Incredulous and stunned we went back to our sources and double-checked our research and our math. The essentials remain intact, have even grown in import:
1. It is generally agreed that the most believable historical records bearing on the dating of the birth of Christ are those of the Gospels and Flavius Josephus.
2. It is generally agreed that Matthew is the least historically credible and most probably mythological of the Gospels -- at least with regard to the Star of Bethlehem story, since none of the others even mention it.
3. So all the recent efforts, including those of respected planetariums, to date Christ's birth by associating it with some striking or unusual astronomical event of known date are not only highly conjectural but probably chimerical to begin with.
4. Our renewed digging however did turn up the marvelous fact that it was none other than Johannes Kepler who originally concluded (in 1603), from astronomical calculations based on his reading of Josephus and the Gospels, that Christ could not have been born later than early 4 B.C.
5. And notwithstanding all the copious reconsideration by later astronomers and historians, the simple and straightforward reasoning that led Kepler to this determination -- based on Josephus' account of events surrounding the positively identified lunar eclipse of March 12-13, 4 B.C. -- remains unassailable.
6. There simply is no good reason to postpone the Inaugural Celebration of the Millennial Jubilee beyond the moment of greatest portent as provided by the perihelion of Comet Hale-Bopp (March 31-April 1, 1997), and having ranged from the ridiculousness of All Fools to the sublimity of the empyrean, we may now take this utterly cosmic synchronicity as a true sign and revelation of heavenly apocalypse. Our arrow has hit the bull's eye. And the cosmos has split the arrow.
7. Our assessment has grown so grandiose in part because the Comet Hale-Bopp itself looms larger under scrutiny. Unheralded and unknown until a year or two ago, it already promises to be the brightest visitor to pass inside the earth's orbit since Tycho Brahe's great comet of 1577. Its nucleus is described as "huge" and its forms of display are expected to be unusually varied and unusually dramatic. Its exact moment of perihelion (April 1 at 03:14 GMT, or March 31 at 22:14 EST) coincides perfectly with and is in fact a direct hit athwart our exact recommendation, depending only upon what time zone one is in. In one swath of Brazil and Greenland the Hale-Bopp perihelion will occur within the same quarter hour as the All Fools Millennium arrival. (Spla-a-at!)
8. But the comet straddles and announces the millennium in a larger sense as well. The best and brightest show will occur during the last two weeks of March and the first two weeks of April, and the grandest and most climactic display will most likely be concentrated within the last week of March and the first week of April, that is, between the full moon cum lunar eclipse of March 23 (Palm Sunday) and the following new moon of April 7.
9. An additional if somewhat ludicrous coincidence makes this latter date of April 7, 1997 (besides being the new moon at the true end of the true month and true week of the true millennium) at the same time the correctly numbered "Day 999" of the Millenary Countdown to the Common (or "Bogus") Millennium's "Zero Day": January 1, 2000. A millennium and a millennium and a millennium.
10. Finally, for whatever it is worth, our careful rereading of Josephus (Antiquities 17.6.4 and 17.9.3 especially, but the intervening passage also) made it clear to us that Herod actually survived the lunar eclipse of March 12-13, 4 B.C., by at least five days but did not survive until Passover. This produces a revised death date range for Herod of between March 18 and April 9, 4 B.C., a virtually perfect Hale-Bopp climax overlay. One modern writer, perhaps for this reason, has given April of 4 B.C. as the month of Herod's death (while at least one additional source, on the strength of an unnamed "Jewish tradition," reports Herod to have survived into the following year, 3 B.C., and by implication gives some small additional credence to 3 B.C. as the latest possible birth year of Christ, a surmise given also but also unexplained, in the Catholic Encyclopedia), yet all the mentioned newfound data taken together, no matter which of them are favored, don't appreciably reduce the overwhelming likelihood of a birth date for Christ before April of 4 B.C., and hence could not seriously dampen the prospects of, nor our still-growing enthusiasm for, an All Fools 1997 Bimillenary Jubilee Inaugural Cum Hale-Bopp Perihelion Countdown Celebration.
What to do with all this new territory and grace remains a question, but we don't doubt that something will occur to us. Stay tuned (and let us know your best thoughts too if you would). This is after all heaven.