Every festive season I’m asked the same question “was Jesus really born on the December 25?” There seems to be much debate on this subject, even among devout Christians. Some are convinced that the day has its origin in paganism celebratingsol invictus,the “unconquering sun”, which was associated with the winter solstice. There is no historical substance to Christmas originating from pagan or heathen festivals.
The idea of pagan roots goes back to two scholars from the 17th and 18th centuries, Paul Ernst Jablonski, a German Protestant, and Dom Jen Hardouin, a Benedict monk, who tried to show that Catholicism adopted pagan festivals to influence the masses. A simple Google search will open a Pandora’s box of paradoxical questions and answers. The choice of December 25 is the result of a quest by early Christians to figure out the date of Jesus’s birth based on calendrical calculations that had nothing to do with pagan festivals, although some pagan elements over time crept into the observance.
It may seem strange that the evidence indicates, in fact, that the attribution of the date was a by-product of attempts to determine when Jesus died and rose again, backdating from His death at the age of 33, astute scholars determined the time of His birth. The historical record, as espoused by St John Chrysostom, a renowned ascetic and a native of Antioch in the fourth century, is that Jesus was conceived on March 25, exactly nine months before His birth on December 25. Concerning this testimony, Chrysostom said: “It is clear that He was born during the first census (of Caesar Augustus). “It is possible to know exactly by reading the original codices publicly stored in Rome to learn the time of the census.” The biblical record is that Jesus was born in Bethlehem during this census.
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