How old was Jesus when he died?

What the Gospels say

No Gospel gives Jesus’s age when he died. Only Luke gives an age at all, and it is for the start of his work.

Jesus himself, when he began to teach, was about thirty years old, being the son (as was supposed) of Joseph, the son of Heli,

“About thirty” is a round number, and a meaningful one. Joseph was thirty when he stood before Pharaoh (Genesis 41:46), David was thirty when he became king (2 Samuel 5:4), and Levites began their service at the Tent of Meeting at thirty (Numbers 4:3). Luke also dates the moment like a historian: John the Baptist starts preaching “in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar” (Luke 3:1), which is AD 28 or 29.

How long did he teach?

That depends on the Gospel. Mark, Matthew and Luke mention only one Passover, the one at which he dies, so their story fits in about a year. John sends him up to Jerusalem for at least three Passovers (John 2:13; 6:4; 11:55), which stretches the ministry to two or three years.

John adds a clue of his own. At that first Passover, his questioners say the Temple has been under construction for forty-six years (John 2:20). Josephus says Herod began rebuilding it in the eighteenth year of his reign, 20 or 19 BC, which brings us to about AD 27 or 28.

Doing the arithmetic

• Birth. Matthew and Luke put it in the reign of Herod the Great (Matthew 2:1; Luke 1:5), who died in 4 BC. So Jesus was born around 6 to 4 BC. A monk’s miscount in 525 explains how he came to be born “before Christ” (see was Jesus born on December 25?).
• Death. Under Pilate, prefect from AD 26 to 36, on a Friday at Passover. Most scholars choose AD 30 or 33 (see what day of the week Jesus died).
• No year zero. The calendar goes straight from 1 BC to AD 1, so 4 BC to AD 30 is 33 years, not 34.

Put the ends together and he was most likely between about 33 and 38.

Where 33 comes from

Thirty-three is what you get by adding John’s three Passovers to Luke’s “about thirty.” It became the standard number in Christian tradition, repeated by preachers and painters for centuries. It was not the only answer. Around AD 180, Irenaeus of Lyon argued that Jesus kept teaching into his forties. His evidence was a line in John, where opponents scoff at him:

You are not yet fifty years old! Have you seen Abraham?

Nobody says “not yet fifty” to a man of thirty-two, Irenaeus reasoned, and he added that the elders of Asia who had known the apostle John said the same. Few follow him today. Most readers hear the line as a jab: you are not even an old man, and you claim to have seen Abraham? Either way, the Gospels leave the number open.