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WHEN WAS JESUS BORN?

“On the 25th December, AD 0, of course!”  Well, maybe not: for a start, there was no year zero.  “OK, then, AD 1.”  A 6th century monk Dionysius Exiguus (“Dennis the humble”, AD 470-544) devised our BC/AD year system.  He apparently thought Christ was born in 1 BC.  There are varying and somewhat contradictory chronological clues in the New Testament and in the historical record of the Roman Empire including of Syria and Judaea at the time of the Emperor Augustus, not to mention debate over the nature and date of the heavenly body referred to as “the Star of Bethlehem”.  And the 25th December is almost certainly wrong: no one knows and that date only came to be celebrated after AD 200.  Shepherds certainly wouldn’t have been out in the snow.  More likely is the adoption of the Winter solstice for a celebration of new life as in many other religions at the time, such as the cult of Sol Invictus (the Sun God) of the Romans.  And eastern Orthodox Christians went for 6 January (epiphany and the Twelfth Day of Christmas in the Catholic west), perhaps relating it to the circumcision of Jesus.  Or alternatively based on assuming that Jesus was conceived around Easter time.

As for date, the historian Luke records: “In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to his own town to register” (Luke 2:1-3). For 2,000 years, from the early Church Fathers to modern times, the scholars have analysed the biblical, and extra-biblical literary and archaeological evidence and astronomical clues and most have found good reasons for backdating the birth year of our Lord to 4 BC or before.  This is because most date the death of King Herod the Great to 4 BC. (Note that nowadays, politically correct persons use not BC/AD but BCE/CE, where CE = “the common era”. This pedantry seems pointless when the actual dating still revolves around Jesus’ supposed birth year whether one likes it or not!)

Herod the Great

The range of estimates by Biblical scholars has ranged between 9 and 2 BC, whereas most earlier astronomical research had prompted estimates between 5 and 1 BC, with 3 and 2 BC being particularly popular because of comets and/or several bright conjunctions of planets at that time.  More recently, however, astronomers have favoured between 7 and 4 BC.

A survey and analysis of the evidence and theories by Daryn Graham in 2014 concluded: “Just as Luke described, a decree for all the Roman world to register was issued by Augustus. It was issued by Augustus alone, just as Luke states, and was carried out in Judaea while Herod I was still alive, just as Matthew’s Gospel maintains. We can be relatively certain, therefore, that Jesus must have been born sometime between the fifth month of Saturninus’ term as governor of Syria in 8 BC, and the fifth month of 7 BC, still during Saturninus’ term, given that governors arrived in their provinces at the beginning of each year. The biblical narratives of Matthew and Luke are thus both solid and reliable, as we would expect, given that they were composed relatively soon after the events they describe.”

The conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn occurred three times in 7 BC (April, October and December) and some astronomers now favour that year for Jesus’ birth. This date overlaps with Graham’s estimate.  It is important to note that astronomers in Babylon were able to predict such celestial events, as Finnish scholar Simo Parpola has shown.  Babylon was then part of the Parthian Empire, which was a thorn in the side of the Romans in the east.  Babylon’s astronomers were also astrologers, who found portents in such celestial events.  These conjunctions at that time told them that an old king would die and a new king would be born.  Given the importance of King Herod to the Romans on the eastern borders of their empire, the Magi would have had good reason to investigate this.  It also helps to explain the questions they asked Herod and Herod’s response of killing male babies after they didn’t report back to him as requested (Matthew 2:1-12, 16-18).  Not only that, but the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn could occasionally give the temporary impression of retrograde motion or of standing still (e.g., in December 7 BC), as the star of Bethlehem was said to have done (Matthew 2:9).  It would have taken the Magi between one and two months by camel from Babylon to Jerusalem, so they could have set out in October and arrived in December of that year.  (That does not necessarily mean that Jesus was born in December, as Herod ordered the killing of boys up to 2 years of age.)

FURTHER READING

Daryn Graham, “Dating the Birth of Jesus Christ,” The Reformed Theological Review, Vol. 73 No. 3 (December, 2014), pp. 147-159.

Simo Parpola, “The Magi and the Star: Babylonian Astronomy dates Jesus’ Birth,” Biblical Archaeology Review, December 2001.

Ben Witherington III, “The Turn of the Christian Era: The Tale of Dionysius Exiguus”, Biblical Archaeology Review, November/December 2017.

N. Zain, K. Ng & Yang Shuyi, The Star of Bethlehem, http://www.math.nus.edu.sg/aslaksen/ gem-projects/hm/0203-1-18-bethlehem.pdf

For free resources, see

https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/free-ebooks/the- first-christmas-the-story-of-jesus-birth-in-history -and-tradition/?mqsc=TA-FC-CHN

– Malcolm Prentis