Advent is back, and so are the historically illiterate fedora tippers who come out of the woodwork each year to play Grinch.
December 25 really is the date of Jesus’ birth.
Zechariah was in the priestly course of Abijah. Thus he served in the temple in the 8th and 32nd week of the year.
Luke’s Gospel has him serving on the Day of Atonement (at the end of September) and conceiving John the Baptist right when he got home.
This places John’s birth in late June.
The Catholic Church has traditionally celebrated the Nativity of John the Baptist on June 24, which fits Luke’s time line perfectly.
The Protoevangelium of James flat out confirms St. John’s late September conception. Sure, it’s apocryphal, but that doesn’t disqualify it as a source of historical data.
Luke clearly states that Jesus was conceived when Elizabeth was six months pregnant with John.
Scriptural, traditional, and historical evidence place John’s birth in late June. Adding 6 months puts Jesus’ birth in late December.
This is nothing new, either. The Church Fathers knew the evidence & reached the same conclusion.
St. John Chrysostom preached his famous Christmas Morning Homily on December 25, 388.
St. Hippolytus, who died in AD 235, wrote, “The first advent of Our Lord in the flesh occurred when He was born in Bethlehem on December 25.”
But the tradition goes back even further than that!
St. Theophilus, d. AD 181, wrote, “We ought to celebrate the birthday of Our Lord on what day soever the 25th of December shall happen.”
There you have it. The Bible, eyewitnesses to Jesus’ ministry who knew and loved Him–including His mother–and His Apostles’ early successors, give strong testimony that Jesus really was born on December 25.
There are really only 3 objections to affirming December 25 as the actual date of Christ’s birth. I’ll answer them in turn.
Objection 1: Luke has shepherds tending their sheep on the night of Jesus’ birth, but shepherds don’t graze their flocks in winter.
Answer: Bethlehem has a similar climate to Houston. You’ll find sheep out in the pasture in both places year-round.
Objection 2: The Church “baptized” Saturnalia, an ancient Roman feast, by setting the celebration of Christmas to the same date.
Answer: Saturnalia was held on the Winter Solstice, between December 17 and 23. The dates simply don’t match. Close only counts in horseshoes & hand grenades.
Objection 2: OK, if not Saturnalia, then Sol Invictus.
Answer: The Emperor Aurelian did decree the feast of Sol Invictus in 274, prior to the first documented celebration of Christmas on December 25, 336. But there’s no record of Sol Invictus’ celebration on December 25 until 354, when Julian the Apostate moved it in the original War on Christmas.
TL; DR: Scripture, tradition, & history attest to December 25 as Christ’s actual birthday. Atheists got nothin’. Merry Christmas!
Looking for fun adventure fiction by an author who doesn’t hate Christians? Look no further!
Yeah, the whole Saturnalia thing is dumb. As if scoffers wouldn’t be saying Christians just stole Neptunalia if Christmas was in July.
Now that we’ve established the Lord’s birthday, when do Catholics traditionally decorate their homes? My neighborhood (and its homeowners’ association) was Protestant, so we usually turned on the lights during Advent and packed them up after the Nativity feast like the rest of America.
Dcal
December 13 Saint Lucy day. That’s when the Christmas season officially kicks off in many places.though placing a wreath on your front door or lighting an Advent candle now is acceptable
xavier
Most folks around here put up the tree and lights the weekend after Thanksgiving, regardless of religious affiliation.
I’m a culturally mugged member of Generation Y, though, so your mileage may vary.
Brian
Interesting. Where I live the natural Christmas trees aren’t yet for sale. However one of my students is going to tree plantation to choose and have hers cut.
xavier
Catholic convert, so maybe doesn’t count, but sometime after Thanksgiving. I sometimes joke that it’s an Advent tree until Dec. 25.
But we do observe Advent with wreath and penitential acts.
I recommend using your Christmas tree as a Jessie tree for Advent. Last year, I ordered a handpainted set of wooden ornaments from a rural Catholic family on Amazon.
My family always prepared Christmas in phases starting with the first week of advent, bringing out the wreath, and bringing down the stable for the Nativity scene, and then continuing to add on decorations as the weeks went by, until we erected the tree one the fourth Sunday, added Mary and Joseph to the stable, in addition to the animals and the Shepards, and then on Christmas, shortly after midnight mass, we would add baby Jesus to it.
For those curious, we would add the three kings to the nativity on Epiphany, and remove the shepards since they were long gone by the time the Kings arrived.
I don’t have a consistent time for putting my decorations up. This year, I think it’ll be December 6th, or St. Nicholas’ old feast day.
Atheists and that one teacher in my RCIA who’s bent on letting the air out of unformed bubbles because it’s intellectual. When I know enough, I’ll have to make her an oblique challenge.
Evidence-based Atheists Rage at Evidence They Don’t Like.
– Can offer no counter evidence; “not really ‘holiday'”; make sad face–again!
– Film at 11!
The SMRTest people who ever lived can’t process the idea that people who’ve been dead for centuries years were right, and those of us who have the good sense to listen to them are still right, even if we aren’t credentialed.
I’d posit a hypothetical debate between St Augustine of Hippo and St Thomas Aquinas, on the one side, and Carl Sagan and H.G. Wells on the other, but it wouldn’t be a fair contest, and the good Doctors probably have better things to do with their time anyway.
SMRT is always a dead end, whether the question is religious or secular.
Bitter, lonely, and wrathful defines “The SMRT”.
Hey now! Sometimes, the SMRT pipo marry and raise children. Their children can even be super progressive like their parents and turn out transgender—or barring that, the kids can become critically acclaimed authors of such classics as THE LAST CLOSET.
Sagan and Wells would be too busy arguing the ethics of Atheism+ between each other to do much else. They were very lucky to come around when they did.
As sorry a state as Christianity is in, we can take solace in the even shabbier state of atheists. Former rationalist luminaries like Dillahunty are now beclowning themselves online spouting Death Cult mantras about some women having dicks.
From the Catholic Encyclopedia on the Annunciation:
“All Christian antiquity (against all astronomical possibility) recognized the 25th of March as the actual day of Our Lord’s death. The opinion that the Incarnation also took place on that date is found in the pseudo-Cyprianic work “De Pascha Computus”, c. 240. It argues that the coming of Our Lord and His death must have coincided with the creation and fall of Adam. And since the world was created in spring, the Saviour was also conceived and died shortly after the equinox of spring. Similar fanciful calculations are found in the early and later Middle Ages, and to them, no doubt, the dates of the feast of the Annunciation and of Christmas owe their origin. Consequently the ancient martyrologies assign to the 25th of March the creation of Adam and the crucifixion of Our Lord; also, the fall of Lucifer, the passing of Israel through the Red Sea and the immolation of Isaac. (Thurston, Christmas and the Christian Calendar, Amer. Eccl. Rev., XIX, 568.) The original date of this feast was the 25th of March. Although in olden times most of the churches kept no feast in Lent, the Greek Church in the Trullan Synod (in 692; can. 52) made an exception in favour of the Annunciation. In Rome, it was always celebrated on the 25th of March. “
One can argue about whether assigning all these dates to March 25 is more than just superstition (it’s also the date the one ring was destroyed, incidentally.) But what is a historical fact is that these dates WERE being put together in the third century at latest. And if the Annunciation is on March 25, there is no mystery as to why Christmas would be December 25.
What December 25 skeptics always miss is the solid textual evidence that Luke consulted Mary as a primary source for his Gospel. He records minute details, even interior thoughts, that would be seen as certain proof in any other historical context.
Thinking that Jesus’ mother didn’t tell His biographer her Son’s birthday strains credibility more than accepting the date His Church handed down.
One reason I like focusing on the Annunciation is that for the “December 25 was chosen because of pagans” narrative to work out, the Annunciation would have had to have been dated second, based on the date of Christmas. But I’ve never seen anyone explicitly do that. (And it would be difficult to do so given the antiquity of discussions of the Annunciation.) Rather they either ignore the Annunciation entirely, or accept that it was dated independently of pagan concerns but Christmas was not. That is, that Christians decided on the Annunciation’s date first, and then decided on Christmas for entirely independent reasons which just so happened to arrive at a date exactly nine months afterwards. It’s absurd.
Rudolph.
Father Z has a magnificent post on Christmas. You can find it in the archives.
He cites the astronomical data at the time and weaves in theology history and astronomy.
It’s a really great post and complements Brian’s.
xavier
In addition to this, there is no evidence for the tradition of any alternative date that I’m aware of–with the possible exception of January 6th, which is associated with Epiphany and the Christmas season. Thus, one would have to assume that no one cared until the whole Church, without dispute or discussion (and bear in mind that even Easter, which is even more important, had serious debates on how it should be calculated), adopted a pagan feast for the second or third holiest day of the Church year.
Dcal
December 13 Saint Lucy day. That’s when the Christmas season officially kicks off in many places.though placing a wreath on your front door or lighting an Advent candle now is acceptable
xavier
Question for historians:
On looking for information about the annunciation I encountered an article claiming that Christians did not celebrate Christmas until after the time of St. Augustine, since he attacked the Donatists for not celebrating the epiphany but did not mention Christmas. Surely, the argument went, if he complained about them not celebrating Christmas he would be even angrier about them not celebrating Christmas, thus Christmas came later. But I immediately thought of the objection “maybe the Donatists did celebrate Christmas, in which case there would be no need to attack them on those grounds.”
Looking around I have found many sites claiming that in fact the Donatists DID celebrate Christmas, and that they did so on December 25. But other sites say that the fact that Augustine DIDN’T say that the Donatists DID NOT celebrate Christmas means that they did (without a date listed.) This is always attributed to Augustine, but the closest I’ve seen to a specific source is “a sermon by Augustine.”
I would like to see the original source to determine just what can be drawn from it, but I haven’t been able to find it. I’ve looked through Augustine’s sermons on John, but while he mentions the Donatists he doesn’t seem to talk about the epiphany. I can’t find anything in City of God or On Baptism, Against the Donatists (through searches; obviously I didn’t read through them in their entirety in just an hour or so.)
Does anyone know where Augustine attacks the Donatists for not celebrating the Epiphany?
I had a comment with a bunch of long quotes lined up but unfortunately closed the window and lost it.
Short version is this: while I didn’t find the reference to the Donatists and the Epiphany in Augustine, he does say (in On the Trinity) that the Annunciation and Crucifixion both happened on March 25, and that Christ was born on December 25 (which he identifies as the traditional date). So it makes the whole matter rather moot; regardless of what the Donatists celebrated Christmas was established at December 25 at the time of Augustine.
While researching this I also came across the claim made by Pope Benedict XVI (in The Spirit of the Liturgy) that Christmas is indeed dated from the Annunciation which in turn is dated from Good Friday. He says that Tertullian was the oldest reference to the date of the Crucifixion. In An Answer to the Jews:
Therefore, when these times also were completed, and the Jews subdued, there afterwards ceased in that place libations and sacrifices, which thenceforward have not been able to be in that place celebrated; for the unction, too, was exterminated in that place after the passion of Christ. For it had been predicted that the unction should be exterminated in that place; as in the Psalms it is prophesied, They exterminated my hands and feet. And the suffering of this extermination was perfected within the times of the lxx hebdomads, under Tiberius Cæsar, in the consulate of Rubellius Geminus and Fufius Geminus, in the month of March, at the times of the passover, on the eighth day before the calends of April, on the first day of unleavened bread, on which they slew the lamb at even, just as had been enjoined by Moses.
I don’t know enough about the Roman calendar to know if that puts the date exactly at March 25, but at the very least it’s the end of March. Frustratingly Tertullian does talk about the date of Christmas in the same lecture, but only in terms of the year, not the day of the year.
I’m reading the Bible and, I know this will surprise any illiterate atheists, there appear to be a shocking number of pagans mentioned throughout.