(avg. read time: 7–14 mins.)
I have previously posted a version of this paper under a different title on academia.edu. I am presenting it here in 12 parts for a few reasons. One, the full version is over 35,000 words. Two, it is easily dividable as I examine distinct pieces of evidence in discrete sections. Three, readers can focus on the parts they are most interested in without needing to wade through a lot of other material to get there. Four, I am interested to see which pieces of evidence interest readers the most. With that being said, let’s get to it.
In this series, I aim to examine the evidence that the Gospel according to Matthew and the Gospel according to Luke can supply for when Jesus was born in order to answer the following questions: Could Jesus have been born on December 25? Could he have been born in the traditional birth year of 1 BCE assigned by Dionysius Exiguus, the founder of the BC/AD dating system in the West? If not, what does the Gospel evidence actually indicate? My own response to these questions, in short, is that it is not at all improbable that Dionysius was correct in following tradition that Jesus was born on December 25, although it is much less likely that he was born in the year that we know as 1 BCE, but he was likely born in 3 (or possibly 2) BCE.1
Now that thesis statement seems pretty weak, I will admit. But it is crucial to clarify what we can establish in this analysis. Clearly, the Gospel authors did not find it crucial to tell their audiences Jesus’s exact date of birth, whether the year or the day he was born. Even for the events all the Gospel authors regarded as important—namely, Jesus’s death and resurrection—we do not receive any attempt at a precise date, but only that these things happened around Passover, with Jesus’s resurrection in particular taking place on the Sunday after the Passover that year. But we see nothing in the Gospels on par with ancient historians linking events with the times of consulships, a year in the reign of an emperor or king, a year in an Olympiad, or even how many years it had been since some other major event. Later Christian sources engage in this chronological work, as we will see below, but none of the Gospels show particular interest in this activity. The closest analogue is when Luke dates the beginning of John the Baptist’s, Jesus’s baptism, and the beginning of Jesus’s ministry to the 15th year of Tiberius (Luke 3:1), but he does not make similar precise links to either Jesus’s birth or death and resurrection. And the fact that they are not clear on this matter gave room to later Christian work that shows fascinating diversity, although some strands of tradition are more consistent and persistent than others. We have seen this already in my other essay on December 25 concerning the day when Jesus was born, and we will see more of it as we have occasion to note what year the early Christians thought Jesus was born in (although the diversity is considerably less here).
Such facts create some significant problems for traditionalists that attempt to rush too quickly to the defense of the traditional date, as in this series of pointed questions from Taylor Marshall:
Now ask yourself: Would the Blessed Virgin Mary ever forget the birth of her Son Jesus Christ who was conceived without human seed, proclaimed by angels, born in a miraculous way, and visited by Magi? She knew from the moment of His incarnation in her stainless womb that He was the Son of God and Messiah. Would she ever forget that day?
Next, ask yourself: Would the Apostles be interested in hearing Mary tell the story? Of course they would. Do you think the holy Apostle who wrote, ‘And the Word was made flesh,’ was not interested in the minute details of His birth? Even when I walk around with our seven-month-old son, people always ask ‘How old is he?’ or ‘When was he born?’ Don’t you think people asked this question of Mary?2
This is hardly the only case of Marshall “preaching to the choir” on this subject, but these two series of questions are perhaps the most vivid example of pulpit-pounding in the absence of strong evidence. Mary certainly remembered the day, but who is to say she marked the date, especially if it was not considered important to mark birthdays per se on an annual basis in her culture (Josephus, Ag. Ap. 2.204) and only an idea of general age was necessary? And if she herself remembered (without marking with celebration) the birthday for years to come, that does not entail that she knew how to convert the date on the Jewish calendar in Judea of that year to the Julian calendar, on which the date of December 25 is based. This is all the more likely an obstacle given the imprecision of Jewish calendars at this time, which I will have occasion to reference later. It might have been easy for her to remember the date if she knew that Jesus was born on the date the Julian calendar assigned to the winter solstice (December 25), but one could say the same if he was born on the summer solstice, either of the equinoxes, or on any date that would have been part of a significant festival.
Likewise, the apostles certainly seem to have showed interest in hearing Mary tell the story, but if they showed such interest in the date, why do none of them reflect this interest in their own writings? He cites John as someone who would be interested in the minute details of Jesus’s birth, but John still does not mention the day or year Jesus was born. I suppose that minute detail escaped his interest, or at least he did not find it interesting enough to write about. Matthew and Luke were clearly interested enough in Jesus’s birth to write about it, but neither of them finds the date of his birth to be of any special significance, otherwise they surely would have made clearer statements about it. If indeed Mary said that the date of his birth was on December 25, and the apostles passed this information along, even if they did not write it, one must wonder why the earliest records of the date of Jesus’s birth are precisely records involving debate, calculation, and argument. None of these sources saw fit to appeal to the testimony of Mary. None of them saw fit to appeal to the testimony of tradition at all in support of the December 25 date until the time of John Chrysostom, Augustine, and Jerome. I have argued that the tradition is plausibly early, but it is not unassailably so, as Marshall’s argument would necessitate.
Furthermore, as Roger Beckwith observes, there are inevitable uncertainties for any theory in the absence of such chronological information, whether they follow the traditional claims or not:
They all depend upon the assumption that Elizabeth conceived as soon as her husband returned from his service in the Temple, and that Mary conceived as soon as she heard the message of the angel. We celebrate the Annunciation and the Nativity nine months apart on the basis of just such an assumption, and yet we know that it is completely uncertain, and that the period between is more or less symbolic. In the cases of two of the three miraculous births recorded in the Old Testament, it is explicitly said that the child will be born in a year’s time, not in nine months’ time (Gen. 17:21; 21:2; 2 Kgs. 4:16f.). How do we know that this is not the case with miraculous births foretold in the New Testament as well?3
The lack of such specific chronological statements in Matthew and Luke as we have in the OT could imply that the reader is supposed to understand the temporal gaps as small, but that is by no means definite. In this light, the most that the Gospel evidence will allow us to establish is plausibility that Jesus could have been born on December 25 in a given year. It can, at most, provide support for such a date, but not definite confirmation. Indeed, many would claim that it provides positive disconfirmation, but we will address these matters later. To begin, here is a layout of the evidence these two Synoptic Gospels provide, with the evidence that I will argue is either of questionable relevance or simply inconclusive in italics:
Herod commands the slaughter of male children in Bethlehem two years old and under (Matt 2:7, 16)
Zechariah the priest serves in the temple as part of the priestly order of Abijah (Luke 1:5, 8–9)
Jesus is born while Augustus is Caesar and while he has decreed a census (Luke 2:1)
Jesus’s birth and the cited census have some relationship to when Quirinius was governor of Syria (Luke 2:2)
Luke tells us that there were shepherds in the field on the night when Jesus was born (Luke 2:8)
Mary and Joseph presented Jesus at the temple in Jerusalem, presumably some forty days after his birth (Luke 2:22–24, 39)
John begins his ministry in the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius (Luke 3:1)
Some Hypotheses
Before we dive into the evidence proper, it is important to set the stage to understand some of the competing hypotheses I have only briefly mentioned to this point. I have already laid out the reasonings for the dates assigned to Jesus’s birthday in another essay on the subject (available in five parts at Sarolta Tatar’s site here), so here I will focus on the different hypotheses about the year. As Harold Hoehner observed back in 1977, scholars both ancient and modern have argued for birth years of Jesus as far apart as 20 BCE to 1 BCE.4 But such wide variability is not restricted to older sources.
In 1989, Jerry Vardaman argued, on the basis of the context of the major reference to Jesus in Josephus (Ant. 18.63–64), that Josephus claimed that Jesus’s ministry would have begun no later than 15–19 CE.5 His reasoning, on which the rest of his arguments ultimately hinged, was that, “It is true that Josephus is not always arranged chronologically. Nevertheless, it is just as true, demonstrably, that Josephus is sometimes chronological in his arrangement of material—certainly in his general arrangement of material. For example, Moses is not reported in the later part of his Antiquities, but in the earlier part.”6 However, to move from this basic fact to his radical conclusion misses much in the process.
First, even if we were to grant his basic argument about the historical events Josephus surrounds his reference to Jesus with, Josephus frequently shifts back and forth in his contextualizing of events, whether flashing back to examine causation or flashing forward to examine consequence or something else of significance. In this very book of Jewish Antiquities, Josephus has moved from talking about Judas the Galilean and the revolt he led in 6 CE to the time when the movement he began came to fruition during the tenure of Gessius Florus, and then back again (18.1–10, 25). Second, if Vardaman is to be believed, Josephus’s later reference to John the Baptist’s death (18.116–119) would imply that it happened around the time of Herod Antipas’s loss in battle to Aretas IV, which happened not long (~34–36 CE) before the death of Caesar Tiberius (37 CE), and then Josephus’s narration moves backwards to outline the family history of the Herodian dynasty (18.109–142).7 By Vardaman’s argument, John the Baptist must have died over a decade after Jesus (who he claims died in 21 CE). Third, in order to re-date both Jesus and Pilate, he must ignore the chronological information provided by his own major source, as Josephus notes that Annius Rufus was the governor when Caesar Augustus died in 14 CE (18.32), he was succeeded by Valerius Gratus (presumably, sometime in 15 CE), and Gratus worked in Judea for eleven years before he was succeeded by Pontius Pilate (18.33–35), which would imply that Pilate took office in ~26 CE. It is in connection with Pilate, not any of the other events, regardless of how they are dated, that Josephus mentions Jesus. Fourth, in order to make this argument, he must further suppose, admittingly in the absence of any manuscript evidence, that Luke originally wrote that Jesus was baptized in the “second” year of Tiberius, rather than the “fifteenth” year, based on the potential for confusion of writing these years in shorthand (β vs ιε [in capitals: Β vs. ΙΕ]).8
Apart from such exceptions, scholars have more often argued for dates between 7 and 1 BCE. Those who argue for 7 BCE are those who adopt a certain interpretation of what the star of Bethlehem was, although the fact that they take for granted the date of Herod the Great’s death in 4 BCE (based on Josephus) also influences the scope of their investigations of astral phenomena. Those who argue for 6 BCE emphasize even more the date of Herod’s death in 4 BCE and take the note that Herod commanded the killing of all male children “two years old and under” to mean that Jesus could well have been two years old at this time. Those who argue for 5 BCE either follow the same track as the 6 BCE argument, while allowing for some latitude on what this provision from Herod meant for when Jesus was born, or they adopt a different date for Herod’s death in 5 BCE. Those who argue for 4 BCE lean heavily on the date of Herod’s death in the same year, thinking that the Gospel according to Matthew implies that his death was shortly thereafter. Those who argue for 3 or 2 BCE often lean heavily on the testimony of the early Christians:
Irenaeus of Lyons (Haer. 3.21.3) claimed that Jesus was born in the 41st year of Augustus = 3/2 BCE.
Clement of Alexandria (Stromata 1.21) claimed that Jesus was born in the 28th year of Augustus (at Alexandria) = 3/2 BCE.
Tertullian (Adv. Jud. 8.11–18) claimed that Jesus was born in the 41st year of Augustus/28th year after Cleopatra’s death = 3/2 BCE.
Origen (Hom. Luke frag. 82) claimed the same 41st year of Augustus = 3/2 BCE.9
Eusebius provided separate dates in his Chronicle (third year of the 194th Olympiad/42nd year of Augustus = 2/1 BCE)10 and Church History (1.5.2: 42nd year of Augustus, which he dates to 305 years before the 19th year of Diocletian [7.32–8.2] = ~3 BCE).
Epiphanius of Salamis (Pan. 51.22) followed the later dating of the 42nd year of Augustus, also described as the year of his 13th consulship = 2 BCE.
Sulpicius Severus (Chron. 2.27) dated Jesus’s birth to what he claimed was the 33rd year of Herod the Great’s reign = 3 BCE.
Orosius (Hist. 6.22.1–5; 7.2.14–15) dated Jesus’s birth to the 42nd year of Augustus and to the 752nd year from the foundation of Rome, when Augustus closed the gates of Janus (a signal of a time without war) for the third time = 2 BCE.11
Cassiodorus Senator (Chron.) dated Jesus’s birth to the 41st year of Augustus = 3 BCE.12
The few who argue for 1 BCE tend to follow a similar track, though perhaps drawing more on Dionysius Exiguus and some of the sources I mentioned in my previous essay, such as a certain reading of Julius Africanus (who appears to have been used to support both 2 BCE and 1 BCE).13 Like those who argue for 3–2 BCE, they also lean more heavily on the notes in Luke that Jesus was about 30 years old in Tiberius’s 15th year, while arguing that Herod’s death has been misdated. With these theories outlined, let us look at the indications the Gospels give for when Jesus was born.
Steven L. Ware (When Was Jesus Really Born? Early Christianity, the Calendar, and the Life of Jesus [St. Louis: Concordia, 2013], 93–119) provides an excellent analysis of Dionysius’s calculation work and makes clear that, even if Dionysius were correct on the precise date of Jesus’s birth, it would practically be by accident, given the mistakes in his calculations.
Taylor R. Marshall, The Eternal City: Rome and the Origins of Catholic Christianity, vol. 3 of Origins of Catholic Christianity (Dallas: Saint John, 2012), 54.
Roger T. Beckwith, Calendar and Chronology, Jewish and Christian: Biblical, Intertestamental and Patristic Studies (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 78.
Harold W. Hoehner, Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1977), 12.
Jerry Vardaman, “Jesus’ Life: A New Chronology,” in Chronos, Kairos, Christos: Nativity and Chronological Studies Presented to Jack Finegan, ed. Jerry Vardaman and Edwin M. Yamauchi (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1989), 55–82. It should be noted that this reference to Jesus is controversial in scholarship on Josephus, as most suggest at least partial interpolation in this text (if the entire thing is not interpolated). For presentations of the majority view that the passage is basically authentic with a few interpolations by Christian scribes, see John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: The Roots of the Problem and Person, vol. 1 of Rethinking the Historical Jesus (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 59–88; Robert E. Van Voorst, Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 84–104. On whether the earlier text was negative or neutral, see John Curran, “‘To Be or to Be Thought to Be’: The Testimonium Flavianum (Again),” NovT 59 (2017): 71–94; Fernando Bermejo-Rubio, “Was the Hypothetical Vorlage of the Testimonium Flavianum a ‘Neutral’ Text? Challenging the Common Wisdom on Antiquitates Judaicae 18.63-64,” JSJ 45 (2014): 326–65.
Vardaman, “Jesus’ Life,” 56 (emphasis original).
Cf. Timothy D. Barnes, “The Date of Herod’s Death,” JTS 19 (1968): 205 n. 7.
Vardaman, “Jesus’ Life,” 59–61.
As Alden A. Mosshammer (The Easter Computus and the Origins of the Christian Era, OECS [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008], 326) notes: “The first year of Augustus at Rome was usually counted from the year after the death of Julius Caesar, 1 January of 43 BC. His first year at Alexandria was 30/29 BC. His 28th year at Alexandria was therefore his 41st or 42nd at Rome.”
Available online at http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/jerome_chronicle_06_latin_part2.htm. This work is attributed to Jerome here because Jerome used Eusebius’s work as a basis for his own extensions and updates, he was the one who translated Eusebius into Latin, and thus he was the one who popularized this text.
Orosius is the only ancient author to attempt to provide a date for the third closing of the gates of Janus (for the first two, see Cassius Dio, Rom. Hist. 51.20.1–5; 53.26–27). On the different tabulations and correlations of Augustus’s regnal years, see Jack Finegan, Handbook of Biblical Chronology: Principles of Time Reckoning in the Ancient World and Problems of Chronology in the Bible, rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 280–87. It is also worth noting that the Chronography of 354, which has appeared in both of my previous analyses on chronological subjects, the author claims that Jesus was born in what we call 1 CE (http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/chronography_of_354_08_fasti.htm).
Ware (When Was Jesus Really Born?), one of the most recent examples, argues on the basis of these texts and others, astronomical events, and calendrical conversions that the most likely birth date of Jesus was December 25, 3 BCE (13–30).
Mosshammer, Easter Computus, 385–421.