how come nobody knows when jesus was born?

Question

he's the focus of christianity and yet nodody has an exact day for when he was born. not even the exact year. does this strike anyone else as extremely peculiar?

tp, you might not, but other people do. besides, i'm not going around claiming to be god... i'm sure if i did and people believed i was god people would want to know my birthday...

blessed, what? you mean he was born before 0 b.c.? then what happened on 0 b.c.? why isn't 4 b.c. actually zero b.c.?

gees, by your explanation, the day should only be off by a year. 2000 divided by 4 is 500. that's how many leap days have occured in the past 2000 years. 500 days is between 1-2 years, not 3-4.

furthermore the leap year was discovered incorporated into calendars about 2000 years ago. so the leap year excuse doesn't explain much of anything.

Answer 1

If he never existed at all, it would explain everything.

Answer 2

People weren't quite as obsessed with records as much as we are. The births of peasant children were not logged in some civil repository. In fact, until they were adults, they were merely the property of their father. No one kept track of when Jonas bought his latest wagon, or when his son Phineas was born. Kids were just useful farming tools and housekeeping aids.

You may note that the first gospel, Mark's, doesn't mention anything before Jesus' baptism and declaration of his ministry. Jesus just didn't matter before that. Matthew and Luke wrote their (very contradictory) infancy accounts only because people kept asking where Jesus had come from, since he was important after all.

There is no year "zero". A clever monk, Dionysius the Small, was working in the Sixth Century on a way to reliably calculate the dates of Easter when he got the idea to renumber all the years from the birth of Christ. Before that, years were a hodge-podge of different monarchs' regnal years or a reference to the legendary founding of Rome. Dionysius took all the historical documentation he could find and counted back to what he thought was the actual year of Christ's birth. Since it was celebrated December 25, the following year became the First "Year of the Lord" (Anno Domini).

He was close but he missed. Herod the Great had died 3 years before Jesus was "born", but by the time the mistake was discovered, enough books and charts had been changed that no one bothered to correct it, since they didn't have a better candidate anyway. About all they did was start renumbering the years BEFORE Christ, starting with 1 and counting backwards into the past.

So, we still don't know when Jesus was born, not the year, not the day, not the hour. How does that change anything?

Answer 3

It's because the story of Jesus is a fairy tale. It never happened. Sure there may have been some men from the past who had similar things happen to them or did similar things in their lives. But there was no Jesus who did all the things described in the bible. Those stories about him were inspired by stories about other characters (Mithras, Horus, Krishna, etc.). The stories of these other characters predate the approximate lifetime of Jesus by hundreds, even thousands of years. Since the stories seemed to work for them, they were simply redone with slight differences in order to fit into that particular culture and time period. And what happened? The story stuck and still seems to work today. But Jesus is just a character in a fictional story, just like Superman, just like Santa Claus, just like Moses, just like Luke Skywalker, and just like the Bogey man. They're all stories to teach us lessons and to entertain us. They are not about real people who actually existed, so we won't be able to trace their history.

Answer 4

The years we go by are based on Jesus' birth. Jesus' birthday would have been at the year 0. But it has been discovered that a few years were lost in correctly counting them, because they didn't have leap years etc.. So Jesus was born in 3B.C.
B.C. means Before Christ.

Answer 5

The only reference to Jesus being alive is in the Bible. You'd think that there would be contemporaries who would have written about him. Also, I would think that since he was a Jewish rabbi that he would've had his own writings, which don't seem to have survived. I think that Jesus is like King Arthur - fictional characters composed of a number of real men who lived around that time.

Answer 6

Jesus evidently was born in the month of Ethanim (September-October) of the year 2 B.C.E., was baptized about the same time of the year in 29 C.E., and died about 3:00 p.m. on Friday, the 14th day of the spring month of Nisan (March-April), 33 C.E. The basis for these dates is as follows:

Jesus was born approximately six months after the birth of his relative John (the Baptizer), during the rule of Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus (31 B.C.E.–14 C.E.) and the Syrian governorship of Quirinius Jesus evidently was born in the month of Ethanim (September-October) of the year 2 B.C.E., was baptized about the same time of the year in 29 C.E., and died about 3:00 p.m. on Friday, the 14th day of the spring month of Nisan (March-April), 33 C.E. The basis for these dates is as follows:

Jesus was born approximately six months after the birth of his relative John (the Baptizer), during the rule of Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus (31 B.C.E.–14 C.E.) and the Syrian governorship of Quirinius and toward the close of the reign of Herod the Great over Judea.—Mt 2:1, 13, 20-22; Lu 1:24-31, 36; 2:1, 2, 7.), and toward the close of the reign of Herod the Great over Judea.—Mt 2:1, 13, 20-22; Lu 1:24-31, 36; 2:1, 2, 7.

Bible critics have said that the only census taken while Publius Sulpicius Quirinius was governor of Syria was about 6 C.E., which event sparked a rebellion by Judas the Galilean and the Zealots. (Ac 5:37) This was really the second registration under Quirinius, for inscriptions discovered at and near Antioch revealed that some years earlier Quirinius had served as the emperor’s legate in Syria. (The Bearing of Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament, by W. Ramsay, 1979, pp. 285, 291) Concerning this, the Dictionnaire du Nouveau Testament in Crampon’s French Bible (1939 ed., p. 360) says: “The scholarly researches of Zumpt (Commentat. epigraph., II, 86-104; De Syria romana provincia, 97-98) and of Mommsen (Res gestae divi Augusti) place beyond doubt that Quirinius was twice governor of Syria.” Many scholars locate the time of Quirinius’ first governorship as somewhere between the years 4 and 1 B.C.E., probably from 3 to 2 B.C.E. Their method of arriving at these dates, however, is not solid, and the actual period of this governorship remains indefinite. His second governorship, however, included 6 C.E., according to details reported by Josephus.—Jewish Antiquities, XVIII, 26 (ii, 1).

So historian and Bible writer Luke was correct when he said concerning the registration at the time of Jesus’ birth: “This first registration took place when Quirinius was governor of Syria,” distinguishing it from the second, which occurred later under the same Quirinius and to which Gamaliel makes reference as reported by Luke at Acts 5:37.

Answer 7

The calender got messed up and is believed to be off 2 to 4 years either way.

Answer 8

I not only find that his date of birth is unknown, but the majority of his life is unknown, and there is no Roman historical records that show an execution for him.

Answer 9

.yeah if you notice Jesus was born in the time when all the people had to Patronized, it was an old tradition for the Jews, that was around march or April.

the Year was when the King Herodotus was in charge of Judea! 2 or 3 A.C

Answer 10

I looked it up in the same book that lists Socrates exact birthday.

Answer 11

1961.