What Is the Jesus Year? Turning 33, a Modern Saying

The “Jesus year” is the year you turn 33, named for the age at which Jesus is traditionally said to have died. It is a modern saying. The Bible never gives his age at his death, and the best reckoning from the Gospels and the history around them puts it between 33 and 38.

Scripture does have something to say about the age of Christ, though not in birthdays. Luke tells us that as a boy, “Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man” (Luke 2:52). The Greek word behind “stature” is helikia, which can mean height, and can also mean age or maturity. Paul uses the same word when he describes where the whole Church is going: “unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13). That is a Jesus year we never age out of. We grow toward it at 20, at 33 and at 80.

Where does the phrase “Jesus year” come from?

The phrase came out of popular culture rather than the Church. In 2012 the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail traced it to early blogs and Myspace pages, and found one of its first mainstream uses in a 1996 Chicago Sun-Times article about a Tennessee-born singer-songwriter. Urban Dictionary’s definition, which the paper quoted, catches the spirit of it: “Time to get moving and get things done (maybe).” The paper itself called it a “stalled-life crisis” for people in their early thirties, and one woman it interviewed answered hers by quitting her job, selling her things and spending the year abroad.

The restlessness behind the saying is far older than the saying: the fear that the years are slipping past and we have little to show for them. What is new is measuring that fear against the age of Christ, as though his life were a timetable for ours. Portuguese speakers have their own name for the year, idade de Cristo, the age of Christ, which the Priberam dictionary gives as the time when someone is 33. In every language the saying leans on one belief, that Jesus died at 33, and so it is worth asking whether he did.

Was Jesus 33 when he died?

The number comes from setting two Gospels side by side, and it may well be close. Luke says that when Jesus began his ministry he “began to be about thirty years of age” (Luke 3:23). John mentions three Passovers during that ministry (John 2:13, 6:4 and 11:55). Count a year for each of those feasts on top of Luke’s thirty, as the tradition counts, and you arrive at 33.

Luke says about thirty, though, and the dates we can check lean a little older. Jesus was born around 6 to 4 BC, before Herod the Great died, and he was crucified under Pontius Pilate at Passover, most likely in AD 30 or AD 33. That puts his age at the cross between 33 and 38, and the full reckoning is in how old Jesus was when he died. So 33 is a fair estimate, and only an estimate. The Gospels tell us a great deal about how he died and leave his age to be worked out.

What did Jesus do in his last days?

The Gospels slow down for those last weeks and give them a great deal of their space. In that time Jesus raised Lazarus at Bethany, rode into Jerusalem for the Passover, cleared the Temple, ate the Last Supper with his disciples, prayed in Gethsemane, was arrested, tried and crucified, and rose on the third day. On the night before he died he prayed, “I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do” (John 17:4).

That sentence is the heart of whatever a Jesus year can mean for us. What made those days matter was the work: he did all the Father gave him to do, and left nothing undone. He could say it with his life cut short, and no one reaching the end of a long one can say more.

Is 33 a special number in the Bible?

The Bible gives the number 33 no spiritual meaning. It turns up in plain records, such as the length of King David’s reign in Jerusalem: “seven years reigned he in Hebron, and thirty and three years reigned he in Jerusalem” (1 Kings 2:11). The meanings sometimes attached to it, such as a sign of the Trinity or a “master number,” come from numerology. Scripture counts David’s thirty-three years as the time God gave him to reign. They were a gift to use, and nobody in the Bible treats them as a code to crack. Our own years are given the same way.

Did early Christians think Jesus died at 33?

Irenaeus of Lyon, writing around AD 180, did not. He took the crowd’s words in John 8:57, “Thou art not yet fifty years old,” to mean that Jesus was past forty. To a man of thirty, he reasoned, “it would unquestionably be said, You are not yet forty years old.” He even claimed that elders who had known the apostle John passed this down. His reckoning never became the usual one, but it shows that the earliest teachers did not all count to 33.

More than two centuries later Augustine, writing around AD 426, asked a different question about the age of Christ: at what age will we rise from the dead? He suggested that “all shall rise neither beyond nor under youth, but in that vigor and age to which we know that Christ had arrived,” as one way of reading Paul’s “measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.” Following “the world’s wisest men,” he put the bloom of youth “at about the age of thirty.” Think what he was picturing. The man who died bent with old age would rise as he was in his youth, and the child who died before its prime would rise as the grown man or woman it never lived to be. Augustine offered it as one of two readings of Paul, not as a rule, but the hope inside it is the Church’s hope: no life is left unfinished in the resurrection.

Does “the year of our Lord” mean the Jesus year?

“The year of our Lord” is something else, though the two are easily confused. In Latin it is anno Domini, the AD in our calendar, which counts the years from the birth of Jesus. A monk named Dionysius Exiguus worked out the system in the sixth century, dating his own year as 525 after “the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ.” It took a long time to catch on: England adopted it in the eighth and ninth centuries, and the popes’ own offices did not use it until the tenth. Every time we write the date today, we are counting from Christmas, even though the count is a few years out. Jesus’ birth came a little before the year Dionysius began from.

The phrase has an echo in Scripture, and it begins in the town where Jesus grew up. He stood up in the synagogue at Nazareth, “where he had been brought up” (Luke 4:16), and read from Isaiah that he had been sent “to preach the acceptable year of the Lord” (Luke 4:19). Then he closed the book, sat down, and said, “This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears” (Luke 4:21). That year of the Lord was never a number on a calendar. It was the time of God’s favour, and it had come because he had come. Whether we think of it or not, the AD on our calendars remembers the same favour, which came to us as a child.

Is there a Christian way to keep a Jesus year?

If you are turning 33 and the phrase has lodged in your mind, there is nothing wrong with marking the year. But the Jesus year as people usually describe it can turn into a weight: a deadline to have achieved something, or a fear of falling behind. Jesus spoke to that fear directly. “Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?” (Matthew 6:27). The word for stature there is helikia again, and some scholars read it as the length of a life. Worry adds nothing to our years.

So keep it the way Scripture keeps time. The psalmist asks, “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom” (Psalm 90:12). We count our years so that we can give them back to the one who holds them. At 33 or at any age, the psalmist’s words are enough to carry into the year ahead: “My times are in thy hand” (Psalm 31:15).

Related reading

• How old was Jesus when he died?
• How old was Jesus when he started his ministry?
• How long was Jesus’ ministry?
• When was Jesus born?
• What was Jesus doing in his 20s?