About this time, every year, we hear protestations from Jehovah witnesses and other cultists that Christmas is a pagan feast and that Jesus could not possibly have been born on December 25th because of these words;
And in that region there were shepherds out in the field,
keeping watch over their flock by night.~Luke 2
The JWs claim that this is proof the Christ could not possibly have been born in December because the weather was cold and snowy and the roads nearly impassible.
Right now, in Israel , the temperature is 54 degrees. Tonight, it will drop down to just below 40.
So, the shepherds in the fields in December is, by no means, impossible.
What the JWs fail to consider, however, is that if you accept their premise of a June-September birth of Christ, based on the fact that weather was too cold for sheep, you must accept an even more difficult prospect. For if Jesus was born between June and September, He was conceived between September and December. This means that, at precisly during this cold, bitter, inhospitable time of year, Joseph allowed Mary to travel-alone- into the hill country of Judea, to visit her cousin Elizabeth.
Not likely.
JWs (and many others) claim that the December 25th date was chosen only after the roman emperor Constantine legalized Christianity, circa 380 AD, and that it was chosen to supplant the roman feast of the sun god, which occured on that date.
The truth is that these claims have been discredited and the celebration of the nativity on December 25th, can be historically proven to have pre-existed the feast of Saturnalia by almost 50 years at least. In fact, the reverse of the JW claim appears to be the truth. The roman emperor Aurelian, in 274 AD, created the feast of the sun god in an apparent attempt to diminish the Christian feast, not the other way around.
The feast of the Nativity, celebrated on December 25th, can be traced back to at least Tertullian. That places it some 200 years before Constantine.
The date of December 25th is not in scripture, to be sure. However, it was deduced by good-faith efforts to determine the date of the birthdate of Christ, based on scripture and Jewish tradition.
It was the commonly held wisdom that a prophet of God died on the same calendar date of his conception. Using this formula, the early church attempted to use the scriptures detailing the time of Christ's life and death, to determine when it was.
Since it was universally accepted that Jesus ministry lasted 3 years, and that his death occured when He was 33, Luke Chapter 3 is instructive;
In the fifteenth year of the
reign of Tiber'i-us Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod
being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of
Iturae'a and Trachoni'tis, and Lysa'ni-as tetrarch of Abile'ne,
If one accepts the premise that his date of conception coincides with the date of his death, than passover 29-33 AD would have been in late march/ early april and, thus, His birth would have occured in late December/ early January.
Add to that the narrative of Zechariah's service in the Temple. (thanks to agape Bible study)
“In the time of Herod king of Judea there was a
priest named Zechariah, who belonged to the priestly divisions of Abijah; his wife Elizabeth was also a descendant of Aaron. Both of them were upright in the sight of God, observing all the Lord’s commandments and regulations
blamelessly. But they had no children because Elizabeth was barren; and they were both well along in years. Once when Zechariah’s division was on duty and he was serving as priest before God, he was chosen by lot, according to the custom of the priesthood, to go into the Temple of the Lord and burn incense. And when the time for the burning of incense came, all the assembled worshipers were praying outside. Then an angel of the Lord appeared to him, standing at the right side of the altar of incense.”
The line in red is telling and the accepted tradition is that this was the universal day of atonement (Yom Kippor) that Zechariah was chosen to enter the temple to perform. The date would have coincided with our September 25th. Moving forward to the Angel Gabriel appearing to Mary would take us around March 25th. John would be born 3 months later, around June 25th and, six months further, to the birth of Christ, on December 25th.
So, is December 25th the actual birthdate of Jesus? No one knows, but it's a very reasonable guess made by using the Scriptures and the Jewish calendar.
That is why church documents, perhaps as old as the first century, require it's celebration to be on the 25th day of the Jewish month of Nisan. Our December 25th.
I would suggest to the JWs that they spend more time focusing on the WHO then on the WHEN.
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