Lecture 15: The Life of Christ: The Date of the Birth, the Length of the Ministry, and the First Two Years

The lecture, section by section

1. Three chronologies, three birth dates

   The three recommended chronological authorities each date the birth of Christ differently. Thomas and Gundry hold the traditional position, birth around 6 to 5 BC; Hoehner places it in the last days of December or early January of 5 to 4 BC; and Finegan, in the second edition of his handbook, moves it to roughly 3 to 2 BC. The debate itself is modern: our calendar system was not devised until the sixth century AD, and only with the Enlightenment lives of Christ did scholars labor to align the biblical data with modern dates. Three scriptural anchors govern the whole discussion: Jesus was born in the days of Herod the king, John began preaching in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar, and Jesus was about thirty years of age at his baptism.

2. Herod's death, and the children two years old and under

   Matthew 2 sets the birth before Herod's death, and correlation of Josephus with Roman records, anchored by an eclipse followed by a Passover, has fixed that death between mid-March and mid-April of 4 BC in the judgment of the last several generations of historians. The magi saw the star at the birth, not before it, and arrived months later at a house, not the stable; Herod, learning the time of the star's appearing, killed the boys of Bethlehem two years old and under. Since eighteen months of paranoia rounds up to two years in a man like Herod, the birth is usually placed twelve to twenty-four months before his death. That no massacre appears in Josephus surprises no one: in his final years Herod executed his own sons and ordered Jewish leaders killed at his death so that someone would mourn; a couple dozen infants in a small town vanished into that river of blood.

3. The fifteenth year of Tiberius

   Luke 3:1 has become the most debated verse among biblical chronologists. Read against the Roman records, where Augustus dies in August of AD 14 and the Senate hails Tiberius in September, the fifteenth year runs from AD 28 to 29, and John's ministry begins in that window. The alternative counts from Tiberius's co-regency with Augustus over the eastern empire, two to three years earlier, yielding AD 26 and preserving the traditional scheme. Essex, a former history undergraduate, admits he wanted to believe the co-regency reading and that colleagues in the New Testament department hold it, but he remains unconvinced; with a famous Essexism, he leans to AD 29, and some of the faculty, he reports, lean the same way under their breath.

4. Weighing the three positions

   Each position pays a price. The traditional 6 to 5 BC scheme stumbles on Luke 3:1 if the Roman reading is right. Hoehner keeps AD 29 and Herod's death in 4 BC by compressing all the infancy events, the fortieth-day purification of Leviticus, the family's travels between Bethlehem and Nazareth, and the magi's journey of four to five months from Mesopotamia, where tradition holds a remnant of Gentile magi had learned from Daniel's prophecies, into sixty to ninety days, which is far too much in far too little time, and he must also stretch about thirty years of age toward thirty-five. Finegan redates Herod's death to 1 BC against nearly all contemporary scholarship, replacing one speculation with another. Essex's verdict on the birth date: my feet are firmly planted in mid-air; it is one of the three, and he will not say which.

5. Josephus: our one source, and a propagandist

   A student asks why so much weight rests on Josephus. Because he is the only major Jewish historian of the first century, favored with temple records that Titus gave him after AD 70. But he writes propaganda: his histories argue to Rome that the Jewish people should not be blamed for the rebellion of a fanatical few, and where he can be checked against earlier Jewish literature he is not always accurate. Essex presses the standing question: why is it that when Josephus and the New Testament disagree, critical scholarship always assumes Josephus is right and Luke is wrong? Read him, but read him with discernment, between the lines, as a historian with an agenda.

6. The Quirinius conundrum

   Luke 2:2, the census while Quirinius was governor of Syria, is the problem every chronologist shrugs at. The Roman records we possess know of no governorship of Quirinius before AD 6, and the grammar has been read several ways, the first census under Quirinius, or even the census before Quirinius was governor. Liberals answer simply that Luke was wrong; conservatives answer that our records are incomplete, as they demonstrably are, and that the right explanation has not survived. It settles no dates, which is why it stays out of the chronological calculations altogether.

7. The two genealogies

   Matthew and Luke give different lines from David onward. The traditional harmonization runs both through Joseph by way of levirate marriages; the better view, Essex argues, reads Luke 3:23 with a parenthesis, Jesus, being, as was supposed, the son of Joseph, was the son of Eli, so that Luke traces Mary's physical ancestry back through Eli, her father or forefather, while Matthew gives Joseph's line, which confers on Jesus, as Joseph's legal son, the legal right to David's throne. The genealogies also teach how biblical genealogies work: Luke includes a Cainan absent from the Hebrew of Genesis, and Matthew openly compresses, stepping from Josiah to Jeconiah past a generation, because a genealogy's purpose is identification, not exhaustive listing.

8. The birth, and the infancy

   Matthew hurries past the birth itself, she brought forth her firstborn son, and Joseph kept her a virgin until after; it is Luke who gives the night, the census that brought the family to Bethlehem, the days completed, the manger, the shepherds, the material of every Christmas Eve service, so that the church is not left to apocryphal gospels. Then the sequence: named on the eighth day, the purification on the fortieth, and, it seems, a settled home established in Bethlehem, for the magi, arriving months later, come to a house and find a child, not a newborn in a stable, and nothing says there were three of them. Warned in a dream, Joseph flees to Egypt, and at the return is warned again not to settle in Judea, so the family reestablishes its home in Nazareth.

9. The hidden years

   Jesus grew up in a faithful Jewish family that went up to Jerusalem every year. Luke preserves one event of the childhood: at twelve, Jesus remains behind, confounds the teachers, and answers his anxious mother with the first recorded words of his life, did you not know that I had to be in my Father's house, or about my Father's business, either way claiming a submission to his heavenly Father that framed his submission to his parents. Then some eighteen silent years. Matthew 13 calls him the carpenter, so he took over Joseph's shop; and since Joseph never appears as a living contemporary in the public ministry, it is assumed he died in those years, Jesus working the wood until he passed the trade to the next brother and began his itinerant ministry.

10. How long was the ministry?

    Four positions. The one-year ministry, built on the acceptable year of the Lord and on treating Mark, with its single Passover, as the only historical source, discounts John and can be set aside. The two-year ministry counts only the three named Passovers of John 2, 6, and 11, but must either deny that any Passover intervenes between the first two or transpose John 5 and 6 without a shred of textual evidence; Carson allows that two years can be fitted, at the end of the day, though he advocates nothing. The four-year scheme of Cheney and Ellison multiplies feasts into Passovers. The evidence is best for the traditional three years, and here Essex is dogmatic: with the months of baptism, temptation, and early ministry before the first Passover, the public ministry ran about three and a half years.

11. Four Passovers, and the feast of John 5

    The three-year case stands on a fourth, unnamed Passover. In the synoptics the disciples pluck heads of grain, which is the barley harvest, and barley is harvested right after Passover; that places a Passover between John 2 and the feeding of the five thousand, which John 6 sets explicitly at Passover, the same season Mark betrays with his green grass. Mark 2 and Mark 6 are thus two different Passovers, and once they are distinguished, the ministry spans four Passovers: year one from the first to the grain-plucking Passover, year two to the feeding of the five thousand, year three to the Passover of the crucifixion. As for John 5, the feast of the Jews, with the article in many manuscripts, points to Tabernacles, the preeminent feast, not Passover; Thomas and Gundry agree in their footnote even while leaving Robertson's placement in the text.

12. The year of obscurity

    John baptized about six months before Jesus came to him in the fall; then the forty days of temptation, John's testimony to the delegation from Jerusalem, the first disciples, the first sign at Cana, the move from Nazareth to Capernaum, and the first Passover. John's gospel then discloses what the synoptics skip: Jesus remained in Judea for months, perhaps eight, his disciples baptizing, his ministry overlapping John's, until John's own disciples grew jealous and John answered, he must increase, but I must decrease. When the Pharisees turned their attention from John to Jesus, he withdrew through Samaria, where the saying, four months and then comes the harvest, whether idiom or calendar, marks the fields already white. The synoptic call by the sea now makes sense: the four fishermen drop their nets immediately because they were already his disciples from Judea; this is the call to leave the vocation, and, Essex warns, do not make it theological, it is not a proof text on irresistible calling. The first tour of Galilee closes the year in which Jesus emerged from the shadows of John the Baptist.

13. The year of public favor, and the turn

    With John in prison, the great Galilean ministry begins, the year of public favor, and with it the controversy: the grain-plucking, Levi's banquet with its sinners, and the planted man with the withered hand, healed on the Sabbath, after which the Pharisees' verdict is fixed, he is a Sabbath breaker and therefore not Messiah. The twelve are appointed to full-time following; the sermon that Matthew sets on the mountain and Luke on a level place is one sermon on a mountainside plain, differently excerpted. At roughly the midpoint of the whole ministry falls the fateful day of the blasphemy charge, answered by the parables of the kingdom. A second tour, then a third with the disciples sent two by two, and the year of favor ends at the feeding of the five thousand, when the crowd that wanted a bread king would not repent and believe. The final year, the year of opposition, then runs by John's feasts, Tabernacles, Dedication, the ministry in Perea, the raising of Lazarus, and the last journey to Jerusalem; Luke, Essex holds, moved the one Nazareth rejection forward for thematic reasons, opening each major section on the note of rejection.

1. Essex is agnostic about the year of Christ's birth and dogmatic about the length of his ministry, because the evidence differs. What does that model teach about matching the firmness of our conclusions to the strength of the evidence?

2. The magi were not at the manger, and Scripture never counts them. Why do such traditions take hold, and how should a church handle beloved traditions that go beyond the text without despising the people who love them?

3. John's answer to his jealous disciples, he must increase, but I must decrease, came at the peak of a competing ministry. Where is that sentence hardest to say today, and what made John able to say it?