The Birth of Jesus Christ
Event · About 3 BC
The Years
- The Year 3 BC
- The early church’s date for the birth, with Herod’s death in 1 BC. Ussher: 5 BC
- “in the fulnesse of time was born of the most blessed Virgin Mary”
In the autumn of 3 BC, as the early church dated it: Irenaeus and Tertullian put the birth in the forty-first year of Augustus, Tertullian twenty-eight years after the death of Cleopatra, and Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius give the same years; none of them puts it in 5 or 4 BC. The text does not give the year. Herod was yet living (Matthew 2:1), and he died early in 1 BC (see Herod the Great). “There went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed” (Luke 2:1): in 2 BC Augustus was named Father of his Country, and Orosius ties an enrolling of the whole empire to that time. Born so, he was twenty-nine at his baptism in the autumn of AD 27, when he “began to be about thirty years of age” (Luke 3:23), and thirty-three and a half at the cross. The season is Ussher’s. He puts the birth in the autumn quarter of the Year of the World 4000, the margin’s 5 BC: "full four years before the beginning of the vulgar Christian aera, as is demonstrable by the time of Herods death."
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.
