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Japanese Jesus was baptized probably in AD 29, possibly AD 28, when he was about thirty years old. Luke dates the start of John the Baptist’s preaching to the fifteenth year of the emperor Tiberius (Luke 3:1) and gives Jesus’ age just after the baptism (Luke 3:23). No Gospel records the day, the month or the season.
Luke dates John’s preaching the way a historian would. He names the emperor in Rome, the governor of Judea, three rulers of the lands around it and the two high priests in Jerusalem, and then he tells us where God was speaking: “the word of God came unto John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness” (Luke 3:2). All the powers of the age are listed, and the word of God went past every one of them to a man in the wilderness. A few verses later another word comes, this time from heaven, and it is spoken over Jesus as he prays after his baptism.
How old was Jesus when he was baptized?
About thirty. Luke tells the baptism in two verses and then says, “And Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age” (Luke 3:23). The age belongs to the moment the ministry began, and the baptism was that moment. Luke’s “about” is a round number. The Gospels give no exact year for Jesus’ birth, but most historians place it around 6 to 4 BC, so by our calendar he may have been nearer 32 or 33. The reckoning is set out in how old Jesus was when he started his ministry.
In what year was Jesus baptized?
Luke’s date is “the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judaea” (Luke 3:1). He gives it for the start of John’s preaching, and all four Gospels move quickly from John’s preaching to Jesus coming to him, so scholars place the baptism in the same year. What they disagree on is when Tiberius’s fifteenth year was.
| Year of the baptism | How Tiberius’s years are counted | Who holds it |
|---|---|---|
| AD 29 | From Tiberius’s accession in AD 14, on the Roman historians’ usual count | Paul Maier, Andrew Steinmann |
| AD 28 | From Tiberius’s accession in AD 14, counting the part-year of AD 14 as the first | John P. Meier (who also allows AD 29), and apparently N. T. Wright |
| AD 26 or 27 | From AD 12, when Tiberius began to share rule of the provinces | A few, such as Craig Evans and David Garland |
On the plain Roman count, Tiberius’s fifteenth year ran from 19 August AD 28 to 18 August AD 29, and Maier noted that Roman historians usually counted a reign from the January after the emperor took power, which points to AD 29. Counted from AD 14, then, the fifteenth year falls in AD 28 or 29, and AD 29 is the likelier. A few scholars prefer AD 26 or 27 because it fits a birth around 4 BC with Jesus being about thirty. In 2022 Steinmann went through the coins, inscriptions and writers of the first two centuries and found no support in any of them for counting Tiberius’s reign from AD 12. He holds AD 29, and he concluded that “it is highly unlikely that Luke or his readers would have understood the fifteenth year of Tiberius as occurring before AD 29.”
On what day and in what season was Jesus baptized?
We do not know. Mark says only that it happened “in those days” (Mark 1:9), and Luke adds one quiet detail: Jesus was “praying” when “the heaven was opened” (Luke 3:21). No Gospel gives a month, a day of the week or an hour.
Scholars who work back from John’s Gospel suggest summer or autumn. Between the baptism and the first Passover of the ministry, in spring, come the forty days in the wilderness that the other Gospels describe, and then in John the calling of the first disciples, the wedding at Cana and a short stay in Capernaum (John 1:35–2:12). The New Testament scholar Harold Hoehner reckoned that stretch at four to nine months. That is an estimate from the order of events, and the Gospels themselves leave the season open.
Why is the baptism of Jesus celebrated in January?
The Gospels give no date, but a January date is very old. The earliest mention comes from Clement of Alexandria, writing about AD 200. He reported that the followers of Basilides, an Alexandrian Gnostic teacher whom Irenaeus wrote against, kept the day of Jesus’ baptism as a festival, “spending the night before in readings.” They said it was the fifteenth year of Tiberius, on “the fifteenth day of the month Tubi; and some that it was the eleventh of the same month.” In the Egyptian calendar, 11 and 15 Tubi fall on 6 and 10 January. The Church’s own feast appears in the fourth century: Vatican News dates the Eastern celebration of the baptism on 6 January to about the year 300, and the Catholic Encyclopedia finds the first certain mention of the feast of Epiphany in 361.
The churches still keep the baptism in January, in different ways:
- Orthodox and other Eastern churches celebrate it on 6 January as Theophany, the feast that, in the words of the Orthodox Church in America, “reveals the Most Holy Trinity to the world through the Baptism of the Lord.” Churches that keep the older Julian calendar, among them the Russian Orthodox Church, celebrate the same 6 January on what most calendars call 19 January, because the Julian calendar now runs 13 days behind.
- The Catholic Church has kept the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord on the Sunday after Epiphany since its liturgical reform of 1969, and the feast closes the Christmas season. Where Epiphany is moved to a Sunday, the Baptism of the Lord can fall on the Monday after it.
- Churches that follow the Revised Common Lectionary, among them the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the United Methodist Church and the Church of England, also keep the Baptism of the Lord on the Sunday after Epiphany; in 2026 it fell on 11 January.
More on the January feast is in what Epiphany is and why Christians celebrate it.
Where was Jesus baptized?
In the river Jordan. “Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized of John in Jordan” (Mark 1:9). John’s Gospel names the place where the Baptist was working: “These things were done in Bethabara beyond Jordan, where John was baptizing” (John 1:28). Some manuscripts call the place Bethabara and others Bethany beyond the Jordan, which is a different Bethany from the village near the Mount of Olives. “Beyond” means the east bank. There, at Al-Maghtas in the modern kingdom of Jordan, archaeologists have uncovered churches, hermits’ caves and a baptistery built by Christians who honoured the site as the place of the baptism, and UNESCO added it to the World Heritage List in 2015. The road from Nazareth is the subject of how far Jesus walked to be baptized.
Why was Jesus baptized if he had no sin?
John asked the same thing. “I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me?” Jesus answered, “Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness” (Matthew 3:14–15). The sinless one was baptized along with all the people (Luke 3:21), as one of them. Christians have read that moment in many ways. The Orthodox Church in America sums up John of Damascus: the Lord was baptized “to bury human sin by water,” to fulfil the Law, to reveal the Trinity, and to sanctify “the nature of water” for our own baptism.
The Gospels do not give us the date, but they give us what was said. Above the river, in a year we can narrow only to AD 26 to 29, and most likely 29, the Father spoke over his Son, and those words we have exactly: “Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased” (Luke 3:22).
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