So Dr. Tighe thinks that the early Christians, even though they couldn't understand the Jewish calendar (or, apparently, the Julian calendar), were so tuned into the Jewish tradition of "integral age" that they assumed Jesus' death must have occurred on the same day as the Annunciation? Pretty speculative.

However, Good Friday did fall on the date of the Annunciation this year, 2005.

One wonders how we can be sure how long Jesus' gestation took, since his conception was a bit unusual.

Speculating about the gestation of Jesus would border on heresy at the very least. Ever since the ancient heresies were ironed out, it has been well established that Jesus was indeed fully human as well as fully divine. To be fully human implies all the regular human life processes and events, including an essentially normal gestation.

But anyway...

"Fully human" always brings up a lot of sticky questions. My church had a display of reproductions of Madonna-and-child paintings one year at Christmas. One of them, by a nineteenth-century Romantic, depicted a toddler Jesus being given a spanking by Mary. (These pictures were owned by the pastor.) Was the child Jesus ever naughty? If so, how can we call him perfect? If not, how could he have been fully human? Isn't that as much a part of the standard human experience as a nine-month gestation?

Being naughty is part of a fallen human's experience, but not necessarily an unfallen human (one not touched by original sin). As He was like us in all but sin, it follows that He would not have been naughty hence did not need spanking.

So he didn't behave or think like a human. In other words, he was human in body only. This makes him "fully human"? If so, we're all toast.