Christmas date remains one of the most hotly debated subjects. Its implication – God coming into history, is downplayed
By Ishaya Ibrahim, News Editor
Globally, there is no event like Christmas. Businesses record growth in sales. Families rejoice over reunion of members. Gifts are exchanged. One Pew Research even finds that 86 per cent of Americans always plan to buy gifts during Christmas. It is one event with many strands which is underpinned on the birth date of Jesus, or Yoshua in Hebrew, Yeshua in Aramaic, and Yesua in Arabic.
It is a settled argument that the birth date of Jesus Christ is uncertain. December 25 may not be the match for the birth date of Jesus Christ.
According to a scholarly article in the Biblical Archaeology Society, the Bible offers few clues about the birth of Jesus Christ besides the reference to shepherds tending their flocks at night when they hear the news of Jesus’ birth (Luke 2:8). Some scholars have suggested that this might be the spring season; in the cold month of December. But others have countered that on the other hand, sheep might well have been caged for some other purpose. The conclusion from the article is that most scholars would urge caution about extracting such a precise but incidental detail from a narrative whose focus is theological rather than calendrical.
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What does extrabiblical evidence from the first and second centuries tell us about the birth of Jesus Christ? It is still little. To be clear, scholars can easily connect the chain that leads from the original disciples of Jesus Christ down to the second and third-century church fathers.
Men like Polycarp, Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch communed with some of the original disciples, and then Tertullian, Irenaeus and Origen continued the chain down to our own time.
In the writings of the church fathers, there is no mention of birth celebrations, according to the Biblical Archaeological Society. In fact, in the writings Origen of Alexandria ( 165–264 AD), he goes so far as to mock Roman celebrations of birth anniversaries, dismissing them as “pagan” practices—a strong indication that Jesus’ birth was not marked with similar festivities at that place and time.
The article states that the earliest mention of December 25 as Jesus’ birthday comes from a mid-fourth-century Roman almac that lists the death dates of various Christian bishops and martyrs. The first date listed, December 25, is marked: natus Christus in Betleem Judeae: ‘Christ was born in Bethlehem of Judea.’
There have been many theories about the development of December 25 as a Christmas date. One of the most talked-about possibilities was that Christmas was borrowed from pagan celebrations.
The story goes that in 274 AD, the Roman emperor Aurelian established a feast of the birth of Sol Invictus (the Unconquered Sun), on December 25. Christmas, the argument goes, is really a spin-off from these pagan solar festivals. According to this theory, early Christians deliberately chose these dates to encourage the spread of Christmas and Christianity throughout the Roman world: If Christmas looked like a pagan holiday, more pagans would be open to both the holiday and the God whose birth it celebrated.
Whatever the story around the origin of Christmas may be, the core of the message is incontrovertible – the saviour came into time, space to become part of man’s history, hence, the ingenuity to commemorate the event
