When was Jesus historically born?

1. A: Impossible to exactly know.
2. Dr. Michael Heiser argued that Jesus’ birth date can be dialed down to a 90-minute period on September 11, 3 BCE using astrology.(edited)
3. A number of assumptions are needed to make it work:
4. • john of patmos has knowledge of jesus’s birth that the gospel authors and others lacked, particularly since it contradicts matthew (before 4 BCE) and luke (after 6 CE).
   • revelation is using astrological symbolism
   • he’s interpreted these astrological symbols correctly
   • there is something significant about this arrangement of astronomical bodies.
5. Obviously, Heiser doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
6. Historically, people either thought 1 BCE or 4 BCE.
7. ━━━ Why 1 BCE?
8. The 1 BCE date begins to appear in Christian chronographical thought in the mid-200s CE, in the pseudo-Cyprianic De Pascha computus 18-23 which dates to 243, and later in Eusebius’ Armenian chronicle (early 300s), and the Chronography of 354, actually based on material dating to 336, in the ‘fasti consulares’ section.

1. ━━━ What early Christians thought about Jesus’ dates?
2. no extant writers had access to any information beyond what’s in the gospels, specifically the opening chapters of Matthew and Luke. atthew and Luke quote four sets of chronological markers, and most of them disagree with each other.
   • Matthew 2 dates Jesus’ birth to the reign of Herod the Great, who died in 4 BCE: that is, Jesus was born in 4 BCE or earlier.
   • Luke 1.5-38 dates John the Baptist’s conception to Herod’s reign, and Jesus’ conception 6 months later.
   • Luke 2.1-2 dates Jesus’ birth to the governorship of Quirinius, that is, 6 CE or later.
   • Luke 3.1-3 and 3.23 dates the start of Jesus’ ministry to ‘Tiberius 15’, that is, 29 CE, and states that he was 30 at the time, which inidicates a birth year of 1 BCE (or perhaps a little earlier).
3. We have four other 1st-2nd century sources that comment on Jesus’ dates: Josephus, Tacitus, Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus. They contain no information beyond beyond what’s in the gospels. Literally all they say is that Jesus died during Tiberius’ reign, as in Luke 3. Irenaeus repeats this in three different places, in contexts where he’s clearly trying to make a point about chronological precision, and that makes it clear that it’s the limit of his information.

Around Clement of Alexandria he disccuses dating in (Stromateis 1.21.144-146):

1. How then, did ancient Christians come up with a date of 1 BCE?
2. The synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke) refer to a darkness at the time of Jesus’ death which lasted from midday until the ninth hour, that is, about three hours. Starting in the 100s, some people started trying to link this darkness to a solar eclipse. The earliest is Thallos, whose work is lost (BNJ 256 F 1). Tertullian (ca. 200), Julius Africanus (220s), Origen (ca. 250), and Eusebius (early 300s) all discuss this interpretation, and so do several later writers. By the 220s people were trying to tie this darkness to a specific eclipse, one that took place in 29 CE. The information they had about the 29 CE eclipse came from a pagan writer, Phlegon of Tralles, who apparently reported it in a lost chronographical work called the Olympiads (BNJ 257 T 16a-e).

1. 1. Calendar-era systems.
   All the sources are using different calendar-era systems, that is to say systems for expressing which year an event took place. The Roman empire didn’t have a single calendar-era system. In Rome you could use consular fasti, and name the consuls in that year; under the principate, an alternate system took hold, referring to how many tribunates the emperor had held. (And just to be convenient, the tribunician year began on 10 December, not 1 January.) But in other parts of the empire many other systems were used. The most common system in the east was to refer to the emperor’s regnal year — but regnal years began at different times of year depending on where you were. Other systems that we find in sources on Jesus’ dates include Olympiads (bunches of four years, starting from the 1st Olympiad in 776-771 BCE, with each year running from midsummer to midsummer), years since Abraham, years since Adam, and others. (And by the way, when Julius Africanus refers to a number of years since the Creation, his count is different from that used by contemporary Jews and the official Byzantine year count.) There are nice convenient calendar-era systems that they could have used. But they don’t. Systems like ‘AUC’ (counting years from the legendary founding of Rome: unfortunately that’s mostly a modern fad, no one used it in antiquity), or the Seleucid year (which was in widespread use in the Levant until the late Mediaeval period). Ancient Christian chronographers didn’t want things to be simple.
2. 2. The 29 CE eclipse couldn’t possibly have coincided with Jesus’ death.
   Julius Africanus sensibly points out (Chronographiae F 93 ed. Wallraff) that Jesus died at Passover, but Passover is at full moon, while solar eclipses happen at new moon. In addition, we can add that totality lasted less than two minutes, not three hours; the path of totality passed about 700 km north of Jerusalem; and the eclipse took place in November, not in spring. It’s pretty clear that the Christian sources on Jesus’ dates didn’t have direct access to Phlegon’s report of the eclipse. Origen didn’t know which bit of Phlegon’s book talked about the eclipse, and he gets the title wrong. Africanus says Phlegon talked about a three-hour eclipse, but that’s obviously contamination from the gospels, and that means that Africanus’ source had that contamination. (They didn’t have direct access to consular fasti either: when they name the consuls at the time of Jesus’ death, they get the correct consuls for 29 CE, but without exception, every ancient Christian source misspells their names, in a variety of ways.) Be that as it may, an in spite of some sources’ scepticism about the eclipse, the 29 CE eclipse seems to have become the linch pin of ancient Christian efforts to pinpoint Jesus’ dates. The argument runs:
3. • according to Phlegon (so everyone says) there was an eclipse in 29 CE;
   • Jesus’ death coincided with that eclipse;
   • Luke 3 says Jesus was 30 when he began his ministry;
   • Luke refers to only one Passover, so – Jesus was still around 30 at the time of his death;
   • Jesus was born 30 years before 29 CE
   .
4. Why the modern ‘consensus’ of 4 BCE?
5. The following points are likely to be central to modern arguments putting Jesus’ birth in 4 BCE:
   • Herod is the one chronological marker that appears in both Matthew and Mark, and Herod died in 4 BCE.
   • Luke says Jesus was 30 at start of his ministry. And the gospel of John refers to 3 Passovers during Jesus’ ministry. And if every gospel is telling the exact truth without error, that must mean Jesus was 33 when he died.