If Herod the Great died in 4 BC was that before Jesus was born?

Answer 1

A:It is well established that King Herod the Great died in April 4 BCE. All we know about the birth of Jesus is in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. The simplest of these is Matthew, which says that Jesus was born in the lifetime of Herod, implying that this was some years before he died. Luke has a small problem in its story of the birth of Jesus, saying on the one hand that he was born during the reign of Herod, but also that he was born while Quirinius was governor of Syria and ordered a census of Judea. Here the trouble is that Quirinius only became governor of Syria in 6 CE, ten years after the death of Herod. He was given authority over Judea, with orders to conduct a census, because Rome had just sacked King Archelaus of Judea and would henceforth tax the province directly, and so needed to know what taxes it could collect.

We talk of Jesus being born in 1 CE because the Roman abbot Dionysus Exiguus, who devised the new Christian calendar in 533, chose to begin his Christian calendar on the year of Herod's death. He knew that it was impossible to say when Jesus was born, but he knew, or thought he knew, when Herod died. He based the year of Herod's death on the reign of the Roman emperor Augustus, unaware that Augustus only adopted that name four years after his reign began, going by his birth name of Octavius until then. Exiguus commenced his calendar just 4 years too late.