Jesus’ Birth Date Sidestepped

In declaring a Holy Year to launch the third millennium of Christianity, Pope John Paul II has ignored a historical uncertainty--the exact date and year of Jesus’ birth.

Christmas has been observed on Dec. 25 since the 4th century, but historians believe that to be an arbitrary date--perhaps set to offset pagan ceremonies marking the birth of the sun at the winter solstice.

It was not until the 6th century that the Vatican established the year of Jesus’ birth and made it the basis for counting years from AD 1.

The Vatican relied on calculations by Dionysius Exiguus, a Scythian monk. He determined that Jesus had been born 753 years after the founding of Rome. The year of his birth became 1 BC; the year that began a week after his presumed Dec. 25 birth date became AD 1.

How Dionysius made his calculations is unknown, but they have been in dispute almost from the start. According to the Gospel of St. Matthew, Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great, who died in what we now call 4 BC.

According to the Gospel of St. Luke, Jesus was born the year of a census. Some historians believe that the only census taken in the Roman Empire before 4 BC was three years earlier.

Thus, most modern historians believe that Jesus was born between 4 BC and 7 BC, which means that the 2,000th anniversary of his birth was sometime in the mid-1990s.