When Was Jesus Born? The Date Theories (12 of 12)

Nobody knows, and the interesting part is why people keep proposing answers anyway.

There are four serious attempts, they rest on completely different kinds of evidence, and two of them are much better than their reputations.

What Does the Bible Say About the Date?

Nothing. Not a month, not a season, not a festival.

That silence is the first fact and it should be held before anything else. The Gospel writers who recorded the birth in detail did not think the date was worth preserving, which tells you something about what they considered load-bearing.

Everything that follows is reconstruction.

What Are the Fixed Points?

Two, and they are outer limits rather than a date.

Herod the Great is alive and dangerous in Matthew’s account, and he died in 4 BC. So the birth falls before that, and the massacre targeting boys two years old and under implies some interval, which pushes the range back toward 6 BC.

The census under Quirinius in Luke is the second anchor and it is a genuinely difficult one, since the census historically attested under Quirinius falls in AD 6, a decade too late. Proposals include an earlier and unattested registration, a different reading of the Greek, or an earlier term of office for Quirinius. None is settled.

So the year is roughly 6 to 4 BC and the calendar is off by a few years, because the sixth-century arithmetic that produced the BC and AD system was slightly wrong and nobody has fixed it.

Do the Shepherds Rule Out Winter?

Weakly, and the argument is usually overstated in both directions.

Luke has shepherds living out in the fields keeping watch over their flocks at night, which fits the warmer months more comfortably. That has been used for centuries to argue against a December birth.

The counter is that flocks near Bethlehem could be out in winter, and that sheep destined for temple sacrifice may have been kept in the fields year round.

It leans away from deep winter without excluding it. That is all it does.

What Is the September 11, 3 BC Argument?

A reading of Rev 12 as a description of the sky, matched to a date when the sky matched.

Rev 12 describes a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars, giving birth while a great red dragon waits to devour the child.

Read as a celestial tableau, that is Virgo with the sun at her shoulder, the moon at her feet, and twelve stars above. Astronomical software can find dates when the configuration occurs, and the one most often proposed is 11 September, 3 BC, which also fell on the Day of Trumpets.

Michael Heiser gives this a serious hearing in Reversing Hermon, and the groundwork he lays for it is the stronger part. Paul quotes Ps 19 in Rom 10:18 to argue that the message has gone out to all the earth, and Ps 19 is about the heavens declaring the glory of God without speech. If Paul can use a text about wordless celestial testimony to describe the spread of the gospel, then the heavens function as a medium of announcement in his thinking.

That licenses reading a sky-sign as a sign rather than dismissing it as astrology.

What it does not do is establish a date. Heiser himself presents the specific 3 BC calculation as a possibility rather than a conclusion, and that is the right posture. The configuration is real, and how often it recurs, whether Rev 12 is describing a datable event at all, and whether John intended a sky map are all open.

Hold the Ps 19 argument firmly. Hold the date loosely. They are not the same claim and the second does not follow from the first.

Why Is Christmas Nine Months After Good Friday?

Because of a Jewish tradition about prophets, applied to Jesus.

The idea is that a great prophet dies on the same date he was conceived, a whole number of years, with no remainder. Applied to Jesus, the date of the crucifixion becomes the date of the conception.

Tertullian dated the crucifixion to 25 March. Add nine months and you arrive at 25 December.

This is usually called the computation hypothesis, and it has a real advantage over the alternative. It explains the date from inside Christian reasoning, using a principle Christians actually held, without needing to borrow anything.

Neither explanation tells you when Jesus was born. Both tell you how a date got chosen centuries later, which is a different question and the only one that has an answer.

Was Christmas Stolen From a Pagan Festival?

Wesley Huff has written the piece on this and there is no sense in my rewriting it. Read Christmas Isn’t Pagan, published at The Gospel Coalition Canada.

The short version of why it matters here: the chronology does not run the direction the popular claim requires. Christians are attesting December 25 before Sol Invictus was fixed to that date under Aurelian in AD 274, and the Christian attestation keeps accumulating from there, through the Philocalian Calendar of 354 and Chrysostom in 386, who already describes it as long-standing.

One thing should be said plainly before anyone treats the case as closed, because I understated it in an earlier draft of this post. The displacement explanation is not a lazy internet claim. It is generally called the History of Religions theory and it remains the most widely held account among church historians as well as in the wider culture.

The evidence it rests on is real. The Chronograph of 354 records the feast of Sol Invictus on December 25, and the same document records the birth of Christ on that date. December 25 was also the winter solstice in that era, so solar symbolism is in the air whether or not a specific festival was being displaced. And the earliest undisputed evidence for December 25 as Christmas comes from early to mid fourth century Rome.

So the honest position is that two explanations compete, that the majority currently favours the displacement account, and that Huff’s case for the computation hypothesis rests on Christian attestation of the date that runs earlier than the Sol Invictus establishment under Aurelian in 274.

Read his piece and weigh it. What the popular version gets wrong is not that a connection exists but the confidence with which the chronology is asserted in one direction.

What Is the Priestly Course Theory?

An attempt to date the birth by working backward from Zechariah’s temple duty.

Luke says Zechariah belonged to the priestly division of Abijah and was serving when the announcement came about John. The divisions rotated through the year on a known schedule, so if you can place Abijah’s week, you can date John’s conception, then his birth, then Jesus’s birth six months later.

The reasoning is sound. The inputs are not solid enough to carry it.

The rotation ran twice a year, so any given division has two possible weeks and the theory must choose. The whole system was disrupted by the exile and reconstructed afterward, so aligning a first-century BC rotation with the list in Chronicles requires assumptions. And all divisions served at the major festivals, which adds further possibilities.

It is the most methodical of the four attempts and it produces a range rather than a date, with the answer depending on choices made at the start.

Why Does the Date Not Matter?

Because the writers who had access to it did not record it, and because nothing in the accounts depends on it.

That is worth saying plainly at the end of a post full of calculations. The nativity narratives are dense with detail about place, family, political circumstance, and prophetic fulfilment. The one thing they omit is the one thing modern readers most want.

What that omission implies is that the date was not the point for them. The point was that it happened under Herod, in Bethlehem, to that family, in that political situation.

Which does not make the question uninteresting. It makes it a question about how the church has thought rather than about what happened, and on that question the September and December arguments are both worth knowing well.

Companion to the nativity post, which covers what Luke and Matthew actually record. Part of the series following the Life of Jesus timeline.

Sources

Michael S. Heiser, Reversing Hermon: Enoch, the Watchers, and the Forgotten Mission of Jesus Christ (Defender Publishing, 2017), chapter 4. Supports the Ps 19 and Rom 10:18 argument for celestial announcement as genuine revelation, the reading of Rev 12 as a sky-sign, and the presentation of the 3 BC dating as a possibility rather than a conclusion.

The biblical texts cited: Luke 1:5, 2:1-8, Matt 2:1-16, Rev 12:1-5, Ps 19, Rom 10:18, and 1 Chr 24 for the priestly divisions.

Wesley Huff, “Christmas Isn’t Pagan,” The Gospel Coalition Canada. The full treatment of the displacement claim, which this post defers to rather than duplicating. Note that Huff sits on my trusted list for manuscripts, textual criticism, canon and transmission, and this piece is outside that lane, so it is cited here as a well-sourced popular treatment rather than on the strength of his specialism.

Chris Marchand and Blair E. Clark, Celebrating the 12 Days of Christmas (Wipf and Stock, 2019). Supports the standing of the History of Religions theory, the Chronograph of 354 recording both Sol Invictus and the birth of Christ on December 25, and the dating of the earliest undisputed evidence.

Lee Martin McDonald, The Story of Jesus in History and Faith (Baker Academic, 2013), 180-181. Supports the dating of Herod’s death and the resulting window for the birth.

Where the sourcing stops: the frequency with which the Virgo configuration recurs is an astronomical question I have not independently verified, and it bears directly on how much weight the September argument can carry. On the pagan-origins question I have summarised Huff’s conclusion and named the principal objection to it rather than adjudicating between them.

Footnotes

1. The distinction between the Psalm 19 argument and the specific date is the whole discipline of this post. One is a claim about whether the heavens can carry a divine announcement, which Paul appears to grant. The other is a claim that a particular configuration on a particular day marks a particular birth. The first does not deliver the second, and treating them as one argument is how a reasonable position becomes an unfalsifiable one.
2. The computation hypothesis deserves better treatment than it usually gets. It is regularly waved aside in favour of the displacement theory, which is the more entertaining story, but it explains the date using a principle the early church actually held rather than a motive assigned to them afterward.