Birth of Jesus
The birth of Jesus of Nazareth, traditionally placed in Bethlehem in Judea, marks the beginning of the story at the center of Christianity, now the world's largest religion. The date "0 AD" is a convention rather than a historical finding: there is no year zero in the Western calendar, and most scholars think Jesus was born a few years earlier, somewhere between about 6 and 4 BC.
The setting was the Roman province of Judea, a territory with a deep Jewish religious heritage and a complicated political situation. Herod the Great ruled as a client king under Roman authority, and many Jews lived with a mix of resentment toward foreign rule and hope for a promised deliverer, often called the Messiah. Galilee, where Jesus is said to have grown up, was a region of small towns and farming communities. The calendar we use today was devised in the sixth century by the monk Dionysius Exiguus, whose calculations placed Jesus's birth later than most modern historians do.
Nearly everything we know about the birth comes from two of the New Testament Gospels, Matthew and Luke, which differ in their details. Luke describes a journey to Bethlehem connected with a Roman census, a birth in humble surroundings, and the visit of shepherds. Matthew tells of Magi following a star and of Herod's hostility toward the child. Mark and John do not narrate a birth at all. Historians debate how literally to read these accounts, and some question whether Bethlehem was the actual birthplace, since the Gospels also link Jesus to Nazareth. Most scholars, however, accept that Jesus was a real Jewish teacher who lived in this period, a conclusion supported by references in Roman and Jewish writers such as Tacitus and Josephus.
The consequences of this birth, as understood through the later life and death of Jesus, were immense. His followers came to regard him as the Son of God, and the movement that grew from his teachings spread across the Roman Empire despite periods of persecution. In the fourth century it gained official favor under Emperor Constantine, and later it shaped the politics, art, law, and learning of Europe and eventually much of the world.
The legacy is visible in everyday life. Christmas, celebrated on December 25 in most Western churches, developed in the fourth century, and the date is not recorded in the Gospels. The Anno Domini dating system, later paired with BC, became standard in Europe over the following centuries and remains the basis of the international civil calendar. Bethlehem itself remains a major pilgrimage site, centered on the Church of the Nativity, one of the oldest continuously used churches in the world.