Weaverville – Most in Christendom just celebrated the birth of Christ with the holiday known as Christmas. Some in Christendom don’t celebrate Christmas, believing it to be the Christian bastardization of a pagan holiday.
What is Christmas? Is it the day Christ was born? Is it a pagan holiday that Christians should ignore? The question needs to be answered.
Some Christians and even atheists point to Deut. 12:29–31 to say Christians should not use a pagan holiday to celebrate Christ’s birth, if indeed that’s what they are doing.
“When the LORD thy God shall cut off the nations from before thee, whither thou goest to possess them, and thou succeedest them, and dwellest in their land; take heed to thyself that thou be not snared by following them, after that they be destroyed from before thee; and that thou enquire not after their gods, saying, How did these nations serve their gods? Even so, I will do likewise. Thou shalt not do so unto the LORD thy God: for every abomination to the LORD, which he hateth, have they done unto their gods; for even their sons and their daughters they have burnt in the fire to their gods.”
So first, let’s look to see if December 25 was really Christ’s birthday.
Numerous signs point to the fact that the December 25th date is not the date of Jesus’ birth. The fact that the shepherds took their flock out of the fields before December The fact Jesus lived to be 33 and a half before is crucifixion near the Jewish Passover (see https://carm.org/about-jesus/how-old-was-jesus-when-he-was-crucified/). The fact is that the birth of John the Baptist was six months before that of Jesus. These facts point to the fall of the year for Jesus’ entry into our world, not December.
The best book I’ve found on the subject is Ernest L. Martin’s 1996 book The Star of Bethlehem: The Star that Astonished the World. In it, Martin argues quite convincingly that Jesus was born on September 11, 3 BC, between the hours of 6:45 p.m. and 7:15 p.m. Yes, he gets that precise. While this may not be the exact date or time, it certainly has more evidence than it does for December 25th. More than 600 planetariums showed Martin’s model of the star after his book came out (for those who want to read or listen to Martin’s argument for the date, you can find it at https://www.askelm.com/star/).
So how was the December date chosen?
Well, if History.com is your preferred authority, here’s what they say:
“Most Christians today probably can’t imagine Christmas on any other day than December 25th, but it wasn’t always that way. In fact, for the first three centuries of Christianity’s existence, Jesus Christ’s birth wasn’t celebrated at all. The religion’s two most significant holidays were Epiphany on January 6th, which commemorated the arrival of the Magi after Jesus’ birth, and Easter, which celebrated Jesus’ resurrection. The first official mention of December 25 as a holiday honoring Jesus’ birthday appears in an early Roman calendar from AD 336.
“But was Jesus really born on December 25th in the first place? Probably not. The Bible doesn’t mention his exact birthday, and the Nativity story contains conflicting clues. For instance, the presence of shepherds and their sheep suggests [sic] a spring birth. When church officials settled on December 25th at the end of the third century, they likely wanted the date to coincide with existing pagan festivals honoring Saturn (the Roman god of agriculture) and Mithra (the Persian god of light). That way, it became easier to convince Rome’s pagan subjects to accept Christianity as the empire’s official religion.”
Writer Jon Sorensen wrote last month at Catholic.com a post that refutes History.com’s claim that December 25 made it “easier to convince Rome’s pagan subjects to accept Christianity as the empire’s official religion.” (You can read his essay at https://bit.ly/3WE9mme)
Writer Dean Smith on Opentheword.org gives yet another reason for December 25th, also refuting the date being chosen for pagan reasons, and that’s just from the top three websites from a search I did. (You can read Smith at https://bit.ly/3VEmWop) I’m sure there would be many other reasons if we had time for them.
Now that we’ve established that the December date is most likely not the correct date in the Deut. 12 verse, the question remains. Are Christians doing something wrong by celebrating the 25th as the date of Christ’s birth?
Well, unless you are sacrificing your children in the arms of a red hot idol, or some such similar thing, I think it’s okay to give gifts to your loved ones in honor of the birth of Jesus, just as God gave his best gift to the world. Maybe not on December 25th, but as they say, “It’s the thought that counts.”