With
the New Year celebration behind us, we are five years
past the beginning of a new millennium. Or are we? Our
calendar system is based on the supposed birth of Christ
some 2005 years ago. But the Bible is unclear about the
year in which Jesus was born.
The first hint comes from
Matthew 2:1, where we read that Christ was born in the
time of “Herod the king.” That this refers to Herod the
Great and not to one of his sons of the same name, is
clear from the fact that neither Herod Antipas nor Herod
Philip were kings, but tetrarchs only. It is true that
Herod had named another of his sons, Herod Archelaus,
as king, but Matthew 2:22 makes it clear that this Archelaus
was son of the Herod who had ordered the slaughter of
the children at Bethlehem.
Luke 1:5 notes that the birth
of John the Baptist had been announced “in the days of
Herod, the King of Judaea.” John was second cousin to
Jesus and was evidently born six months before him (Luke
1:30-36). So Luke agrees with Matthew in placing the birth
of Christ in the time of King Herod. The problem is that
scholars consider that Herod died earlier than Christian
tradition has placed the birth of Christ. This is based
on the fact that the first-century A.D. Jewish historian
Josephus recorded that Herod had died after an eclipse
of the moon (Antiquities of the Jews 17.6.4). [1]
Famed German astronomer Johann
Kepler (1571-1630) calculated that there would have been
a partial lunar eclipse (40%) visible in Palestine during
the night of 13-14 March 4 B.C., a month before Passover,
which fell on 14 April that year. [2] This
would mean that Jesus could not have been born later than
that time.
The second-century Christian
writer Clement of Alexandria wrote that Christ was born
in the twenty-eighth year of the reign of Caesar Augustus.
Since Augustus became emperor in 31 B.C., this would indicate
a date of 4 B.C. Since Herod had ordered the destruction
of the children of Bethlehem from two years and under,
according to the information given him by the wise men
concerning the time when the new star appeared (Matthew
2:7, 16), one assumes that Jesus was born no later than
6 B.C.
Unfortunately, Luke muddies
the waters when he places Jesus’ birth at the time of
the taxation under “Cyrenius, governor of Syria” (Luke
2:1-2). When Herod the Great died, his son Archelaus became
king of Judaea, Samaria, and Idumaea; Herod Antipas became
tetrarch of Galilee and Perea; and Herod Philip became
tetrarch of Ituraea, Trachonitis, and the area known today
as the Hulah Valley and the Golan Heights. Archelaus fell
into disfavor with the Jews, then the Romans. The Roman
emperor Caesar Augustus banished him in A.D. 6 and made
Judaea a Roman prefecture, with Coponius as the first
prefect.
Coponius and Quirinius, governor
of Syria (the Cyrenius of Luke’s account) went to Judaea
for the express purpose of taxing the people (Josephus,
Antiquities of the Jews 18.1.1, 18.2.2). Since
Joseph and Mary lived in Galilee, they were under the
rulership of Herod Antipas, not Coponius. Because the
prefect of Judaea had no authority over Antipas’s territory,
scholars have doubted that Joseph could have gone to Bethlehem
for taxation purposes. And if he did go at the time specified
by Luke, it would have been A.D. 6. This was ten years
after the death of Herod the Great.
The fourth-century Christian
historian Eusebius wrote that Christ was born in the forty-second
year of the reign of Augustus Caesar (Ecclesiastical
History 1.5.2). Counting from 31 B.C., this would
bring us to A.D. 11, which is too late by all accounts.
Some have suggested that he was counting Augustus’s reign
from the death of his adoptive father, Julius Caesar,
in 44 B.C., which would give us 3 B.C. for the birth of
Christ.
The matter is further complicated
by Eusebius’s declaration that Christ entered his thirtieth
year at the time of his baptism, being the fifteen year
of the reign of Tiberius Caesar (Ecclesiastical History
1.10.1-2). Since Tiberius became emperor in A.D. 14, this
would place Christ’s baptism in the year A.D. 29 and his
birth in the year 1 B.C.
Eusebius derived his information
from Luke 3:1-2, 23, where we read that John the Baptist
began preaching “in the fifteenth year of the reign of
Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate being governor of
Judaea, and Herod [Antipas] being tetrarch of Galilee,
and his brother [Herod] Philip tetrarch ... Annas and
Caiaphas being the high priests.”
Another complication comes
from John 2:20, where we read that the Jerusalem temple
had already been forty-six years in the building. Since
Herod had begun the structure in his eighteenth year (21
B.C.), the suggestion is that Jesus was teaching as early
as A.D. 25 or 26. This would agree with an earlier birth
date between 7 and 4 B.C. To this, we must add that all
four gospels agree that Jesus was crucified during the
prefecture of Pontius Pilate — a fact in which both Josephus
(Antiquities of the Jews 18.3.3) and the Roman
historian Tacitus (Annals of Imperial Rome 15.44)
agree. Pilate governed from A.D. 26 to A.D. 36.
There was a time when Latter-day
Saints, based on an all-too-literal reading of D&C
20:1, would have argued that Christ was born in 1 B.C.
But when it became clear that we don’t really know, from
the available evidence, precisely when he was born, things
changed. When the LDS Church began publishing its own
edition of the King James Bible in 1979, all dates were
omitted from the time of Christ’s life from the “Chronology”
chart in the Bible Dictionary included at the end of that
edition. The dates in the left-hand column end abruptly
immediately before the birth of Christ and resume only
after his crucifixion.
So what year is it really
and when did the twenty-first century really begin? No
one can be certain, so take your pick.
