Date of birth of Jesus in the context of "Before Christ"

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⭐ Core Definition: Date of birth of Jesus

The date of the birth of Jesus is not stated in the gospels or in any historical sources and the evidence is too incomplete to allow for consistent dating. However, most biblical scholars and ancient historians believe that his birth date is around 6 to 4 BC. Two main approaches have been used to estimate the year of the birth of Jesus: one based on the accounts in the Gospels of his birth with reference to King Herod's reign, and the other by subtracting his stated age of "about 30 years" when he began preaching.

Aside from the historiographical approach of anchoring the possible year to certain independently well-documented events mentioned in Matthew and Luke, other techniques used by believers to identify the year of the birth of Jesus have included working backward from the estimation of the start of the ministry of Jesus and assuming that the accounts of astrological portents in the gospels can be associated with certain astronomical alignments or other phenomena.

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Date of birth of Jesus in the context of Anno Domini

The terms anno Domini (AD) and before Christ (BC) are used when designating years in the Gregorian and Julian calendars. The term anno Domini is Medieval Latin and means "in the year of the Lord" but is often presented using "our Lord" instead of "the Lord", taken from the full original phrase "anno Domini nostri Jesu Christi", which translates to "in the year of our Lord Jesus Christ". The form "BC" is specific to English, and equivalent abbreviations are used in other languages: the Latin form, rarely used in English, is ante Christum natum (ACN) or ante Christum (AC).

This calendar era takes as its epoch the traditionally reckoned year of the conception or birth of Jesus. Years AD are counted forward since that epoch and years BC are counted backward from the epoch. There is no year zero in this scheme; thus the year AD 1 immediately follows the year 1 BC. This dating system was devised in 525 by the Eastern Roman monk Dionysius Exiguus but was not widely used until the 9th century. Modern scholars believe that the actual date of birth of Jesus was about 5 BC.

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