What Year Was Jesus Born?

Articles Leave a Comment

How to cite this article: JP Staff Writer, “What Year Was Jesus Born?” Jerusalem Perspective (2025): [https://www.jerusalemperspective.com/31054/].

Determining the year in which Jesus was born is a surprisingly difficult endeavor. Only two of the four New Testament Gospels (Matthew and Luke) give us any information regarding the year of Jesus’ birth and the information these two Gospels supply is anything but straightforward.

Dating Jesus’ Birth Based on Matthew’s Infancy Narrative

Matthew’s Gospel places Jesus’ birth during the reign of Herod the Great, which lasted from ca. 40 B.C.E.-4 B.C.E. Matthew’s Infancy Narrative also reports certain events that should be datable—the appearance of a star and the massacre of the infant males of Bethlehem—but, unfortunately these events are not corroborated by any other independent source.[1] Moreover, the historicity of Matthew’s Infancy Narrative is in considerable doubt. The details of Matthew’s Infancy Narrative are so strongly reminiscent of ancient Jewish tales concerning the birth of Moses that it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Matthew’s Infancy Narrative is rather an example of narrative theology—teaching moral or ethical lessons through stories not necessarily based on historical facts—than an attempt to write history.[2] Any attempt to calculate the year of Jesus’ birth based on Matthew’s Gospel is, therefore, fraught with difficulty.

Perhaps the most historical feature in Matthew’s Infancy Narrative appears in Matt. 2:22, where the evangelist refers to Archelaus reigning in Judea after the death of his father, Herod the Great. This more-or-less accurate information[3] seems to bring Matthew’s Infancy Narrative out of the realm of legend and into the mundane world of historical events.

However, some scholars have suggested that Matt. 2:22-23 is an addendum to Matthew’s source for the Infancy Narrative, which the evangelist added in order to get Jesus from “the land of Israel,” where his source left the holy family, to Nazareth in the Galilee in order to explain why Jesus was associated with that town and to afford an opportunity to add the fulfillment notice about how Jesus “will be called a Nazarene” (Matt. 2:23).[4] In support of this hypothesis scholars note that having two dreams in which Joseph is sent with his family to a place of safety, first in Matt. 2:19-21 to the “land of Israel” and then in Matt. 2:22-23 to the Galilee and Nazareth, is a bit clumsy. Why not just send Joseph and his family directly to the Galilee? Moreover, the wording of Matt. 2:22-23 bears a marked similarity to a redactional passage in Matt. 4:12-16 that describes Jesus’ movement from Nazareth to Capernaum, which the evangelist presents as the fulfillment of Scripture:

Matt. 2:22-23

Matt. 4:12-16

But hearing that Archelaus was ruling Judea…

But hearing that John was apprehended,

[Joseph] withdrew into the district of the Galilee.

[Jesus] withdrew into the Gallilee.

And coming, he dwelt in a city called Nazareth,

And leaving Nazareth, he came and dwelt in Capernaum-by-the-sea in the borders of Zebulun and Naphtali

in order to fulfill the word spoken through the prophets,

in order to fulfill the word spoken through Isaiah the prophet, saying,

“He will be called a Nazarene.”

“Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, the way of the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles….”

It seems likely, therefore, that the verses referring to Archelaus and the holy family’s removal to Nazareth are a Matthean addition to his Infancy Narrative, relied on the evangelist’s historically accurate information that Archelaus succeeded his father King Herod as ruler in Judea. But it does not follow that the evangelist’s addition of this historically accurate fact proves the historicity of the source behind Matthew’s Infancy Narrative in general, or the dating of Jesus’ birth to the reign of Herod the Great in particular. Basing one’s calculation of the year of Jesus’ birth on Matthew’s Infancy Narrative remains a hazardous undertaking.

Dating Jesus’ Birth Based on Luke’s Infancy Narrative

On account of the problems inherent in the Matthean Infancy Narrative, Luke’s Gospel would appear to be a more reliable source for accurate dating of Jesus’ birth. Like Matthew’s Infancy Narrative, Luke’s Gospel also synchronizes Jesus’ birth with the reign of Herod, but only by inference. Luke’s Gospel dates the birth of John the Baptist to the days of King Herod (Luke 1:5), and since according to Luke’s Infancy Narrative Mary conceived Jesus while Elizabeth was still pregnant with John the Baptist (Luke 1:36) the assumption is that Jesus must have been born during Herod’s reign, too. Hence Jesus’ birth has traditionally been dated to ca. 4 B.C.E.[5]

But dating Jesus’ birth to the reign of Herod is not easily reconciled with Luke’s more explicit notice dating Jesus’ birth to the time of the census that took place in Judea while Quirinius was governor of Syria in the days of Caesar Augustus (Luke 2:1-2). Luke explicitly states that this was the first such enrollment for the purposes of taxation. This census can be firmly dated to the year 6 C.E.[6] The problem with this date is that King Herod died in 4 B.C.E. The Romans instituted the census in Judea when this region was annexed as a province after Archelaus, one of the sons of King Herod, was removed from office.[7] The imposition of the tax lead to a popular Jewish uprising against the Roman Empire and spawned the militant Jewish nationalist movement Josephus referred to as the “Fourth Philosophy,” the objection being that submission to taxation was tantamount to recognizing Caesar as lawful king, whereas Israel has no King but God alone (J.W. 2:118, 433; Ant. 18:3-5, 23; cf. Acts 5:37). Clearly the strongly negative reaction to the census in 6 C.E. was related to its being the first such census, not an earlier one that could have taken place sometime during the time of Herod.

From an historical point of view Luke’s explicit dating of Jesus’ birth to 6 C.E. looks much more solid and reliable than the inferential synchronizing of Jesus’ birth with the reign of King Herod. The contradiction likely arose when an originally independent Birth of John the Baptist narrative was woven into a Birth of Jesus narrative by someone who did not notice the chronological discrepancy he was thereby creating.[8] As a result of this interweaving the census of 6 C.E. now seems to take place while King Herod was still alive.[9]

There are good reasons, therefore, to look favorably on 6 C.E. as the year of Jesus’ birth. But by coordinating Jesus’ birth with the Roman census might the author of Luke (or his source) also have been doing narrative theology, just like in Matthew’s Infancy Narrative? After all, having Jesus born at the same moment the militant nationalist philosophy took root in Israel might send a powerful theological message that a divinely approved alternative (Jesus and his gospel) to the violent ideology of the extremists appeared at the same time as the extremist movement itself. On the other hand, Luke’s tying of one historical event (Jesus’ birth) to another historical event (the Roman census of 6 C.E.) does not really resemble Matthew’s parallelisms between the birth of Moses and the birth of Jesus, none of which can be historically corroborated. If the chronology of Luke’s Infancy Narrative is narrative theology, it is of quite a different species from what we encounter in Matthew.

The Date of Jesus’ Birth in View of Other Chronological Data

Can dating Jesus’ birth to 6 C.E. be squared with other chronological information we possess about Jesus? And what other chronological information do we possess? For the parameters of Jesus’ lifetime we possess chronological information about Jesus’ baptism and crucifixion. All four New Testament Gospels are agreed that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate. The dates of Pilate’s tenure as governor of Judea are not entirely certain. Most historians date the beginning of Pilate’s term to 26-27 C.E., but Daniel Schwartz has argued that it may have begun as early as 19 C.E.[10] Pilate’s term as governor of Judea ended shortly before the death of the emperor Tiberius in 37 C.E.[11] According to Luke 3:23 Jesus was “about thirty years” when he began his career, after being baptized under John the Baptist. If we follow the Synoptic rather than the Johannine evidence for the duration of Jesus’ public career (about a year according to the Synoptics, three years according to John) then Jesus could have been born in 6 C.E. and still have been around thirty when he was crucified under Pontius Pilate if we place the crucifixion near the end of Pilate’s term as governor, which concluded in 37 C.E. The chronology is tight, but it could work.

A potential difficulty arrises when we take into account Luke’s chronological notice in Luke 3:1-2 about the beginning of John the Baptist’s public career. Luke dates John’s appearance on the scene to the fifteenth year of Tiberius, which, depending on how one counts, falls between 27 and 29 C.E.,[12] but is probably best identified as 27-28 C.E.[13] If Jesus was thirty in 28 C.E., he would have had to be born in 2 B.C.E., too late for Herod’s reign, but too early for the Roman census.

This difficulty, however, may be resolved by the same solution we proposed earlier; that Luke’s chronological notices are coming from separate sources. The chronological notice in Luke 3:1-2 relates to the beginning of John’s public career, whereas the notice about Jesus’ age in Luke 3:23 follows Jesus’ baptism and relates to the beginning of Jesus’ public career. Since Luke does not say that Jesus was baptized as soon as John began proclaiming his baptism and since Luke is vague about how much time elapsed between Jesus’ baptism and the beginning of his public career, there is no reason to suppose that Luke’s chronological notices in Luke 3:1-2 and Luke 3:23 should refer to the same time period. Luke’s chronology allows for considerable wiggle room between the beginning of John’s proclamation and Jesus’ baptism and between Jesus’ baptism and the beginning of his public career.[14]

To solidify our suggestion that the chronological notices in Luke 3:1-2 and Luke 3:23 come from different sources, we note an oddity with respect to the sequence in which Luke narrated events. The evangelist reports the imprisonment John the Baptist (Luke 3:19-20) prior to the account of Jesus’ baptism (Luke 3:21-22). The reason for this reversed order may well be that Luke’s source first finished with its John the Baptist material, which it took from a pre-existing source, before going on to report the public career of Jesus. If that is the case, then the the chronological notice in Luke 3:1-2 about the beginning of John’s proclamation may have nothing to do with the timing of Jesus’ baptism except to provide a terminus a quo (the earliest possible date) for Jesus’ baptism. The termius ad quem (latest possible date) would be the date of John the Baptist’s imprisonment, which, unfortunately, is in doubt. But since there is no reason to assume that John’s ministry lasted only a single year or that Jesus was baptized the year John began his proclamation, Luke’s notice about Jesus’ age in relation to the inauguration of his public career (Luke 3:23) need not be directly coordinated with Luke’s notice about the year of John’s appearance (Luke 3:1-2).

Setting aside the inference that Jesus must have been born during the reign of Herod, we can provisionally accept the rest of Luke’s chronological data:

  • John the Baptist was born in the days of Herod, sometime before 4 B.C.E.
  • Jesus was born during the Roman census in 6 C.E.
  • John began proclaiming his immersion of repentance for the forgiveness of sins in the sabbatical year of 27/28 C.E.
  • Jesus was baptized at around thirty years of age in ca. 35 C.E.
  • Jesus was crucified just prior to Pilate’s removal from office in 37 C.E.

The Date of John the Baptist’s Imprisonment and Execution

One of the advantages of accepting the timeline proposed above is that an extended career for John the Baptist helps explain the imprint he left on Second Temple Jewish society. Not only do the New Testament Gospels attest to the Baptist’s popularity, the Book of Acts indicates that John had a following in the Jewish diaspora (Acts 18:24-19:7). Josephus also regarded John the Baptist as a sufficiently important figure to warrant giving a description of John and his message in his writings (Ant. 18:117). It would be surprising if the Baptist had made such a lasting impression if his public career had only lasted a year or a few months. Moreover, Josephus claims it was popularly held that Antipas’ defeat by the Nabateans in 36 C.E.[15] was a divine punishment for Antipas’ having executed John the Baptist (Ant. 18:116). That the two events would come to be linked in the popular imagination is more understandable if they were not separated by a long stretch of time. Also, Antipas was in conflict with the Nabateans because he had divorced the daughter of the Nabatean king Aretas in order to marry Herodias,[16] the former wife of Antipas’ half brother (Ant. 18:109-113). According to the Gospels (Matt. 14:4; Mark 6:18; cf. Luke 3:19), John the Baptist was arrested precisely for speaking out against Antipas’ marriage to Herodias, which was in violation of the Torah, which forbids sexual relations with one’s brother’s wife (Lev. 18:16; 20:21; cf. Ant. 18:136). It makes sense if the affront to Aretas’ daughter occasioned by Antipas’ divorcing her and marrying Herodias in her stead, John the Baptist’s denunciation of Antipas’ marriage to Herodias, John’s imprisonment and execution for the same, Aretas’ successful attack on Antipas and the popular judgment that its success was a divine punishment for Antipas’ execution of John the Baptist all took place within a relatively compressed amount of time.

Of course we also do not know the length of John’s imprisonment.[17] But the duration of John’s confinement need not have been long. It lasted long enough for John to send Jesus a message and (presumably) to receive Jesus’ reply (Matt. 11:2-6; Luke 7:18-23), but that exchange could have taken place over the span of a few days or, at most, weeks. A lengthy imprisonment seems unlikely, for the longer John remained in prison the less he was likely to be remembered by any but his closest companions. An imprisonment of a few months rather than several years therefore seems more likely.

Conclusion

No answer to the question “When was Jesus born?” will be perfect since there is conflicting evidence that must be weighed and sifted. If one is willing to accept the results of literary and source criticism, then our solution, that Jesus was born in 6 C.E. at the time of the Roman census, is attractive. It respects nearly all of Luke’s chronological data apart from the inference that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great, which may have come about by the weaving of a source on John the Baptist into a source on the birth of Jesus.

Anno Domini painted by Edwin Long (1883). Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
  • [1] On the problems of identifying, and therefore of dating, the atronomical phenomenon described in the Matthean Infancy Narrative, see Gary A. Asperschlager, “The Star of Bethlehem: An Astronomical Perspective,” Jerusalem Perspective (2025) [{insert url}]. ↩
  • [2] See Joshua N. Tilton, “Wisemen or Stooges: Who Were Matthew’s Magi?” Jerusalem Perspective (2025) [https://www.jerusalemperspective.com/29924/]. ↩
  • [3] One might quibble that Matthew’s use of the verb βασιλεύειν (ba·si·LEV·ein) implies reigning as king, whereas Archelaus was never made king (despite his ardent wishes), but only named ethnarch and ruler of Judea. However, we may allow that the evangelist was not using βασιλεύειν in its strictest sense. ↩
  • [4] Cf. Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in Matthew and Luke (Garden City, N.Y.: Double Day, 1979), 106-108; Ulrich Luz, Matthew: Hermeneia—A Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible (3 vols.; trans. James E. Crouch [Das Evangelium nach Matthäus, 1985-2002]; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001, 2005, 2007), 1:118. ↩
  • [5] Cf., e.g., Harold W. Hoehner, “Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ Part I: The Date of Christ’s Birth,” Bibliotheca sacra 131.4 no. 520 (1974): 41-54 ↩
  • [6] On the date of this census and its relation to the chronology in Luke, see Menahem Stern, “The Province of Judaea,” in The Jewish People in the First Century (ed. S. Safrai and M. Stern; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974), 1:308-376, esp. 372-374. ↩
  • [7] See Marc Turnage, “The Census of Quirinius and Luke 2,” Jerusalem Perspective (2016) [https://www.jerusalemperspective.com/15498/]. ↩
  • [8] See Daniel R. Schwartz, “On Quirinius, John the Baptist, the Benedictus, Melchizedek, Qumran and Ephesus,” Revue de Qumran 13 (1988): 635-646, esp. 336-339. ↩
  • [9] See David N. Bivin and Joshua N. Tilton, “Yohanan the Immerser’s Execution,” The Life of Yeshua: A Suggested Reconstruction (Jerusalem Perspective, 2020) [https://www.jerusalemperspective.com/20260/], under the subheading “Story Placement.” Cf. Marc Turnage, “The Expectation of Sabbatical Redemption within Ancient Judaism and Luke-Acts,” Jerusalem Perspective (2024) [https://www.jerusalemperspective.com/28733/], footnote 67. ↩
  • [10] See Daniel R. Schwartz, “Pontius Pilate’s Appointment to Office and the Chronology of Josephus’ Antiquities, Books 18-20,” in his Studies in the Jewish Background of Christianity (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1992), 180-201. ↩
  • [11] For chronological problems relating to the end of Pilate’s tenure, see Daniel R. Schwartz, “Pontius Pilate’s Suspension from Office: Chronology and Sources,” in his Studies in the Jewish Background of Christianity (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1992), 202-217. ↩
  • [12] See Harold W. Hoehner, “Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ Part II: The Commencement of Christ’s Ministry,” Bibliotheca sacra 131.1 no. 521 (1974): 41-54, esp. 41-48; Brian Messner, “‘In the Fifteenth Year’ Reconsidered: A Study of Luke 3:1,” Stone-Campbell Journal 1.2 (1998): 201-211. ↩
  • [13] See Ben Zion Wacholder, “Chronomessianism: The Timing of Messianic Movements and the Calendar of Sabbatical Cycles,” Hebrew Union College Annual 46 (1975): 201-218, esp. 213-215; David N. Bivin and Joshua N. Tilton, “A Voice Crying,” The Life of Yeshua: A Suggested Reconstruction (Jerusalem Perspective, 2020) [https://www.jerusalemperspective.com/30118/], Comment to L15. ↩
  • [14] Hence an alternative interpretation of Luke’s chronological markers to what I here propose is that Jesus was baptized in 27/28 C.E. and nearly a decade passed before Jesus initiated his public career when he was about thirty years old (Luke 3:23). What Jesus was doing during that decade is anyone’s guess. Perhaps he spent that time as a disciple of John the Baptist. However, the portrait Luke paints of the relations between Jesus and John suggests that they were little more than acquaintances, associated more in the popular imagination than in actual fact. I therefore prefer the hypothesis that Jesus received John’s immersion ca. 35 C.E. ↩
  • [15] On the date of Herod’s defeat, see Harold W. Hoehner, Herod Antipas: A Contemporary of Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1972), 125, 126. ↩
  • [16] Antipas had to divorce the daughter of Aretas in order to marry Herodias not on account of Jewish halakhah, which permitted polygyny, but because Herodias made this a condition of her marriage to Antipas (Ant. 18:110), monogamy being in conformity with Roman custom. ↩
  • [17] See Hoehner, Herod Antipas, 170-171. ↩

Leave a Reply