Good tidings of great joy

The sixth-century Italian monk who formulated the dating system which the world now uses, Dionysius Exiguus, made a mistake. He miscalculated the date of King Herod's death relative to the founding of Rome.

Most historians agree on the period 7 BC – 5 BC as the most likely range of dates for Jesus' birth. This would square with the firmly-established fact that Jesus was crucified by the Romans in or about 30 AD, in Jerusalem, when a man in his mid-thirties.

Certainly, his birth cannot have been later than 4 BC, because it happened "during the time of King Herod" (Matthew 2:1; see also Luke 1:5). No one disputes that Herod died in that year.

6 BC would be consistent with Luke's statement that Jesus' birth coincided with "the first census that took place when Quirinius was governor of Syria" (Luke 2:2).

It used to be objected that Quirinius did not become governor of Syria until 6 AD. But there is now archaeological evidence that Quirinius had served an earlier term there as a governor (or military "ruler" or "proconsul"), beginning around 11 BC. There is also firm evidence that a Roman census was conducted in Judea in 7 BC. This was a different census to that conducted in 6 AD (and to which Luke refers separately in Acts 5:37).

(Incidentally, the precise date on which Christmas is celebrated in the West – 25 December – is a convention only. No date is specified in the Gospels, not even a season. The eventual choice of 25 December was made in the early fourth century, during the reign of Emporor Constantine, for various theological and political reasons.)

Who were Jesus' parents?

There is near-universal agreement among experts that their names were indeed Joseph and Mary, as the Bible says. In the words of Professor John Meier, "the[ir] identification … is secure".

Where was Jesus born?

As almost everyone knows, the Bible says Bethlehem, a little town in Judea. (See Matthew 2:1, Luke 2:4, John 7:42.)

Many scholars have challenged this, on the basis that Jesus grew up with his parents in the Galilean village of Nazareth, to the north. They assert that the evangelists substituted Bethlehem in order to "fulfil" an Old Testament prophecy that the Jewish Messiah would come from there (cf. Micah 5:2). They reject the biblical explanation, viz., that because Joseph's descendents were from Bethlehem, he was required to return there with his family for the purpose of the Roman census (Luke 2:1-5)

Considered in isolation, the problem cannot be resolved definitively. But whether the birth took place in Bethlehem or Nazareth, few experts question one remarkably distinctive aspect of the story: that the new-born baby Jesus was laid down in a "manger", a type of feeding trough. (See Luke 2:7.) Why invent that peculiar detail?