When Was Jesus Born? Herod, the Census of Quirinius and the Date of Christmas

Every December the same three challenges come back. Did Luke get the census wrong? Was Jesus really born on December 25? And isn't Christmas just the Roman festival of the sun with a new name?

The short version: Christ's birth is an event in Roman history, placed by the Gospels in the days of Herod the king and the reign of Caesar Augustus. The Quirinius census is a real puzzle with several serious answers. The day is not in Scripture, and the Church has never made it a dogma. The "pagan origin" of December 25 is a later hypothesis, first found in the twelfth century, not an ancient charge.

In brief

Matthew and Luke place the birth "in the days of Herod the king," so it fell before Herod's death, which most historians date to 4 BC and a minority to 1 BC. Luke also says the registration happened "when Cyrenius was governor of Syria," while Josephus dates Quirinius's census to AD 6. The main answers (Luke's wording can mean "before"; Quirinius held an earlier command; Augustus held registrations of several kinds) are possible but unproven. No New Testament writer gives a day. Around AD 200 Christians were proposing dates in May and April, and the first undisputed witness to December 25 is a Roman list of about 336. Two explanations for the date now compete: an early calculation tying Christ's conception to March 25, and the "Sol Invictus" theory, which first appears in the twelfth century.

Thesis: the Gospels give Christ's birth a place in verifiable Roman history, the exact day was never recorded and the Church never pretended otherwise, and the feast of the Nativity is a Christian feast, not a baptized pagan one.

What the Gospels give us, and what they leave out

Matthew opens the story with a date marker: "Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem."¹ Luke agrees that the setting is the reign of Herod ("There was in the days of Herod, the king of Judæa, a certain priest named Zacharias") and then widens the frame to the whole empire: "there went out a decree from Cæsar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed."

Luke also anchors the start of Christ's ministry in "the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Cæsar," and says Jesus "began to be about thirty years of age." These are the only calendar markers. Neither evangelist names a month or a day. Luke 2:8 mentions shepherds "abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night." Some have argued from this that the birth was not in midwinter. The text is not a calendar, and we should not build a date on it.

The year: Herod's death

If Jesus was born in the days of Herod, the question becomes when Herod died. Here we depend on Josephus, writing in the late first century. He says that Herod, who was suffering from a painful illness, executed some rebels, "and that very night there was an eclipse of the moon." Shortly afterwards Herod died, and Josephus summarizes: "having reigned, since he had procured Antigonus to be slain, thirty-four years; but since he had been declared king by the Romans, thirty-seven."² On Josephus's account the death falls after the eclipse and before a Passover.

The standard reading counts those reign years from 37 and 40 BC and identifies the eclipse with that of March 13, 4 BC, which puts Herod's death in the spring of 4 BC. A minority, notably Andrew Steinmann and W. E. Filmer, argue for early 1 BC, pointing to the coins of Herod's sons and a different count of the reign. Critics of the 4 BC date say the interval between that eclipse and the Passover is too short for the events Josephus describes.³ {{moderate: Herod died in 4 BC, with a serious minority case for 1 BC; either way the birth falls before his death, in the last years of the first century BC.}}

Early Christian writers also counted from the reign of Augustus. Clement of Alexandria, around AD 200, says Christ was born in "the twenty-eighth year" of Augustus, and Tertullian puts the birth "in the forty-first year of the empire of Augustus, when he has been reigning for xx and viii years after the death of Cleopatra."⁴ Tertullian's figures work out to about 3 or 2 BC. These are calculations, not memories, and they differ.

The census of Quirinius, stated fairly

This is the hardest question, so the objection should be put in its strongest form. Luke says the registration "was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria." The Greek is hēgemoneuontos tēs Syrias Kyrēniou, and Cyrenius is the Greek form of Quirinius.⁵ Josephus describes Quirinius as a Roman senator and former consul "sent by Cæsar to be a judge of that nation, and to take an account of their substance." That happened when Judea was added to the province of Syria after Archelaus was removed, and Josephus dates it to the thirty-seventh year after Actium, which is AD 6 or 7. It provoked Judas the Galilean's revolt, which Luke himself mentions in Acts: "After this man rose up Judas of Galilee in the days of the taxing."⁶

The difficulties, then, are three. Herod was dead ten years before that census. The enrollment of AD 6 concerned Judea, not Galilee, where Joseph lived under Herod Antipas. And no known Roman census required people to travel to ancestral towns. Many critical scholars, among them Raymond Brown and Joseph Fitzmyer, concluded that Luke has erred or has used the census as a literary device.⁷

Orthodox Christians receive Luke as part of Scripture, and Luke says he wrote having "perfect understanding of all things from the very first." That does not oblige us to hold any one harmonization as dogma, and the Church has defined none. The serious proposals are these.

Answer one: "first" can mean "before"

The word Luke uses is prōtē ("first"). In John's Gospel the same word is used with a genitive for "before": "he was before me" in John 1:15 and 1:30 is prōtos mou ēn, and in John 15:18 emè prōton hymōn means that the world hated Christ before it hated you.⁸ I. Howard Marshall proposed that Luke 2:2 can mean that this census took place before the one held when Quirinius was governor. This is grammatically possible, but it is not the natural reading of the sentence, and most commentators do not adopt it. {{debated: Luke 2:2 means that this census came before Quirinius was governor. Possible, not the natural reading; most commentators hesitate.}}

Answer two: an earlier role for Quirinius

Quirinius was a major figure under Augustus. Tacitus says he "won the consulship under the Divine Augustus," received a triumph "for having stormed some fortresses of the Homonadenses in Cilicia," and was "appointed adviser to Caius Caesar in the government of Armenia."⁹ Some scholars have argued that such a man held a military command in Syria during Herod's last years, alongside the civil governor. The difficulty is that no source says so. Ralph Martin Novak holds that the lists of Syrian governors are well documented and leave no gap for an earlier term, while Paul Barnett and Wayne Brindle have proposed instead a dual command or an earlier census not tied to taxation. {{debated: Quirinius held an earlier command in Syria that Luke has in mind. Plausible for his career, unattested in any source.}}

Answer three: Augustus's registrations were wider than one census

Augustus himself lists three censuses of Roman citizens, in 28 BC, 8 BC and AD 14. The last, he writes, was done "with my son Tiberius Caesar as my colleague," and "4,937,000 Roman citizens were entered on the census roll."¹⁰ Those counted citizens, not subjects of a client king, so they do not by themselves explain Luke. Roman Egypt, though, had house-to-house registrations, and an edict of the prefect Gaius Vibius Maximus of AD 104 orders "all persons absent from their homes for any reason whatsoever to return to their homes."¹¹ That shows a registration requiring a return to one's home place, a century after Christ. It does not show one in Herod's kingdom around 5 BC. Early Christians also named a census near this time: Tertullian writes that "there is historical proof that at this very time a census had been taken in Judæa by Sentius Saturninus," and Justin Martyr points the emperor to "the registers of the taxing made under Cyrenius."¹² They name different governors. {{moderate: Augustus oversaw periodic registrations of different kinds. Documented for citizens and for Egypt, not demonstrated for Herod's kingdom.}}

The honest verdict: there is a real difficulty, there are three respectable answers, and none has been proved. What we can say is that Luke places the birth in a datable reign that the other evidence supports, and that an unresolved puzzle about an administrative detail is no evidence that the Nativity is a legend.

The day: what the early Christians actually wrote

No Gospel tells us the day. For the first two centuries there is little interest in celebrating birthdays at all: Christians kept the Pascha and remembered martyrs on the day of their death. Andrew McGowan, an Anglican historian of early worship, notes that Origen mocked Roman birthday celebrations as pagan and that Irenaeus and Tertullian never mention a Nativity feast.¹³

The earliest evidence is a list of proposals. Clement of Alexandria reports, around AD 200: "There are those who have determined not only the year of our Lord's birth, but also the day; and they say that it took place in the twenty-eighth year of Augustus, and in the twenty-fifth day of Pachon." Pachon is an Egyptian month, so this is about May 20. He adds that "others say that He was born on the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth of Pharmuthi," which is about April 20 or 21. December 25 does not appear.⁴

The calculation tradition is also early. Tertullian says that the passion happened "in the month of March, at the times of the passover, on the eighth day before the calends of April," which is March 25.¹⁴ The link between the passion and the conception shows up in a later text. An anonymous fourth-century North African treatise on the solstices and equinoxes says: "Therefore our Lord was conceived on the eighth of the kalends of April in the month of March, which is the day of the passion of the Lord and of his conception." Nine months after March 25 is December 25. Augustine knew the same link: "He is believed to have been conceived on the 25th of March, upon which day also He suffered ... But He was born, according to tradition, upon December the 25th."¹⁵ In the East some reckoned the passion to April 6, nine months before January 6, the older Eastern date for the Nativity, which the Armenian Church still keeps.

The first undisputed witnesses to December 25 come in the fourth century. The Chronograph of 354, a Roman calendar compiled for a Christian named Valentinus, lists under December 25 the entry "natus Christus in Betleem Iudeae," that is, "Christ was born in Bethlehem of Judea." Historians generally agree this section was written in Rome in AD 336. A text attributed to Hippolytus of Rome (about AD 204) gives the date as "eight days before the kalends of January," a Wednesday, "while Augustus was in his forty-second year." But the older English translation (ANF) lacks it, the Greek text survives only in a few late manuscripts and catena quotations beside an Old Slavonic version, the modern French editor queries part of the passage, and some scholars, among them the liturgical historian Paul Bradshaw, regard the date as a much later interpolation.¹⁶

In the East, John Chrysostom preached on the feast at Antioch on December 25, 386, and said the date had been known there for less than ten years, according to Thomas Talley. Scholars disagree whether the feast was introduced there then or had been kept a few years already.¹⁷

The "pagan origin" theory and the calculation theory

The popular claim goes like this. In 274 the emperor Aurelian made the Unconquered Sun (Sol Invictus) an official cult and established a festival of its birthday on December 25, the winter solstice by the Roman calendar. Later Christians, wanting to win pagans over, picked the same day for Christ. McGowan calls this "the most loudly touted theory" and lists its problems.¹³ (For the wider claim that Christianity copied pagan religions, see our article on Mithras, Horus and the rest.)

• The theory does not appear in any ancient Christian writer. Writers such as Ambrose speak of Christ as the true sun, but, as McGowan notes, "early Christian writers never hint at any recent calendrical engineering." The first suggestion that the Christian date was moved (from January 6) to match the pagan feast is a marginal note on a manuscript of the twelfth-century Syriac writer Dionysius bar-Salibi.
• The evidence for the pagan feast on December 25 is itself thin. The Chronograph of 354 lists "Natalis Invicti" on that day, but the same collection also lists the Christian entry, so the earliest explicit evidence for both is the same document. Steven Hijmans has argued that there is no evidence for a feast of Sol Invictus at the Roman winter solstice before the emperor Julian (362), and he questions whether the Chronograph's entry is a Sol festival at all.¹⁸ Other scholars accept an Aurelianic festival. The matter is contested.
• Christians of the first three centuries took pains to separate themselves from public pagan festivals. McGowan argues that the first mention of a date (about 200) and the earliest known celebrations (about 250 to 300) come from a period when Christians were not borrowing heavily from pagan observances, a practice he says developed after Constantine.

The calculation theory has its own limits. It shows that Christians linked March 25 and December 25 by arithmetic, and that the link appears in sources from the third and fourth centuries onward. It does not prove that the calculation came first and the feast second; a feast already kept on December 25 could have attracted the explanation afterward, and some scholars who accept the calculation also think the solstice mattered. McGowan's own conclusion is guarded: "We cannot be entirely sure." {{moderate: The December 25 date was reached in the Church by a Christian calculation tying the conception to the passion on March 25. Attested in the sources; not proven to be the cause.}} {{debated: December 25 was chosen to replace a pagan Sol Invictus festival. The coincidence is real; the direction of influence is unproven, and no early Christian says so.}}

Christians did use sun imagery, because Scripture does: "the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings" (Malachi 4:2) and "the dayspring from on high" (Luke 1:78). They used it as a claim about Christ, not a concession to the cult of Sol.

Why some Orthodox churches keep December 25 on January 7

All Orthodox churches keep the Nativity on December 25 by their own calendar; the difference is which calendar. The Julian calendar now runs 13 days behind the civil Gregorian one (until 2100), so December 25 by the Julian count is January 7 on the wall calendar. The Revised Julian calendar of 1923 (proposed by Milutin Milanković) matches the Gregorian until 2800. Churches using it for fixed feasts include the Ecumenical Patriarchate, Greece, Antioch, Alexandria, Romania, Bulgaria and Cyprus; the Russian, Serbian, Georgian and Jerusalem churches and Mount Athos keep the Julian and so celebrate on January 7. Nearly all Orthodox churches, on either calendar, still reckon Pascha by the Julian calendar.¹⁹ It is one feast and one faith. See also the Orthodox Church calendar.

Objections

"If the date is uncertain, why celebrate it?" The Church celebrates the event, not a proven anniversary. Like the Annunciation on March 25, the Nativity on December 25 is a day set apart to remember what is certain, the Incarnation, without claiming the calendar was revealed.

"Luke contradicts Josephus, so the Gospels are unreliable." The difference concerns one administrative detail, not whether Jesus was born under Augustus in Herod's last years. The faith rests on the Resurrection (see the historical case), and the Gospels' authorship is treated in our article on who wrote them.

"Christmas is pagan, so Christians should not keep it." This is the position of the Jehovah's Witnesses (see their own reasons) and of some Protestants. The date evidence above is much weaker than they assume, though McGowan notes that many modern trappings do reflect pagan customs borrowed much later. Orthodox Christians keep the feast because the Church received it and because it proclaims the Incarnation.

What we can say confidently

• Matthew and Luke both place Christ's birth in the days of Herod the king, and Luke places it under Caesar Augustus; neither gives a month or a day.
• Herod died before Christ's ministry began, most probably in 4 BC, and in any case the birth falls in the last years of the 1st century BC.
• Josephus dates a census under Quirinius to AD 6, and Luke 2:2 is read by many scholars as referring to it; the proposed harmonizations are possible but unproven.
• The first Christian proposals for the day, around AD 200, name dates in May and April, not December 25.
• A Christian calculation that linked March 25 to December 25 is attested from the third and fourth centuries, and December 25 is certainly kept in Rome by about 336 and in Antioch by 386.
• No ancient Christian writer says the date was borrowed from a pagan festival; that claim is first found in the twelfth century.

What remains disputed

• The year of Herod's death (4 BC or 1 BC), and so the year of the birth.
• How to read Luke 2:2, and whether Quirinius had an earlier role in Syria or Luke refers to a different registration.
• Whether the Hippolytus passage on December 25 is genuine.
• Whether Aurelian instituted a December 25 festival of the Unconquered Sun, and whether it came before or after the Christian feast.

Conclusion

St Paul writes that "when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman" (Galatians 4:4). The Church confesses that the Word became flesh at a particular time, under a particular emperor, in a particular town. The Gospels give us that setting. They do not give us the day, and the Church has never required that we know it. What the Church does, in the services of the Nativity, is proclaim what happened that night, and that is the faith of the Nicene Creed, which confesses that the Son came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and became man. To continue, see Why Orthodoxy and how the Orthodox Church knows which councils are ecumenical.

Notes

1. Scripture is quoted from the King James Version (1769 text), checked against the KJV served by this site's Bible reader (https://honestapologist.com/api/bible/connections/texts?v=kjv), on 2026-11-06. Greek forms are from the SBL Greek New Testament in the same reader (v=sblgnt). Quoted: Matthew 2:1; Luke 1:3, 1:5, 1:78, 2:1-2, 2:8, 3:1, 3:23; Acts 5:37; John 1:15, 1:30, 15:18; Malachi 4:2; Galatians 4:4.
2. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 17.6.4 (eclipse) and 17.8.1 (length of Herod's reign), trans. William Whiston, Project Gutenberg ebook 2848, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2848.
3. The 4 BC and 1 BC positions, with the arguments about the coins of Herod's sons and the interval between the eclipse and the Passover, are summarized in "Herod the Great," Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herod_the_Great, which names Emil Schürer's 4 BC date and Andrew Steinmann's and W. E. Filmer's 1 BC arguments. I relied on this summary and did not open Schürer, Steinmann or Filmer directly.
4. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 1.21, trans. William Wilson, ANF vol. 2, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/02101.htm; Tertullian, An Answer to the Jews 8, trans. S. Thelwall, ANF vol. 3, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0308.htm. The May 20 and April 20-21 equivalents are given by McGowan (note 13).
5. SBL Greek New Testament, Luke 2:2, "αὕτη ἀπογραφὴ πρώτη ἐγένετο ἡγεμονεύοντος τῆς Συρίας Κυρηνίου" (https://honestapologist.com/bible/sblgnt/luke/2#v2).
6. Josephus, Antiquities 18.1.1 (Quirinius's mission) and 18.2.1 (the thirty-seventh year after Actium), trans. Whiston as in note 2.
7. "Census of Quirinius," Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Census_of_Quirinius, which reports the positions of Raymond Brown, Joseph Fitzmyer, E. P. Sanders and Ralph Martin Novak, and of defenders (I. Howard Marshall, Paul Barnett, Wayne Brindle and others). I read this summary, not the works themselves.
8. SBL Greek New Testament, John 1:15, 1:30 and 15:18, as served by the Bible reader (note 1). The use of prōtos with a genitive for "before" in these verses is read directly from the Greek; the application to Luke 2:2 is Marshall's, as reported in note 7.
9. Tacitus, Annals 3.48, trans. Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb, https://classics.mit.edu/Tacitus/annals.3.iii.html (Tacitus spells the name Quirinus).
10. Augustus, Res Gestae Divi Augusti 8, Loeb Classical Library translation (1924), as published at LacusCurtius, https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Augustus/Res_Gestae/2*.html. The dates 28 BC, 8 BC and AD 14 are from the editor's notes on that page.
11. Edict of Gaius Vibius Maximus (AD 104, P. Lond. 904), in Johnson, Coleman-Norton and Bourne, Ancient Roman Statutes (Austin, 1961), no. 208, as published at https://droitromain.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/Anglica/Aegypti29_johnson.htm; a second translation (Hunt and Edgar, Select Papyri 2.220) at https://www.attalus.org/docs/select2/p220.html.
12. Tertullian, Against Marcion 4.19, trans. Peter Holmes, ANF vol. 3, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/03124.htm; Justin Martyr, First Apology 34, trans. Marcus Dods and George Reith, ANF vol. 1, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0126.htm.
13. Andrew McGowan, "How December 25 Became Christmas," Biblical Archaeology Society, https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/ancient-cultures/ancient-israel/how-december-25-became-christmas/ (read in full 2026-11-06).
14. Tertullian, An Answer to the Jews 8 (note 4).
15. The treatise De solstitiis et aequinoctiis is quoted as translated in McGowan (note 13); Augustine, On the Trinity 4.5 (4.9), trans. Arthur West Haddan, NPNF1 vol. 3, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/130104.htm.
16. Chronograph of 354 (Latin of the Depositio Martyrum entry, Valentinus as its owner): "Chronography of 354," Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronography_of_354; McGowan (note 13) calls it a "mid-fourth-century Roman almanac." The AD 336 date of this section, and Paul Bradshaw's interpolation view of the Hippolytus passage, are as reported in "Date of the birth of Jesus," Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_of_the_birth_of_Jesus. Hippolytus, Commentary on Daniel 4.23.3, trans. Tom Schmidt, quoted with the textual notes of Roger Pearse at https://www.dec25th.info/Textual%20Tradition%20of%20Hippolytus%20Commentary%20on%20Daniel.html (a site that argues for the authenticity of the passage). I could not open a critical edition.
17. Thomas Talley, "The Adoption of Christmas in the Eastern Churches," an excerpt of The Origins of the Liturgical Year republished at https://www.johnsanidopoulos.com/2017/12/the-adoption-of-christmas-in-eastern.html. I read the excerpt, not the book.
18. Steven Hijmans, "Sol Invictus, the Winter Solstice, and the Origins of Christmas," Mouseion, series 3, vol. 3 (2003): 377-398, doi:10.1353/mou.2003.0038. I could not open the paper; its argument is reported in "Sol Invictus," Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sol_Invictus.
19. "Revised Julian Calendar," OrthodoxWiki, https://orthodoxwiki.org/Revised_Julian_Calendar (the churches that adopted and rejected it, Milanković, 2800, Pascha on the Julian reckoning); "Revised Julian calendar," Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_Julian_calendar (Mount Athos); the 13-day difference is stated at "Christmas," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas.

Bibliography

Scripture and ancient sources

• The Holy Bible, King James Version (1769 text); The Greek New Testament: SBL Edition.
• Josephus. Antiquities of the Jews, trans. William Whiston.
• Tacitus. Annals, trans. Church and Brodribb.
• Augustus. Res Gestae Divi Augusti, Loeb translation.
• Edict of Gaius Vibius Maximus (P. Lond. 904).

Fathers

• Justin Martyr. First Apology. ANF vol. 1.
• Clement of Alexandria. Stromata. ANF vol. 2.
• Tertullian. An Answer to the Jews; Against Marcion. ANF vol. 3.
• Augustine of Hippo. On the Trinity. NPNF1 vol. 3.

Modern scholarship and reference works

• McGowan, Andrew. "How December 25 Became Christmas." Bible Review / Biblical Archaeology Society.
• Talley, Thomas J. The Origins of the Liturgical Year, as excerpted online.
• Hijmans, Steven. "Sol Invictus, the Winter Solstice, and the Origins of Christmas." Mouseion, series 3, vol. 3 (2003).
• Brown, Raymond E. The Birth of the Messiah; Fitzmyer, Joseph. The Gospel According to Luke; Marshall, I. Howard. The Gospel of Luke; Novak, Ralph Martin. Christianity and the Roman Empire. Cited as reported in the secondary summaries named in the notes.