Reckoning Tiberius’s Reign and Jesus’s Baptism: First- and Second-Century Evidence Concerning Tiberius’s Fifteenth Year (Luke 3:1)

Abstract

One much-discussed Bible verse relating to the chronology of Jesus’s ministry is Luke 3:1 where Jesus’s baptism is placed during Tiberius’s fifteenth year. Normally, Tiberius’s reign is said to have begun after Augustus’s death, making AD 29 his fifteenth year as emperor. However, some have wished to date the fifteenth year of Tiberius earlier by claiming that Luke would have understood Tiberius’s reign as commencing sometime between AD 11 and 13 when Tiberius was granted joint authority with Augustus over the provinces. A survey of the extant literary-historical sources from the first and second centuries combined with surveys of the surviving numismatic and inscriptional evidence reveals that there is no support for an earlier dating of Tiberius’s reign. Thus, it is highly unlikely that Luke or his readers would have understood the fifteenth year of Tiberius as occurring before AD 29.