FS-108 - The Timing of Christ's Birth

The traditional date of December 25th for Christ’s birth is a matter of church tradition, not direct Scriptural testimony — so when, and in what year, was Jesus Christ actually born? This course walks through the historical and Scriptural evidence in careful, point-by-point detail, beginning with the question of whether our own calendar year is even correctly dated (the centuries-old miscalculation introduced by the monk Dionysius Exiguus) before turning to how and why the Western church settled on December 25th as the date of celebration. From there, the course reconstructs the political and religious landscape of the Middle East in the years surrounding Christ’s birth and examines the Old Testament priestly duty-cycle system that anchors the timing of Zacharias’s temple service and the conception of John the Baptist. It then works carefully through the two most contested chronological problems in the Gospel narratives — reconciling Luke’s account of the census under Quirinius with the secular historical record, and establishing the actual year of Herod the Great’s death — before drawing every strand of evidence together into a single proposed timeline, concluding that Christ was most likely born in the autumn of 4 BC.