about challenging this authority the Roman Church had built up, which it imposed not only through religious means by controlling detailed aspects of everyone's lives over a large region, but also economically in that it had attracted a large part of the surplus wealth of those nations towards itself, such that often it was far more wealthy than the actual rulers of the countries where it operated. Letting people discover how far it had departed from the word of scripture was merely a means to the end of weakening its authority.

We see something similar in Islam, in terms of control of information, which insists the Quran is authentic only in the Classical Arabic. And to ensure Classical Arabic remains poorly understood, learning to "read the Quran" means learning to recite it from memory, and associate it with the written form you see in front of you. What they don't do is teach you Classical Arabic. There was also an early Islamic governer under the Umayyad Caliphate, Al-Hajjaj ibn Yussuf (661-714) who went around destroying all the historical records of his area of control from approximately the birth of Mohammed to his time, a period of aroudn 130 years, so that they wouldn't be "misunderstood". We can understand that would likely contain things that conflict with the traditions of early Islam. The only records we have of that are some official books only written after that point, and which are plainly what we would call "hagiographies". He was so successful that hardly any historical records of that era exist, within the area of his control, a notable contrast to the periods either side of it. Thus we have almost nothing to compare Islam's official histories with. Islam has very successfully achieved control of its early history so that it is almost impossible to produce evidence against it. More recently the modern Arabs have completely obliterated any possibility of any archaeological examination of Mecca of that period. So they can laugh at people tugging at faint evidence that Mecca was at most a small village in Mohammed's time, and other factors, which suggest that it was most ulikely that it was Mecca where Mohammed lived and did various things, rather it was likely much further north within closer reach of Baghdad and Jerusalem.

Re: Mocking religion

Posted: Wed Jan 05, 2022 10:35 pm
by shpalman
Anyway, 12 days after the baby Jesus brings them presents, tomorrow Italian children celebrate the arrival of the wise men by having sweets brought to them by a witch.

There was someone on facebook trying to do a sort of bible-studies version of James Fell's sweary histories.
Today is the day! We are about to embark on an adventure together of biblical proportions. A one year Bible study for grownups. There will be no talking vegetables or singing Bibles. Just jumping into the pure guts, gore, myths, legends, and downright lies that have shaped our cultural understanding of the Bible.
The new year has finally arrived and, for many, that means it’s time to start packing away the Christmas decorations. But you shouldn’t put the Three Wise Men away just yet because, well, they haven’t arrived. Thats right, nearly every nativity set throughout the world is wrong. But what’s new! It’s religion, where everything is made up and the points don't matter.

That’s right, the Magi were not present at or even immediately after the birth of Jesus. And as much as the Church has tried to clean the story up, they were not three kings coming to worship the new born babe: the were likely Zoroastrians, mystic astrologers from Persia.
Well, the tradition is that they show up on the epiphany, the 6th of January, so as of this post on the 2nd, no, they wouldn't have shown up yet, but everyone knows this. He reckons "they would have traveled in a large group, up to even fifty" (the bible doesn't say how many there were, just that there were three gifts).
They didn’t show up until Mary and Joseph were safe at home, at least momentarily safe. Right before these “wise men” stop to see the baby Jesus, they walk right into King Herod’s castle, tell him that his own personal King Arthur was just born to dethrone him, and he decides to commit genocide to weed out the competition.
Except anyone who knows anything knows that this bit was all made up by the writer of the gospel of Matthew, to make Jesus more important to a Jewish audience. No mention at all of any of this in the gospel of Luke who was writing for a more Greek audience, giving Jesus a more humble origin story among the shepherds. So the wise men shouldn't be in a nativity set for a much more interesting reason.

Re: Mocking religion

Posted: Thu Jan 06, 2022 7:56 am
by El Pollo Diablo
A whole host of reasons, really. I once had an RE teacher, a former minister, who explained how most traditional aspects of the nativity have no biblical basis.

Even for Christians who complain about Christ being taken out of Christmas, the version of Christmas with him in is still very much mumble mumble Christ mumble Mary mumble birth mumble FIIIIIVE GOOOOLD RIIIIIIINGS

Re: Mocking religion

Posted: Thu Jan 06, 2022 9:34 am
by Trinucleus
I like Richatd Dawkins's suggestion that Virgin was a mistranslation and actually just meant maiden, thus destroying one huge tenet of the faith.

He also suggested that it wasn't the Red Sea that parted for Moses, but the Reed Sea, part of the Nile delta where watercourses can change rapidly, a very sensible suggestion.

Re: Mocking religion

Posted: Thu Jan 06, 2022 10:41 am
by Gfamily
Trinucleus wrote:
Thu Jan 06, 2022 9:34 am
I like Richatd Dawkins's suggestion that Virgin was a mistranslation and actually just meant maiden, thus destroying one huge tenet of the faith.

He also suggested that it wasn't the Red Sea that parted for Moses, but the Reed Sea, part of the Nile delta where watercourses can change rapidly, a very sensible suggestion.
Ha, ha, "Richard Dawkin's suggestion". Lol!

Re: Mocking religion

Posted: Thu Jan 06, 2022 11:21 am
by shpalman
Gfamily wrote:
Thu Jan 06, 2022 10:41 am
Trinucleus wrote:
Thu Jan 06, 2022 9:34 am
I like Richatd Dawkins's suggestion that Virgin was a mistranslation and actually just meant maiden, thus destroying one huge tenet of the faith.

He also suggested that it wasn't the Red Sea that parted for Moses, but the Reed Sea, part of the Nile delta where watercourses can change rapidly, a very sensible suggestion.
Ha, ha, "Richard Dawkin's suggestion". Lol!
Indeed, these things are well known to serious bible scholars. Matthew literally mentions the virginity once, quoting a mistranslated verse from (I think) Kings, along with a couple of other OT prophesies because, like I said, he was trying to make Jesus look important to the Jews. But Luke goes on about it somewhat more.

I do appreciate Dawkins's response to the non-overlapping magisteria idea though.

Re: Mocking religion

Posted: Thu Jan 06, 2022 12:54 pm
by Trinucleus
Gfamily wrote:
Thu Jan 06, 2022 10:41 am
Trinucleus wrote:
Thu Jan 06, 2022 9:34 am
I like Richatd Dawkins's suggestion that Virgin was a mistranslation and actually just meant maiden, thus destroying one huge tenet of the faith.

He also suggested that it wasn't the Red Sea that parted for Moses, but the Reed Sea, part of the Nile delta where watercourses can change rapidly, a very sensible suggestion.
Ha, ha, "Richard Dawkin's suggestion". Lol!
OK, I read it in one of his books

Re: Mocking religion

Posted: Thu Jan 06, 2022 3:24 pm
by IvanV
shpalman wrote:
Thu Jan 06, 2022 11:21 am
Indeed, these things are well known to serious bible scholars. Matthew literally mentions the virginity once, quoting a mistranslated verse from (I think) Kings, along with a couple of other OT prophesies because, like I said, he was trying to make Jesus look important to the Jews. But Luke goes on about it somewhat more.
Matthew, originally written in Greek, quotes Isaiah 7:14, originally written in Hebrew. The Hebrew Isaiah has "almah", which would usually mean young woman rather than virgin. Matthew translates it as "parthenos", which usually means virgin, but may occasionally mean young woman. This is the only use of "parthenos" in Matthew. Of course the interpretations the New Testament places on various bits of the Old Testament as a prophesy of Jesus are highly strained. Anything in Latin is a translation. Virgo in classical Latin means no more than maiden, as in the constellation Virgo. But this is a red herring: when the Roman church calls Mary "Virgo", they mean she is a virgin. Matthew then says Mary becomes pregnant, not by Joseph, but "from the Holy Spirit".

Luke 1:26 describes Mary as a virgin, and then in following verses we get the annunciation and conception by "the holy spirit will come upon you" (I don't think it has that unfortunate connotation in the original). This is the more clear origin of the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. But there is some considerable textual evidence that the first two chapters of Luke were a later addition. Some early churches, such as the Marcionites, rejected their authenticity. There are various other bits of the New Testament, often crucial for some important doctrine, that have all the appearance of being later additions. Or some crucial word has been changed. Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (also sold in Britain as "Whose word is it?", is hot on this kind of thing. I find it a fascinating book.

Mark is the oldest (surviving) gospel, as is clearly used as a source by Matthew and Luke. Both are sufficiently late - a few decades after the events related - that their authors can have had no direct contact with the events related. Often Mark is quoted word for word in Matthew and Luke. Mark, our older source that is potentially more closely connected to actual events, doesn't mention the nativity or anything about virginity. It is generally thought that there must have been an early lost gospel, referred to as "Q", which acts as a second source for Matthew and Luke, given the considerable parallelism of the parts of Matthew and Luke which add to Mark, and in which it appears that neither is the source for the other. In the early church, gospels were copied from hand to hand without any attempt to put them on quality materials which might last centuries. Only later do we get long-lasting copies, and already there are variant versions.

The notion that Mary was a virgin before the conception of her eldest child is not philosophically difficult. And all that stuff about the Holy Spirit can just be a euphemism - unexpected children are often "gifts from God". So that is really all that the New Testament really claims, although the doctrine of the Virgin Birth is clearly very early, from the first decades of the chuch. But then in the 2nd century they went beyond that to the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary. This rather sweeps past serious scriptural difficulties, as Jesus is plainly mentioned as having brothers in 2 gospels, additional sisters in another, and names are even given to some brothers.

John is the only gospel that is a source independent of Mark. But it doesn't give any kind of a history of Jesus' life (not a "synoptic gospel"). This is the origin of the observation that the historical existence of Jesus is only attested in precisely 2 independent sources, Mark and John. I think the earliest mention of Jesus in a non-church source is in Pliny, but he only observes that there are people who revere Jesus as a prophet, so it isn't really an attestation of his existence. But you get nowhere if you try to address the historicity of Jesus. There's only a handful of relevant facts, they don't allow a clear decision either way, and that's the end of it.

Re: Mocking religion

Posted: Thu Jan 06, 2022 3:58 pm
by shpalman

Re: Mocking religion

Posted: Thu Jan 06, 2022 8:58 pm
by shpalman
11-Year-Old Boy Genius Out to Prove Stephen Hawking is Wrong; There Is a God
In recent years, Stephen Hawking has been a firm believer that God does not exists.
Well, not that recently. But then despite this article seeming to have a recent date on it, googling suggests that kid isn't still 11 either.*
“We know the universe has an age, right? 13.8 billion years. So, 13.8 billion years ago, the entire universe was reduced to a singularity, a particle smaller than a quark. However, if gravity is always working, i.e.: if you jumped off this building, you’re not going to fall 15 seconds later, you’re going to fall immediately, so, if gravity was always working, and the singularity was always there […] then the universe should have no age, it should be infinitely old. But it’s not, it’s 13.8 billion years old. And something can’t come from nothing, because it would have to exist in order to cause itself to exist, which is illogical. So, therefore, something other must have created the singularity, and that something other me observe as God.”

...

“I want to be an astrophysicist so that I can prove to the scientific world that God does exist,” he shared in an interview.
* from 2019: https://www.kold.com/2019/08/28/year-ol ... r-year-ua/

Re: Mocking religion

Posted: Fri Jan 07, 2022 1:01 pm
by Bird on a Fire
Heh, what a dweeb. Imagine liking science that much.

Go fly a kite, kid.

Re: Mocking religion

Posted: Fri Jan 07, 2022 1:13 pm
by shpalman
I'm not mocking the kid, although I hope he grows out of the christianity once he studies physics properly at university level and develops some life experience and wisdom.

But I am mocking the grown up christians putting him on their websites as someone who's got scientific proof that god exists (and he's clever! just like all you scientists who deny god! but better!) as if such a thing made sense on any level or they even understood what he was saying (which in my scientific opinion doesn't actually make sense, but then he hasn't studied cosmology and general relativity properly yet, but then to be fair neither have I).

(I have no idea what he means with "if gravity was always working, and the singularity was always there […] then the universe should have no age, it should be infinitely old" for example, unless he means that the singularity's own gravity should have held it together and stopped it from expanding. But anyway, requiring some sort of supernatural entity to put the singularity into existence from which the universe evolved with no further intervention doesn't logically lead to any particular widespread modern religion being the "right" one, let alone that the one he happens to believe in be the right one.)

Re: Mocking religion

Posted: Fri Jan 07, 2022 2:20 pm
by dyqik
Benjamin Franklin wrote:
Fri Jan 07, 2022 1:01 pm
Heh, what a dweeb. Imagine liking science that much.

Go fly a kite, kid.
;)

Re: Mocking religion

Posted: Fri Jan 07, 2022 2:22 pm
by dyqik
shpalman wrote:
Fri Jan 07, 2022 1:13 pm
But I am mocking the grown up christians putting him on their websites as someone who's got scientific proof that god exists (and he's clever! just like all you scientists who deny god! but better!) as if such a thing made sense on any level or they even understood what he was saying (which in my scientific opinion doesn't actually make sense, but then he hasn't studied cosmology and general relativity properly yet, but then to be fair neither have I).
It doesn't make any sense. Time is one of the dimensions collapsed into the singularity, so there is no "earlier" than the point in time when the singularity expands.

Re: Mocking religion

Posted: Fri Jan 07, 2022 5:08 pm
by IvanV
shpalman wrote:
Fri Jan 07, 2022 1:13 pm
But I am mocking the grown up christians putting him on their websites as someone who's got scientific proof that god exists (and he's clever! just like all you scientists who deny god! but better!) as if such a thing made sense on any level...

...But anyway, requiring some sort of supernatural entity to put the singularity into existence from which the universe evolved with no further intervention doesn't logically lead to any particular widespread modern religion being the "right" one, let alone that the one he happens to believe in be the right one.)
Christian, indeed. We can't imagine Muslims, or Jews doing this, even though as you say it is not specific to any religion with a god. Nor indeed many kinds of Christian. It tends to be a certain kind of Christian who is particularly concerned with the apparent obstacles put in the way of their religion by science.

Science is unable either to prove or disprove god, as a general idea. The young man has been misled if he has been informed otherwise. There is a sense in which science can't disprove anything. But what it can do is make it very hard for people to show that a god must have magically intervened, because we have no alternative explanation. Thus when people make stronger claims about god, that he magically intervenes, then science can make those claims hard to support by providing a reliable explanation that leaves no space for that intervention.

The religious people who are most obsessed by this science/religion issue are the ones who would like to carry on promoting those stronger claims about god. The young man will not be able to reopen any space for a powerful god that scientists have already closed.

I suspect the best he can do for his religious sponsors is identify things that science has difficulty with, that might leave a space for religion. In a sense some scientists have been happily doing that anyway, with all their untestable - unscientific - speculation about multiverses, etc. The scientific sponsors can only be happy with that if they are happy to refocus their particular obsessions, and that is one thing those kind of Christians aren't very good at.

Re: Mocking religion

Posted: Fri Jan 07, 2022 5:16 pm
by dyqik
dyqik wrote:
Fri Jan 07, 2022 2:22 pm
shpalman wrote:
Fri Jan 07, 2022 1:13 pm
But I am mocking the grown up christians putting him on their websites as someone who's got scientific proof that god exists (and he's clever! just like all you scientists who deny god! but better!) as if such a thing made sense on any level or they even understood what he was saying (which in my scientific opinion doesn't actually make sense, but then he hasn't studied cosmology and general relativity properly yet, but then to be fair neither have I).
It doesn't make any sense. Time is one of the dimensions collapsed into the singularity, so there is no "earlier" than the point in time when the singularity expands.
BTW, this is why I said upthread that belief in a Prime Cause is a bit of a conflict for theoretical cosmology.

Re: Mocking religion

Posted: Fri Jan 07, 2022 5:17 pm
by dyqik
IvanV wrote:
Fri Jan 07, 2022 5:08 pm
shpalman wrote:
Fri Jan 07, 2022 1:13 pm
But I am mocking the grown up christians putting him on their websites as someone who's got scientific proof that god exists (and he's clever! just like all you scientists who deny god! but better!) as if such a thing made sense on any level...

...But anyway, requiring some sort of supernatural entity to put the singularity into existence from which the universe evolved with no further intervention doesn't logically lead to any particular widespread modern religion being the "right" one, let alone that the one he happens to believe in be the right one.)
Christian, indeed. We can't imagine Muslims, or Jews doing this, even though as you say it is not specific to any religion with a god. Nor indeed many kinds of Christian. It tends to be a certain kind of Christian who is particularly concerned with the apparent obstacles put in the way of their religion by science.
There are devout Creationist Muslims, including those in positions of power that have persecuted biologists in their countries and published creationist biology books. I'm not aware of the same as the cosmological level, but it seems likely that there are some.

Re: Mocking religion

Posted: Sat Jan 08, 2022 9:44 am
by shpalman
Hidden and coherent chronology of Jesus’ life in the literary work of Maria Valtorta
Maria Valtorta (1897−1961) was a mystical writer active in the years of World War II. Her literary work contains a detailed life of Jesus, without any explicit dates with respect to the Julian calendar. She sets Jesus’ birth (Nativity) on Kislev 25, first day of the Hebrews’ feast of Hannukah, and Jesus’ age at his death, on a Friday, in 1737 weeks. She writes that the Passover of the year before his death fell on Saturday. All these chronological data are unusual in mystical writings concerning Jesus’ life and raise the question about their coherence and self-consistency. We have studied these data and show that they refer to a hidden and coherent chronology. The astronomical and calendar analysis of these data allow: i) To set Jesus’ crucifixion on 23 April 34, a unusual date but the only one that can harmonize Johannine and Synoptic traditions about the Last Supper; ii) To verify that the Nativity set on Kislev 25 is compatible only with the Eastern tradition, 6 January 1 AD; iii) To assess that between birth and death’s dates exactly 1737 weeks have elapsed. Maria Valtorta proposes also an original story about the Star of Bethlehem: the Magi would have realized the birth of the Messiah by counting the days elapsed between some astronomical conjunctions, decoding the meaning of the numbers, so obtained, through Gematria, in close agreement with all other details of her narration.
(I added the links)