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Christians confess that Jesus was eternal God come in the flesh.
We celebrate his birth into our space-time continuum because his life, death, and resurrection on our behalf allow us to be credited with perfection as an unmerited gift of grace when we accept it by faith.
But in order to be as helpful to students as I could, I have taken as the date of the Savior’s birth the date now accepted by many scholars,—late 5 b.c. In the timetables he employed in his book, Clark listed his preferred time range for Jesus’s nativity as December of 5 bc, and the time range of the Annunciation to Mary as nine months earlier in March of 5 bc. Mc Conkie was the third General Authority to prepare a systematic study of the life of Christ.
Deseret Book Company published the four-volume series, beginning in 1979.
Talmage maintained that Jesus Christ was born on April 6 in the year 1 bc.
Talmage was apparently the first LDS writer to propose this particular date.
Published Views of LDS General Authorities Before considering any other data, a brief review of LDS thinking on this subject is in order.
During the nineteenth century, latter-day prophets from Joseph Smith to Lorenzo Snow evidently made no specific comments on the date of Jesus’s birth.
On the other side you have a choir of dissenting voices (including General Authorities J. Mc Conkie) that disagree with that date for Jesus’ birth. This conclusion may disappoint some Latter-day Saints who have been conditioned to think of April 6 as the Savior’s birthday. Hinckley before him*) linked the knowledge of an April 6 date of Jesus’ birth to “revelation” raises some significant questions: Mormon belief: A troubling question that must be asked In light of these issues raised by Bednar’s affirmation to “know” something based on revelation that is likely not even true, perhaps the most important question we could ask is: How reliable is the Mormon testimony for the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith and the LDS Church since it is likewise based on a subjective revelation?