On what date was Jesus born according to the gospels and how did the convention of December 25 come about?

It could have been April 13. Or on October 14. Or July 3…

It is also likely that if the medieval monk who was commissioned to determine the date of his birth had not miscalculated, we would be in 2026 right now.

About.

It is impossible to know for sure what date Jesus of Nazareth was born. The only source historians have to reconstruct his life are the gospels, which were written decades after his death by people who never met him in life and who were propagandists for faith in Jesus as messiah.

His story comes from second, third or fifth hand, narrated by first generation christians interested, according to historians, in the death and resurrection of Jesus, not so much in his birth.

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The texts of the evangelists, however, provide clues to situate Jesus -about whose existence as a historical character there is a broad consensus among researchers- at a specific moment in history.

The sources

The main sources, explains the Spanish historian Javier Alonso to BBC Mundo, are the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, written approximately around the years 80-90 d. c.

While the oldest texts of the New Testament, such as the Gospel of Mark and the seven letters of the Apostle Paul of Tarsus considered authentic, make no mention of his early life, the Gospels of Matthew and Luke include what are known as the “childhood stories” of Jesus.

“The problem is that, from the chronological point of view, they are incompatible,” says Alonso, who is also a Semitic philologist and biblical scholar.

Mark claims that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great, shortly before his death. “Since we now know that Herod died in 4 B.C. C., according to the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus must have been born in 4, 5, 6 or 7 a. C.”.

Possibly they have realized the inconsistency that Jesus was born several years before Christ, that is, from himself. But patience, we’ll get there.

Luke, however, does not speak of Herod, but relates the birth of Jesus to the census of Quirinus. According to his account, Mary and Joseph, the parents of Jesus, had to travel from Galilee to Bethlehem in order to register in the census.

The evangelist assures that it is the recount carried out by Publius Sulpicius QuirinusRoman governor of Syria, which at the time included Judea, and that the couple had to travel there, despite Mary’s advanced state of pregnancy, because it was the birthplace of Joseph.

The census existed, as the historian testified Josephus Flavius, which allows us to give a date: the year 6 AD. C. “That is, there is a difference of at least 10 years between Mateo and Lucas,” argues Alonso.

To all this we must add one more circumstance: the possibility that these chapters, Matthew 1 and 2, and Luke 1 and 2, were added to the respective gospels once they were already circulating, Antonio Piñero, professor, explains to BBC Mundo emeritus of Greek Philology from the Complutense University of Madrid, whose study has focused on the language and literature of primitive Christianity.

“We know that they were beaten because the characters in the later gospel, from Matthew 3 and Luke 3, have no idea of ​​what happened in the previous chapters, and there are even contradictory data,” argues Piñero, who assures that historians They place the writing of these stories at the beginning of the second century.

So it is possible that, by the time the birth and childhood of Jesus was written about, more than 60 years had passed since his death.

By then, Piñero points out, it is estimated that there were some 3,000 Christians in the world, scattered, moreover, in different communities.

So which account is closer to reality, Matthew or Luke?

To determine this, historians have studied the other historical anchors that appear in the Gospels, especially a pivotal character in the life of Jesus: Pontius Pilate.

It is known that Jesus died during the prefecture of the prefect Pontius Pilate, which took place from 26 to 36 AD. C., and that he began to preach in the fifteenth year of Emperor Tiberius, explains Alonso.

“If we listen to Matthew, and Jesus is born in the year 4 a. C, it makes sense. He would die in the year 30 and would be, perhaps, about 34 years old, ”argues the historian, author of works such as“ The five faces of God ”or“ The resurrection, from man to God ”.

However, if we listen to Lucas, the accounts do not come out.

“By dates, what fits is Matthew, that is, that Jesus was born approximately in 4 a. C., in the last years of Herod the Great. On the other hand, the Quirino census does not fit, and it is understood that Lucas used it as an excuse to move some people who are from Nazareth, in the north of Israel, to Bethlehem, which is where the messiah is to be born, but nothing plus. He is a literary artifice”, concludes Javier Alonso.

Antonio Piñero agrees that it is a prophetic resource: “once you believe that Jesus is the messiah, you agree with the prophecy of Micah, chapter 5:1, that from Bethlehem, from the city where David was born, the messiah will come from there.” The prophecy, which was in the Old Testament, is then fulfilled if Jesus is born in Bethlehem.

Are there more sources?

The answer is no.

The Gospels offer other chronological anchors that allow us to place Jesus in time, but there are no other texts where his life was recorded.

Flavio Josefo, the Jewish-Roman historian of the first century, “mentions Jesus in his ‘History of the Jews’, which he wrote around the year 95, but he does so in a general way, he does not mention his birth,” explains Piñero.

“You could know the day Emperor Augustus was born, but not when a Galilean preacher had done it, nobody would know. And, in reality, the sources that we have are not written until much later”, adds Javier Alonso.

And why were the first Christians not interested in the childhood of Jesus? How is it that Paul did not tell anything about the first years of his existence? Why does Mark, who wrote the earliest Gospel some 40 years after Jesus’ death, make no mention of his birth?

According to Piñero, it must be taken into account that, for the first Christians, the message of Jesus was that the arrival of the Kingdom of God was “imminent”. It wasn’t something that would happen in the future, at the end of time or after the final judgment. That is why there was no interest in remembering specific moments or facts of the teachings of his teacher.

“For primitive Christianity, the arrival of the Kingdom was very imminent, so why would they worry? Neither of the tomb of Jesus, nor of the exact date of his death, much less of his birth, ”says the professor.

However, as the contemporaries of Jesus died and the following generations realized that the Kingdom was not coming, the need arose to put in writing what was known about him to transmit it to the following generations.

“The birth of Jesus in the primitive Christian religion does not have any importance because the original message is that Jesus dies for the sins of humanity and rises again. and that’s the triumph over death. Everything else is decorations”, argues the historian.

But, with the increase in his popularity, the need to know more about the character arises, to fill in the gaps in the biography that are not available.

“That is why Christianity writes the biography of Jesus backwards. The oldest texts refer to death and resurrection. Then they begin to talk about his public life, about his 3 years of preaching. And the two texts that speak of the birth are the most recent, those of Matthew and Luke.

The Monk Dionysus

So, if the historical evidence brings us closer to the year 4 a. C., where does the date of year 1 come from?

Here a fifth-century Byzantine monk enters the scene, Dionysus the Meager.

As Piñero explains, Dionisio, while in Rome around the year 497, was commissioned by the Pope to determine the date of Easter in order to agree with the Eastern churches. And, once the easter datehe was asked to find out exactly when Jesus was born.

Dionisio was a chronograph, that is, he studied chronography from the texts of the time.

“He did not have the sources that a historian has today, so he did it as God made him understand, and he was wrong,” argues Javier Alonso.

The monk determined that Jesus was born 753 years after the founding of Rome, and pointed to 754 as the year 1 of the Christian era. This way of numbering the years was imposed over time and, with it, the error of the date of Jesus’ birth.

At that time, in the Roman world, time was measured by the number of years of the emperor (for example, the year 5 of Tiberius, or the 4 of Nero) and, in some cities, by its foundation date, such as the Rome case.

And on December 25?

In this, Dionysus had nothing to do, since it was established before him.

It is, explains Piñero, a “Christian invention”: Emperor Theodosius I the Great established Christianity as the exclusive religion of the Roman Empire after the year 380 “and when the church goes from being persecuted to being a persecutor, it tries to assimilate into Christianity as much of paganism as possible”.

On December 25, the empire celebrated the feast of the “undefeated sun”, the day Zeus, the sun, defeated the darkness. Neither more nor less than the winter solstice, the moment in which the days begin to get longer.

The solstice is on the 21st, “but the ancients celebrated it on the 25th because it was the date on which it was already noticeable that the “undefeated sun”, that is, Zeus, was defeating the darkness. And who was the undefeated sun? Well Jesus. That is why that date is Christianized and it is determined that the birth of Jesus was on December 25”, explains Antonio Piñero.

In that month the Romans also celebrated the Saturnalia, a festival dedicated to the god Saturn “in which garlands were hung, gifts were made and there were even trees like ours at Christmas. In this way, the dates and many times the customs are copied, supplanted ”, adds Alonso.

So it is not until the fourth century that the birth of Jesus begins to be celebrated.

And when does it become relevant as a Christian holiday?

Art can serve as a clue, explains the historian: in the church of San Vitale in Ravenna, from the 6th century, from the time of Emperor Justinian, “there are already images, for example, of the adoration of the Kings, so Episodes from the Gospels related to the birth of Jesus are already being given importance.

If the date we celebrate is not really the one on which Jesus was born, what other data about his birth do historians take for granted?

Antonio Piñero considers that, since the chapters of Matthew and Luke in which they speak of the childhood of Jesus are so different from each other, “to the point that it seems that they are talking about two different people”, we could consider them presumably historical. what they agree on. Basically, that her parents were called Mary and Joseph, that it was a very religious family, and that Jesus was a Galilean.

For Javier Alonso, practically none: “they seem to me to be two almost mythological texts.”