It was in AD 525, we are told, that the Abbot Dionysius Exiguus, at the Pope’s command, instituted the system of computing the years from the birth of Jesus Christ. With the means and material at their disposal, it is remarkable that the chronologists employed established the beginning of the Christian Era so close to the correct date.

And the correct date? It must be confessed that the exact time of the famous census-night in Bethlehem is difficult to determine. Even to say that it was in such and such a year that the decree “went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed”, takes no account of the time which may have elapsed between the edict and the execution, and of the local situation, disturbed in many ways, which in remote Palestine could postpone the processes of government.

The date, however, is worth some attention. The “first enrolment” which took place while “Quirinius was administering Syria”, was obviously not the enrolment to which Gamaliel referred, and which occasioned an unpleasant revolt. That enrolment took place in AD 6 or 7 and it follows that the earlier occasion was 8 or 7 BC. Papyrological evidence has established a fourteen year cycle for the census in Egypt, and there is no reason to suppose that it was different in Palestine.

Luke’s Worth

A knotty historical problem thus arises which can find solution only if firm support is given to Luke’s claim to be writing authentic history. Luke’s accuracy and historical worth has long since been abundantly vindicated, and his reference in his Gospel to an earlier census of Quirinius, and, indeed, an earlier period of authority in Syria, must be taken seriously. Nor does it require distortion of known facts to fit established history into Luke’s scheme of events.

Luke’s language is consistent with an extraordinary command in the East for Quirinius some ten years before his regular governorship of Syria. It was established Roman practice to appoint able officers to such extraordinary posts of authority to deal with some local situation beyond the power or ability of the man on the spot. A century of history had taught Augustus to be wary of placing too much power in the hands of a frontier governor, and the whole history of the Roman principate was to demonstrate how wise such caution was. Hence the use of special commissioners for tasks involving resources and responsibilities which the Emperor chose to keep closer to his hand.

If Quirinius was employed on such a mission when he supervised the census in Palestine, Luke’s language is preserved. He was not to know that so much historical evidence was to vanish with the passing of the centuries, and leave historians wondering why he spoke of Quirinius as the governor of Syria, when it must have been common knowledge that Quinctilius Varus, he who, in AD 9, was to lose three legions for Augustus in the Tentobery Forest, was governing Syria between 7 and 4 BC.

These years are significant, because enough is known of Publius Sulpicius Quirinius to make it certain that, if his extraordinary mission took place, it must have been in the years 6 and 7 BC. An inscription found near Tivoli in AD 1764, seems to confirm both the appointment and the date.

The inscription is without a name, but almost certainly refers to Quirinius. It describes a nobleman who twice governed Syria for Augustus, and who received the military honours due for the successful pacification of the Empire’s enemies. The same man had governed Asia.

Herod’s Position

The reconstruction of events would therefore be as follows. Varus came to Syria, an untried man, in 7 BC. Augustus was engaged in the ordering of his frontiers, and, impressed by the difficulty which Tiberius and Drusus, his own sons, had encountered in subduing the Alpine tribes of Europe, judged it wise to relieve Varus of the task of clearing the mountains of Phrygia. Sixteen years later, trapped and killed by Arminius in Germany, Varus justified such hesitation. Quirinius successfully subdues the Homonodeuses, and was told to turn his attention to Palestine, where the census, due in 8 BC had not yet been taken. There were reasons for this. Herod I had recently lost the favour of Augustus by ill-advised hostilities against Syllaeus, the vizier of the Nabataean King Obodas. This person, perhaps with a shrewd appraisement of Herod’s growing domestic difficulties, had abetted a Beuin raid into the borders of Trachonitis, and was also disputing a public debt owing to Herod by his own country. In 9 BC the quarrel erupted, and Herod, seemingly with the consent of the legate of Syria, invaded Nabataea. The expedition roused Augustus’ suspicions, and in unusually firm language the Emperor renounced his old friendship with Herod. He would treat him henceforth, he intimated, “as a subject”: This was about the year 8 or 7 BC. In the latter year Herod executed his two sons provoking Augustus’ Greek pun that he would sooner be Herod’s pig than his son.

Disaffection almost immediately arose in Herod’s army, suggesting that a coup d’état was not remote. It spread to the country, and Herod’s position was precarious. He had weathered the storm from Rome with difficulty, and only because Aretas IV had succeeded his enemy Obodas in Nabataea, and had no love for the vizier Syllaeus who had found a way to Augustus’ ear. Herod, too, appears to have pacified Augustus by establishing an oath of fealty to the Emperor, which was fruitful among the Jews. It is easy to see with what desperation Herod would endeavour to avoid an enrolment, that irritating reminder of Roman domination to which the world, least of all the Jews, was not accustomed. It seems more than likely that Augustus, sensitive in a new fashion to what was afoot in Palestine, was determined, perhaps with something less than his usual wisdom, to bring Herod to heel. His patience exhausted, he now bids an able officer to supervise the process. There was almost no limit to the processes of delay which Herod, by repeated and repetitive embassies to Rome, could multiply. The more relevant consideration is how long Quirinius would require to reach the scene of his special task, to subdue the mountain tribes, to proceed to Syria, and to put in train the necessary arrangements.

Comparing Dates

Ramsay is of the opinion that the autumn of 6 BC was the time. It is more convenient to the task of reconciling the date of the Nativity with the fairly certain date of 29. AD for the Crucifixion, if the autumn of 5 BC is chosen. Quirinius took up the governorship of Asia about this time, but Luke’s reference could well be to the final days of the supervision of Syria’s external policy. Quirinius made his dispositions, set in order all necessary precautions for a popular explosion, and moved to his next task. Herod had seven months to live. They were filled with a madman’s cruelty.

If Christ was born about October, 6 BC, he would be “about thirty” in the fifteenth year of Tiberius. And it agrees with this that when he was in Jerusalem at the beginning of His ministry the Herodian Temple, begun in 37 BC had been forty-six years building It is a tradition as old as Eusebius that Christ suffered at the age of thirty-three. The year most likely is AD 29. The fixing of the Nativity at 5 BC conserves the position.