The Years

Nowhere is the life of Yeshua (Jesus) written down as a year. But the men around him are dated — by coins, inscriptions, Josephus and Roman administration — and their reigns close in on his life from four sides at once. Put those spans on one axis and you need not settle the question on someone's authority; you can read it off.

The four sides

The window the life of Yeshua has to fit in is not set by any one text but by four bounds that cut across each other.

Herod must still be alive. Matthew puts the birth in his days (Matthew 2:1) and has him die afterwards (Matthew 2:19). Josephus dates that death after a lunar eclipse and before a Passover, which most read as the spring of 4 BCE. That is therefore the latest the birth can be, not the earliest.

Tiberius supplies the one year. Luke opens the preaching in his fifteenth year (Luke 3:1) — the one place in the gospels where an event is fastened to a reign the world outside counts too. Counted from his accession in August 14, that comes out at 28 or 29 CE, depending on whether the part year counts.

Yeshua is then about thirty (Luke 3:23). Count thirty years back from 29 CE and you land near 2 BCE — and that collides with Herod. Take about seriously and a birth in 6 to 4 BCE fits, at an age of thirty-three or thirty-four, and then it closes.

Pilate is the outer bound at the other end. His ten years in office run from 26 to 36 CE, and the crucifixion falls inside them. That is the firmest bound there is: of Pilate we have not only Josephus but a stone with his name on it, found at Caesarea in 1961.

The chart draws those four, plus the tetrarchs and the high priests Luke names in the same breath. Click a band and you see what the span rests on and where it touches the account.

What the chart deliberately does not do

It gives the birth no date. There is a window of about two years, because that is what the evidence yields. A stroke on a single year would suggest more certainty than there is.

It does not choose between 30 and 33 CE. Both years meet every condition: both inside Pilate, both after the fifteenth of Tiberius, and on this calendar Passover falls on a Wednesday in both. They are both there, as they are on the timeline.

On this calendar the weekdays come out right in three years: 27, 30 and 33. The first drops out, because 27 lies before the fifteenth year of Tiberius, and by then there has been no preaching. The crucifixion week therefore leaves it out as well: what was a historical judgement there is a bound on this axis.

And in fairness: neither 30 nor 33 sits easily. John names three Passovers — John 2:13, John 6:4 and John 11:55 — and if the crucifixion falls at the third, the other two lie one and two years earlier. For 30 the first must then fall in 28, which works only on the earliest reading of the fifteenth year and with the baptism right at the start of it. For 33 the first must fall in 31, two years after the fifteenth year, and then there must be Passovers John does not name. That last is no objection — he nowhere says he names them all, and whoever reads the unnamed feast of John 5:1 as one counts four — but three named Passovers give a floor, not a ceiling. That is exactly why the chart does not choose.

Two spans are hatched, and that means the evidence allows more than one year. With Herod it is the reading of Josephus — 4 BCE or 1 BCE, and that shifts the whole birth with it. With Philip it is a difference between the manuscripts: the Greek says the twentieth year of Tiberius, many Latin copies the twenty-second, and that is 33 or 34 CE.

Which season was he born in?

The text names no day and no month. But there are two chains that try to work the season out, and the odd thing is that both lean on the same word from John — and go opposite ways with it.

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth. John 1:14

Dwelt is ἐσκήνωσεν in the Greek, from σκηνή, a tent. Literally: he tented among us, he tabernacled. That word calls up a tabernacle — but which one?

The first chain: autumn

This one runs by way of the priestly courses and is the more common.

Zechariah served in the division of Abijah (Luke 1:5, Luke 1:8), and 1 Chronicles 24:10 numbers it the eighth of the twenty-four. The divisions served a week each, and at the three feasts they all served. Counted from Nisan, with those feast weeks added in, the eighth turn comes out around the tenth week — somewhere in Sivan, our May or June.

Elizabeth conceives shortly after (Luke 1:24), and six months later Mary does (Luke 1:26, Luke 1:36). Count nine months on and the birth comes out around Tishri — the month of the Feast of Tabernacles. Hence the reading of John 1:14: he tabernacled among us, in the week Israel lived in booths.

The second chain: spring

This one reads the same word toward a different tabernacle.

And it came to pass in the first month in the second year, on the first day of the month, that the tabernacle was reared up. Exodus 40:17

The tabernacle was raised on the first day of the first month. Read ἐσκήνωσεν that way and you come out not at Tabernacles but at Nisan — and the picture takes a different point: not the booth of the desert journey, but the tent that was set up on the first day of the year and in which the glory came to dwell. John puts we beheld his glory in the same sentence, and that is exactly what happens in Exodus 40 as soon as the tabernacle stands.

Then there is the field:

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. Luke 2:8

Keeping watch over the flock at night is lambing work, and that is spring. The flocks near Bethlehem are moreover connected with the lambs for the temple. A birth in Nisan therefore sets the lamb in the month of the lamb.

What neither chain carries

I set them side by side and do not choose, and that is not politeness but necessity — in three places there is slack.

The priestly courses. The text does not say in which year Zechariah served, nor whether the cycle of twenty-four started over at the beginning of each year or simply ran on. Two reasonable assumptions give two different months, and the whole first chain hangs on that one assumption.

The word itself. ἐσκήνωσεν means to tent or to dwell. It names no feast and no month. Both readings supply the feast themselves; the word only confirms what you already brought to it.

The shepherds. That they were out at night argues more strongly against December than for any one season. In Judea flocks can stay out for much of the year, and the lambing season is an argument for spring, not a proof.

What does stand: the season is not December, and both chains come out at a moment that touches an appointed time. Which of the two, the text leaves open.

The acceptable year of the Lord

There is one more place where an appointed time touches the dating, and it is not about the birth but about the opening of the preaching. At Nazareth he stands up to read, is handed the scroll of Isaiah, and reads:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, To preach the acceptable year of the Lord. Luke 4:18-19

Then he closes the book and says: This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears (Luke 4:21).

Two things can be pointed at here without assuming anything.

He stops in the middle of the sentence. Isaiah 61:2 reads in full: To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and the day of vengeance of our God. The second half he does not read.

What he does read is the language of Leviticus 25. Proclaiming liberty to captives is not a figure of speech there but an institution, and that institution has a day:

Then shalt thou cause the trumpet of the jubile to sound on the tenth day of the seventh month, in the day of atonement shall ye make the trumpet sound throughout all your land. And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family. Leviticus 25:9-10

So the jubilee does not begin at the start of the year: it is proclaimed with the trumpet on the Day of Atonement — on this site a high sabbath, the tenth of the seventh month. Read Luke 4 as that proclamation and you read a day into it as well.

That would yield two things. A season: autumn, the seventh month. And a place in the count: the preaching would then lie not only between the reigns but inside the sabbatical and jubilee reckoning, and that is a quite different kind of hold than a coin.

Why there is no mark for it

The text says sabbath, not Day of Atonement. Luke 4:16 says he went into the synagogue as his custom was, on the sabbath day. The Day of Atonement is a sabbath — Leviticus 23:32 calls it one — so it could have been that day, but Luke does not name the day.

The text does not say jubilee. He reads Isaiah, and Isaiah says the year of the Lord’s favour. That the words about proclaiming liberty come from Leviticus 25 is a strong echo, but an echo it remains; Luke does not draw the conclusion in so many words.

The count itself is not fixed. Sabbatical years are attested outside the Bible too — 1 Maccabees, Josephus, and debt deeds from the Judean desert — but the scholars differ by a year over where the series falls, and over the jubilee by more than that: forty-nine years or fifty, and whether the count ran on unbroken after the exile. No year can be got out of a jubilee, therefore, and what an instrument does not know it should not draw.

What is there: click The preaching in the chart and Luke 4:19 stands among the passages, with this reservation beside it.

And one thing it is not: a second witness for an autumn birth. It concerns a different event — the opening of the preaching, some thirty years later — and two separate touches on the seventh month do not together make a chain.

Where the numbers come from

The regnal years follow the common scholarship: Josephus for the Herodians and the high priests, Roman sources for Augustus and Tiberius, the Caesarea inscription for Pilate, and the coins of Antipas and Philip for their length. Where the sources contradict each other it says so at the band, and then the band is hatched.

Four death years you often meet I have deliberately not drawn. That Pilate died around 39 comes from later church tradition and not from a source of his own time; the same holds for Caiaphas around 46 and Annas around 40. The ossuary bearing the name Caiaphas does not date his death. What an instrument does not know, it should not draw.

The crucifixion week, for the days themselves →  ·  The Timeline, for the centuries around it →  ·  Texts and datasets used →