Laurentius Suslyga

Who was Laurentius Suslyga?

Laurentius Suslyga or Laurence Suslyga, was a Polish Jesuit historian, chronologist, and an author of Baroque visual poetry. He was the first person to claim that Jesus Christ was in fact born around 4 BC, not in AD 1, 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 after Augustus's daughter, Julia. Since she had been exiled from Rome by Augustus in 2 BC, 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. Suslyga's work was in turn used by Kepler to bolster Kepler's theory that the Star of Bethlehem was in fact a great conjunction of the three planets: Jupiter, Saturn and Mars. According to Kepler's calculations, this conjunction occurred around 7/6 BC.