Nothing is known of the life of Jesus other than what is recorded in the four Gospels, written down some fifty to eighty years after his death. No trace of him survives in any contemporary historical record. Nevertheless the Gospels, based on a continuous oral tradition deriving from those who knew him, contain more detail than can be assembled about anyone else of comparable obscurity in his own time.
The evidence of the Gospels suggests that Jesus is born in about 6 BC - revealing an initial error in the chronology of the Christian era.