By guess and by God

It takes pluck to write about the historical Jesus, not just because doing so always stirs the wrath of hot-headed Christians but because there is not a single ‘fact’ relating to Jesus’s life that cannot be fiercely disputed according to any objective interpretation of the available evidence.

Take, for instance, the supposed year of his birth. In 525 Pope John I issued a papal bull decreeing that this event had taken place in 1 AD. Matthew, however, stated in his Gospel that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great who is known to have died in 4 BC. If, as Matthew also suggests, Jesus was about two years old when Herod slaughtered the innocents, and if that slaughter happened to be one of the last acts of Herod’s reign, then Jesus could well have been born in 6 or 5 BC, but that, alas, is not the only possibility. Luke, the Evangelist, muddles everything by suggesting, on the one hand, that Jesus was born during the census of Quirinius (in 6 AD) and, on the other, that he was baptised when Lysanias was Tetrarch of Abilene. Well, since Lysanias was executed by Mark Antony in 36 BC and since Jesus was a grown man at the time of his baptism, he must (according to this part of Luke’s version) have been born around 60 BC. Not so, says Irenaeus, the second-century church historian who argued that Jesus was well over 50 at the time of his death. If historians can accept the crucifixion as having occurred when Pontius Pilate was lording it over Judea (and not all of them can), then Irenaeus’s proposition places the birth of Jesus somewhere between 26 and 16 BC. But even Irenaeus doesn’t get the last word. Epiphanius concurs with an ancient Sefer Toldoth Yesu document in stating that Jesus was born during the reign of the Hasmonean king and crucifier of the Jews, Alexander Jannaeus, who died in 76 BC, while a surviving fragment from Victorinus of Pettau baldly asserts that he was born in 9 AD, baptised in 46 AD and died in 59 AD.