When Was Jesus Born? Probably 6 to 4 BC; the Day Is Unknown

Most historians place the birth of Jesus in 4 BC or a little earlier. If Herod the Great died in 4 BC, as most hold, Matthew 2:16 puts the birth around 6 to 4 BC. The Gospels give no day or month. The Church chose 25 December to keep the feast of his birth; the Bible does not record it.

The Gospels tell us when in the way people told time then: they name the men in power. Matthew says it in one line: “Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king” (Matthew 2:1). Luke sets the journey to Bethlehem under “a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed” (Luke 2:1), and he opens his whole account, with the angel’s visit to Zacharias, “in the days of Herod, the king of Judaea” (Luke 1:5). They give no calendar date. They give us Herod, Augustus and Bethlehem, a king, an emperor and a town, and so the Son of God was born at a point in history his neighbours could have named.

Was Jesus born on December 25?

No one knows the day, and the early Christians did not claim to. About the year 200, Clement of Alexandria reported that some, counting by the Egyptian calendar, placed the birth “in the twenty-eighth year of Augustus, and in the twenty-fifth day of Pachon”, which is 20 May, while “others say that He was born on the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth of Pharmuthi”, in April. Christians were asking this question eighteen centuries ago, and they did not agree then either.

The first record of 25 December as Christ’s birthday comes about a century and a half after Clement, in a Roman almanac of AD 354, where the church of Rome’s list of its martyrs’ days opens with the birth of Christ. Why the Church settled on that day, whether by counting nine months from 25 March or by setting it beside a Roman sun festival, is told in why the Church keeps Christmas on 25 December. Churches that keep the old Julian calendar, the Russian Church among them, keep the same 25 December, which falls on our 7 January. The Armenian Apostolic Church keeps Christ’s birth and his baptism together on 6 January, as the East once did.

What year was Jesus born?

Herod’s death is the firmest marker we have. Matthew places the birth in Herod’s reign and the holy family’s return from Egypt “when Herod was dead” (Matthew 2:19), so Jesus was born before Herod died. The Jewish historian Josephus says that Herod died soon after “an eclipse of the moon” and before the Passover that followed, having reigned “thirty-four years” from the death of his rival Antigonus and thirty-seven from the day Rome declared him king. Most historians match that eclipse to the night of 13 March in 4 BC, and so date Herod’s death to 4 BC. A smaller group, the scholar Andrew Steinmann among them, argues for 1 BC, after a full eclipse on 10 January of that year. Either way, the nearest we can come to the year of Christ’s birth is a night when the moon went dark near the end of Herod’s life.

Matthew then gives a detail that moves the birth earlier. When the wise men did not return, Herod “slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men” (Matthew 2:16). It is the darkest line in the Christmas story, and it carries a date inside it. A furious king killed the little children of Bethlehem to be sure of one child, and he reckoned that child could be up to two years old. Set that beside a death in 4 BC and the birth falls somewhere around 6 to 4 BC. It also bears on how old Jesus was when the wise men came.

Here are the clues the Gospels give, and what each one can and cannot tell us:

Luke gives a second reckoning, and he gives it with great care. Before John the Baptist preaches a word, Luke names the emperor Tiberius, the governor Pontius Pilate, three rulers of the land around and the high priests Annas and Caiaphas (Luke 3:1–2), so that we know exactly when “the word of God came unto John”. Tiberius’s fifteenth year ran from the late summer of AD 28 to that of AD 29. If Jesus came to John soon after and was close to thirty, he was born about 3 or 2 BC. Yet Luke writes that Jesus “began to be about thirty years of age” (Luke 3:23), and a man of thirty-two or thirty-three is about thirty too, which takes us back to 4 BC or earlier. Luke was giving us the age of a grown man at the start of his work, and the word he chose leaves room on either side.

What about the census under Quirinius?

Luke says the birth came with a decree of Augustus and adds, “(And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.)” (Luke 2:2). Cyrenius is the King James spelling of Quirinius, and here we reach the hardest knot in the whole question. Josephus describes Quirinius coming into Judea “to take an account of their substance” after Herod’s son Archelaus was removed, a census usually dated to AD 6 or 7, about ten years after Herod’s death. Yet Luke opens his story in Herod’s reign (Luke 1:5) and has the angel come to Mary six months after Zacharias’s vision (Luke 1:26), so his account too puts the birth while Herod was alive.

Christians have answered this in more than one way. Some read Luke’s Greek word for “first” as “before”, so that the verse says this census came before the one under Quirinius. Others hold that Quirinius served in Syria twice, pointing to an inscription found at Tivoli in 1764, or that a census begun under an earlier governor was finished under him and took his name. Many critical scholars think Luke was simply mistaken here. No answer yet found settles it, and a believer can leave the question open without fear. Matthew and Luke agree on the point that matters for the year: the child was born while Herod was king. How Luke’s census fits beside that, we do not yet know, and saying so takes nothing from the child or the good news the angel brought.

Why does our count of years begin at Jesus’ birth if he was born “BC”?

Because the monk who first counted the years from Christ placed his birth a few years too late. In AD 525 Dionysius Exiguus, a monk living in Rome, drew up tables for the date of Easter. The tables he inherited counted years from the emperor Diocletian, who had persecuted the Church, and Dionysius did not wish “to bind to our circles the memory of this impious man and persecutor”. He chose instead “to count the time of the years from the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ, so that the beginning of our hope will appear better known to us”. He wanted the very numbering of the years to point to Christ.

Dionysius set the incarnation in a year that, counted from the founding of Rome, falls after Herod’s death, so the count we still use began a few years too late. It spread slowly, and only in the eighth century, when the English monk Bede used it in his history, did it come into wide use. Every date on a letter or a receipt still counts from the birth of Christ, a few years off and pointing the right way.

What season was Jesus born in?

Luke gives one outdoor detail: “there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night” (Luke 2:8). Some take that as a sign of spring or summer, on the view that flocks would not be out on a winter night. Luke does not name the month, though, and one verse cannot carry a date. What he wanted us to see in that field was who heard the news first: men out at work in the dark, watching over sheep.

A second argument starts with an old priest at his work. Zacharias belonged to “the course of Abia” (the Greek form of Abijah), and “his lot was to burn incense when he went into the temple of the Lord” (Luke 1:5, 9). Outside, “the whole multitude of the people were praying” (Luke 1:10). Inside, beside the altar, an angel told a man whose wife was barren, and who was himself “well stricken in years” (Luke 1:7), “Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard” (Luke 1:13). Abijah was the eighth of twenty-four priestly families (1 Chronicles 24:10), and Josephus says each family served “eight days, from sabbath to sabbath”. So some readers count: fix the week of Abijah’s turn, count forward to John’s conception, add the six months to Mary’s (Luke 1:26, 36) and nine more, and you would have the birthday. Preaching at Antioch in about 386, John Chrysostom used this reckoning to defend 25 December, assuming that Zacharias was the high priest entering the Temple on the Day of Atonement.

Luke never says which week it was. Burning the incense by lot was the work of an ordinary priest, not the high priest, and with twenty-four families taking turns, each served about twice a year, so the sum has no first number. What Luke gives us instead is the man: an old priest on an ordinary turn of duty, hearing that his prayer was heard. The week is lost, and the answer to his prayer is not.

Does it matter that no one knows the day?

The Gospels were written to tell us who was born and why, and on that they are full and clear. Paul says it in a sentence: “But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, To redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons” (Galatians 4:4–5). God chose the time. He chose a year under King Herod and the emperor Augustus, and he chose to let the exact day go unrecorded.

So whether we kneel at the manger on 25 December, on 7 January or on 6 January, the child is the same, and so is the gift. The shepherds knew which night it was. We do not, and the angel’s words reach us all the same, every time they are read aloud: “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:11).

Related reading

• Why is Christmas on 25 December?
• How old was Jesus when the wise men came?
• What was the Star of Bethlehem?
• Where was Jesus born, Bethlehem or Nazareth?
• Is December in the Bible?
• How old was Jesus when he died?