When one moves on to the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, traditionally identified as those Christians who were thought to succeed the Apostles and the New Testament writers (c. AD 80–110), there is virtually no mention about the precise date of Christ’s birth. Outside of Matthew and Luke (treated below), no New Testament author gives any attention to the birth of Jesus. Since they had the advantage of having lived shortly after the Nativity, they could have conceivably benefited from information now lost to us. To properly answer the question of when Jesus was born, one must consider whether there is any surviving primary evidence to be gleaned from early Christian writers. Early Christian Speculation on Jesus’s Date of Birth We are convinced that the primary evidence does not allow one to pinpoint a year, let alone a month, for the birth of Jesus with any degree of certitude. Therefore, this study seeks to reconsider the ancient evidence concerning the timing of the birth of Jesus in light of Chadwick’s assertions. We feel that while some of his conclusions were reasonable, his main argument was based on faulty evidence and that his handling of certain ancient sources, including the Book of Mormon, was problematic.
1 Relying on a wide variety of sources, he argued that Jesus’s birth must have occurred sometime during December of 5 BC. Chadwick proposed a very specific timeline for the date of Jesus’s birth. Keeping these caveats in mind, in a previous issue of BYU Studies Jeffrey R.
While this means there are genuine historical limitations involved in precise chronological reconstructions of antiquity, this does not mean that all efforts to date events from antiquity are totally futile.
As a result of these challenges, many events from antiquity can be dated only approximately (within a few years or even decades) or relatively ( ante quem/ post quem-before or after another more securely established event). But because we possess very little documentation from the ancient world, and the survival of such records is largely the result of happenstance, our chronological reconstructions of various events are more often than not quite spotty. On the other hand, some ancient societies did at times keep rather specific chronological or calendrical records that can be converted into our modern system of reckoning, thereby allowing us to assign a specific date to a particular event. Therefore, even good primary sources from antiquity will not always describe a particular event by reference to the exact date that it actually happened. Though modern society tends to implicitly associate “important” events with a specific date (or dates), like September 11, 2001, or December 7, 1941, ancient societies did not always feel compelled to remember such events by reference to the actual date on which they occurred. We welcome this rigorous and respectful give-and-take, and we hope that all readers will enjoy drawing their own conclusions about the evidences and approaches advanced by both of these articles.ĭetermining an exact date (year, month, and day) for many events from antiquity is fraught with difficulties and challenges. While both of these articles agree on many points, this new analysis urges readers to adopt a less precise time frame in thinking about when the birth of Jesus might have occurred. By contrast, Professors Wayment and Blumell prefer a more cautious approach, placing less weight on positions that cannot be established with historical or textual certainty. The goal of the Chadwick article was to harmonize as much of the evidence, both scriptural and historical, as possible, sometimes using new or uncommon interpretations in order to reconcile apparent disparities in the sources. Chadwick on this subject, which appeared in 2010 in our volume 49, number 4, available on the BYU Studies website. This article responds to the article by Professor Jeffrey R. Editor’s note: We are pleased to publish this article, which pushes forward the conversation about what is known and not known about the dating of the birth of Jesus Christ.
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