It takes pluck to write about the historical Jesus, not just because doing so always stirs the wrath of hot-headed Christians but because there is not a single ‘fact’ relating to Jesus’s life that cannot be fiercely disputed according to any objective interpretation of the available evidence.
Take, for instance, the supposed year of his birth. In 525 Pope John I issued a papal bull decreeing that this event had taken place in 1 AD. Matthew, however, stated in his Gospel that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great who is known to have died in 4 BC. If, as Matthew also suggests, Jesus was about two years old when Herod slaughtered the innocents, and if that slaughter happened to be one of the last acts of Herod’s reign, then Jesus could well have been born in 6 or 5 BC, but that, alas, is not the only possibility.
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