None of the New Testament writings record the precise date of his birth. The lack of concern about this historical fact is easy to understand when one recalls that the first Christians expected the ‘end of the age’ to arrive imminently and Christ to return to establish God’s Kingdom on Earth in all its fullness. Knowledge of such matters would have little significance in the age to come.
The estimation of the birth only began to happen centuries later by Clement of Alexandria (200 CE):
Even half a century later, Clement’s compatriot Origen (c.– c.) does not mention any such occasion in a list of festivals (Contra Celsum 8.22).
Two Theories
One has been dubbed the ‘History of Religions’ hypothesis, first developed substantially by Usener (1889) and adopted by many scholars thereafter, most notably Botte (1932). It claims that those festivals were influenced by—or intended to supplant—pagan feast days that were being celebrated on those particular dates. In the case of January, it was alleged that according to the calendar in use at the time of Amenemhet I, in the winter solstice in Egypt had been celebrated on the equivalent of that day (Norden). Epiphanius went on to claim that the same celebration took place in the cities of Petra and of Elusa in Arabia. The parallels between this virgin birth and that of Jesus seem to suggest the reason why the Christian festival that emerged on January celebrated the birth as well as the baptism of Jesus, both constituting manifestations of divinity (see, for example, John Cassian, Conferences .).
- Unfortunately for the History of Religions hypothesis, however, after sixty years of dominance, Talley convincingly demonstrated that its theory about the winter solstice was based upon a fundamental miscalculation: ‘there is no such calendar, nor is there any meaningful basis for the association of the Julian date, January , with any festival connected with the winter solstice in the twentieth century before Christ’ (Talley 1986: 111). . Doubts have even been expressed by some about the reliability of the testimony of Epiphanius concerning a pagan Egyptian festival on January, on the grounds that he was not an Egyptian, that the feast he described was of Hellenistic and not Egyptian origin, and that his detailed account lacks any other contemporary witness. Talley concluded: ‘When all is said and done, from all of the evidence we have considered for a pagan background to Epiphany, nothing points definitely to a widespread festival on January ’ (Talley : ). The alternative school of thought, known as the Calculation (or Computation) hypothesis, emerged at the same time as Usener’s work. An attempt was later made by Strobel () to strengthen the case by pointing to rabbinic belief that the patriarchs had lived for an exact number of years, but this still failed to provide any more testimony as to why the dates of death and conception rather than birth might have been thought to have been identical in the case of Christ. Although Talley tried to bolster his argument with further rabbinic witness, the majority of scholars were still not sufficiently convinced to abandon their preference for the History of Religions hypothesis (Talley 1986: 81–83).
- The Spread of Epiphany
Winkler (19994) argued in some detail that a fundamental theme of Epiphany in this region was the appearance of fire or light at the baptism of Jesus, reflected in this hymn by the words ‘rays flashed out from it’ and also by the name given to the feast in Syriac, Denha, ‘dawn of the light’. We should also recall that in early sources Christian baptism was understood as illumination. Then Matthew 1:18–25 (the account of the birth of Jesus) was read in the cave where it was believed Jesus had been born, followed by a nocturnal vigil and Eucharist celebrated in the middle of the night in the Bethlehem church itself, for which the readings were Titus :– and Matthew :– (the visit of the Magi). The readings at the Eucharist that was held on the return to Jerusalem on January were again Titus 2:11–15 and Matthew1 :18–25, which seems to suggest that this liturgy had been the original celebration of the feast, especially as Matthew 2:1–12 was used on the following day, with the visit to Bethlehem being a later addition.
As we shall discuss later, Connell (1999) argued that some passages in the writings of Ambrose of Milan (c.340–397) pointed to 6 January having been celebrated as Christ’s Nativity in Milan in the 350s. This is another possible sign of the existence of a tradition there that predated the adoption of 25 December as the feast of the Nativity (Connell 2006: 173–176).
25 December
So far no mention has been made of Rome or North Africa. That is because there is no evidence for the feast of January having been adopted by Christians there in early times. This is not surprising because both churches tended to be conservative, following similar liturgical traditions to one another but differing from the rest of the ancient Christian world. It appears therefore that there was no festival celebrating Christ’s birth in these regions until the fourth century, and when one was instituted, it was on December. The earliest quite firm evidence for the Christian celebration of the Nativity on this date occurs in what is known as the Philocalian Calendar or Chronograph of , a collection of both civil and religious chronologies. Among these are lists of consuls of the city of Rome up to , of Roman bishops from to arranged on an annual cycle in the order of the dates on which they died, and of the anniversaries of Roman martyrs similarly organized. It has generally been agreed by liturgical scholars that this list was originally compiled in the year , prior to the time of these two bishops. The proponents of the History of Religions hypothesis based their case on two principal points. First, December was the official date of the winter solstice in the Roman Empire until the Julian calendar was adjusted by the Council of Nicaea in to the true date of December. Second, the Emperor Aurelian had revived the cult of Sol Invictus, ‘the invincible sun’, proclaiming Sol as the sole divine protector of the empire and of the emperor in and creating an annual festival, Dies natalis Solis Invicti, ‘Birthday of the Invincible Sun’, at the time of that winter solstice. Thus, they argued, the establishment of the Christian feast on that day was in order to act as a counter-attraction to those pagan festivities (Roll 1995: 65,113 –14, 127–49).
We have seen that the supporters of the Calculation hypothesis pointed to Christians in Asia Minor having adopted April as the local equivalent of the Jewish Passover on Nisan and hence also as the date of Christ’s death and conception, resulting in a birthdate of 6 January. They also cited ancient Western sources that had done the same with the Julian calendar and produced a date of March, which would have resulted in a date for the Nativity of December (Roll 1995: 87–94). These set out the date of the paschal full moon for each year of a sixteen-year cycle together with the corresponding date of Easter for years beginning from . Among eight marginal notes on the dates of biblical Passovers was one that indicated that the ‘genesis’ of Christ was on the Passover of April, , and another that his death was on March, (Mosshammer 2008: 117–25). Another work by Hippolytus not included in the list on the statue, a commentary on the Book of Daniel, gave the date of the birth of Christ as Wednesday, 25 December in the forty-second year of Augustus, 5,500 years after the creation of Adam (4.23). However, this passage, with all its manuscript variants, is normally regarded as a later interpolation (Roll 1995: 80–1).
- Talley gave the Calculation hypothesis a boost by a detailed reiteration and expansion of the arguments made by earlier scholars, including the point that in a sermon on Epiphany, Augustine of Hippo (–) had said that the heretical Donatists had never wished to celebrate that feast ‘with us’ (Talley 1986: 86–7, 92–6). Talley argued that because Augustine did not say anything like that in relation to the Donatists and Christmas, it seemed likely that they did celebrate that particular festival, and thus Christmas would have ante-dated the Donatist schism in , which was long before Christians were likely to have been influenced by pagan feast days. Moreover, Christmas could have originated in North Africa rather than Rome. His conclusions have been challenged by Connell on the basis that they rely entirely on the absence of contrary evidence rather than any positive piece of data (Connell 2006: 110–112).
- The earliest evidence for the existence of Christmas on December outside Rome is a sermon delivered at the feast by Optatus, bishop of Milevis in North Africa, probably around 361–3 (Roll 1995: 195–196).
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