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In some ancient historical (versus biographical) works, especially in the Greek tradition, there was more attention to chronology. This helps explain the "synchronisms" in Luke 3:1-2 or Acts 18:2. A synchronism tries to locate an event in divine history in relation to secular events, like the reign of a certain governor. Thus Luke-Acts would have seemed to ancients to be less biographical and more historical in character.

What kind of historical information, then, do the Gospels give about Jesus?

First, the Gospel accounts (especially Matthew, Mark, and John), present a good deal about Jesus' character and how he was evaluated by his contemporaries. These character sketches, however, are largely indirect, and let Jesus' words and deeds speak for themselves.

Second, the Gospel writers presented what they deemed were the salient facts readers absolutely must know to understand Jesus' mission, person, and work.

Third, these writers presented this information in a broadly chronological way (e.g., Jesus' birth obviously came before his ministry, and his ministry before his death), but they were not concerned with chronological minutiae (except, perhaps, in parts of Luke).

Fourth, this literature was written by and for a special community—a tiny minority in the Roman Empire—so they could know more about their Savior.

The Gospels also appear to have been written, in at least the case of the last three Gospels, for audiences that had inadequate knowledge of Jesus' Jewish world, including the meaning of Aramaic words (Mark 15:34; John 19:13) and Jewish customs (Mark 7:3).

In the case of the fourth Gospel, the audience was not expected to have personally known the characters in the story (see John 11:2, 12:4,6). The Gospels, then, were by and large written for non-Jewish converts to Christianity.

Given all this, what can the discipline of history, using the Gospels as the main source, tell us about Jesus?

Jesus was born somewhere between 4 and 6 B.C. It might seem strange to suggest that Jesus was born "before Christ," but this is due to an early miscalculation when in A.D. 525 Pope John I ordered a new calendar that would be reckoned from Christ's birth. Regardless of the numbers, the Gospel accounts are clear that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great, who died before this new calendar had begun counting the new era. In fact, Matthew 2:1-12 (where Jesus' family flees to Egypt until Herod dies) suggests Jesus was born some time before Herod's death.

The remarkable story of the virginal conception is found in two different accounts: Matthew 1:18-25 and Luke 1:26-38. What is most remarkable about these stories is that they try to account for something extraordinary that, so far as we can tell, Jews were not expecting—a Messiah coming into the world by means of a virginal conception.

Isaiah 7:14 in the Hebrew simply says, "Behold, the nubile young woman is with child and will bear a son," though the later Greek version says, "The virgin will be with child, and will give birth to a son." Still, it was not necessary to conclude that a miraculous conception was involved, only that a woman who had, up to that point, been a virgin, would now conceive. In other words, it was the anomaly of what happened at Jesus' origins, not the Old Testament text, that led early Christians to search the Scriptures for an explanation.

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