Why did Christians celebrate the Birth of Jesus on the 25th of December?

Why did Christians celebrate the Birth of Jesus on the 25^th of December?

In my previous post, I talked about how Hippolytus of Rome (around the year 200) took for granted that Jesus was born on the 25^th of December.  This places the dating of Christmas well before Theodosius made Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire (380), before Constantine made Christianity a legal religion in the Roman Empire (312), and also before Sol Invictus became the Pagan holiday on December 25^th (274).  This of course leads to the natural question, where did early Christians get the idea of celebrating the birth of Jesus on December 25^th.

I believe the answer to such a question can be gleaned from the New Testament.  The Day of Atonement/ Yom Kippur takes place on the 10^th day of the month of Tishrei, which is nine days after Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year).  The joys of working with a Jewish calendar versus the Julian or Gregorian calendars is that there is not a one to one correspondence.  This means that, according to the calendars of the goyim, Yom Kippur falls somewhere between middle September to middle October.  All of this is relevant because of some dating in Luke’s Gospel.

If we take that Yom Kippur happens sometime around the beginning of October or late September, and we add that the priest only entered the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur, then we can do simple math to figure out the date when Jesus was born.

In Hebrews 9:7, we are told about the Holy of Holies that “only the high priest goes, and he but once a year.”  This means that only once a year would a priest enter the Holy of Holies to burn incense and sprinkle blood on the altar inside the Holy of Holies.[1]

Turning to Luke, we find that Zechariah was “was chosen by lot to enter the temple of the Lord and burn incense” (Luke 1:9).  Luke goes on to tell how “the whole multitude of the people were praying outside at the hour of incense.” (Luke 1:10).  At this moment, Zechariah saw the angel of the Lord standing on the right of the altar of incense.  The angel announced that Zechariah and Elizabeth would have a son in their old age.  This all happened between the middle of September and the middle of October.

 Then we arrive at the important (for the purpose of their inquiry) statement in Luke 1:23–24:

“And when his time of service was ended, he went to his home.  After these days his wife Elizabeth conceived.”  This is important because Elizabeth conceived after Yom Kippur.  But how soon?  This is the weakest part of the argument.  I think that the best understanding for the phrase “after these days” is that the conception of John the Baptist took place directly after Zechariah’s time of service.  If this is the case, then we can plot out the timeline fairly easily.

“Elizabeth conceived, and for five months she kept herself hidden, saying, "Thus the Lord has done for me in the days when he looked on me, to take away my reproach among people." In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. And the virgin's name was Mary.”  (Luke 1:24–27)

Following the timeline, Elizabeth was six months pregnant when Mary conceived Jesus.  Now for the math:

John the Baptist was conceived somewhere between middle September to the middle of October (tradition puts this on the 23^rd of September).

Six months later, Mary conceived sometime in March or April (tradition puts it at March 25^th)

Nine months after March or April puts us into late December or early January.

This is terribly imprecise, but it shows that December 25^th is a biological and mathematical possibility for the birth of Jesus.  Thus when taken together with early Christian attestations for the birth of Christ being on December 25^th, the onus is put squarely on those who argue for a date other than December 25^th for the birth of Jesus.  It is an argument against Scripture and Tradition.

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[1] See also: Leviticus 16:12–13 “And he shall take a censer full of coals of fire from the altar before the LORD, and two handfuls of sweet incense beaten small, and he shall bring it inside the veil and put the incense on the fire before the LORD, that the cloud of the incense may cover the mercy seat that is over the testimony, so that he does not die.”

The Date of Christmas

The Date of Christmas

It seems as though every year I encounter the assertion that  the 25^th of December was chosen to be celebrate Christmas because this day coincided with a major pagan holy day.  This assertion is even found in “scholarly works.”  Not too long ago when reading Strauss' Four Portraits One Jesus, I was struck by his statement “the traditional date of the Western church is December 25, and in some eastern Churches January 6^th.  The former seems to have arisen in the time of Constantine (circa 325).”[1]  Sadly, this is both wrong and oft repeated in both “scholarly” and unscholarly works.

            
This argument has several flaws.  Firstly, with a little effort, one could find a pagan celebration occurring on every day of the calendar during the Early to Middle Roman Empire.  The Romans accepted every religion of the peoples they conquered (with the exception of religions that practiced human sacrifice, those were ruthlessly crushed) and practiced some interesting syncretism with the various pantheons.

Secondly, Struss is completely unaware of the change in calendars and how January 6^th is still December 25^th according to the Julian Calendar, which continues to be used in some ecclesiastical bodies in the East.  Therefore, everyone is still celebrating on December 25^th, they are just relying upon pre-Gregorian Calendars.

 Thirdly, his view utterly fails to account for how early Christians viewed the date of Christmas.  Hippolytus, writing sometime around 200, provided a rather exact dating for the birth and the death of Jesus:

“For the first advent of our Lord in the flesh, when he was born in Bethlehem, was December 25th, Wednesday, while Augustus was in his forty-second year, but from Adam, five thousand and five hundred years. He suffered in the thirty-third year, March 25th, Friday, the eighteenth year of Tiberius Caesar, while Rufus and Roubellion were Consuls.”[2]

Hippolytus here completely dismantles the erroneous assertions about the date of Christmas being a syncretistic practice to make the newly legalized Christian religion more syncretic with Ancient Paganism.  Indeed, Hippolytus is simply stating the facts as he had received them at a time when Christianity was still illegal and violently persecuted.

This fact then forms the basis for how he interpreted the "days" in Daniel as referring to the entire history of the world.  

But one will always say, “How will you demonstrate to me whether the Savior was born in the five thousandth and five hundredth year?  Be easily instructed, O man. For in the desert long ago under Moses there were models and images of spiritual mysteries which concerned the tabernacle and they fulfilled this number, so that having come to the fulfillment of truth in Christ you are able to apprehend these things which are fulfilled.  For he says to him, “And you will make an ark of incorruptible wood and you will cover it with pure gold inside and outside and you will make its height two cubits and a half and its breadth a cubit and a half and its height a cubit and a half.” The measure of which added together makes five and a half cubits, so that the five thousand five hundred years may be demonstrated, in which time the Savior comes from the Virgin, and then he offered the Ark, his own body, into the world, covered in pure gold, inside with the Word, outside with the Holy Spirit, so that the truth may be shown and the Ark may be manifested.  And so from the generation of Christ it is necessary to count the remaining five hundred years to the consummation of the six thousand years, and in this way the end will be. But because in the fifth and a half time the Savior arrived in the world bearing the incorruptible ark, his own body.  John says, “and it was the sixth hour,” so that half of the day may be demonstrated, a day of the Lord is thousand years. And so the half of these is five hundred years.[3]

Hippolytus' exegetical argument for his dating which in itself is quite revealing.  He does not provide an argument for the birth of Jesus on December 25th, but argues that the birth of Jesus was at a set point in the history of the world.  He treats the birth of Jesus on December 25th as a given.  Whether or not we follow Hippolytus’ numerology and exegesis (he clearly was wrong about when the world will end), his argument for the date of Christmas is not based upon finding a means to relate the celebration of the birth of Christ to a pagan holy day, but it is a blanket assertion that he ues to construct a interpretation of an ambiguous passage.  This in itself is an important clue that Hippolytus was not dealing with a recent alteration to the Church calendar, but something that predated him.  This means that one cannot point to Constantine (over 100 years after Hippolytus) as the time when the date for Christmas was set.  Rather one finds an early practice of celebrating the birth of Christ on the 25^th of December even when the Church was still an illegal and persecuted entity within the Roman Empire.

            
The point from all of this is that the next time you encounter someone who states that December 25^th is a pagan influenced date for the celebration of the birth of Jesus, you can now be aware that the assertion is silly and baseless.  

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[1] Strauss, Four Portraits One Jesus, 406.

[2] Hippolytus, Commentary on Daniel, 23.3.

[3] Hippolytus, Commentary on Daniel, 24.1-5