Some modern pagans, sometimes anti-Christian secularists, try to claim Our Lord Jesus Christ wasn't born on Dec. 25th, whereas we know that He was. There are at least 3 ways by which we can answer such a false claim and show that Sacred Scripture itself, beside Sacred Tradition, gives us many clues to the date; (1) first, from the Gospel of St. Luke, whom we know to have been close to the Blessed Mother, and relied on Her as an eyewitness to the events of Jesus' Life; who has also handed down paintings of Her with the Infant Jesus. St. Luke gives us enough information to be able to reasonably deduce the Conception Date and Birth-Day of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And as the Precursor St. John the Baptist prepared the way for Christ, so the date of his conception, shows us the date of Christ's Conception. Now, Zacharias the father of the Baptist, was ministering as Chief Priest in the Temple, in the course of Abias, near the end of September, likely on the Jewish high holy Day of Atonement, which is usually in late September, and which God had commanded them to keep; that means the story of our Redemption began on the Day of Atonement, and 6 months later would be Christ's Conception in late March. 9 months later, His birth in late December. (2) second, from the Gospel of St. John, the beloved Apostle, who reposed on His Sacred Heart, and would have received from Christ Himself all the information concerning His Birth. Indeed, in a revelation to a Mystic, we see Our Lord Jesus told St. John the date of His Birth, corresponding to what the Jews kept as the Festival of Lights, which is also called the Feast of the Dedication of the Temple. Typically, this was celebrated on Kislev 25th, the month of the Jewish year that roughly corresponds to our December, from which we can also see that Christ Our Lord willed us to celebrate ChristMas on December 25th in our Christian Calendar. Now, in the Gospel itself, St. John presents Jesus as the Light that has come into the world, and thus the fulfilment of that Festival of Light. Hence, it is fitting that His birth was on Dec. 25th. As the Maccabees had commemorated the victory of God in His Temple, St. John presents Jesus Christ Our Lord as the True Temple of God, and thus once more it is fitting that that Temple came to us on Dec. 25th. (3) third, and finally, as His Immaculate Mother would surely know His Birthday, and hand it down via Tradition - we have at least 4, and probably countless more upon a brief search, express and explicit early testimonies from Sacred Scripture, Patristic Literature and Church Tradition confirming the Dec. 25th date as the Day of Our Lord's Nativity! Let us reflect on God's Great Love and wondrous Providence on His Birthday! A nice article from Dr. Taylor Marshall on Christ's Birth: https://taylormarshall.com/2012/12/yes-christ-was-really-born-on-december.html "Now we move on to establishing the birthday of Christ from Sacred Scripture in two steps. The first step is to use Scripture to determine the birthday of Saint John the Baptist. The next step is using Saint John the Baptist’s birthday as the key for finding Christ’s birthday. We can discover that Christ was born in late December by observing first the time of year in which Saint Luke describes Saint Zacharias in the temple. This provides us with the approximate conception date of Saint John the Baptist. From there we can follow the chronology that Saint Luke gives, and that lands us at the end of December. Saint Luke reports that Zacharias served in the “course of Abias” (Lk 1:5) which Scripture records as the eighth course among the twenty-four priestly courses (Neh 12:17). Each shift of priests served one week in the temple for two times each year. The course of Abias served during the eighth week and the thirty-second week in the annual cycle.[ii]However, when did the cycle of courses begin? Josef Heinrich Friedlieb has convincingly established that the first priestly course of Jojarib was on duty during the destruction of Jerusalem on the ninth day of the Jewish month of Av.[iii]Thus the priestly course of Jojarib was on duty during the second week of Av. Consequently, the priestly course of Abias (the course of Saint Zacharias) was undoubtedly serving during the second week of the Jewish month of Tishri—the very week of the Day of Atonement on the tenth day of Tishri. In our calendar, the Day of Atonement would land anywhere from September 22 to October 8. Zacharias and Elizabeth conceived John the Baptist immediately after Zacharias served his course. This entails that Saint John the Baptist would have been conceived somewhere around the end of September, placing John’s birth at the end of June, confirming the Catholic Church’s celebration of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist on June 24. The second-century Protoevangelium of Saint James also confirms a late September conception of the Baptist since the work depicts Saint Zacharias as High Priest and as entering the Holy of Holies—not merely the holy place with the altar of incense. This is a factual mistake because Zacharias was not the high priest, but one of the chief priests.[iv]Still, the Protoevangelium regards Zacharias as a high priest and this associates him with the Day of Atonement, which lands on the tenth day of the Hebrew month of Tishri (roughly the end of our September). Immediately after this entry into the temple and message of the Archangel Gabriel, Zacharias and Elizabeth conceive John the Baptist. Allowing for forty weeks of gestation, this places the birth of John the Baptist at the end of June—once again confirming the Catholic date for the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist on June 24. The rest of the dating is rather simple. We read that just after the Immaculate Virgin Mary conceived Christ, she went to visit her cousin Elizabeth who was six months pregnant with John the Baptist. This means that John the Baptist was six months older that our Lord Jesus Christ (Lk 1:24-27, 36). If you add six months to June 24 you get December 24-25 as the birthday of Christ. Then, if you subtract nine months from December 25 you get that the Annunciation was March 25. All the dates match up perfectly. So then, if John the Baptist was conceived shortly after the Jewish Day of the Atonement, then the traditional Catholic dates are essentially correct. The birth of Christ would be about or on December 25. Sacred Tradition also confirms December 25 as the birthday of the Son of God. The source of this ancient tradition is the Blessed Virgin Mary herself. Ask any mother about the birth of her children. She will not only give you the date of the birth, but she will be able to rattle off the time, the location, the weather, the weight of the baby, the length of the baby, and a number of other details. I’m the father of six blessed children, and while I sometimes forget these details—mea maxima culpa—my wife never does. You see, mothers never forget the details surrounding the births of their babies. Now ask yourself: Would the Blessed Virgin Mary ever forget the birth of her Son Jesus Christ who was conceived without human seed, proclaimed by angels, born in a miraculous way, and visited by Magi? She knew from the moment of His incarnation in her stainless womb that He was the Son of God and Messiah. Would she ever forget that day?[v] Next, ask yourself: Would the Apostles be interested in hearing Mary tell the story? Of course they would. Do you think the holy Apostle who wrote, “And the Word was made flesh,” was not interested in the minute details of His birth? Even when I walk around with our seven-month-old son, people always ask “How old is he?” or “When was he born?” Don’t you think people asked this question of Mary? So the exact birth date (December 25) and the time (midnight) would have been known in the first century. Moreover, the Apostles would have asked about it and would have, no doubt, commemorated the blessed event that both Saint Matthew and Saint Luke chronicle for us. In summary, it is completely reasonable to state that the early Christians both knew and commemorated the birth of Christ. Their source would have been His Immaculate Mother. Further testimony reveals that the Church Fathers claimed December 25 as the Birthday of Christ prior to the conversion of Constantine and the Roman Empire. The earliest record of this is that Pope Saint Telesphorus (reigned A.D. 126-137) instituted the tradition of Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. Although the Liber Pontificalis does not give us the date of Christmas, it assumes that the Pope was already celebrating Christmas and that a Mass at midnight was added. During this time, we also read the following words of Theophilus (A.D. 115-181), Catholic bishop of Caesarea in Palestine: “We ought to celebrate the birthday of Our Lord on what day soever the 25th of December shall happen.”[vi]
Shortly thereafter in the second century, Saint Hippolytus (A.D. 170-240) wrote in passing that the birth of Christ occurred on December 25: The First Advent of our Lord in the flesh occurred when He was born in Bethlehem, was December 25th, a Wednesday, while Augustus was in his forty-second year, which is five thousand and five hundred years from Adam. He suffered in the thirty-third year, March 25th, Friday, the eighteenth year of Tiberius Caesar, while Rufus and Roubellion were Consuls.[vii] Also note in the quote above the special significance of March 25, which marks the death of Christ (March 25 was assumed to corresponded to the Hebrew month Nisan 14 – the traditional date of crucifixion).[viii] Christ, as the perfect man, was believed to have been conceived and died on the same day—March 25. In his Chronicon, Saint Hippolytus states that the earth was created on March 25, 5500 B.C. Thus, March 25 was identified by the Church Fathers as the Creation date of the universe, as the date of the Annunciation and Incarnation of Christ, and also as the date of the Death of Christ our Savior. In the Syrian Church, March 25 or the Feast of the Annunciation was seen as one of the most important feasts of the entire year. It denoted the day that God took up his abode in the womb of the Virgin. In fact, if the Annunciation and Good Friday came into conflict on the calendar, the Annunciation trumped it, so important was the day in Syrian tradition. It goes without saying that the Syrian Church preserved some of the most ancient Christian traditions and had a sweet and profound devotion for Mary and the Incarnation of Christ. Now then, March 25 was enshrined in the early Christian tradition, and from this date it is easy to discern the date of Christ’s birth. March 25 (Christ conceived by the Holy Ghost) plus nine months brings us to December 25 (the birth of Christ at Bethlehem). Saint Augustine confirms this Tradition of March 25 as the Messianic conception and December 25 as His birth: For Christ is believed to have been conceived on the 25th of March, upon which day also he suffered; so the womb of the Virgin, in which he was conceived, where no one of mortals was begotten, corresponds to the new grave in which he was buried, wherein was never man laid, neither before him nor since. But he was born, according to Tradition, upon December the 25th.[ix] In about A.D. 400, Saint Augustine also noted how the schismatic Donatists celebrated December 25 as the birth of Christ, but that the schismatics refused to celebrate Epiphany on January 6, since they regarded Epiphany as a new feast without a basis in Apostolic Tradition. The Donatist schism originated in A.D. 311 which may indicate that the Latin Church was celebrating a December 25 Christmas (but not a January 6 Epiphany) before A.D. 311. Whichever is the case, the liturgical celebration of Christ’s birth was commemorated in Rome on December 25 long before Christianity became legalized and long before our earliest record of a pagan feast for the birthday of the Unconquered Sun. For these reasons, it is reasonable and right to hold that Christ was born on December 25 in 1 B.C. and that he died and rose again in March of A.D. 33."
I watched Dr. Marshall's video Friday afternoon. It was really good. I have often wondered if the apostles asked Mary after Jesus' death about his birth. Seems like an obvious line of questioning trying to find out more about His life. We all do this after someone dies, talk about the deceased. For many years I bought the "Christmas was pagan in origin" line of thinking. I have several relatives that would yearly bash people with this conversation. I always thought the Church got it right but maybe they replaced a pagan holiday with the birth of Our Lord. The video is well worth the watch
Thank God for converts for Taylor Marshall. I wouldn't be too quick to point the finger at Protestants and Pagans for doubting the Gospels. We Catholics have had our share of "experts" who, 2000 years after the fact, considered themselves better informed than the Evangelists. For example: https://www.smh.com.au/national/arc...the-truth-from-good-yarns-20131122-2y0mn.html Fr. Murhy O'Connor died about ten years ago. May the Lord have mercy on his soul, he knows now that God is more than capable of sending angels to announce the birth of His son. And, despite what the Superior General of the Jesuits might believe, Satan is a real being and not a construct of the early Christians.
Yes, absolutely. Dr. Marshall has done great work on the subject, in both his articles and his videos. Thank Goodness many Catholics now know how to answer false secularist objections to our Faith and our Tradition. The Devil hates ChristMas. We must believe in God's Love in becoming Man, and being born for us on ChristMas Day. Here's a Jewish site understand that ChristMas in the New Testament is really the fulfillment of Hanukkah in the Old Testament. Jesus is the New Light of the World: " What is missing in the Christianity Today article, and most discussions about the origin of December 25th as the date for the birth of Jesus, is the possible Jewish cultural background to this date and future Christian practices. The Jewish cultural background I am referring to is the holiday of Chanukah ... Chanukah and Christmas The holidays of Chanukah and Christmas have a number of common themes. There are three that I believe are pertinent to the question, Why December 25th? The first is the holidays fall on the same day – the 25th. Chanukah begins on the 25th of the Hebrew month Kislev and Christmas is celebrated on the 25th of December." http://www.jewishawareness.org/why-december-25th/ So, there are many, many reasons imo, and it all wondrously fits together. And also, as per your intuition Tanker, Our Lady Himself, according to Italian Mystic Maria Valtorta, told the Apostles and many others, even when Jesus was present, the wonderful story of His Birth, the Angels, the shepherds, where He was born, and how our salvation began in that Manger in Bethlehem. It was well known to all. "« Do not weep! The first thing of the Christ with which you have become acquainted is His sorrowful destiny, the end of His mission as Man. It is not fair, having learned that, that you should be unacquainted with the first hour of His life in the world. Listen… Everybody will be pleased to come out of the dark bitter contemplation by recalling the sweet hour, full of light, of songs, of hosannas, of His Birth… Listen… » and Mary, explaining the reason for Her journey to Bethlehem in Judah, the town predicted to be the birthplace of the Saviour, in a soft gentle voice tells the story of the night of Christ's Nativity" (Book 4, Chapter 434, Poem of the Man-God)
