Everything this site leans on

Listed so you can check it. Where scholars disagree, both sides are here — a bibliography that cited only the argument this site finds persuasive would be advocacy dressed as scholarship.

Dating the crucifixion — the case

• Humphreys, C. & Waddington, W. G., "Dating the Crucifixion," Nature 306 (1983), 743–746. The original astronomical argument.
• Humphreys, C. & Waddington, W. G., "The Jewish Calendar, a Lunar Eclipse and the Date of Christ's Crucifixion," Tyndale Bulletin 43.2 (1992), 331–351. The fuller case, and their defence against the visibility objection.
• Humphreys, C., The Mystery of the Last Supper (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Book-length treatment, including his pre-exilic-calendar reconciliation of John against the synoptics. One proposal, not a consensus.

Dating the crucifixion — the objections

• Schaefer, B. E., "Lunar Visibility and the Crucifixion," Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 31 (1990), 53–67. Argues the AD 33 eclipse would have been at most marginally perceptible: never more than ~59% of the disc shadowed, with light leakage washing out the reddening.
• Gonzalez, G., "Reevaluating the Visibility of the April 3, AD 33, Lunar Eclipse from Jerusalem," Bibliotheca Sacra 179:713 (Jan–Mar 2022). Concludes the closing phase would have been visible under normal conditions, but that a khamsin most likely prevented it — removing a principal argument for AD 33.
• Schaefer, B. E., "Lunar Crescent Visibility," QJRAS 37.4 (1996), 759–768. On how hard first sighting actually is to predict — the problem underneath every reconstruction on this site.

The Jewish calendar

• Stern, S., Calendar and Community: A History of the Jewish Calendar, 2nd Century BCE – 10th Century CE (Oxford University Press, 2001). The standard history. Diversity before unity; no uniform intercalation as late as the sixth century; early lunar calendars running late, with Passover always after the equinox.
• Talmud, Sanhedrin 11a–b. The pre-fixed criteria for declaring a leap year: equinox, ripeness of the barley, condition of the roads.
• Encyclopaedia Judaica, "Calendar." Records the competing intercalation sequences that persisted into the tenth century.
• Jewish Encyclopedia, "Calendar, History of." On Hillel II and the traditional date (~358–359 CE) for the fixed calculated calendar.

The Islamic calendar

• Qur'an 9:36–37, with Tafsir al-Tabari and Tafsir Ibn Kathir on 9:37. The abolition of nasī', proclaimed at the Farewell Pilgrimage — the ruling that makes the Hijri year refuse to correct.

Roman and historical framing

• Tacitus, Annals XV.44. Independent attestation of the execution under Pilate during Tiberius's reign.

Validating the engine against independent chronology

• Parker, R. A. & Dubberstein, W. H., Babylonian Chronology 626 B.C. – A.D. 75, 4th ed. (Brown University Press, 1971). The standard reference chronology: 8,670 Babylonian month beginnings with Julian equivalents. This site scores its visibility criteria against the whole table. Note that P&D's month-starts are themselves largely computed rather than observed — see the caveat on the robustness page.
• Schoch, C., lunar visibility algorithm, in Langdon, S. & Fotheringham, J. K., The Venus Tablets of Ammizaduga (1928). The criterion Parker and Dubberstein computed their tables with. It matters because it means our comparison is against a reconstruction, not against raw sightings.
• van Gent, R. H., The Babylonian Calendar (Utrecht University). Digitisation of the P&D tables, and the independent comparison — modern lunar theory plus Yallop against P&D, 680 of 8,670 lunations differing — that this site uses to check its own astronomy end to end. webspace.science.uu.nl
• Bennett, C., Babylonian Calendar Conversions (Tyndale House). A version of the P&D table corrected against the astronomical diaries, goal-year texts and eclipse reports. The next thing worth folding in, because those corrections are where observation actually enters.

The astronomy

• Meeus, J., Astronomical Algorithms, 2nd ed. (Willmann-Bell, 1998). Ch. 49 for the new-moon series, ch. 47 for lunar position, ch. 25 for solar longitude. The engine implements these directly, and its agreement with an independent implementation is measured rather than asserted.
• Yallop, B. D., A Method for Predicting the First Sighting of the New Crescent Moon, RGO NAO Technical Note 69 (1997). The criterion that best reproduces the reference chronology in our own testing — 91.97% of 8,670 Babylonian months.
• Odeh, M. Sh., "New Criterion for Lunar Crescent Visibility," Experimental Astronomy 18 (2004), 39–64. Fitted to a larger modern sighting database than Yallop, but its bands A–B are markedly more permissive, and against P&D it runs systematically a day early.
• Espenak, F. & Meeus, J., polynomial expressions for ΔT (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center). The dynamical-to-universal time correction — nearly three hours at this epoch.

What has actually been checked

A bibliography records what a project cites. It does not record whether anyone opened any of it. This section does, because the gap between those two things is where most citation errors live — and on this site the gap is currently large.