OK, maybe the title of my article is a little too bold. The Bible doesn’t give us the date of Jesus’s birth, so we can’t claim a particular date with certainty. But is it the case that Jesus was actually born in late summer? Is it the case that the church chose December 25 to co-opt pagan festivals? Enough people — Christians and non-Christians alike — believe these theories that they are repeated every Christmas season. Yet given the historical data we have, there’s no reason to believe them.
Let me state up front that it doesn’t really matter when Jesus was born; what matters is that he was born. Remarkably, a New Testament author never recorded the date for us, even though they could have. Surely Mary and Joseph and the shepherds remembered the date, and this date would have been known by Jesus and passed on to the apostles. Yet the Holy Spirit didn’t deem it necessary to put into writing.
If it doesn’t matter, then why defend a December 25 date? Defenders of December 25 primarily do so in response to the naysayers. It’s a matter of defending the decisions and intentions of the church, and of historical accuracy. Given the information we have, there’s no indication that the church wanted to co-opt pagan festivals. In fact, the opposite was generally true: The church wanted nothing to do with pagan practices. Christians, of all people, should want to be charitable to our ancestors and not impugn their motives.
When people say the church chose December 25 to copy pagans, it is pure speculation at the conspiracy-theory-level. We have no written record of a church father admitting or hinting to it. There’s no correspondence that says, “We must copy the traditions of the pagans” or anything of the sort. That means these theories are built on silence and therefore impossible to prove. There is no positive evidence to support the pagan theories whatsoever. They are nothing more than assertions about people’s intentions — people whom we can’t interrogate today.
Unlike the pagan theories, there is evidence for December 25 being Jesus’s birth date. For starters, church fathers such as Theophilus of Caesarea and Hippolytus of Rome claimed that Jesus was born on December 25, and their claims predated the pagan Sol Invictus festival. It would be more plausible to say that pagans copied Christians, not the other way around.
Secondly, biblical and historical records point to a December 25 date. It all starts with the conception of someone else: John the Baptist. According to the Gospel of Luke, we know that John was conceived 6 months before Jesus (Luke 1:36). If John’s conception date could be determined, so could Jesus’s. You would then count 9 months for the pregnancy and arrive at a due date for the birth.
Luke gives us more information about John’s conception. John’s father, Zechariah, was a priest in the order of Abijah (Luke 1:5). 1 Chronicles 24 explains that there were divisions of priests that would rotate serving in the temple. When Zechariah’s rotation was completed, he returned home, and shortly after is when his wife Elizabeth conceived John (Luke 1:23-24).
So when was Zechariah’s rotation and when would he have returned home? At this point we must rely on extra-biblical, rabbinical tradition. When piecing together various clues, it appears that Zechariah’s rotation would have begun in early September. He would have returned home in late September or early October, and Elizabeth would have conceived John at that time. (For the homework on this, see part three of this article by Kurt Simmons.)
If this calculation is true, Jesus’s conception would have been 6 months later in late March or early April. Count 9 months and you have a late December or early January due date. This explains why the western church celebrates Christmas on December 25 and why the eastern church celebrates Christmas on January 7.
Now, none of this definitively proves that Jesus was born on December 25. The calculations assume that the extra-biblical sources are reliable, and we can’t know that for certain. But the purpose of this article hasn’t been to prove Jesus’s birth date. December 25 could be totally wrong and that would be just fine.
The purpose of this article has been to prove two things: (1) that the pagan theories are unfounded and (2) that the church really thought Jesus was born on (or near) December 25. If it turns out that we got the date wrong, no big deal. But please, stop saying we were stealing from someone else’s party.
Ive seen an other article recently with precisely the same argument but adding 6 months instead of 9 and therefore Jesus would have born in September. The problem however is that I couldnt find the source. Sorry
Thanks, Gigio. Some have used the same method to calculate a September birth, but the article I linked by Kurt Simmons argues that it is incorrect based on all the information we have. Blessings!
I always figured what was important is that the dominant religion will subsume the culture including holidays. Today we see the pagan takeover of christmas (in the US) as christianity recedes in the culture.