Christmas and chronology
Posted on | November 8, 2008 |
The stories of Jesus’ birth and infancy in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke are not integral parts of a continuous biographical narrative. They are tacked on at the beginning of accounts of Jesus’ ministry and crucifixion, and their purported historical details are not corroborated elsewhere in the Gospels or in other books of the New Testament. There may have been similar material in the Gospel of Mark, but the beginning of that Gospel is evidently lost (as well as its original ending), and the Gospel of John takes a different approach to explaining Jesus’ origins.
Matthew places Jesus’ birth in the time of ‘King Herod’ (Matthew 2:1). The reference must be to Herod the Great (who is generally considered to have died in or around 4 bc) in view of the subsequent reference to his son and successor in Judaea Archelaus (2:22). Luke places the conception of John the Baptist and Jesus in the time of ‘King Herod of Judaea’ (Luke 1:5). Does he mean Herod the Great or Archelaus, ethnarch of Judaea?
Luke also says that Jesus was born at the time of a census held when Quirinius was governor of Syria. As Quirinius is known to have begun his governorship of Syria in ad 6/7, there is a clear discrepancy in the datings between Matthew and Luke, and a gap of at least a decade or more. With Quirinius taking over from Archelaus in Judaea, it would have been possible for a child to be conceived in the time of Archelaus and born in the time of Quirinius.
We can at least say that Jesus was believed to have been born in the time of Augustus, whose period of rule overlapped for more than twenty years with Herod the Great’s kingship and extended to ad 14.
Given that the birth and infancy accounts in both Gospels are literary creations, we are free to speculate as to when Jesus was born and what these Gospels may contribute by way of information or tradition. If both Gospels are referring to Herod the Great, this does not increase the likelihood of that dating, since both would be using the one tradition. A date of ad 6/7 would allow time for Jesus to reach the age of about 30 if the crucifixion took place in ad 36, as has been argued, instead of the usually preferred 30 or 33, when he would have been in his mid to late thirties at least if born in the time of Herod the Great.
A census in ad 6/7 makes sense because that was when the Roman government assumed direct control of Judaea after deposing Archelaus, who had been cruel and unpopular, and banishing him to Gaul. There is no evidence for an earlier Roman census in Judaea, and none would be expected in a period when Herod the Great or his son was ruling.
A belief that the Bible is inerrant has led to attempts to overcome the dating discrepancy which the Gospel of Luke presents. There is a recent example on the website of the Associates for Biblical Research, where a reader is assured that the Bible is inerrant and the discrepancy is only apparent (Stephen Caesar, ‘A Brief Comment on the Census in Luke 2’, 16/10/08; a list of his articles is given on the www.creationism.org website).
Stephen Caesar cites a number of arguments which are intended to help resolve the difficulty but do not in fact do so.
One of his references is to Clifford Wilson, Rocks, Relics and Biblical Reliability, Grand Rapids, MI, Zondervan, 1980, p. 116, for the view that as a high official in central Asia Minor in 8 bc Quirinius was in charge of the army there and apparently put down an uprising which was probably obstructing imposition of the poll tax. It would be interesting to know what birth date for Jesus this argument is understood to imply.
Clifford A. Wilson (b. 1923) studied at the University of Sydney, became Director of the Australian Institute of Archaeology in Melbourne (1967-70), and edited the Institute’s journal Buried History. His books include Archaeology and the Bible Student: A Survey of Some of the Ways in Which Archaeology Has Demonstrated the Accuracy of the Scriptures and Added to Our Knowledge of Bible Backgrounds, Melbourne, Australian Institute of Archaeology, 1967.
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