This is a season of the year that has multiple meanings for all of us whether they be secular or religious. I am tiring of outraged mouthpieces screaming that this time of year has a singular meaning and if you don’t adhere to that you are declaring war on Christianity. Let everyone enjoy this holiday season as they see fit. As Christians, we can enjoy the symbolism, but do you honestly believe that the baby Jesus was born on December 25th?

It is mind-boggling to me how many people attribute this date as the literal day that Jesus was born. Historians have written about this myth for years pointing out numerous factors that indicate that the birth more than likely ocurred in June – September.

Outrage seems to increase each year about the commercialization of this holiday season and it stems from devout Christians who are intent on insinuating their faith into this time of year. As I do often, I turned to several knowledgeable Bible scholars and historians and none other than my co-researcher, Alex Bird who is known as “dogemporer”. She contributed the following that gives background to this holiday which should defuse any sanctimonious cry about a “War on Christmas”. (Notice that I said “should”)

By Alex Bird

“The arguments concerning the birth date of Jesus have to do with numerous criteria including the following:

 

a) The fact that a number of church holidays (especially holidays outside of Easter–which is one of the few holidays VERY much tied to a holiday on the pre-existing Jewish calendar) coincide with pre-Christian paleopagan holidays.  In the case of Christmas, the fact that the old festival of Saturnalia was based around the time of the Solstice and other pre-Christian indigenous faiths in Europe have Solstice festivals points to this.

 

As noted below, the Cathoic Church had not set a liturgical date for the birth of Jesus until 270 CE–a number of centuries after Jesus supposedly walked the earth; an accepted date among all Christian groups of the time (including the Coptic Church) did not exist until at least 337 CE.

 

b) Another good argument comes from the Bible itself in Luke 1:26:
“In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, ” (RSV; wording is substantially identical in all English translations)

 

At the time the Bible was written, two calendar systems would have been in use–the Hebrew calendar (the modern Jewish liturgical calendar, now used as the legal calendar in Israel) and the Julian calendar (used as a liturgical calendar in some Eastern Rite churches); neither of those use the same new-year dates as the modern Gregorian calendar.  There were also areas still using the old Egyptian calendar system (and a variant of that is still used as the liturgical calendar in the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Churches.)

 

The Jewish calendar (and the Coptic calendar) both have their “New Years” in September, as does the “old Greek” calendar known as the “Byzantine Calendar” which was formerly used as the liturgical calendar for the Orthodox Church . The Coptic Calendar usually has its New Years’ Day around 11 or 12 September , and the Byzantine calendar usually has its New Year’s Day around 13 or 14 September (it is based in part on the Coptic calendar).  The Jewish calendar is a lunar calendar, and Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) normally falls sometime in September.

 

The sixth month of these calendars and their equivalent Gregorian dates are as follows: 6th month of Coptic calendar would fall roughly between February and March (which IS pretty much when lambing and calving would begin–fun with growing up right next door to a farm) and also the sixth month (at least for civil purposes) usually falls around February-March.

 

It gets worse when we include ecclesiastical “calendar skewing” in the Jewish calendar and the Julian Calendar.

 

To make a very long story short–the Julian calendar originally had March as the first month, with New Year’s Day being March 1; there is also an ‘ecclesiastical calendar” used in Jewish calendar calculations that is skewed exactly six months from the primary civil calendar.  The sixth months for each of these….don’t look good for winter Christmases; the “sixth month” in the Jewish ecclesiastical calendar would end up right smack dab in the middle of August/September (with the end of the month culminating in Yom Kippur) whilst the “sixth month” in the Julian calendar (VERY new at that time, so it hadn’t yet had the “date creep” from its error in calculating leap years) has its “sixth month” being–surprise surprise–AUGUST.  (In fact, they’d just renamed the month Formerly Known As Sextilus pretty much within shouting distance of the time of Christ’s birth (usually felt to be anywhere from 4 BCE to 7 CE; the change of Sextilus to August occurred 8 BCE).

 

c) The big argument isn’t so much with temperature as agricultural cycles. Specifically, the Bible explicitly depicts the Star of Bethlehem and the angelic visitation being seen by shepherds guarding flocks grazing freely (indicating that this would be during the lambing season in spring; normally sheep would be corralled in winter as they would be at greater risk of predation).

 

As for the star of Bethlehem (which supposedly shined when Jesus was born)…nobody is really sure about that yet (for many reasons, not the least of which is still a definite uncertainty over whether the story of Jesus is itself a co-opting of Mithraic mythology or (if he existed) what the date of birth was).

 

Most who do think the Star of Bethlehem existed don’t see it as anything in the modern skies. not something we can point to today, at any rate.

 

The particular account of the “star” only occurs in Matthew, and there are those Biblical scholars who feel this may have been a later addition or even a bit of “divine gloss”; astronomers who don’t just dismiss the story of the Star of Bethlehem being an embellishment have attributed it to conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn, to comets (even Halley’s Comet), and to a supernova explosion that caused a temporary brightening of a star.

 

(Of note, the one account that gives an actual date is that of Luke, which does NOT include the story of the three Magi.)

 

If there’s anything to the “Star of Bethlehem” story, the role of the Magi becomes important, as “Magi” in the world of that time were typically Zoroastrian priests who were astronomers (yes, if the Magi existed…it’s very likely they came from what is now Iran, as this is where Zoroastrianism was based until religious oppression led to most active Zoroastrians moving to India or following their faith underground in Iran) and by extension the term was applied to all practitioners of esoteric arts; in fact the term “Magi” is pretty much consistently translated as “fortune-teller, illusionist, practitioner of esoterica” OTHER than in John (save in VERY early versions of the Bible, where it is translated “magician”–in this sense, a magick-user, a practitioner of magick).

 

Probably the closest parallels nowadays would be if a neopagan circle saw an unusual occurence in the sky as an astrological omen and followed it.

 

Those who dismiss the Star of Bethlehem story as dramatic gloss (and even some who do accept it as true) have noted the author of that particular section was almost certainly familiar with the “Star Prophecy”(Numbers 24:17; which was popular amongst Israeli independence groups in what was then the Roman province of Judaea (technically what was then Judaea would be what we’d refer to now as an autonomous area or overseas possession of the Roman Empire, with Herod being a “Hellenic-friendly” king generally despised by those seeking full independence from Rome).

 

The “Star Prophecy” becomes important in this note because it’s a method of setting Jesus up as “King of the Jews” destined to drive invaders out of the land–it was also notably used explicitly in the late Jewish revolts against the Roman Empire, including the final stand at Masada and the final revolt that led to the Diaspora (and the functional end of Judah and Israel as independent states until 1948).  A popular theory is that the Magi may have observed an astronomical occultation of Jupiter in Ares, which was seen as a sign of a kingly birth.

 

There are a few Chinese and Babylonian sources that would point to a number of possible unusual astronomical events that could have been described as the “Star of Bethlehem”; most likely (that fit with the time period in Luke) is a possible supernova event recorded by Chinese and Korean sources around March 31st, 4 BCE that would probably have been seen as notable enough to get the notice of astrologers.

 

(Of particular note here–a supernova of a star not normally visible to the naked eye would appear to be a “new star” that would shine for only a few months to a year.  The brightening of the sky by a supernova can be impressive; the Supernova of 1054 was visible for two years.

 

All in all, though, this is actually somewhat irrelevant:

d) Christmas, liturgically speaking (and even popular-culture-speaking) is actually a relatively young holiday; celebrations of Christmas are almost unknown until at least the late first millennium CE (in fact, early Christian writings–including that notably of Origen of Alexandria–explicitly mock the entire concept of birth anniversaries and celebration of birthdays as pagan).  The earliest definitive mention of Christmas as a holiday being celebrated dates from 336 CE; there was not set liturgical date for what we know as Christmas until 170 CE.

 

More important–well into the medieval period–were celebrations of Easter; in fact, in many Eastern Orthodox traditions (particularly the Russian Orthodox and Greek Orthodox) Easter is STILL seen as the more important liturgical holiday and a much bigger deal than Christmas (many of these countries pretty much didn’t have a winter-holiday tradition until Westernization happened in the 20th Century).

 

After the great split of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches in 1054 CE, the Catholic Church seems to have embraced Christmas (with Christmas replacing Easter as the primary liturgical holiday by 1100 CE) and it started becoming a popular holiday until the 1500s in Catholic (and later, CoE) parts of the world.  This ended up getting shot to hell by (ironically) the Protestant Reformation, as we’ll see below.

 

e) Christmas–at least as celebrated in the US–is pretty much a holiday restricted to present and former Commonwealth countries and to South Korea and Japan (and in the last two cases, primarily as a marketing holiday–though South Korea does have at least enough of a Christian presence as the result of American and British missionary groups to have a “Commonwealth-style Christmas”).

 

In general, in the rest of the Christian world, Christmas is still seen very much as a liturgical holiday (similarly to how Easter is seen here, or more properly, how Pesach is celebrated in Jewish communities worldwide); the gift-giving usually takes place before Christmas on St. Nicholas’ Day (December 6th) in Germanic- and Nordic-language nations, or on Epiphany (January 6th) in Romance-language countries; Santa Claus also does not exist, with presents given out in “St. Nicholas Day countries” by St. Nicholas and a helper (sometimes the politically-incorrect “Black Peter” or a “Moorish helper”, sometimes (and elevated to a meme by the American cartoon “Venture Brothers”) the Krampus–a goat-demon-thing that gives switches to bad children; interestingly, the Netherlands (the ultimate source of American depictions of what would becomes Santa) is of the “St. Nicholas and Black Peter” tradition, which has caused not a small bit of controversy as of late).  “Epiphany countries” typically have the Three Magi giving out presents, though some countries actually have the Christ Child delivering presents to good kids.

 

To complicate things even more–in parts of the U.S. that have been relatively isolated until recently (Appalachia, for one, and also Amish communities) you have the interesting phenomenon in much of Appalachia and Pennsylvania Dutch country of having both “new Christmas” (the December 25th holiday, which is seen as more secular) and “old Christmas” (which is–ironically–Epiphany) which follows the older Scots-Irish and German traditions, and yes, I’ve known folks in Appalachia who celebrate both.

 

f) Even in Commonwealth and ex-Commonwealth countries, Christmas is a modern phenomenon.  The very celebration of Christmas was seen as outright pagan during the Protestant Reformation, and was considered controversial enough well into the 1600s that it was one of the precipitating events behind the coup-de-etat of the British monarchy by theocrats in the 1600s (during the Cromwell years, Christmas celebrations were actually forbidden by decree); in the United States (largely founded by religious communities that had a distressing tendency to set up their own state religions after leaving countries with OTHER state religions) Christmas as we know it was pretty much well unknown if not forbidden by law.

 

(Yes, you’re reading this right: the early religionationalists in the United States literally made Christmas illegal.  Truly ironic, considering their spiritual successors promoting the “War on Christmas”!)

 

One of the FEW places in what would become the United States that managed to preserve old British Christmas traditions (pre-Saint Nicholas, and in spite of Oliver Cromwell and his son trying to make the holiday illegal) was the state of Virginia; you can actually go to Colonial Williamsburg and see how Christmas was celebrated at that time.

 

Pretty much it bore little resemblance to Christmas nowadays; if it was celebrated at all (which was still extremely controversial and by no means universal even in Colonial-era Virginia) it was pretty much an excuse to get drunk and/or party–not unlike how we celebrate New Year’s Eve nowadays in modern times; also common was the tradition of indentured servants and the poor begging for alms (a tradition that still lives on in most Commonwealth countries, including Canada, as “Boxing Day”–the day when donation boxes for the poor in churches would be distributed…the closest thing we have to that tradition in the U.S. is with Toys for Tots).

 

St. Nicholas didn’t come to the US at large till the 1800s; until then, he was a New York phenomenon (thanks to the fact the Dutch were the first Europeans in New York, and there was still enough of a Dutch influence to have a Dutch-American Society in the 1700s and 1800s).  His “American Break-out” was when the New York Historical Society declared him their patron saint and started the Dutch gift-giving tradition (though, I expect, without “Black Peter” helping out Santa).

 

The modern image of Christmas (as other than a strictly religious holiday) can be said to have come from four sources: Clement C. Moore’s poem “A Visit From St. Nicholas” (which actually didn’t refer to Santa as we know him, but rather Norwegian and Finnish depictions of St. Nicholas), Charles Dickens (whom, in his fictionalized depictions of Victorian-era poverty also pretty much depicted his ideal of the Perfect Christmas–yes, “A Christmas Carol” has done a LOT to shape modern depictions of Christmas), Thomas Nast and later Coca-Cola (pretty much giving the US the modern image of Santa Claus) and the Montgomery Ward store chain (the ultimate origin of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer–as amazing as it sounds, Rudolph didn’t exist until 1939, when a storybook was released as part of a Montgomery Ward toy campaign–probably the most successful ever).

 

Christmas celebrations didn’t really catch on in the US until well into the 1800s; it pretty much wasn’t until after the Civil War (during Reconstruction) that Christmas became a universally celebrated holiday in the States.

 

(Interestingly, no less than the Americanized version of St. Nicholas–Santa Claus–was used in a propaganda effort against the Confederacy during the Civil War; Abraham Lincoln asked Thomas Nast (pretty much responsible for modern “fat Santa” depictions) to create a picture of Santa with Union Soldiers–implying the Rebs would all be getting coal and switches in their stockings.)

 

-dogemperor (and I bet these folks would be really disappointed to read the National Geographic stuff on excavations and research on the actual reign of King Herod–long story short, not a whole lot of evidence of baby genocide, but evidence he may have been disliked due to being “too damn Hellenicized”)”

What Alex has laid out here is just the tip of the iceberg. There are volumes of information available for all of us to read and research into how December 25th became this recent high-Holy holiday. Being informed, bodes well for all of us in all things, and this is another example of where learning about the origins of traditions can help us avoid taking ridiculous stances that create tension and divisiveness. Fortunately this new hymn – the “War on Christmas” is emanating from a minority of devotees that spend more time complaining than studying.