An Advent reflection: of Pharoahs, Kings and the real date of the first Christmas

Today is Advent Sunday and the official start of the season leading up to Christmas.

In this Christmas season I would like to reflect and speculate on the events which we commemorate - when Jesus Christ was really born, and leading up to his birth, when the Hebrews led by Moses really first arrived in what is now Israel, and when the temple of Solomon was built.

 The first thing to be understood before you appreciate the uncertainty around all ancient dates is that there was no common point of reference between dates used by different empires and nations before 525 AD or CE when a monk called Dionysius Exiguus of Scythia Minor introduced the A.D. or Anno Domini system, counting the years since the date when he thought Jesus had been born. As I will be explaining in the lecture, it is very unlikely that Dionysius got it exactly right, though all things considered he was remarkably close.

Prior to 525 AD there are no consistent ancient calendars, and almost no dates prior to 525 CE are quoted or available in the modern form on contemporary records. If you see a date written in a modern format prior to that year, it’s been derived by subsequent historians as part of a vast n-dimensional jigsaw in which they tried to fit together disparate and inconsistent calendars and records to derive an accurate picture. It is very hard to do. 

Go back another five hundred years before that, to the calendar reforms under Julius Caesar in the year we later came to call 45 BC, though at the time Romans called it the fourth year that he was consul or Year 709 since the founding of Rome. Prior to Julius Caesar’s reforms of the calendar, there not only was no such thing as a universal system of dating, there was not even agreement on how many days a month or year should have.  

The Egyptians had one of the best understandings of the calendar in the Ancient world including a year lasting 365 days. A proposal that they should adopt a leap year with an extra day every four years had been made in what they called the ninth year of Pharoah Ptolemy III, which we now think corresponds to the year 238 BC. 

However, that proposal was not adopted, so the Egyptian calendar, lost a day every four years compared to the solstice. So did the Persian system of dating which was one of the other relatively accurate calendars.

Egyptians mostly designated dates based in the number of years the incumbent Pharoah had been reigning, and there are serious problems with that. It was common for a Pharoah to appoint the son or brother who was his heir, as co-regent or joint Pharoah. This immediately creates possibile confusion about whether a regnal year should count from the point when such a Pharoah was appointed co-Regent or when he became sole or senior ruler. Hence with overlapping reigns, if the same practice is not followed consistently we get the possibility that any given overlap will be double counted making a period of history appear longer than it actually was, or missed entirely making the period appear shorter.

There were also periods in the history of both Egypt and other countries where there are known to be, or appear to be, gaps or interregnums in the record, and the range of opinions about how long such periods lasted can be huge, with the range of possibilities in some cases being a matter of multiple centuries.

There is the further problem that some ancient rulers deliberately attempted to erase sections of the historical record. What we now call “cancel culture” goes back thousands of years before the age of political correctness: both the Romans, who called this “Damnatio Memorae” and some Ancient Egyptian rulers, attempted to erase from history every record of people they particularly disapproved of. We know of cases where this was very nearly successful, but for all we know there may have been other cases where they actually succeeded.

For example - would anyone reading this like to think of he first Egyptian Pharoah whose name coms into your head?

I suspect many of not most people will have thought first of King Tutankhamun.

Tutenkhamun is possibly the best known of all the Ancient Egyptian rulers today, because contemporary grave robbers didn’t find his tomb, and 20th century archaeologists did.

Yet for thousands of years the knowledge of his reign and those of his successor and two or three predecessors was not just forgotten, but suppressed. King Tut’s father Akhenaten is sometimes known as the “heretic Pharoah” because he defied the priests of the previous Egyptian pantheon of Gods in favour of a predominant or possibly even monotheistic God, expressed through the worship of the Aten, or solar disc, the light of the sun. 

After Ahkenaten’s death, Egypt swiftly reverted to the previous religion, and a few years after the passing of King Tut, his successor but one, General Horemheb, made a very determined attempt to suppress all records, not just of Ahkenaten but the whole of the so-called “Armana period” which had included, we think,  either four or five reigns and, probably lasted about thirty years. 

Horemheb very nearly succeeded in rewriting history to show his own reign starting immediately after Tut’s grandfather and Ahkenaten’s father, Amenhotep the Third. For thousands of years until the discovery of his tomb King Tut was nearly forgotten.

I have explained how difficult it is to piece together the chronology of the ancient world so that it will sound less absurd when I go on to say that there is very real debate about the most basic facts about major events in ancient history further back than about 500 BCE, in some cases including whether they happened at all or when within a range of centuries they occurred.

And there are arguments which sound very convincing to a lay person, if not always to an expert, to the effect that much of the generally accepted chronology of the Egyptian, Jewish, Trojan and Greek civilisations may be confused and in places three or four hundred years out of sync.

Possibly the most extreme example of an event which there is controversy about whether it happened at all and if so when is the exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt. If you have watched almost any film about these events, be it the works of Cecil B de Mille through the animated film “Prince of Egypt” to the more recent film “Exodus: Gods and Kings” they will invariably present the Pharoah of the exodus as being Ramesses II.

Now when I first saw a film which identified the Pharoah of the Exodus with Ramesses II, I laughed and thought “That can’t possibly be right – trust Hollywood film-makers not to check their script against the facts.” I was quite shocked when I learned that the conventional chronology actually does suggest a date for the Exodus at about the time of the reign of Ramesses II.

That chronology is based on a number of Anchor points fixing particular events in Egyptian history with particular events in the bible, and in particular the assumption that Pharoah Shishak in the bible, (who took away some treasures from the temple at Jerusalem five years after Solomon died,) is the ruler known in Egyptian records as Shoshenk the First.

That may or may not be right, but if anything like the events of the Book of Exodus really happened, they didn't happen in the reign of Ramesses II.

The problem is that this particular Pharoah was one of the most powerful, richest and successful, the longest lived, and had one of the best documented and longest reigns of any ruler of ancient Egypt. He came to the throne as a teenager and died of natural causes at about the age of ninety. And there is no record that during his long and well-documented reign Egypt was hit by a string of disasters such as the great plagues described in the book of Exodus, suffered a major slave rebellion or escape, or lost an army in the Red Sea. 

So that leaves us with three explanations. 

• The one favoured by the so-called “Copenhagen School” of Egyptologists is that the bible is basically a work of fiction fabricated by Jewish priests a few hundred years before the birth of Jesus which bears little or no relation to historical reality. On that view the events of the Book of Exodus are almost entirely a myth. 
• The second option was that Ramesses II’s court scribes successfully suppressed all mention of the events of the Book of Exodus in Egyptian history. This can't be entirely ruled out - after all, Horemheb largely suppressed the history of the entire Armana period for three thousand years. But it would have been difficult to do.
• The third possibility is that there WAS an exodus but that it happened at a completely different date during one of the reigns where records DO suggest the possibility of disasters such as those described in the bible.

For example at some point in the middle of the second millennium BCE, the island of Thera in the Mediterranean, also known as Santorini, blew apart in one of the most violent volcanic eruptions known in history. The exact date is hotly disputed between various scientific specialties, but it has been suggested that this could have caused a sequence of events not dissimilar to the plagues which hit Egypt according to the book of Exodus.

Alternatively, the Exodus might make more sense in the reign of the Pharoah Dudimose. David Rohl, author of an alternative chronology, identifies Dudimose with Tutimaeus, of whom the Jewish historian Josephus quotes the ancient Egyptian Historian Manetho as writing 

“In his reign, for what cause I know not, a blast of God smote us.”

Rohl makes a strong case for Dudimose as the Pharoah of the exodus.

Coming back to the Temple of Solomon, the date of the Exodus is significant for working out a consistent chronology of the ancient Jewish monarchy, because the First book of Kings in the bible states explicitly that there were four hundred and eighty years between the date when the Israelites left Egypt and the date in the fourth year of his reign when Solomon began to build his temple. 

Even on the conventional chronology and accepting the identification of Pharoah Shishak in the bible  with Shoshenk the First, that would put the Exodus at 1425 BC or earlier, and well over a century before the currently favoured date for the birth of Ramesses II.

Egypt and Israel are not the only ancient nations for whose history Davd Rohl points out issues with the conventional chronology. Others include Greece, Troy and Rome.

There is clear evidence that shortly after the Trojan war, late Bronze age civilisations went down like a row of dominoes as brilliantly described by American historian Eric Cline in his book “1177 – the year civilisation collapsed.”

The causes listed by Professor Cline sound remarkably familiar to the problems of our own age from climate change and economic chaos exacerbated by wars, rebellions and mass migration.

There is little doubt that he’s right that there was such a collapse at the end of the bronze age, but much more room for debate about how long the following Dark age lasted and, therefore whether 1177 was the correct date for when it happened. The conventional chronology, partly adopted to fit the conventional view of what happened in Egypt, suggests that Troy and Greece suffered a 300-year dark age. It is very likely that there was some sort of dark age before the new Iron age civilisations established themselves – but Rohl points out that there is a dearth of evidence that it was really as long as three centuries – and some of the archaeological evidence, historical accounts and records, currently dismissed as legends, look a lot more credible if you assume a much shorter interregnum.

I referred earlier to the identification of Shishak with Shoshenk I, and Rohl makes a credible case that this identification by 19th century historians may well be a mistake. He makes a very interesting argument about who a more credible candidate to be the biblical Shishak is, and it's someone I have already written about in this essay.

The bible describes Pharoah Shishak as an ally of King David, and after David’s death, an even closer ally of King Solomon, who married Pharoah Shishak’s daughter. However, Pharoah’s daughter does not seem to have been very pleased with Solomon marrying a large number of other wives and his dalliance with the Queen of Sheba. Shishak honoured the terms of the alliance for the duration of the marriage, which was never dissolved during Solomon’s reasonably long reign, but five years after Solomon’s death, Shishak invaded, took back a town which had been his daughter’s dowry, and took some treasure away from Solomon’s Temple as reparations for how she had been treated.

This tells us that Shishak had a very long reign and was still a powerful ruler when he had been on the throne for decades. In fact in the whole of the centuries of Egyptian history which could be contemporary with Solomon, there is only one reign long enough to match the biblical Shishak – the seventy year plus reign of Ramesses the Second.  

So Rohl argues that Shishak is not Shoshenq 1 but is none other than the very Pharoah who is often portrayed instead as the Pharoah of the Exodus. And Rohl produces a list of parallels which show that the records of Ramesses match the biblical story of Shishak to back up the argument. This puts both King Solomon, and the Exodus, hundreds of years earlier.

If Solomon was the ally and son-in-law of Ramesses II, that dates his reign in the 12th century BC and in the wealthy late bronze age, rather than the dark era at the start of the Iron age when the whole area was much poorer.

It helps explains how Solomon could have been rich enough to build a magnificent temple which would have been the envy of the known world, because his kingdom would have sat right on the lucrative trade routes between wealthy and powerful Egypt and the kingdoms to the North and East.

Turning now to the first Christmas

We have a much better idea when the first Christmas took place than we do of when the Temple of Solomon was built – but there is excellent reason to believe, as I said earlier, that the year estimated by Dionysius Exiguus on which our entire AD or Common Era system of dating is based is unlikely to be exactly right. The most likely range of possibilities are that he put the birth of Jesus between six years later than it actually occurred, and six years earlier.

There is an element of doubt about whether Jesus was born while Bethlehem was under the rule of a client King dependent for his position on Roman authority as appears likely, or that of a Roman governor. But it was definitely one or the other, and therefore the calendar used to calculate his birth would have been the contemporary Roman calendar.

The principal method used by the Romans to identify a year for dating purposes was to name it after the two consuls who took office in it, the eponymous period in question being the consular year. The calendar year has begun in January and ended in December since about 450 BC according to Ovid or since about 713 BC according to Macrobius and Plutarch. In addition to consular years, the Romans sometimes used the regnal year of the emperor.

Roman historians rarely used the one system of dating they had which, if applied consistently would help us to quickly understand the chronology, namely the number of years since the founding of the city (of Rome). And worse, different historians had several different dates for the founding.

St Luke bent over backwards to cover every base in an attempt to make clear exactly when John the Baptist began his ministry, writing in his gospel,

“In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John.”

That absolutely has to be 28 CE and gives us a clear baseline for the dates of the ministries and deaths of both John the Baptist and Jesus. Unfortunately neither Luke nor any of the other Gospel writers were as comprehensive about the date of the birth of Jesus.

To work out when Jesus might have been born, we must consider the known dates of three monarchs and two roman governors: Herod the Great, Herod Archelus, Herod Antipas, Publius Sulpicius Quirinius, and Pontius Pilate.

Two of the four gospels, those of Matthew and Luke, contain accounts of the birth of Jesus. These accounts have a great deal in common, but the dates inferred by references to these five rulers do not match, and neither correspond to Dionysius's dates.

The gospel according to St Matthew, and one very old version of Luke's gospel in which one name is different from the draft usually accepted today, suggest that Jesus was born between 8 B.C.E. and 4 B.C.E. while the usually accepted version of St Luke's gospel suggests that he was born six years later than Dionysius calculated.

Both gospels refer to the birth of Jesus as taking place in the time of "Herod the King." All six of the princes who governed parts of Palestine as client rulers under Roman authority between 37 B.C.E. and 93 C.E, had "Herod" as one of their names, so there is great potential for confusion about which ruler is meant when the name is used.

The compiler of Matthew's gospel clearly intended the expression "Herod the King" to refer to Herod the Great. After the death of this ruler, the Romans divided the kingdom between three of his sons, Herod Archelaus, Herod Antipas, and Herod Philip, none of whom had the title of King. Matthew's gospel also refers to Archelaus as the son of King Herod in whose reign Jesus was born.

We can be certain that the Herod who put John the Baptist to death, to whom Pontius Pilate sent Jesus, and who then returned him to Pilate was Herod Antipas. The dates match, and line up with a date when Jesus was crucified as 29 CE. The Jewish historian Josephus, a near contemporary who was born less than ten years later and would almost certainly have known people who were prominent at Herod’s court at the time, wrote that Herod Antipas had John the Baptist executed (and criticised Herod for the killing.) 

But it is not so easy to be certain which was the Herod in whose reign Jesus was born.

Records state that Herod the Great died of a particularly nasty medical condition, subsequently named for him as “Herod’s Evil,” shortly after a lunar eclipse. We have the advantage over Dionysius that modern astronomers have calculated the dates of past and future eclipses and the movements of stars and planets are far more reliable and predictable than human records and behaviour. 

There are only four lunar eclipses which could be candidates: they occurred on the following dates:

• September 15, 5 BCE 
• March 12–13, 4 BCE 
• January 10, 1 BCE and 
• December 29, 1 BCE. 

The eclipse shortly before Herod the Great died is regarded by the majority of historians as being extremely likely to be the either that which took place on 23rd March 5 B.C.E, or the one which occurred just under a year later on 13th March 4 B.C.E, probably the latter.

There is a minority view, put forward in the 19th century by by scholars such as Édouard Caspari and Florian Riess and in this century by Professor John A. Cramer, Professor of Physics at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia that the eclipse after which Herod died might have been that of December of 1 BC, in which case the estimate by Dionysius Exiguus that Jesus had been born 525 years before he was writing is a lot closer than he is usually given credit for.

There are a number of reasons why the majority of academics who have studied the question believe that Herod the Great died after the 4 BCE Eclipse.

These include that the historian Josephus writes that Herod reigned for 37 years from the time of his appointment in 40 B.C.E and for 34 years following his conquest of Jerusalem in 37 B.C. (Antiquities 17.8.1, War 1.33.8). Both those comments about the length of his reign would place Herod’s death in 4 BCE.

There is also surviving evidence in the form of coins minted by Herod Antipas, which state that they were produced in the 43rd year of his reign. As explained above Herod Antipas was one of the three sons of Herod the Great who succeeded him as ruler of part of his Kingdom, and he ruled until 39 AD. That also supports a date when Herod Antipas succeeded Herod the Great on the latter's death as 4BCE.

So if Jesus was born in the reign of Herod the Great he cannot have been born in the year on which our calendar is based: if Matthew's Gospel is right then Jesus was born between about 8 BCE. and at the latest 4 BCE.

However, this date is not consistent with the currently favoured text of St Luke's Gospel.

St Luke refers to the birth of Jesus as being in Bethlehem because his mother's husband, Joseph, had to go there for a census. Since the time of King James the approved draft of Luke’s gospel refers to this as "the first census when Quirinius was governor of Syria."

The significance of the governor of Syria is that this was the official who supervised the client kings in the area on behalf of Rome. During the period when Judea was run by Roman Prefects such as Pontius Pilate, these prefects also reported to the Governor of Syria.

The life of Publius Sulpicius Quirinius is fairly well documented in Roman records. After being consul in Rome in 12 B.C.E. he went to the middle east to put down a rebellion and held various military commands and other senior positions over the following twenty years. He was governor of Syria from 6 C.E, until 9 C.E, and there was indeed a census (mentioned in history because it was unpopular enough to spark an uprising) at the start of his period in this office.

So if Luke's gospel is right, Jesus was born in 6 CE. But the problem with this Gospel is that this account not only makes the birth of Jesus ten years too late to have occurred in the reign of Herod the Great. It is also a few months too late to be in the reign of Herod Archelaus, the son and successor of King Herod the Great as ruler of Judea, the largest part of the kingdom.

At the same time that Caesar Augustus appointed Quirinius as Governor of Syria and ordered the census, he deposed Herod Archelaus. The census was carried out shortly after the Romans took direct control of Judea. Herod Antipas was still ruling Galilee at this period, including Nazareth, but not Bethlehem. Which means that for Herod Antipas to be the Herod of the nativity, he would have had to send a hit squad into Roman territory to murder all infant boys in Bethlehem, in Judah, and get away with the provocative act of committing murder in the territory of a Roman governor, since he continued to rule as Tetrarch of Galilee for a further 33 years after 6 CE.

6 C.E. is a much later date than is usually assumed for the birth of Jesus, but Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea from 26 C.E, to 36 C.E, so birth in 6 C.E, would still give Jesus time to grow to manhood by the time Pilate was in office.

Luke's gospel gives the start of John the Baptist's witness as "The 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar" which means about 28 C.E. If he was born in 6 C.E, that would make Jesus 22 when he began his ministry.

Not surprisingly there have been various attempts to explain the apparent contradiction between Matthew's and Luke's gospels. One theory holds that Quirinius might have had some previous authority over Syria before his formal appointment as governor of Syria in 6 C.E,

As Quirinius was a former Consul and held various senior commands in the middle east from 10 B.C.E. onwards, it is not entirely impossible that he might have been given some such authority during one of his campaigns. The theory goes that there might have been an earlier census during that period.

I am, however, dubious about this idea: if Quirinius was given any authority over Syria while he was suppressing the Homanadensians' rebellion from 10 B.C.E. to 7 B.C.E, it would have been as the overall military commander in chief for the area.

Since it was not unknown for a census to provoke revolts - as the census in 6 C.E, actually did - you would think that a competent military commander who already had one major rebellion on his hands which took three years to put down, would not risk further trouble by organising a census in the provinces surrounding his main area of operations. 

The fact that Quirinius managed to keep the lid on things in one of the most troublesome parts of the Roman Empire and was appointed as Augustus Caesar’s main representative in the Middle East, suggest that he must have been at least reasonably competent. Certainly we know he was highly trusted by Augustus Caesar who at one point appointed him as tutor to his grandson Gaius Caesar, so he must have been regarded as what we might today call “a safe pair of hands.” For such a man to make an unforced error like taking the risk of provoking a second rebellion while he was already busy suppressing a first one does not seem to be in character. 

Another possible explanation concerns an alternative draft of Luke's Gospel. A copy has survived of a version of this gospel belonging to Tertullian, a North African Christian who lived about 200 C.E. His draft appears to have the name 'Saturnius' as governor of Syria, instead of Quirinius. And there was indeed a Saturnius who was governor of Syria from 8 B.C.E. to 6 B.C.E.

Now it is possible and was certainly believed to be the case by the scholars who compiled the bible as we currently use it, that Tertullian's version of Luke's Gospel was in error on this point. But the conference of biblical scholars convened by James the Sixth and First who to draft the King James Bible didn’t have access to the astronomical data which enables us to know that Herod the Great probably died in 5BC or 4BC, any more than Dionysus or Pope Gregory did. If they had, they might have taken a few different drafting decisions.

Let us suppose that Tertullian’s copy of the gospels was the correct and authentic original and that the currently used version is wrong – a speculation which would instantly label me a heretic in the eyes of some evangelicals, but Jesus taught us always to seek the truth, and you don’t do that by supressing ideas.

If Saturnus was the governor of Syria who should have been referred to, and if he held a census the year after Quirinus had put down the rebellion in the neighbouring province of Asia, that would give a date for the birth of Jesus of 6 BCE. which lines up perfectly with St Matthew's Gospel.

So to sum up, the most likely range of dates for the birth of Jesus fall between 6 BCE. and 6 CE

If the former is right, we celebrated the Millennium six years too late and the real date now is not 2025 AD but 2031. If the latter, we celebrated six years too early, and the real date in AD terms is 2019.

I have given you a canter through not one but two very complicated subjects. If anyone wants to study further the issue of when Solomon’s Temple was built and whether and when the Exodus took place, look up David Rohl on Youtube or Google, or you may want to study his books such as “A Test of Time” or “Exodus.”

And whether this is really Christmas Season number 2019, or 2031, or in between, possibly even 2025, I hope you all have a very happy one!