DiscussMormonism.com

When do you think Jesus was born?

I read a book (ikr?) called "From Jesus to Christianity" by L. Michael White (I recommend). In it he goes over the Biblical record of when Jesus was born and places it against the historical record. The book is good, too, because it tells of what is going on around the time Jesus was born in religious thought.

Anyway, here is the brief paragraph on Jesus' birth.

[i[Birth[/i]
Prior to 4 BCE, during the last years of Herod's reign; clearly indicated in Matt. 2:1-23 and also in Luke 1:5. Historical considerations: The story of the census under Quirinius in Luke 2:1-2 cannot be reconciled with this date, since it occured in 6 CE, after the removal of Archelaus.

If the census part of the story is not true, what is lost? Does it damage the integrity of the story?

Wow, this surely is a question for someone else besides me to answer but...I think the Matthew and Luke accounts are referring to two different time periods. Herod vs Quirinius. There are many related issues that remain under debate so my answer is, who knows?

:-)

I think it is a commonplace of New Testament scholarship that the 'infancy narratives' have problems fitting in with history. That is quite apart from the mistake of a 6th-century writer (Dionysius Exiguus, which being interpreted means 'Little Dennis') who left us with the problem that Jesus may well have been born in 4 BC according to the conventional reckoning.

Perhaps we should recall that even if we take those parts of the Gospels dealing with Jesus's adult life as being based on eye-witness sources written down not long after the events (which I do not think they were), the evidence available from the time of his birth three decades earlier would have been much, much more shaky and difficult to make sense of.