Dear Friends,

This Sabbath follows on quickly from the New Moon of the Eighth month. One of the suggested papers for this month is Jeroboam and the Hillel Calendar (No. 191).

The reason this is of interest is that the false calendar which delayed the New Year until after the Equinox – and resulted in the freezing of the Calendar with the New Year at 25 March with the Equinox in Israel – was also adopted by the Samaritans. To this day they are in the Eighth month for the Feasts some 60% of the time.

With the adoption of the Hillel Calendar among rabbinical Jews in 358 under Hillel II, the Jews have the Feast months wrong a great deal of the time also. I have heard it said that they must have it right because they don’t agree with the Catholic dates for Easter most of the time. The Church was keeping the Temple calendar for centuries before the Jews introduced the Hillel aberration in 358. The true Church of God did not disagree with Rome under both Anicetus (ca. 154) and Victor (ca. 192) over the month in which the pagan festival of Easter was kept in relation to the Passover. That was never in question. They both kept the same month except when the Sunday of the Wave Sheaf preceded the Friday, and then the pagans held the Easter Sunday after the Feast and, as a result, Pentecost was a week later for the Roman Church than it was for the Quartodeciman Sabbatarians when that occurred (see the paper The Quartodeciman Disputes (No. 277).

What happened when the Hillel calendar was introduced was that the Feasts were kept in the wrong month a great deal of the time. This also had the effect of keeping two Passovers in the same year, as it did with the Samaritans. This was the cause of much rebuke by the early churchmen. This calendar was never taken on by the Churches of God for 1600 years, until Herbert Armstrong was too lazy and uninformed to see the problem and adopted the Hillel calendar. He affected the Churches of God for decades, and long after his death his worshippers still keep this Jewish post-Temple period aberration, and many of his followers simply fabricate the history of the Hillel systems so they don’t have to admit error and repent.

The postponements of the Hillel system are explained in the paper The Calendar and the Moon: Postponements or Festivals? (No. 195)

The Calendar is also explained in the paper God's Calendar (No. 156).
Please study this issue so that you can give a proper account of it all.

Wade Cox
Coordinator General