In what year was Jesus born?
Michael Langlois is a researcher at the CNRS / Collège de France, lecturer at the University of Strasbourg and author of several scholarly works.
Tradition has placed the birth of Jesus in year 1, the beginning of the Christian calendar. But according to the Scriptures, in what year could Jesus Christ have been born?
In the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, the evangelist writes that at the time Jesus was born, King Herod the Great reigned over Judea. He would have perceived the birth of a child who would be the “king of the Jews” as a threat. This child is Jesus. The massacre of the Innocents clearly shows this fear of Herod who, seeking to eliminate this “king” Jesus, will massacre children under 2 years old in the Bethlehem region. It was for this reason that the Holy Family fled to Egypt.
After the death of Herod, Jesus and his parents, Joseph and Mary, went to live in Nazareth, in Galilee, in the north of the country. If we rely on this chronological framework, Jesus would have been born before the death of Herod the Great and would have returned to the Holy Land, under the reign of his son Archelaus. Herod having died in -4, Jesus would have been born before this date. As the duration of the stay in Egypt remains imprecise, it is not possible to date this event with more precision. The birth of Christ would have happened around the year -5,-6. It is obvious that this creates a shift from the current Christian calendar in which Jesus would have been born in the year 1 AD.
So why did you set the year of birth at year 1, if Jesus would have been born in -5?
If there were only a simple discrepancy, it would be enough to move back the Christian calendar and the problem of dating would be solved. But it is not reconcilable. In the third Gospel, Saint Luke explains to us that Joseph and Mary already lived, before the birth of Jesus, in Nazareth. And that they went down to Bethlehem on the occasion of a population census. Luke even specifies that it was Quirinus, governor of Rome in Syria and Judea, who ruled at that time.
The problem is that this population census only happens around the year 6 AD. As for him, Matthew says that Jesus must have been born before the year -4 and the death of Herod the Great. The date is clear to understand. In the other case, Luke says that he could not have been born before year 6 and the census. There is a vague area. Some people absolutely want to resolve this chronological inconsistency. But the Gospel of Luke underwent successive modifications well after it was written. And, a hundred years after Luke, his Gospel was not yet finalized. Which could partly explain why the date of Jesus’ birth was set at year 1.
What date should we choose given this chronological gap?
This time when Jesus was perhaps born, is a troubled period in Roman history. Historical sources are too few and do not allow us to establish precisely what happened, year after year. Historians and archaeologists would like to have birth registers and archives of the time. But they don’t exist. For example, on the Quirinus census, it is a Jewish historian from the 1st century who is the only source mentioning it. Sometimes there is no documentation, other times there is only one source of documentation, which is open to question.
If there was more information, other than the Gospels, we could cross-reference the data and know when Jesus was born. From this period when Jesus was perhaps born, we must remember a time of strong expectation of the arrival of the Messiah among the Jews. It is no coincidence that Jesus was born at that time (between year -5 and year 6).
