The Gospels according to Matthew and Luke provide the only canonical accounts that we have of the birth of Jesus Christ. According to these narratives, the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saint Joseph completed the first stage of a first-century Jewish wedding (the signing of the marriage contract) but not the second (the introduction of the bride to her husband’s home, which could be months and sometimes more than a year later). During that waiting period, Mary conceived the Christ Child through the agency of the Holy Spirit, and then left town for three months to help her aged cousin Saint Elizabeth give birth to Saint John the Baptist. When she returned, Saint Joseph noticed that she was with child. After being told by an angel in a dream to take Mary to wife (that is, to complete the second stage of the wedding) and to adopt Jesus as his own, he did so.
As the time drew near for Mary to bear her Son, the Holy Couple traveled from their home in Nazareth to Bethlehem in order to be enrolled in a Roman census. Because there was no room for them in any inn (that is, a room for their special needs), Mary delivered her Child in a stable, which according to oral tradition was a sheltered cave (upon which Bethlehem’s Basilica of the Nativity now stands). Angels announced to nearby shepherds the good news, who came to adore Him, and Magi from the East who had been following a star did so as well, but only after they paid a visit to King Herod and inquired into the whereabouts of the newborn King. The question unsettled the paranoid and nefarious Herod, and so he ordered the death of all baby boys in Bethlehem in an attempt to eliminate the competition. Joseph, however, was warned of Herod’s plot in a dream and fled with the Holy Family to Egypt. After Herod died, another dream told Joseph that it was safe to return to Nazareth..jpg) |
| The Flight into Egypt, by Giambattista Tiepolo, 1764-70 |
Critics of the infancy narratives claim that the facts do not add up: Herod the Great was not king when the census of Quirinus was taken but died four years prior to the birth of Christ; the census would not have been taken during the winter and would not have required bringing one’s expectant wife; there were no astronomical anomalies (no “Christmas star”) that we know of in 1 B.C.-1 A.D., and so forth. Biblical critics also claim that because the story of Jesus’ birth resembles that of Moses in some respects (both, for example, involve the slaughter of innocent boys), it must be fictitious.
Defendants, however, point to other considerations: the Christmas star need not have been an astronomical event (it could have been a miraculous apparition limited to the Magi); one should not be hasty in drawing conclusions about dating because it is difficult to align three different ancient calendars (the Jewish lunar calendar, the Roman solar calendar, and a different Greek solar calendar); the conclusion that Herod died in 4 B.C. (four years prior to the birth of Christ) is based on a miscalculation of a passage in the writings of Flavius Josephus; and if you posit that the Magi met the Holy Family after their return to Nazareth rather than, as is popularly imagined, in the stable at Bethlehem, the chronology lines up. As for the belief that the story of Christ’s birth must be false because it resembles Moses’, there is no logical necessity to think so. The resemblance could be coincidental or better yet, part of God’s master plan, in which case the parallels are proof of the story’s veracity rather than its falsity. What is one man’s fiction is another’s divine providence.
Dates
As for when to observe Jesus Christ’s birthday, we know that in the late second or early third century Christians in Egypt celebrated Christ’s birth and His baptism as an adult in the River Jordan on January 6, and that other Eastern-rite Christians eventually followed suit. In Rome, on the other hand, there is evidence that Christmas was celebrated on December 25 as early as A.D. 336. Eventually (from the fourth century on), the East adopted December 25 as the date of Christ’s birth and January 6 as the date of His baptism while the West kept its Christmas date of December 25 and adopted January 6 as the visit of the Magi (though it also commemorated Christ’s baptism on January 6). To this day, there is a difference in emphasis between the calendars of Western Christians and Eastern. In the West, there is a build-up to Christmas as the big day and then a plateauing or denouement that lasts until Epiphany (January 6). In the East, Christmas Day is important but “Theophany” (January 6) is the grand high point of the season and second only to Easter in the entire year.
How these dates were chosen remains a hotly debated topic. There are three main theories.
The first, the “History of Religion” theory, is that Christians in Rome chose December 25 to supplant a Roman pagan festival called the Birth of the Unconquered Sun (Sol Invictus), and that Christians in Egypt chose January 6 to supplant an Egyptian festival to the god Aion, who was born of a virgin. Although this theory has enjoyed the most scholarly support over the years, it has been criticized for overlooking one important detail. It is true that Christmas may not have been celebrated on December 25 until 336, but Christians were nonetheless talking about December 25 as the date of Jesus’ birthday as early as 240. The Roman feast of the Unconquered Sun, on the other hand, was not instituted until 274. Did Christians try to coopt a pagan feast, or did pagans try to coopt a Christian date? Most likely, the Roman Emperor Aurelian, who instituted the Unconquered Sun, was more concerned about the winter solstice (which at the time fell on December 25) than about stealing thunder from a small religious minority. Either way, Christians were not thinking of pagan customs when they first arrived at a date for their Savior’s birth.
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Sol Invictus
Which brings us to the second hypothesis called the “Calculation” theory. According to this view, early Christians were influenced by the Jewish notion of an “integral age,” the belief that the prophets died on the same date as their birth. Some early Christians calculated that April 6 was the date of Christ’s crucifixion while others thought that it was March 25. March 25 became the date of Christ’s conception in the womb (the feast of the Annunciation), and nine months after March 25 is December 25. Similarly, if you add nine months to April 6, you get January 6. The theory is intriguing, but unfortunately there is no evidence that the early Church knew about the rabbinical belief in an integral age, nor does the theory explain why Christians allegedly modified the belief from a two-pronged focus on birth and death to the three prongs of conception, birth, and death.
Finally, some authors hold that Jesus Christ was indeed born on or around December 25. King David had divided the Levitical priesthood into twenty-four “courses” (1 Chron. 24, 7-18). The Gospel according to Saint Luke records that Zechariah, who was burning incense in the Temple when he had a vision of St. Gabriel the Archangel, was in the course of Abijah (1, 5). Drawing from Talmudic sources, we can conclude that Zechariah’s turn to serve in the Temple as a member of his course most likely happened a year before Christ’s birth during the week of September 5-11. John the Baptist was conceived shortly after (Luke 1, 23-24), which would place his birth somewhere between June 20 and 26. Jesus was six months’ younger than His cousin (Luke 1, 36), which means that He would have been born between December 21 and 27. This thesis, however, has yet to gain widespread acceptance.
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| Alexandr Ivanov, Annunciation of the Birth of John the Baptist to Zechariah, 1824 |
So who is right? Here is what we know:
First, in former ages and even in some places today, the date of someone’s birth was not of great concern either because it was difficult to determine or because there were more important factors to take into consideration. In ancient Greece, Plato’s birthday was celebrated on the Feast of Apollo: the great philosopher either forgot to tell his disciples when his birthday was, or his disciples thought it more fitting to associate him with the god of light, beauty, and poetry. And in some contemporary Christian cultures, one’s name day (the feast day of the saint after whom one is named) remains a greater celebration than one’s birthday. In Japan, where the group is traditionally more important than the individual, there were no personal birthday celebrations prior to the influence of American culture in the 1950s: all girls celebrated their birthday on March 3 and all boys on May 5.
The May 5 birthday for boys is associated with koi fish kites, which are symbols of determination and energy, strength and bravery.
Second, I personally don’t think that early Christians tried to coopt a pagan holiday, but even if they did, they clearly understood the difference between their religion and what they were supplanting. Church leaders sternly rebuked converts who retained even the external symbols of the old festivals, as the writings of Tertullian, Saint Augustine, and Pope Saint Leo the Great attest. And the doctrine of the Incarnation, which teaches that Jesus Christ is 100% human and 100% divine, is not the same as talk about demigods being 50% human and 50% divine.
Understanding the pedigree of demigods requires no more imagination than following a family tree chart on ancestry.com, but understanding how the Divine Person Jesus Christ is both consubstantial with the Father and the Son of Man demands a whole new metaphysical skillset. As far as the Christian believer is concerned, there is not a pagan yearning for the gods that Christianity tries to replace; there is a human yearning for the divine that paganism responds to imperfectly and tragically, and that Christianity purifies and fulfills joyfully.
Third, say what you will, the symbolism works. The Bible describes Jesus Christ as the Light or the Sun or the Dawn, and so it is appropriate that His birthday is celebrated on or soon after the winter solstice. A Jewish boy is circumcised eight days after his birth, and so if Jesus’ birthday is celebrated on December 25, it is appropriate to commemorate His circumcision on January 1 (Lk. 2, 21). In accordance with the Mosaic Law, Jesus was presented in the Temple and His mother ritually purified forty days after His birth (Lk. 2, 22-24), and so it is appropriate to celebrate this event on February 2, the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary (aka the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord). The Bible states that John the Baptist is six months’ older than the Messiah (Lk. 1, 24-26), and so it is appropriate that his birthday is said to fall six months later (June 24). St. John the Baptist famously says of Jesus, “He must increase, but I must decrease” (Jn. 3, 30), and so it is appropriate that John’s birthday be celebrated on or after the summer solstice, when the days start to grow longer. The Blessed Virgin Mary was conceived of the Holy Spirit nine months’ prior to giving birth to Jesus, and so it is appropriate that the feast of the Annunciation is celebrated on March 25, a date that follows the Spring equinox and marks the end of the dead, dark winter and the beginning of a new era of life and rebirth.
