Everything about Chronology Of Jesus totally explained
Chronology of Jesus
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The
Chronology of Jesus depicts the attempt to establish a historical
chronology for the events of the life of Jesus depicted in the four canonical
gospels (which allude to various dates for several events). Relating those externally known events to the chronology in the gospels themselves produces the following reconstructed chronology.
When correlated with external secular sources, the accounts of the four canonical gospels describe something like the following outline:
Many of the specific dates here involve some guesswork; the issues are discussed more fully below.
See
Historicity of Jesus and
Historical Jesus for an exploration of the factuality of the gospels and the results of attempts to apply historical methodology to understanding the life of Jesus.
Introduction
The chronology of Jesus is linked to specific Jewish festivals. There are numerous references to specific times, people, and places in the four canonical gospels. There are, however, only a few references that tie events to a specific year, leaving exact timing uncertain and perhaps impossible to ascertain definitively. For example, the specific years of Jesus's birth, death, and age at death are not known. Some events and dates given can be cross-referenced to other known sources, such as the dates of tenure for rulers and high priests. The gospels do, however, provide clear references to specific days of the year associated with the yearly Jewish festivals, and provide much evidence to build upon. Some consider that the material unique to each gospel further complicates the discernment of one, harmonized chronology. However, others consider the unique material crucial to narrowing down the possible chronological timings. Of course, some commentators have questioned the
historicity of the canonical gospels (see
Historicity of Jesus).
In brief, the primary events in Jesus' life are believed to have occurred around these times:
» :
c.
8 BC – Suggested
birth (earliest estimate)
:
c.
5 BC/
4 BC –
Herod the Great's death
» :
c.
6 – Suggested birth (latest),
Census of Quirinius
:
c.
26/
27 – Suggested
death (earliest),
Pontius Pilate appointed governor of
Iudaea Province » :
c.
28/
29 –
John the Baptist begins mission in "15th year of Tiberius"
:
c.
36/
37 – Suggested death (latest), Pilate removed from office
Birth
Year of birth
Our only sources of information on Jesus' birth are the gospels of Matthew and Luke, which provide two different accounts of the nativity. Matthew describes a "
Massacre of the Innocents" under Herod the Great, which Jesus's parents avoid through a
Flight into Egypt. Luke dates the event to the
Census of Quirinius which took place in 6 AD, although also implying that the conception took place during the reign of King Herod, who died in 4 BC.
Numerous commentators have attempted to establish the date of birth identify the
Star of Bethlehem with some known astronomical or astrological phenomenon. There are, however, too many possible phenomena to single out one of them with certainty, and none seems to match the Gospel account exactly.
Raymond E. Brown, having studied the various astronomical explanations, concluded: "no astronomical record exists of what is described in Matthew". Others suggest that the star was a literary invention of the author of the
Gospel of Matthew, to claim fulfillment of an Old Testament prophecy (Numbers 24:17)..
In the 6th century,
Dionysius Exiguus made the birth date of Jesus the basis for his chart of
Easter dates. Dionysius' labeled the years since Jesus' birth
Anno Domini (meaning "in the year of the Lord" in
Latin), which is now abbreviated "AD". Later the abbreviation "BC", which stands for
Before Christ was added. Dionysius' estimate is generally thought to be inaccurate; "although scholars generally believe that Christ was born some years before A.D. 1, the historical evidence is too sketchy to allow a definitive dating".
Day of birth
Determining the exact day of Jesus' birth is even more problematic than the year. Some say that the birth couldn't have happened in the deep winter, because the Bible says that shepherds spent the night outdoors with their flocks when Jesus was born (Luke 2:8).
November/January
Mediterranean climates such as
Judea's have mild winters reaching their coolest in late February.
(External Link
) Thus December nights can be quite balmy and warm enough to graze sheep. Moreover, December/January would have been an ideal time to graze sheep to take advantage of the winter rains. During the hot months, conditions can be quite barren and the grasses dry. But the end of December was the time when the perennial grasses began to turn green again and the annual grasses had sprouted anew. Thus, climatically the ecclesiastical practice of placing Christ's birth between
December 25 and
January 6 is possible. Controversy over whether
Christmas ought to be celebrated on
December 25 or
January 6 underscores the perceived importance of the day of Christ's birth and the determination of church fathers to be accurate.
It is believed that Christmas' date was chosen to take advantage of the imperial holiday of the birth of the Sun God
Mithras, more specifically
Sol Invictus, which coincided with the "return of the sun" after the
shortest day of the year. According to this theory, the reason was to replace the popular pagan holiday with a Christian celebration of holy communion. For example, the
Catholic Encyclopedia states: "Natalis Invicti, celebrated on 25 December, has a strong claim on the responsibility for our December date."
According to one tradition, Jesus was born during
Hanukkah (25
Kislev into the beginning of
Tevet). Under the old Julian calendar, the popular choice of 5 BC for the year of Jesus' birth would place 25 Kislev at
November 25.
Early Christians sought to calculate the date of Christ's birth based on the idea that
Old Testament prophets died either on an anniversary of their birth or of their conception. They reasoned that Jesus died on an anniversary of his conception, so the date of his birth was nine months after the date of
Good Friday, either
December 25 or
January 6.
Additional calculations are made based on the six-year almanac of priestly rotations, found among the
Dead Sea Scrolls. Some believe that this almanac lists the week when John the Baptist's father served as a high priest. As it's implied that John the Baptist could only have been conceived during that particular week, and as his conception is believed to be tied to that of Jesus, it's claimed that an approximate date of
December 25 can be arrived at for the birth of Jesus. However, most scholars (for example Catholic Encyclopedia in sources) believe this calculation to be unreliable as it's based on a string of assumptions.
The apparition of the angel
Gabriel to
Zechariah, announcing that he was to be the father of
John the Baptist, was believed to have occurred on
Yom Kippur. This was due to a belief (not included in the Gospel account) that Zechariah was a high priest and that his vision occurred during the high priest's annual entry into the
Holy of Holies. If John's conception occurred on Yom Kippur in late September, then his birth would have been in late June (the traditional date is
June 24). If John's birth was on
June 24, then the
Annunciation to the Blessed
Virgin Mary, said by the Gospel account to have occurred three month's before John's birth, would have been in late March. (Tradition fixed it on
March 25.) The birth of Jesus would then have been on
December 25, nine months after his conception. As with the previous theory, proponents of this theory hold that Christmas was a date of significance to Christians before it was a date of significance to pagans.
At least as early as A.D. 354, Jesus' birth was celebrated on
December 25 in
Rome. Other cities had other traditional dates. The history of Christmas is closely associated with that of the
Epiphany. If the currently prevailing opinion about the compilation of the gospels is accepted, the earliest body of gospel tradition, represented by
Mark no less than by the primitive non-Marcan document (
Q document) embodied in the first and third gospels, begins, not with the birth and childhood of Jesus, but with His
baptism; and this order of accretion of gospel matter is faithfully reflected in the time order of the invention-of feasts. The church in general adopted Christmas much later than Epiphany, and before the 5th century there was no consensus as to when it should come in the calendar, whether on
January 6 or
December 25.
The earliest identification of 25 December with the birthday of Jesus is in a passage, otherwise unknown and probably spurious, of
Theophilus of Antioch (171-183), preserved in
Latin by the
Magdeburg centuriators, to the effect that the
Gauls contended that as they celebrated the birth of the Lord on the
December 25, whatever day of the week it might be, so they ought to celebrate
Easter on 25 March when the
resurrection occurred.
The next surviving mention of
December 25 is in
Hippolytus' (c. 202) commentary on
Daniel. Jesus, he says, was born at
Bethlehem on
December 25, a Wednesday, in the forty-second year of
Augustus. This passage also is almost certainly interpolated. In any case he mentions no feast, nor was such a feast congruous with the orthodox ideas of that age. As late as 245,
Origen, in his eighth homily on
Leviticus, repudiates as sinful the very idea of keeping the birthday of Jesus "as if he were a king
Pharaoh." Thus it was important to the early Christians not to have indecorous parties on that day, but to keep it a time of devotion, reflection, and communion.
The first early mention of
December 25 is in a Latin chronographer of A.D. 354, first published in complete form by
Mommsen. It runs thus in
English: "Year I after Christ, in the consulate of
Augustus Caesar and
Paulus, the Lord Jesus Christ was born on 25 December, a Friday and 15th day of the
new moon." Here again no festal celebration of the day is attested.
October
Another argument (
Reference), that relies only on dates named in the Bible, places Jesus' birth on the 15th day of the seventh Jewish month during Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles. This is based on the time when Zechariah, father of John the Baptist, was ministering in the temple, and received an announcement from God of a coming son. The Bible states that Zecariah's term of ministry was in the "eighth course of Abia", a period dated according to Hebrew calendar in the Old Testament. If John was conceived soon after, and Jesus' conception was six months after John, then Jesus was born during the first day of the feast of the tabernacles. This is an engimatic reference because the Gospel of John introduces Jesus in this manner: "the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us" (KJV). The word used for "dwelt" literally means "tabernacled" - for example God's Word became flesh and put his tent up among ours. (
Reference)
Other Dates
There were many speculations in the 2nd century about the date of Jesus' birth.
Clement of Alexandria, towards its close, mentions several such, and condemns them as superstitions. Some chronologists, he says, alleged the birth to have occurred in the twenty-eighth year of Augustus, on the 25th of
Pachon, the
Egyptian month (
May 20). These were probably the
Basilidian gnostics. Others set it on the 24th or 25th of
Pharmuthi (
19th or
20 April). Clement himself sets it on
November 18, 3 B.C.
The same symbolic reasoning led
Polycarp (before 160) to set his birth on Sunday, when the world's creation began, but his baptism on Wednesday, for it was the analogue of the sun's creation. On such grounds certain Latins as early as 354 may have transferred the human birthday from
January 6 to
December 25 and is by the chronographer above referred to, but in another part of his compilation, termed
Natalis invicti solis, or birthday of the unconquered Sun. (Under the
Julian Calendar, the
winter solstice occurs on
December 24, so starting with
December 25, the days begin to get longer again.)
Cyprian invokes
Christus Sol verus, Ambrose
Sol novus noster, and such rhetoric was widespread. The
Syrians and
Armenians, who clung to
January 6, accused the
Romans of sun-worship and idolatry, contending with great probability that the feast of 25 December had been invented by disciples of
Cerinthus and its readings by
Artemon to commemorate the natural birth of Jesus.
Ambrose,
On Virgins, writing to his sister, implies that as late as the
papacy of
Liberius 352 - 356, the Birth from the
Virgin was feasted together with the Marriage of Cana and the Feeding of the 4000, which were never celebrated on any other day but
January 6.
Chrysostom, in a sermon preached at
Antioch on
December 20,
386 or 388, says that some held the feast of
December 25 to have been held in the West, from Thrace as far as
Cádiz,
from the beginning. It certainly originated in the West, but spread quickly eastwards. In 353 - 361 it was observed at the court of
Constantius II.
Basil of Caesarea (died 379) adopted it.
Honorius, emperor (395 - 423) in the West, informed his mother and brother
Arcadius (395 - 408) in
Byzantium of how the new feast was kept in Rome, separate from
January 6, with its own
troparia and
sticharia. They adopted it, and recommended it to Chrysostom, who had long been in favour of it.
Epiphanius of
Crete was won over to it, as were also the other three patriarchs,
Theophilus of Alexandria,
John II of Jerusalem,
Flavian I of Antioch. This was under
Pope Anastasius I, 398 - 400.
John or Wahan of
Nice, in a letter printed by
François Combefis in his
Historia monoizeii tarurn, affords the above details. The new feast was communicated by
Proclus, patriarch of
Constantinople (434 - 446), to
Sahak,
Catholicos of Armenia, about 440. The letter was betrayed to the Persian king, who accused Sahak of
Greek intrigues, and deposed him. However, the Armenians, at least those within the Byzantine pale, adopted it for about thirty years, but finally abandoned it together with the decrees of
Chalcedon early in the 8th century. Many writers of the period 375 - 450, for example
Epiphanius,
Cassian,
Asterius,
Basil, Chrysostom and
Jerome, contrast the new feast with that of the Baptism as that of the birth after the flesh, from which we infer that the latter was generally regarded as a birth according to the Spirit. Instructive as showing that the new feast travelled from West eastwards is the fact (noticed by
Usener) that in 387 the new feast was reckoned according to the
Julian calendar by writers of the province of Asia, who in referring to other feasts use the reckoning of their local calendars. As early as 400 in Rome an imperial rescript includes Christmas among the three feasts (the others are
Easter and Epiphany) on which theatres must be closed.
