The Ministry of Jesus Christ
Event · About AD 27–31
What the Bible Says
- “Forty and six years was this temple in building” John 2:20
Each year here fits these numbers, as the years between the points they count from.
The Years
- Began AD 27
- From the baptism, three years and a half before the Crucifixion. Ussher: AD 29
- “whose way he had hitherto prepared being come, and executing his propheticall office”
- Ended AD 31
- The Crucifixion in AD 31, by Daniel’s seventy weeks. Ussher: AD 33
- “The fourth PASSEOVER in which CHRIST, our Passeover, was sacrificed”
Three years and a half, from the baptism in the autumn of AD 27 to the Passover of AD 31, by the Passovers John tells (John 2:13; 6:4; 11:55) and the feast between them, “a feast of the Jews” (5:1). The text does not name that feast; it is taken here for a Passover, as Irenaeus took it, the first to count the Passovers, and Ussher and Robinson’s harmony after him. Without it John tells three, and the ministry would be two years and a half. The first, AD 28, is fixed by “Forty and six years was this temple in building” (John 2:20), from Herod’s beginning in 19 BC; the last is the one at which Christ our passover was sacrificed (1 Corinthians 5:7), on Wednesday the fourteenth of the first month, AD 31, three days after Daniel’s sixty and nine weeks ended (Daniel 9:25-26). Ussher begins the ministry at John’s record, three years after the baptism (John 1:19, 34), and dates it AD 29–33, which makes the Lord about thirty-six at the Crucifixion.
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.
