Image: Excavation, Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem
The next installment of Eusebius of Caesarea’s The Ecclesiastical History is now posted: book 1, chapter 5 (listen here).
Notes and Commentary:
This is a very short chapter.
Having presented an introduction or prelude to the life of
Jesus from the OT, Eusebius begins with providing a date for the birth of Jesus
in Bethlehem.
He places it in the forty-second year of Augustus and the
twenty-eighth year after the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra. Lake points out in
a note that this would place the birth year of Jesus as being in 1 BC, but this
would not fit with Matthew which says that Jesus was born during Herod the
Great’s reign, and he died in 4 BC.
He also mentions that the birth of Jesus was during the
census of Quirinius of Syria mentioned in Luke and equates this with the rise
of Judas the Galilean “in the days of the taxing” mentioned in Acts 5:37 and
also in the writings of Josephus. Lake points out, however, that Eusebius is
mistaken, since this occurred in AD 6 and would thus contradict the information
in Matthew and Luke. Traditional scholars suggest that the census mentioned in
Luke 2:1-3 was earlier than the one noted in Acts 5:37 and in Josephus.
This chapter shows both how important it was for early
Christians to understand that Jesus had been born as a man in history, but also
how difficult it is to establish his birth date (birth year) with precision. We
rely on the sufficiency of Scripture.
JTR
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