The Time of His Birth

Now, after this necessary preparation for the history of the Church we have set before us, we may set out, as it were, on our journey, beginning from our Savior’s appearance in the flesh. We call on God, the Father of the Word, and on the one we have been speaking of, Jesus Christ himself, our Savior and Lord, the heavenly Word of God, to be our help and fellow worker in telling the truth.

It was in the forty-second year of the reign of Augustus, and the twenty-eighth year after the conquest of Egypt and the death of Antony and Cleopatra, with whom the dynasty of the Ptolemies in Egypt came to its end, that our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem of Judea, as the prophecies about him had foretold. It was at the time of the first census, while Quirinius was governor of Syria. [a] Flavius Josephus, the most famous of the Hebrew historians, also mentions this census taken under Quirinius. Along with it he gives an account of the sect of the Galileans that sprang up at the same time, which Luke too, among our own writers, mentions in the Acts in these words: “After him Judas the Galilean rose up in the days of the census and drew people away after him. He too perished, and all who followed him were scattered.” [c]

The writer we have named agrees with these words. In the eighteenth book of his Antiquities he sets down the following, word for word: “Quirinius, a member of the senate, a man who had held the other offices and passed through them all to become consul, and a man of great standing in other respects, arrived in Syria with a few attendants. He had been sent by Caesar to be judge of the nation and to make an assessment of their property.” [d] A little further on he says: “But Judas, a Gaulanite from a city called Gamala, took Saddok, a Pharisee, as his partner and pressed for revolt. Both of them said that the assessment meant nothing less than outright slavery, and they called on the nation to stand up for its freedom.” [e] And in the second book of his History of the Jewish War he writes this about the same man: “Under him a certain Galilean named Judas stirred up the people of the country to revolt. He reproached them as cowards if they would put up with paying tribute to the Romans and would endure mortal masters after God.” So much for Josephus. [f]