The Birth of Jesus

c. 6–4 BC, estimated dateEstimated date

Matthew and Luke each tell, in a story set in the days of Herod, that Jesus was born at Bethlehem to Mary, a virgin betrothed to Joseph of David’s line, and grew up at Nazareth in Galilee.

Two of the four Gospels tell of the birth of Jesus. Mark and John begin with him as an adult (Mark 1:9) (John 1:29–30), and Paul’s letters say that he was “born to a woman, born under the law” and descended from David (Galatians 4:4) (Romans 1:3). Matthew and Luke tell different stories that share a core. In both, Mary is betrothed to Joseph, a descendant of David; she conceives by the Holy Spirit before they live together; an angel gives the name Jesus; the story is set in the days of Herod the Great; the child is born at Bethlehem and grows up at Nazareth (Matthew 1:18–2:1, 23) (Luke 1:5, 26–35; 2:4–7, 39).

Matthew tells the story through Joseph. An angel in a dream tells him not to fear to take Mary as his wife (Matthew 1:18–25). After the birth, wise men from the east come to Jerusalem looking for a newborn king of the Jews whose star they have seen. Herod sends them to Bethlehem, where they find the child with his mother in a house and offer gold, frankincense and myrrh. Warned in dreams, the wise men avoid Herod and Joseph takes the family to Egypt. Herod has the boys of Bethlehem aged two and under killed. After Herod’s death the family returns and settles at Nazareth (Matthew 2). Matthew quotes a prophet at each step (Isaiah 7:14) (Micah 5:2) (Hosea 11:1) (Jeremiah 31:15).

Luke tells it through Mary. The angel Gabriel comes to her at Nazareth and announces that her son will receive the throne of David (Luke 1:26–38). A decree of Augustus requires everyone to be registered, and Joseph takes Mary to Bethlehem, the city of his ancestor David. There she gives birth and lays the child in a manger, “because there was no room for them in the inn”. Shepherds, told of the birth by an angel, come to see him (Luke 2:1–20). He is circumcised on the eighth day and presented in the temple at Jerusalem, where Simeon and Anna speak about him, and the family goes home to Nazareth (Luke 2:21–40).

Beyond the shared core the two accounts relate different episodes. Matthew has no census, manger or shepherds, and his family appears to live at Bethlehem until the flight (Matthew 2:11, 22–23). Luke has no wise men, flight or killing of children, and his family returns to Galilee once the rites of the law are done (Luke 2:39) (Leviticus 12:2–8). Their genealogies of Joseph also differ (Matthew 1:1–17) (Luke 3:23–38). The killing of the children is reported only by Matthew; Josephus, who describes Herod’s last years in detail, does not mention it there (Josephus, Antiquities book 17). Augustine, about AD 400, argued that each evangelist simply passes over what the other relates, and he set the two out as one continuous story (Augustine, Harmony of the Gospels 2.5.14–17).

Both evangelists present Jesus as the heir to the promise made to David and as conceived by the Holy Spirit (Matthew 1:1, 20) (Luke 1:32–35). The second claim passed into the creeds, which confess him as made flesh by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary (Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed).

How this is dated

Estimated date. A scholarly estimate from primary evidence, with a margin of years.

Neither Gospel gives a year. Matthew puts the birth “in the days of King Herod” and has Herod kill boys up to two years old (Matthew 2:1, 16); Luke begins his story under the same king (Luke 1:5). Josephus’s figures for Herod’s reign place his death in 4 BC (Josephus, Antiquities 17.191) (see the Death of Herod and the Division of His Kingdom), which gives a birth about 6–4 BC. Luke’s other statement agrees approximately: Jesus was “about thirty” when he began to teach, some time after the fifteenth year of Tiberius, AD 28–29 (Luke 3:1, 23).

Luke also ties the birth to a registration ordered by Augustus, “the first enrollment made when Quirinius was governor of Syria” (Luke 2:1–2). Josephus describes a census of Judea by Quirinius, but dates it after the removal of Archelaus, in AD 6–7, ten years after Herod died (Josephus, Antiquities 18.1–4) (Josephus, Antiquities 18.26). Three explanations are offered. Many scholars conclude that Luke attached the birth to the well-remembered census of AD 6 by mistake or as a loose setting: Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah (revised edition, 1993), in its appendix on the census; Emil Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, revised by G. Vermes and F. Millar, vol. 1 (1973), pp. 399–427. Others argue for an earlier registration under Herod, with Quirinius holding an earlier command in the East: William M. Ramsay, Was Christ Born at Bethlehem? (1898). Others translate the verse as “this enrollment was before Quirinius was governor of Syria”: Harold W. Hoehner, Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ (1977), in the chapter on the date of Christ’s birth, who offers it as a possible reading.

On the relation between the two narratives, Brown, in the work cited, judges that they are independent traditions which agree on the core and cannot be fully harmonised in detail; readers who combine them follow the approach that Augustine set out (Augustine, Harmony of the Gospels 2.5.14–17).

Scholars who date Herod’s death to 1 BC place the birth in 3 or 2 BC: Jack Finegan, Handbook of Biblical Chronology (revised edition, 1998). Neither Gospel names the day or the season. The date 25 December stands in a Roman list of commemorations in an almanac compiled for the year 354, which opens with the birth of Christ at Bethlehem on the eighth day before the Kalends of January (Chronograph of 354 part 12).