Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [141]
Like many ancient dating systems, early Christian calendars also referred to the number of years during which a contemporary ruler had been governing. In a modern sense, 1998="the" sixth year in the “reign” of Bill Clinton. Luke says John the Baptist, a close relative of Jesus, was born six months before Jesus and started preaching in the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, which corresponds to between 27 and 29 CE. At that time, Luke says, Jesus was “about thirty years old.” Counting back thirty years provides an approximate date for Jesus’ birth falling between 4 and 1 BCE. That’s little vague and becomes even vaguer if “about thirty” was Luke’s way of saying “thirtysomething”. Was Jesus exactly thirty when he started preaching? Thirty-five? Thirty-eight? Or maybe only twenty-five—that’s about thirty too. And we’re not done yet. This slippery chronology gets even slicker.
Surely Herod’s life must offer some clues about Jesus’ birth date. The Bible says when Herod was king a big census was taken by the Romans. Somebody must know when that happened. Wrong again. Matthew explicitly connects the birth of Jesus with the government of King Herod. And a reference to King Herod’s successor, his son Archelaus, proves that the author meant Herod the Great, not one of his several sons who also took the royal name of Herod. The years during which Herod the Great was king of the Jews are precisely known: Herod was made king of Judea by the Roman Senate in 40 BCE, and he died thirty-six years later, which gives us the exact year 4 BCE. So according to Matthew, Jesus was born sometime before the year 4 BCE.
In Matthew (but no other Gospel), when Herod was told of rumors of the birth of a “messiah” who might threaten his rule, he issued a royal order to kill all the Jewish male infants in Bethlehem. The famed “Slaughter of the Innocents,” depicted in great art over the centuries and films like The Greatest Story Ever Told, was meant to remind Jews of the Pharaoh who had ordered Jewish babies killed in the time of Moses. When did Herod issue this terrible order? Sorry. Herod did some terrible things in his day and his track record for eliminating opponents was on a par with that of King David, his predecessor as King of the Jews. In 7 BCE, Herod executed two of his sons. Before he died, Herod had a group of religious leaders and their students burned to death for desecrating a Roman symbol that had been placed in the Jerusalem Temple. But there are no records of Herod issuing that gruesome order to slaughter innocent children, and even if there were, the command was to kill the babies under two, implying that Jesus might have been born two years earlier, pushing the date back to 7 or 6 BCE. But outside the Bible there is no historical mention of a massacre of infants that surely would have attracted someone’s notice, even though Herod’s other brutal acts are well documented. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but there is no way to confirm Matthew’s story of this massacre.
What about that worldwide census that the Roman emperor Augustus ordered, as reported in Luke? Like Matthew, the author of Luke agrees that Jesus was born under Herod. In his narrative, however, Luke also connected the birth of Jesus with an enrollment for taxation ordered by Emperor Augustus and carried out under Quirinius, the Roman governor of Syria. Sorry again. According to historical records, no such census of the entire Roman world ever