Date of birth of Jesus

The date of birth of Jesus is not stated in the gospels or in any secular text, but most scholars assume a date of birth between 6 BC and 4 BC. The historical evidence is too incomplete to allow a definitive dating, but the date is estimated through two different approaches—one by analyzing references to known historical events mentioned in the nativity accounts in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, and the second by working backwards from the estimation of the start of the ministry of Jesus.

The nativity accounts in the New Testament gospels of Matthew and Luke do not mention a date or time of year for the birth of Jesus, and Karl Rahner states that the gospels do not in general provide enough details of dates to satisfy the demands of modern historians. Mainstream scholars do not see the Luke and Matthew nativity stories as historically factual, and for this reason they do not consider them a reliable method for determining Jesus’ date of birth.Karl Rahner states that the authors of the gospels generally focused on theological elements rather than historical chronologies.

Both Luke and Matthew associate Jesus' birth with the time of Herod the Great. states that "Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king". He also implies that Jesus could have been as much as two years old at the time of the visit of the Magi, because Herod ordered the murder of all boys up to the age of two years, “in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi”. Most scholars agree that Herod died in 4 BC, although a case has also been made that Herod died only in 1BC.

mentions the reign of Herod shortly before the birth of Jesus, but places the birth during the Census of Quirinius, which only took place ten years later in 6 AD as described by the historian Josephus. The Jewish historian Josephus, in his Antiquities of the Jews (ca. AD 93), indicates that Cyrenius/Quirinius' governorship of Syria began in AD 6, and Josephus mentions a census sometime between AD 6–7.

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