"When the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law."Galatians 4:4
The Set Time of the Lamb of God
A life reckoned from Passover to Passover · 6 BCE → 28 CE
TheTimeofTheReturn.com · WellSpr.ing
Three dates anchor the life, and all three are Passover or its season. The birth at Passover 6 BCE is not a daring guess but where Herod's own decree deposits it: a king who killed every boy 'two years old and under' (Matthew 2:16) was hedging against a child already up to two years born before his death in 4 BCE — which lands the nativity at 6 BCE, at Migdal Eder, the tower where the flock for sacrifice was watched. Thirty years on — thirty being the age a Levite entered Temple service (Numbers 4:3) — the Nazarene came up out of the Jordan at the ford opposite Jericho, the very crossing-place where Joshua (Yeshua) brought Israel into the land on Nisan 10. Forty days in the wilderness followed, running through the Passover of 25 — which is why the first cleansing Passover John records (2:13) is 26, not 25. Three named Passovers later — 26, 27, 28 — at the fourth spring, the Lamb was offered. Between baptism and Passion, John hangs the calendar on the feasts: two more Passovers, a Tabernacles, a Dedication 'in winter,' and one feast he pointedly leaves unnamed. Read by season, the Gospel dates itself.
How to read this
This exhibit keeps four kinds of claim deliberately separate, so a reader can see exactly what each rests on. The spine is sourced history and dated text — it should survive a hostile reader who shares none of the author's beliefs. The scaffold is reasoning built on the spine by sequence or season. A core assumption is a reading-choice the frame depends on, named openly rather than hidden. And the reading is conviction — what the author (writing under the covenant name the Wellkeeper) personally holds, set behind a visible fence so it never leans on the spine and the spine is never charged with it. The phrase "fenced as reading" throughout means: held as belief, not offered as proof.
Spine — sourced
Scaffold — reasoned
Core assumption — named dependency
Reading — fenced conviction
6 BCEPassover · born
+ 30
25 CENisan 10 · baptized
+ 3
28 CEPassover · the Passion
no year zero: 1 BCE → 1 CE, so 6 BCE + 30 = 25 CE exactly
Integrated Timeline
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6 BCESPRINGPassoverSCAFFOLD
Born at Migdal Eder
At the tower of the flock near Bethlehem, in the lambing season, while Herod still reigns. Placed at 6 BCE by Herod's own two-year edict read against his death in 4 BCE; corroborated, a year off, by the spring comet of 5 BCE.
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c. 4–1 BCESUMMERSCAFFOLD
The hidden years
Flight, return, Nazareth. No date is argued here; the span is named only to keep the count honest across the BCE/CE seam (there is no year zero: 6 BCE + 30 = 25 CE).
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25 CESPRINGNisan 10SCAFFOLD
Up out of the Jordan at the ford
Baptized at the crossing-place opposite Jericho — Bethabara, the house of the ford — on the day Joshua (Yeshua) brought Israel into the land and the day the lamb is set apart. 'About thirty': the Levitical age of service. The day-of-year is fixed by the ford and the feast; the year rests on the count and the Tiberius reckoning.
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25 CESPRINGthrough PassoverSCAFFOLD
Forty days in the wilderness
The forty days run straight through the Passover of 25 — which is WHY the first cleansing Passover John records is 26, not 25. The first Passover of the ministry is spent fasting in the desert, echoing the forty years before the first crossing. The fast explains where the Passover count begins.
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25 CESUMMERSCAFFOLD
First disciples · the wedding at Cana
After the wilderness, John's testimony and the first followers (John 1:35ff), then Cana 'on the third day' (2:1) — early summer 25 by sequence. Cana carries no seasonal marker of its own; it is placed by the events around it, not by a date the text withholds.
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26 CESPRINGPassover ISPINE
First Temple cleansing
John 2:13 — 'the Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.' The first of three named Passovers. The cleansing of the courts; Nicodemus by night follows (John 3).
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26/27 CEWINTERJohn 4:35SCAFFOLD
The woman at Jacob's well
Passing through Samaria in deep winter. Jesus speaks with a woman at the well at noon and tells the disciples the fields are already 'white to harvest,' four months early, as a sign. The winter date depends on reading his 'four months until harvest' as a real season rather than a saying; see the Core Assumptions below.
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27 CEWINTER5:1 — unnamedSCAFFOLD
'A feast of the Jews'
John 5:1 mentions a feast but does not name it. It falls between the winter in Samaria and the next Passover, a slot that Purim (in March) fits well. This is the one flexible point in the timeline: if this feast were actually a Passover, the ministry would run a year longer and the death would move past 28 CE. The reason for not reading it as a Passover is in the Core Assumptions below.
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27 CESPRINGPassover IISPINE
Feeding of the five thousand
John 6:4 — 'the Passover was nigh.' The second named Passover, fixed to spring by the 'much grass' (6:10) and Mark's 'green grass' (6:39). Bread in the wilderness near the feast of bread.
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27 CEAUTUMNTabernaclesSPINE
The feast of booths
John 7:2 — 'the Jews' feast of tabernacles was at hand.' Autumn. Teaching in the Temple at the great water-drawing; 'if any man thirst, let him come unto me' (7:37). If wanted, the Transfiguration's 'three booths' reads as a Tabernacles-season echo (fenced).
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27 CEWINTERDedicationSPINE
Hanukkah in Solomon's Portico
John 10:22 — 'it was the feast of the dedication, and it was winter.' The clearest seasonal gloss John gives. 'I and my Father are one' (10:30); the first attempt to stone him. Then withdrawal beyond the Jordan (10:40) — back to the baptism ford, the ministry returning to where it began.
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28 CEWINTERbefore PassoverSCAFFOLD
Lazarus raised at Bethany
John 11, in the weeks before the last Passover, the immediate trigger of the plot to kill him (11:53). Martha's 'he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day' (11:24) is doctrinal hope, not a calendar — the dated resurrection is Firstfruits, not a general season.
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28 CESPRINGNisan 10SCAFFOLD
Triumphal entry
'Six days before the Passover' at Bethany (12:1), then the entry into the city. The same Nisan 10 as the baptism and as the lamb's setting-apart — the Lamb now presenting himself in Jerusalem. The ford-day and the city-day rhyme.
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28 CESPRINGPassover III · Nisan 14SPINE
The Passion
The third named Passover, and the fourth spring of the whole life. At the death the temple veil tore from top to bottom (Matthew 27:51). An old rabbinic tradition, written by people with no reason to confirm the Gospels, remembers that the Temple's doors began swinging open on their own around this time. The darkness is treated here as wind, held as a reading; the torn veil is the part that stands on its own.
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28 CESPRINGNisan 16 · FirstfruitsSPINE
Raised, the firstfruits
The morning after the Passover sabbath — the wave-sheaf of firstfruits. 'Now is Christ risen, the firstfruits of them that slept' (1 Cor 15:20). The resurrection is nailed to a dated feast, three days past the lamb. The arc closes where it is most precisely fixed.
Core Assumptions
Now that the whole sequence is in view, here are the three choices it depends on. They are stated plainly rather than buried, because a timeline that shows what holds it up is easier to trust than one that hides it. Each note says what changes if the choice goes the other way.
The ministry lasted three years and ended at Passover in 28 CE.
John's Gospel names three Passovers during the ministry (in chapters 2, 6, and 11). This timeline assumes those are all of them. There is one other feast John mentions but does not name, in chapter 5. If that unnamed feast were a fourth Passover, the ministry would run about three and a half years and the death would move to the following spring. The reason for reading it as something other than a Passover is simple: John names every Passover he reports, so the one he leaves unnamed is probably a different feast, most likely Purim or Pentecost.
The meeting with the Samaritan woman happened in winter.
At the well Jesus says, 'There are yet four months, and then the harvest' (John 4:35). Read as a plain statement about the season, this places the scene four months before the spring barley harvest, which falls in winter. Read instead as a proverb about people being ready, it gives no date at all. This timeline takes it as a statement about the season. If it is only a proverb, nothing else here breaks, but the winter date becomes less certain.
The baptism took place in 25 CE.
The day of the year is well anchored: Nisan 10, the day Israel crossed the Jordan and the day the Passover lamb was chosen. The year is the looser part. It comes from two things together: counting thirty years from a birth in 6 BCE, and reading Luke's 'fifteenth year of Tiberius' from the time Tiberius began sharing power in the provinces rather than from the death of Augustus. Both point to 25 CE. If instead the fifteenth year is counted from Augustus's death, the whole timeline moves a few years later, toward the more common dating of the death around 30 to 33 CE.
◆ Reading — mechanism, fenced
On the darkness — held as reading, not proof
Solar eclipses are associated with a dark moon where the sun and moon conjoin. No solar eclipse occurred over Jerusalem in these years. The reading carried here is that the three hours of darkness were a khamsin: the hot, dust-laden desert wind that blackens the Levant sky in spring, most likely arriving with the earthquake the Gospels report, so that the dark came on suddenly and with violent wind. A blast of wind through the open temple courts would tear a hanging veil from top to bottom and throw the great doors open. The same kind of darkness fell on Egypt in the ninth plague, called 'darkness which may be felt' (Exodus 10:21), a darkness thick enough to touch, just before the firstborn died at the first Passover. The wind is the reading, held as belief. What stands on its own is narrower and does not depend on it: the torn veil that Matthew and Mark record, and the earthquake of that period, whose disturbed layer geologists have found in sediment cores from the Dead Sea.
◆ The Reading — conviction, set apart
Why it matters
Everything above stands on its own: verses that say what they are said to say, a river ford, a comet in the Chinese records, the calculated sky, a layer in a sediment core. What follows is different. It is what the author believes about why these years matter, offered as conviction and not as proof. It is set apart here on purpose, so that it never leans on the evidence above and the evidence above is never blamed for it.
There is an old idea, drawn from 'one day is with the Lord as a thousand years' (Psalm 90:4; 2 Peter 3:8), that the history of the world runs like a week of thousand-year days, closing in a final day of rest, with a new creation beyond it. Early Christian writers such as Barnabas and Irenaeus reasoned this way. On that view, the start of the ministry in 25 CE begins a count whose two-thousand-year mark falls in our own time. The author holds that the year just passed stood two thousand years from that beginning, and that this lines up with the close of a long Jubilee count and a long astronomical cycle around the same time. He holds it as a reason for hope and attention, the way anyone would who believed he was living near a turning point that Scripture had pointed to.
What this belief does not claim from the evidence above
Revelation 20:4 describes a resurrection of martyrs, those 'beheaded for the witness.' It does not give a formula of a thousand years per day for dating anyone's resurrection. The thousand-year count here is the author's own, not something the verse states.
Martha's words in John 11:24 express the ordinary Jewish hope of resurrection 'at the last day.' They are not a hidden timetable. The resurrection that Scripture actually fixes to a date is Firstfruits, three days after the Passover.
The wise men did not know the year in advance. Herod had to ask them both where and when (Matthew 2:4, 7), and he killed two years of children to be safe. The timing of these events can be reasoned out from Scripture, but the Gospels never show it being known ahead of time.
The rise in knowledge and the fall in crime are real and can be measured, and for exactly that reason they are not offered here as prophetic signs. Trends like these have their own ordinary causes and cannot confirm a religious timeline. They are mentioned as encouragement, not as evidence.
References and Citations
"Consistent with" is never "proven by." The spine is cited; the scaffold is reasoned; the dependencies are named; the conviction is fenced. Read by season, the Gospel dates itself — on the joints here marked, and no further.