Timeline of the Bible · The Life of Christ
The Baptism of Jesus
Event · About AD 27
What the Bible Says
- “Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age” Luke 3:23
Each year here fits these numbers, as the years between the points they count from.
The Years
- The Year AD 27
- Three years and a half before the Crucifixion. Ussher: AD 26
- “When all the people were baptized Jesus cometh from Nazareth of Galilee to Jordan, to be baptized of John”
In the autumn of AD 27, about a year after John began to preach in the fifteenth year of Tiberius (Luke 3:1-3), “when all the people were baptized” (Luke 3:21), three years and a half before the cross. Born in the autumn of 3 BC, he was twenty-nine, coming to thirty: he “began to be about thirty years of age” (Luke 3:23). Ussher puts the baptism in AD 26.
Where the year isn’t Ussher’s, the text sets it, and the note says how. Ussher’s years and sentences are from his Annals of the World (1658), quoted as printed.
