When Did Jesus Christ Die? Part 1: The Death of a King

Historically, Archaeologically, and Biblically

We begin with the end in mind. Where we start, we will finish.

This series began, in a sense, with a single question: What year did King Herod the Great die? It is the kind of question a historian asks out of habit, and a believer asks out of curiosity. But pull that one thread, and an entire tapestry unravels before you — the death of a king, the birth of a Savior, the length of a ministry, the date of a crucifixion, the hour of a resurrection, and the morning the Church herself was born on a hillside in Jerusalem.

Historians have argued over these dates for centuries — and they should. Every generation has been given new tools our forebears did not have: better astronomy, deeper archaeology, more rigorous textual criticism. Each of these tools, honestly applied, has not weakened the story of the Gospel. It has sharpened it.

This is not a finished manuscript. It is, and will remain, a working case — one built to be revised as more research surfaces. But the foundation beneath it is solid: historically defensible, archaeologically supported, and biblically grounded. Nothing here is random. Every number means something.

You are invited to walk through it.

SECTION 1: THE DEATH OF HEROD THE GREAT

The scholarly consensus places the death of Herod the Great in 4 BC. The primary source is the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, who ties Herod’s death to a lunar eclipse followed shortly afterward by Passover — a sequence that matches a partial lunar eclipse visible over Judea in March of 4 BC.1 This dating was argued classically by Emil Schürer and has been defended and refined in modern scholarship as well.2

This single, well-anchored date becomes the fixed point from which the entire chronology of Christ’s life can be measured — because Herod’s death is the outer boundary against which the Gospel of Matthew’s account of Jesus’s birth can be set.

SECTION 2: THE BIRTH OF JESUS

Matthew’s Gospel places Herod alive at the time of Jesus’s birth — alive enough to be troubled by the Magi’s report of a new king, alive enough to order the massacre of male infants in Bethlehem two years old and under. That two-year threshold was Herod’s own calculation, based on the timeframe the Magi had reported to him (Matt. 2:7, 16) — a tyrant’s margin for error, not a precise record of the child’s actual age. Scripture states only the outer boundary of Herod’s search; it does not say Jesus was two years old when the Magi arrived, and popular nativity tradition has long assumed a precision the text itself does not supply.

Matthew’s own word choice points the same direction. Luke uses brephos (“infant, newborn”) to describe Jesus at the shepherds’ visit, while Matthew uses paidion (“young child”) to describe Jesus at the Magi’s visit (Matt. 2:11)3 — a deliberate distinction suggesting a child somewhat beyond earliest infancy, without requiring anything close to two years.

This is not merely an editorial observation. The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament treats brephos and paidion as two genuinely distinct developmental stages in its own structure — brephos as the embryo/newborn stage, paidion as the stage immediately following it, “little child.”4

Paidion is itself a diminutive of the broader Greek word pais (“child”), and while standard lexicons show its range can extend from early infancy up to roughly seven to twelve years old depending on context,5 the word’s outer ceiling being wide does not mean Matthew’s usage sits anywhere near that ceiling. The case for a young age at the Magi’s visit does not require paidion to be incapable of describing an older child — it rests on the convergence of multiple independent lines of evidence, laid out below, that all point toward the young end of the word’s range.

Several respected scholars, working independently through these same verses, converge on a similarly early timeframe.

R. V. G. Tasker states plainly that “several weeks had elapsed since the birth of Jesus” by the time of the Magi’s visit, and reads Herod’s “two years and under” decree not as a reflection of the child’s actual age but as premeditated padding — Herod had already resolved on a course of action before he even knew whether his search would succeed.6

Leon Morris, working independently through the same scene in his Pillar commentary, reaches a similar conclusion through his own choice of words. Describing Jesus at the moment the Magi enter the house, Morris deliberately calls him a “little child” — not a “young child” and not a “little boy” — a word choice that sits with paidion’s younger range rather than pointing toward an older child.6a

D. A. Carson, working through the same two verses, places Jesus’s age at the time of the Magi’s visit in a wider range of six to twenty months — a range that comfortably allows for a visit within the child’s first year of life, not only within a second, while still affirming Tasker’s basic direction.7

R. T. France adds a further piece: Luke’s “manger” and Matthew’s “house” are not necessarily in tension, since peasant homes of the period commonly stabled animals on a lower level with living quarters above — removing the assumption that “house” alone proves a long interval had passed.8

Craig Blomberg, in the New American Commentary, confirms the house/paidion detail but offers no specific age estimate of his own — a reminder that not every respected scholar commits to a number, and that this silence does not weigh against the shorter-interval reading so much as simply decline to address it.9

Herod’s decree is also worth reading against what is independently known of his character. Herod had a well-documented history, apart from the Gospel account entirely, of executing his own sons, wives, and others close to him whenever he suspected a threat to his throne — a pattern severe enough that Caesar Augustus is said to have remarked it was safer to be Herod’s pig than his son.10 Raymond E. Brown likewise emphasizes this same pattern of fear-driven paranoia in his own treatment of Herod’s reign.10a Read in that light, the “two years and under” decree looks less like a precise record of the child’s age and more like the wide net of a man who had shown, again and again, that he would rather overreach than risk missing his target.

Leon Morris makes this same point even more directly at Matthew 2:16-18. He states plainly that the “two years and under” figure was Herod’s own calculation, based on what he had learned from the Magi about the timing of the star’s appearance — not any independent knowledge of the child’s actual age. Herod, Morris notes, was “taking no chances,” extending his order to cover Bethlehem and, in Matthew’s words, “all the neighborhood,” determined that no child within the timeframe the Magi had indicated would be left alive. Morris ties this calculated overreach to Herod’s proverbial cruelty, citing the historian Stendahl’s account of Herod ordering the execution of his own three sons and, near his own death, commanding that a member of every family in the land be killed so that the whole nation would mourn.10b

Not every scholar has read the evidence this way. Alfred Edersheim, in his classic nineteenth-century study of the Gospels, argued that Jesus was nearer two years old at the Magi’s visit, tying Herod’s “two years” to an actual astronomical event rather than to simple caution.11 Edersheim’s case is a serious one and deserves to be reckoned with rather than set aside. But followed through on its own terms, even his chronology lands at 5BC birth.12

Raymond E. Brown raises a similar caution from a different angle. He notes that Herod’s two-year decree has led some scholars to a birth year of ca. 6 BC, and — without committing to that year himself — argues the interval Matthew reports “is not easily discounted,” pointing to Luke’s dating of John the Baptist’s conception some fifteen months before Jesus’s birth, both falling within Herod’s reign, as a reason to take the timeframe seriously.12a

Distance and ordinary travel time support a visit well within that range. The Magi most likely traveled from Babylon or Persia — a journey of roughly 500 to 1,000 miles depending on point of origin. Scripture itself supplies a real comparison on that very route: Ezra’s own company, traveling from Babylon to Jerusalem, took four months to complete the journey (Ezra 7:9). Ezra’s caravan included families, temple officials, and considerable goods; a smaller, purpose-driven party of Magi, unencumbered by that larger company, could plausibly have covered the same distance in a similar span or less — a timeframe fully consistent with a visit inside Jesus’s first year of life.

Working backward from Herod’s death in the spring of 4 BC, and allowing for a Magi’s visit within a range of several weeks to twenty months, this series places Jesus’s birth in the range of 6 to 4 BC, most plausibly in 5 BC — not at the range’s latest, most extreme edge. That 6 BC edge exists in the scholarly conversation almost entirely because of Herod’s “two years and under” decree; strip away the traditional, textually unsupported assumption that Jesus was near two years old at the Magi’s visit, and there is no remaining reason to push the birth back toward that earliest boundary. The evidence gathered here — the paidion/brephos distinction, Tasker’s early estimate, Carson’s wider range, France’s house/manger argument, and Herod’s documented pattern of fear-driven overreaction — converges instead on 5 BC. The text gives us a window, not a pinpoint — and intellectual honesty means resisting the temptation to claim more precision than the evidence allows, in either direction. But within that honest window, the evidence leans one way, and this series states plainly which way that is.

This birth date finds an unexpected ally. Harold W. Hoehner, whose Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ remains the standard modern reference on this entire subject, independently reaches a birth date of winter 5/4 BC.13 Hoehner arrives at this figure through an entirely different line of argument than the one built here, drawing primarily on Roman and Herodian regnal chronology rather than the paidion/brephos and travel-time evidence this series has emphasized. That two independent methods converge on the same narrow window is a notable point of agreement, and it will not be the last time this series has occasion to engage with Dr. Hoehner’s work.

W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, in the International Critical Commentary — widely regarded as the standard technical commentary on Matthew — reach a parallel conclusion from their own close reading of the text: dating Herod’s death to shortly before Passover in 4 BC, they state that Jesus “must have been born shortly before this.”13a

John Nolland’s NIGTC commentary reaches the same window by a third independent route — not through Herod’s regnal dates directly, but by reasoning backward from Luke’s own chronology. Jesus began his ministry “about thirty” years old (Luke 3:23); that ministry emerged out of John’s; and John’s ministry began “around A.D. 28” (Luke 3:1). Working that chain forward, Nolland concludes Jesus “must have been born quite late in Herod’s reign,” and states plainly that “5/4 B.C. is the most favored suggestion.”13b

A NOTE ON THE CALENDAR

Before going further, it’s worth pausing on something readers often notice by now: Jesus, born in the range of 6 to 4 BC, was born “before Christ” on the very calendar meant to mark His arrival. That is not an error in the Gospel record — it is an error in the calendar. In the sixth century, a monk named Dionysius Exiguus set out to anchor a new calendar to the year of Christ’s birth and, working from incomplete Roman records, miscounted by several years.

It is worth pausing on what that fact means. It does not mean the Gospel record is unreliable. It means our tools for reading it have improved. Every correction this series traces — from Dionysius’s original error, to the ongoing scholarly conversation over Herod’s death date, to AD 30 versus AD 33 for the crucifixion — is the story of each generation using better evidence to see more clearly what was always there. That is not a weakness in the historical record. It is how honest scholarship is supposed to work.

WHAT COMES NEXT

If Herod died in 4 BC, and Jesus was born a short time just before that death, one question follows naturally: how old was Jesus, then, when His public ministry began — and when it ended? That is where Part 2 picks up: three Passovers, three years, and the two dates every serious chronology narrows down to.

FOOTNOTES — PART 1

1. Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 17.6.4, 17.8.1, 17.9.3.

2. Timothy D. Barnes, “The Date of Herod’s Death,” Journal of Theological Studies 19 (1968): 204–219, building on the classic case for a 4 BC date advanced by Emil Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ.

3. Matthew 2:9, 11 (Greek: παιδίον).

4. Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, eds., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, vol. 5 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1968), 638.

5. Cf. Strong’s Greek Concordance, G3813; Thayer’s Greek Lexicon, s.v. παιδίον; Dodson Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. παιδίον.

6. R. V. G. Tasker, The Gospel According to St. Matthew: An Introduction and Commentary, Tyndale New Testament Commentaries (London: Tyndale Press, 1961), 37–38.

6a. Leon Morris, The Gospel According to Matthew, Pillar New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 41.

7. D. A. Carson, “Matthew,” in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, ed. Frank E. Gaebelein, vol. 8 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984), 94.

8. R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew, New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans).

9. Craig L. Blomberg, Matthew, New American Commentary, vol. 22 (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1992), comments on Matt. 2:11.

10. Blomberg, Matthew, 62.

10a. Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library (New York: Doubleday, 1977; updated ed., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 226–228.

10b. Leon Morris, The Gospel According to Matthew, Pillar New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 45, citing Krister Stendahl on Herod’s execution of his own sons and his order that a member of every family be killed at his death so that the nation would mourn.

11. Alfred Edersheim, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah (London: Longmans, Green, 1883), bk. 2, ch. 8. Edersheim reads Herod’s inquiry of the Magi (Matt. 2:7) as fixing the star’s first appearance, and thus Jesus’s birth, at two full years before their arrival in Jerusalem. He supports this with an astronomical claim: a rare triple conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the constellation Pisces, occurring in 7 BC, first identified by Johannes Kepler (De Stella Nova, Prague, 1606) and elaborated by later scholars including Münter (1827), Ideler, and Wieseler (1843, 1869). Edersheim further notes, as corroborating background rather than scriptural evidence, a tradition preserved in several minor, non-canonical Jewish Midrashim (including the “Messiah-Haggadah” and a collection comprising “The Book of Elijah,” “Chapters about the Messiah,” and “The Mysteries of R. Simon, the son of Jochai”) holding that a star would appear in the East two years before the Messiah’s birth. Edersheim himself acknowledges the dating of these traditions is uncertain and may postdate the events they are said to predict.

12. Edersheim calculates Jesus’s birth at December 749 A.U.C. (5 BC) and Herod’s death at March 750 A.U.C. (4 BC) — a gap of only three to four months, not the two full years his own “star seen two years before arrival” argument requires. For his reading of a near-two-year visit to be internally consistent against a firmly anchored 4 BC death for Herod, the birth would need to fall closer to 6 BC. Instead, Edersheim’s own stated birth year is 5 BC. His chronology therefore does not, on its own terms, sustain the full two-year reading he argues for — so his own numbers land closer to the conclusion of this paper, “When Did Jesus Die?,” than to his own stated position.

12a. Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library (New York: Doubleday, 1977; updated ed., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 205.

13. Harold W. Hoehner, Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1977). Hoehner’s concluding chapter dates Christ’s birth to the winter of 5/4 BC — a conclusion reached independently of the argument developed in this paper, through Roman and Herodian regnal chronology rather than the paidion/brephos and travel-time evidence emphasized here.

13a. W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew, International Critical Commentary, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), 227.

13b. John Nolland, The Gospel of Matthew: A Commentary on the Greek Text, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Bletchley, Milton Keynes: Paternoster Press, 2005), 108.

ADDITIONAL CITATIONS — PART 1

The following sources were consulted in the course of researching this series. They are not directly quoted in the text above, but are listed here for readers who wish to examine the fuller range of scholarship this series has engaged with.

R. T. France, “Herod and the Children of Bethlehem,” Novum Testamentum 21 (1979): 114–120.

K. R. Harriman, “When Was Jesus Born? Part 4: The Slaughter of the Innocents,” K. R. Harriman’s Newsletter (Substack, December 6, 2021). Harriman surveys the same Matthew 2:16 evidence independently and reaches a conclusion consistent with this series’ reading: he argues the “two years and under” decree reflects Herod adding deliberate “leeway” to be sure of catching the child, not a precise report of his age, since the text never states how much margin Herod built in. He further observes that Luke uses paidion for ages ranging from eight days old to forty days old elsewhere in his Gospel, concluding that the term itself “is not helpful for making a determination about Jesus’s age.” His own summary states plainly that Matthew 2:16 places Jesus only “somewhere between a newborn and two,” and that the verse “is not decisive for any theory due to its imprecision” — a conclusion this series affirms, while going further to argue that the weight of the travel-time, lexical, and character-based evidence gathered above favors the younger end of that range.

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