Did Jesus come at the wrong time?

Have you ever wondered why God didn’t become incarnate as Jesus today, with all the benefits of global communications to get the gospel out? Why did Jesus come two thousand years ago? And are critics right when they charge Jesus’ first century AD setting as a foolish choice if God’s purpose was to persuade the world to believe? If you’ve ever asked any of those questions, check this out.

While the first century AD might seem relatively arbitrary to us in the grand sweep of history, and while we might wish to scrutinise Jesus’ teaching and miracles personally, the New Testament speaks of God’s sovereign hand purposefully guiding the arc of history, sending Jesus at just the right time.

In Mark 1:15, for instance, Jesus opens his messianic preaching with the words: “The time is fulfilled.” The Apostle Paul, in Galatians 4:4, speaks of God in the fullness of time sending forth his Son. John’s Gospel constantly speaks of Jesus as working to a careful timeline, awaiting his hour to come. And Paul again in Romans 5:6 says that at just the right time, Christ died for us. Now these verses are only a taster of the ways Scripture speaks of God’s wisdom dictating when and how he sends Jesus, sovereignly choosing the time of Jesus’ incarnation and atonement in order to bring about His ultimate endgame.

So what makes the first century AD the right time for Jesus to come?

Let me give you 3 reasons.

First, Jesus’ coming makes our world possible. Counterfactuals are tricky business for us finite creatures. When we say we wish Jesus came today, rather than two thousand years ago, what we ignore is how Jesus’ absence from the first century AD would radically alter civilisational timelines.

We might think the world would develop along a similar track, but anyone familiar with the fragility of human empires on the one hand, or chaos theory on the other, recognises the slightest change to the beliefs and events of the past could have incalculable effects on the moral and technological arc of the future. So try to imagine, then, erasing Jesus from the past; the one figure Time magazine dubbed as the most influential to have ever lived.

Simply put, our world today would be utterly unimaginable without Jesus.

Scholars of various stripes—from the agnostic historian Tom Holland to the Indian philosopher Vishal Mengalwadi—give numerous examples of the ways the life and legacy of Jesus and the Christian story have changed our world.  From the rise of modern science to the abolition of the Western slave trade, from limiting the powers of kings to the articulation of universal human rights; from a concern for the poor and the vulnerable to the rise of hospitals and healthcare for all; scores of credible sources trace the cultural riches of our civilisation back the colossal figure of Jesus.

So perhaps one of the reasons why, in God’s providence, He sent Jesus into the first century AD is to ensure this future comes about. You could say by sending Jesus at just the right time, God predestined you to exist, with all the advantages of this age that made you pose this question in the first place. That’s cool, right?

Second, God’s timing maximises the gospel’s spread. When you look at the unique geo-political situation of Judea in the first-century AD, various factors converge to make it poised for the great commission.

Take language. Three centuries before Jesus Alexander the Great had expanded his empire around much of the known world, spreading the influence of Greek language and literature. By the time of Jesus in the first century AD, rather than the problem posed by Babel where no one could understand the gospel, you had a thoroughly Hellenised world that all spoke Greek as the lingua franca or common trade tongue, enabling the gospel to be easily spread.

Or take the Pax Romana and Roman roads. With the Roman legions securing peace by the sword, especially for Roman citizens, and ensuring safer travel and trade through connecting major trade cities, all of a sudden Jesus’ Apostles, especially Paul, had a unique freedom that enabled them to cover vast differences relatively unhindered to take the gospel to the nations.

Or take the Synagogue system brought about by the Jewish Diaspora, where after Assyria defeated the northern kingdom of Israel in 723BC, communities of God’s people were spread around Assyria’s empire. That meant by the first century AD, in most of the major cities of the Roman Empire to which the Apostles travelled, there were already Jewish communities devoted to the Torah and awaiting a coming Messiah, making them fertile soil for gospel preaching, and a staging ground from which to plant new churches, often with ready made elders who loved God, knew the Scriptures, and were committed to a Judaeo-Christian vision of ethics in an otherwise pagan world.

So given the tumultuous circumstances of these ancient empires before and after Jesus’ coming, the first century AD provided the right confluence of social and political factors to enable the rapid spread of the gospel message throughout the ancient world, making it the right time for Jesus to come.

And third, Jesus fulfils the prophetic timeline. One of the concerns of critics is that Jesus’ coming in the first century AD mires the evidential value of the Apostles’ testimony, as prescientific ignorance and mythical thinking supposedly predisposed them to falsely believe in miracles, like the resurrection story. Now not only is that an instance of what C.S. Lewis calls chronological snobbery, with the Apostolic sources of the New Testament being careful to challenge faulty miracle claims and offer credible testimony, but in fact the timing of Jesus’ coming actually offers more evidence in the case for Christianity. How? Through the fulfilment of a prophetic timeline for the messiah’s arrival.

Now I get the argument from fulfilled prophecy has been poorly made at a popular level. That’s why I’ve written on the subject fortifying a humble version of the argument for critics to consider, and created some videos on this channel linked in the description. But for those who are new to the subject, the Jewish Bible, or the Christian Old Testament, includes a constellation of historical events that surround the coming of a divine and messianic king, offering a prophetic timeline Jesus had to fulfil.

Genesis 49:10 speaks of the sceptre, or right to self-rule, not being removed from Judah until God comes; a prophecy that became tied up with messianic expectations. Rome removed the Jewish right to capital punishment in 6AD. Malachi 3:1 was also tied to messianic expectations, where the divine figure is prophesied to come quickly to His temple; a temple Rome destroyed in 70AD. And the 70 week prophecy in Daniel 9:24-27 speaks explicitly of a 483 lunar year period between Artaxerxes’ decree to rebuild Jerusalem in 445BC and the coming of the Messiah, foretelling the Messiah would then be cut off or killed, and that sometime afterwards Jerusalem would be destroyed. So how does that prophetic timeline fit the story of Jesus in the gospels? Perfectly. Jesus’ coming in the first century AD threads all of these prophetic needles.

So not only should we thank Jesus for his towering influence that led to the world we now inhabit, and recognise God’s wisdom in sending forth his Son at the right time for the gospel to go out, but we should chew on the prophetic evidence God has embedded into history, with Jesus’ coming in the first century AD adding fulfilled prophecy to the list of some two-dozen or so arguments in the cumulative case for Christianity.

Jesus may as well adapt Gandalf’s famous line from Lord of the Rings: “A messiah is never late, nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to.”

I hope you found that helpful. I’m Dan Paterson, and here at Questioning. Christianity we have hundreds of videos helping you connect the Christian story to life’s deepest questions, exploring theology, history, philosophy, and apologetics. If you haven’t subscribed yet, what are you waiting for, and if you jump over to our socials accounts on instagram and Facebook, we translate all these videos into infographics for you to share away. If you want to help us reach more people then our patreon details are in the description below, or you can find out how to donate at questioning christianity dot com. Thanks for your support, and always remember, truth invites questioning.