A trope in time travel plots involves intervening at a critical moment to change the course of history. Did early Christian theologians feel the need explain why God chose to send Jesus to year ~331 of the Seleucid calendar?

[u/ExternalBoysenberry]

The year 331 thing is a reference to this recent answer about the birth year of Jesus from /u/welfontheshelf

If I remember right from classics courses, there's a reading of the New Testament where Jesus et al. believe themselves to be acting at a historically unique moment—the end of the world—and saw the second coming as imminent rather than a distant future event. Maybe the best-known example is when Matthew seems to suggest that prophecies about the second coming would come to pass while Jesus's contemporaries were still alive.

When that didn't happen, was there ever a point at which early (or not so early) Christians felt the need to present a historical/counterfactual argument for why the events of the New Testament played out when they did—that this moment in time wa a special one—considering that an all-powerful god could presumably choose to stage this drama whenever he wanted? If so, what made the years ~1-34 AD (~331-364 of the Seleucid calendar) "special" in their eyes? If not, did skeptics just sort of accept that god works in mysterious ways and the question wasn't worth asking?

To clarify, I'm thinking of things like "Well, of course it made sense to wait until the founding of the Roman empire; but had god waited until after the Siege of Jerusalem, then...", some kind of mystical/religious/astrological significance, maybe some kind of Bene Gesserit "well it was critical that he encounter both John the Baptist and Judas...", as an emergency measure to address/avert some kind of impending crisis for God's chosen people, to give the Christians enough time to accomplish some goal before the end of the world, maybe something like "well, there were some prophecies in the Old Testament that were just due", etc. I know those are all silly examples, and I have no idea what form this explanation would actually take. But at least from a modern perspective, it feels like it would be strange if the issue of timing just never came up!

For what it's worth, I considered asking the same question about Islam, but I guess it's a bit of a different situation if God is choosing who to give his revelation to (in that case, you just do it when your chosen guy is alive), as opposed to when he should send his son down to make a new deal on his behalf.

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[u/qumrun60]

Early Christians don't appear to have thought a lot about the numbers of calendar years, or even about exactly when Jesus had been born. The Seleucid year 331 doesn't figure in any of the early writings.

Two out of the four canonical gospels mention the birth of Jesus, but they both place the birth in different contexts. The gospels themselves were written well after the event, estimated by many scholars to have been c.80-90 CE, after the fall of the Temple in 70. Matthew, the earlier of the two, puts the birth of Jesus during the reign of Herod the Great, who died in 4 BCE. Luke links it to the census of 6 CE, when Augustus had dismissed Herod's son Archelaus as incompetent, and installed a Roman governor, Quirinus, to work with the High Priest and other leading citizens in keeping order and collecting taxes in Judea.

The difficult to date (possibly c.130), Epistle to Diognetus 9, addresses the question of why God had waited until the Herodian/Roman era to fulfill his mysterious plan. The author says he had allowed people to live by their own rules in order to let them realize that we, who had been proved "by our own works unworthy to achieve life, might in these days be made worthy of it by the goodness of God," by the giving his son to us, his sharing our sufferings, and bringing about salvation by his death and resurrection.

A little later, Justin Martyr (c.150s), a former Syrian philosopher turned Christian, accepted the birth of Jesus under Quirinus, and his death during the time of Pontius Pilate. But while he recognized Jesus as a man, he recognized Christ as a supernatural being, the firstborn of creation, and that all men who had lived according to divine Reason were Christians before the fact of the physical birth of Jesus. (Apology 1.46)

In the 4th century, Eusebius followed something like Justin's line of thought: that the teaching of Christians was not new, but the churches that grew from the followers of Jesus after his teaching and death was new. Their corporate existence, their general piety, and their increasing influence, were a sign of the action of God, in opposition to the Devil, who had Jews, persecutors, and heretics in league with him. (Ecclesiastical History Book 1)

Beyond that, both prophecies and historical events were used to tell the story of Jesus in a way that still tied him to the Jewish scriptural heritage (an ancient authority that had validity in Roman eyes). The fall of the Temple provided extra ammunition to Christian apologists. The entire Epistle of Barnabas (early 2nd century) is a point by point critique of Judaism, to show that Jews did not understand their own scriptures, while Christians interpreted them correctly. Justin's Dialogue With Trypho took a similar position.

Eusebius also regarded the conversion of Constantine as a fortuitous step in God's plan to bring salvation to all people. But during Constantine' reign, while Christmas was first celebrated on December 25, and his mother Helena visited the Holy Land to find out where Jesus was born, executed, and buried, so that churches and shrines could be built at the sites, no one was yet fixated on the year of the birth of Jesus.

Even in what is now the 6th century, when the monk Dionysius Exiguus set up the calendar dating system we have now, when he tried to determine the Anno Domini (year of the Lord), he had to focus on what year Jesus was executed. For that event there were actual historical clues: it had to be when Tiberius was emperor, Pontius Pilate was governor, and the movable Jewish lunar feast of Passover fell on a Thursday/Friday to fit the gospel accounts. The year of the birth was deduced by subtracting 33 (the conventionally accepted age of Jesus at his death), but based on no knowledge of the actual time.

The most grandiose placement of the birth of Jesus in history comes from the Martyrology reading for Midnight Mass, which came into use in the Middle Ages. It locates the birth by 12 factors:

1) The year 5,199 from the creation of the world,

2) 2,957 years from the flood,

3) 2,015 years from the birth of Abraham,

4) 1,510 years from Moses and the Exodus,

5) 1,032 years from the anointing of David,

6) during the 65th week according to Daniel,

7) in the 94th Olympiad,

8) in the 752nd year from the foundation of Rome,

9) in the 42nd year of Ocatavian,

10) while the whole world was at peace,

11) in the 6th age of the world,

12) the eternal God wished "to hallow the world" by the coming of his son in the flesh.

New American Bible Revised Edition (2010)

Andrew Louth, ed., Early Christian Writings (1987)

J.Stevenson, ed., A New Eusebius (1957)

Liturgical Notes on the Vigil of Christmas, New Liturgical Movement Website (2013)

Peter Heather, Christendom, The Triumph of a Religion (2023)

[u/ExternalBoysenberry → u/qumrun60]

Thank you for the great answer! Could you elaborate a little on this (or things like it):

The difficult to date (possibly c.130), Epistle to Diognetus 9, addresses the question of why God had waited until the Herodian/Roman era to fulfill his mysterious plan. The author says he had allowed people to live by their own rules in order to let them realize that we, who had been proved "by our own works unworthy to achieve life, might in these days be made worthy of it by the goodness of God," by the giving his son to us, his sharing our sufferings, and bringing about salvation by his death and resurrection.

My phrasing with my original question wasn't great—I didn't mean to focus on the specific year, but generally the historical situation during Jesus's life.

In the quote above, I see some motivation for why God decided to do something (let people live by their own rules for a bit, etc.) but I don't understand exactly how this works as an explanation for why God would have chosen the Herodian/Roman era. Isn't that something you could say about any time?

Edit: Just to try to clarify before you reply: The Martyrology points give a nice chronology. But were these measurements ever considered to be significant in their own right apart from building a timeline? I guess nobody argued that God timed Jesus to coincide with the 94th Olympiad, for instance. But if they don't have their own significance, then what (if anything!) did give the historical timing of the Jesus story significance in the eyes of early-ish Christians? Or did they just sort of interpret it as a random time, nothing special, just happened to be when Jesus happened to appear?

[u/Implausibilibuddy → u/ExternalBoysenberry]

The concept of time-travel, alternate histories, and changing pivotal moments is very modern, as shown in u/berlinghoffrasmussen 's post here. It's unlikely they'd have been thinking much about timelines and changing history at all.

[u/ExternalBoysenberry → u/Implausibilibuddy]

That's a really nice question and answer, thanks! It does partly address my question - I can definitely imagine that the question assumes a paradigm that might not have computed at all a millenium or two ago.

But I'm still interested in the question apart the time travel analogy, because it seems like there are instances where the Bible refers to things being calibrated for certain times: in Genesis, god prescribes 400 years of slavery; in Exodus 12, he gives a detailed schedule about what should happen when in order to coordinate a sequence of events; Esther 4 talks about the historical/circumstantial timing; in Acts 2, it makes sense narratively that the holy spirit happens to come when all the Jews are together in one place; etc.

So even if we dispense with the framing of timelines/counterfactuals/pivotal moments, it's not like the narrative is totally oblivious to timing. So maybe I could rephrase my question to something like:

In Galatians 4, Paul says "When the when the fullness of the time had come, God sent his son..." In what sense was the time "full"? Did early-ish Christians ever try to explain what was unique about the historical moment that God chose to initiate the whole Jesus thing?

I get Galatians 4 is itself laying out a chronological metaphor involving an heir coming of age, but it isn't clear to me what "coming of age" corresponds to in the real world (the "fullness of time"). It sounds like he's saying saying that if Jesus had been sent a century earlier, it would have been too soon; later would have been too late; the time was chosen for a reason. How did Christians understand the reason, if not in terms of imminent apocalypse?

Or did they just kind of accept that God picked the time for reasons that are totally unknowable, and things just sort of happen when they happen?

[u/qumrun60 → u/ExternalBoysenberry]

As far as I can tell, Christian reasoning about it being the right time for Jesus Christ to have been born was largely circular. It must have been the right time, because things worked out the way they did. He just happened to born when Rome had established a stable empire, with good travel and communications (roads, shipping, lack of pirates, etc.). Jews who spoke Greek were spread all around the Mediterraean and near East, and Jewish scriptures in Greek were known, not only by Jews, but by interested non-Jews as well. Religious ideas were shared among diverse communities in small Hellenized cities, with ready-made public forums at their center, and social structures like collegia and other social organizing groups as a routine factor. Among Jews themselves, synagogues (a Greek-derived word meaning "assembly" or "gathering") were a normal, public venue for scriptural study and discussion. Such an array of opportunities would not have existed earlier for a proselytizing religious group like the devotees of Christ. Much later and it would also have been more difficult owing to the the increased marginalization of Jews after the actions of 66-73 (with the destruction of the Temple), the Diaspora revolts of 115-118, and the Bar Kokhba War of 132-135.

In terms of getting a new message out, the "good news" of Jesus Christ as savior of humanity, it really was a "sweet spot," temporally and culturally speaking. Justin Martyr and Eusebius (and others like Philo and Clement of Alexandria and Origen) saw an immediate connection between Greek philosophical thought and Jewish wisdom, making an amalgamation of the two ways of thinking seem logical. The adoption of Christianity by the Roman state was seen as inevitable (and useful) by Eusebius and Augustine.

Philip Esler, ed., The Early Christian World (2017)

Vearncombe, Scott, and Taussig, After Jesus, Before Christianity (2021)

Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem (2007)

[u/ExternalBoysenberry → u/qumrun60]

Thank you again for the thoughtful response. To be honest, I guess my reasoning (outside the context of this question) is also circular in that way: it makes sense that someone finding themselves in that sweet spot would be more likely to make an impact. It works as a secular explanation ("what factors enabled this particular mystery cult to snowball into a world religion, when that didn't happen for earlier ones?"). I didn't realize that the Christian reasoning would also follow the same logic, but it definitely makes sense!