The best chronology we can build of the life of Jesus, drawn from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John together. Every event shows which Gospels record it and where — filter to a single Gospel to see exactly what it tells, and what it leaves to the others. A harmony, not a forced precision: where the order or the date is uncertain, we say so.
The four Gospels are four portraits of one Lord, each written to its own purpose. Matthew shows the King, the son of David; Mark, the swift Servant; Luke, the Son of Man who seeks the lost; John, the eternal Son of God. They overlap and they diverge — Mark has no birth story, John has no Transfiguration but alone gives us Lazarus and the upper room, and the feeding of the five thousand is the one miracle in all four. The coloured badges on each event let you see at a glance who records what; the filter lets you read the timeline through one Gospel at a time.
No Gospel sets out to be a strict chronology, and they do not always agree on sequence — John runs on a different frame from the other three (his Passovers are most of why we reckon the ministry at about three and a half years), and the writers sometimes group material by theme rather than by time. This timeline follows the most reasonable reconstruction the text allows; wherever the order is genuinely uncertain, an event carries a note saying so. The aim is honesty, not the illusion of precision the Gospels never claimed.
We anchor the chronology to a Wednesday crucifixion — the forensic case made in The Last Week of the Lamb — which points to AD 31 (the year Passover fell on a Wednesday) rather than the conventional Friday dates of AD 30 or AD 33. From there the rest follows: a ministry of roughly three and a half years beginning about AD 27–28 (matching Luke 3:1, “the fifteenth year of Tiberius”), and a birth about 5–4 BC, before the death of Herod the Great. These are our reasoned anchors, held openly — the Friday / AD 30–33 alternatives are real, and we note where it matters.
Click a Gospel to see only the events it records. Click any event to open it.
Here the Gospels close. For forty days He showed Himself alive by many convincing proofs; then He ascended. Fifty days after the resurrection, at Pentecost, the Spirit was poured out and the church was born (Acts 2) — the doorway into the Acts of the Apostles, and the story the Church Christ Built timeline takes up.