Laurentius Suslyga dating history

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Laurentius Suslyga or Laurence Suslyga (Polish: Wawrzyniec Susliga or Susłyga) (1570–1640), was a Polish Jesuit historian, chronologist, and an author of Baroque visual poetry. He was the first person to claim that Jesus Christ was born in or before 4 BC, not in AD 1 or in 1 BC, as the Christian era would imply. Suslyga was thus questioning the Anno Domini chronology introduced by Dionysius Exiguus in AD 525. Suslyga presented this theory in his 1605 doctoral thesis entitled Theoremata de anno ortus et mortis Domini, deque universa Jesu Christi in carne oeconomia at the University of Graz. Among other arguments, Suslyga's treatise included the following: Herod's son, Philip the Tetrarch, renamed a city (Bethsaida) after Augustus's biological daughter, Julia. Since she had been exiled from Rome by Augustus in 2 BC, Suslyga assumed that Philip must have renamed the city prior to that date, and Herod must have died prior to Philip's becoming a ruler, which pushes the Massacre of the Innocents at least 3, if not more, years before AD 1. Dionysius Exiguus' chronology did need to be questioned; his chronology did not even match the point of view of the early Christians. The Church Fathers generally believed that Jesus was born either in the 41st or 42nd year of the reign of Augustus (consulship, principate, etc.), that is in 3 or 2 BC.