The World of Jesus: When Was Jesus Born?

And why we have historically used "B.C." and "A.D." to mark the dates of history

We began our Lent study on “The World of Jesus” last night and had a great time diving into the events that occurred during the 400 “silent years” between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the Gospels. If you weren’t able to join us you can watch the video from the first session below.

A couple of questions from last night’s lecture concerned the dating of Jesus’ birth and the reasoning behind the Western world’s use of “B.C.” (Before Christ) and “A.D” (Anno Domino in Latin, or “The Year of Our Lord”) to mark the timeline of ancient history. More modern terms like “C.E.” (Common Era) and “B.C.E” (Before Common Era) have replaced BC and AD in academic circles, but the point is that the birth of Christ has long been seen as a kind of hinge point in history.

We can thank an Eastern Roman monk named Dionysius Exiguus (Dionysius the Humble”) for this means of marking the timeline. Dionysius lived in the late fifth and early sixth centuries AD/CE in what is present day Romania, and his original design for this system was to track the dates of Easter, not to present a way for dating historical events. Prior to Dionysius, the Julian Calendar (named after Julius Caesar) was marked by the names of Roman consuls who held office in a particular year. One such calendar period was named after the Emperor Diocletian, famous for his persecution of Christians in the late third and early fourth centuries. Dionysius wanted to erase the evil Diocletian from the historic record, at least as far as the calendar was concerned. So, in what we now know as 525 AD/CE, Dionysius took the bold step of naming the year in reference to the birth of Christ ("525 years since the birth of Christ”), thus introducing Anno Domino as a method for dating the calendar.

Dionysius never said how he determined the year of Jesus’ birth, but he likely used the same kinds of sources and calculations that scholars today still debate when it comes to determining the approximate year Christ was born in Bethlehem. Dionysius attempted to set the year A.D. 1 as the year, but based on the witness of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke he was off by a few years. Matthew, for example, states that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great, whose death is dated around 4 B.C. give or take. Luke, on the other hand, sets the birth of Jesus during the time when “Quirinius was the governor of Syria,” which seems to date later, around A.D. 6 or 7. The discrepancy has led to a lot of debate and questions: For example, did Luke mean that the census ordered by Augustus took place before Quirinius became the Roman governor or was he just mistaken? Some scholars posit that Quirinius may have been governor at two different times, though the evidence on that is scant. Others point out that Matthew and Luke are writing to different audiences, with Matthew’s Jewish timeline connecting to Herod’s story and Luke’s references to Roman rulers corresponding to the experience and knowledge of his more Gentile audience. It’s an interesting conundrum.

One aside here—when we think of history, we tend to think of it through our post-Enlightenment Western worldview, which is about facts and empirical evidence. Modern historians are all about getting the facts and timelines straight, even though that isn’t always possible. History is always written after the fact, which allows for the malleable human memory to influence the facts. Take the Battle of Gettysburg, for example, which is one of my major areas of interest. Gathering the evidence for, say, Pickett’s Charge on July 3, 1863, leads to a lot of historical discrepancies. Watches were not synchronized so, what time did the attack begin? How long did the pre-attack bombardment last? Primary source accounts from people who were there vary from a half hour to three hours, which is a pretty big discrepancy! How many men made the attack? 12,500, or 13,000, or 15,000? The accepted number has changed over my lifetime. Point is that if we have this much discrepancy over a single event with thousands of witnesses that occurred only 160 years ago, we should expect even more flexibility with events that occurred more than 2,000 years in the past. History is never a static thing, but always a bit of a moving target as knowledge and evidence grows. As William Faulkner famously said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past!”

The point is that history isn’t always neat and clean when it comes to facts and timelines, and ancient historians in particular were not bound by the same kinds of empirical guardrails that govern historic research today. Arranging details, modifying stories, and altering timelines, were all common in ancient histories because the focus was on the story and the audience as much as the facts. Think of it kind of like the difference between the movie version of a historic event and the actual event—there is some license given and no one in the ancient world would have thought that unusual.

That doesn’t mean the Gospel writers weren’t recording actual events. All four Gospels assume the fact of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, for example, but they vary in the details and in how they tell the story. The Gospels were written not by modern reporters or historians, but by evangelists who wanted to get the story of the good news about Jesus out to the wider world and they did so with great effectiveness.

OK, back to the thorny problem of dating Jesus’ birth…

If Herod died around 4 B.C., that would put the timeline for Jesus’ birth in Matthew’s Gospel around 6 B.C., meaning his crucifixion would have occurred in about A.D. 27 if he was 33 years old at the time. That matches the timeline for Pontius Pilate to be the judge at his trial, since Pilate became governor in about the year 26. Of course, it’s also possible that Jesus was born and Herod died slightly later (4 B.C. and 2 or 1 B.C. respectively). We don’t really know for certain. What we do know is that people and events intersect in such a way that we can date the life of Jesus within those first three decades of Dionysius’ calendar, and that his life would, indeed, become the hinge point of all of human history.

In that vein, Dionysius was right to bring the dating of history back to Jesus. After all, it’s “His story!”