Matthew’s and Luke’s infancy narratives place Jesus’s birth in the final year or so of Herod’s reign, and Herod’s death actually took place in 4 BCE.14 Assuming (although it is a large and even illogical assumption) that we can place more faith in the infancy narratives’ chronological fix on Jesus’s birth than in their general claims for a birth in Bethlehem, it is likely that Jesus was born in that same year, 4 BCE.
