Was Christ Born in September?
An Apology
During an ecumenical discussion with our separated brethren, the dating of Christmas was put into question. A Nondenominational sister said that she follows the Jewish calendar and celebrates it on the Feast of Tabernacles because the original date was changed by Constantine for political reasons. Another Nondenominational brother said that Christmas has pagan roots in Saturnalia and that Catholics are to blame for it. A Lutheran sister was surprised to hear all this and said her parents told her that Jesus was born on Christmas Day and that the more she learns, the more she realizes that Catholics don’t follow the word of Christ. Addressing my Lutheran sister, I intervened as follows:
You can celebrate Christmas with your family and church on December 25 since that’s the Lutheran tradition and the tradition in the West. Our disagreements with our Lutheran brothers are mainly about justification, so we share the same history and many traditions. In the East, some still celebrate it during Epiphany, around January 6. We also see this in the West, in places like Spain, Argentina, Mexico, Paraguay, and Uruguay, where Christmas is celebrated on December 25. The children don’t receive presents from St. Nicholas but from the Three Wise Men on January 6.
The dating of the Nativity on the Feast of Tabernacles (around the end of September or the beginning of October, depending on the year) was proposed by John Lightfoot in 1659 in Horæ hebráicæ et talmúdicæ (II.32) Messianic Jews — a movement that emerged in the 1960’s — adopted this date, and some Christians might have adopted it too. There have been many dates proposed throughout Church history, but the truth is that nobody knows with certainty which month Our Lord was born, so we decided to celebrate it on December 25. It is not because of Saturnalia — which was celebrated by pagans in the Roman Empire around the winter solstice, from the 17th till the 23rd of December — , nor because the original date was changed by Constantine, who made Christianity legal in AD 313, but not the official religion of the empire. If you see St. Irenæus’s and Tertullian’s lists of feast days, it looks like we weren’t celebrating Christmas in the 2nd century, and though by the 4th century it was being celebrated either in December or January.
According to John of Nikiû, in the 4th century, St. Cyril of Jerusalem asked Pope Julius I to assign a proper date to celebrate Nativity based on census documents brought by Titus to Rome, and Pope Julius assigned December 25, which was the date already observed in Rome and the West. St. Cyril wasn’t able to change the celebration from January to December, probably because of conflicts with the feast of David and James the Apostle, so Jerusalem kept January 6, and Armenia did so too (Cf. Euthymius. Panóplia dogmática, 23.), but December 25 was being adopted in Antioch in the 4th century, with St. John Chrysostom as bishop (Homília VI de beato Philogénio [c. 386] December 20); and later in Egypt around the 5th century, though according to St. John Cassian Egyptian monasteries kept the ancient custom, and they still celebrate it in January till this day. Constantinople wasn’t celebrating Christmas by the end of the 4th century when Orthodox Christianity was reviving after the death of emperor Valens, who was a semi-Arian. According to Gregory of Nazianzus, he was the one who brought it there and celebrated it for the first time at a small chapel called Anastasia in December of AD 380 (Homíliæ, XXXVIII).
There are many reasons why we celebrate it on December 25. One of them is that March 25 is the traditional date of the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary and the Conception of Christ, celebrated to this day by Lutherans, too. Nine months later is December 25. Another one that I like (because another claim that you’ll hear is that lambs in Europe are born in spring, and that winter is too cold for shepherds to be outside) is that the lambing season of the Awassi sheep, the indigenous sheep of Israel, is December-January (Epstein, H. [1982] World Animal Review, №44), so was the Lamb of God born when the lambs of Israel were born.
We hear the same stories every December, like we hear the same stories about a pagan origin of Easter every year, mainly by Atheists, but also by our Christian brothers and sisters, so don’t be discouraged, because it doesn’t matter when you celebrate the Nativity, what matters is that you celebrate the Incarnation of the Word.
Article Captions
We hear the same stories every year when Christmas is around the corner—Christmas is a pagan festival, Christ wasn’t born in December. We will go through why there is reason to believe that the Latin Tradition is right to celebrate the Nativity in December, and not in September.
