Questioner

I am trying to come up with how the date of Dec 25 is celebrated as our LORD's birthday. I have studied the scriptures and if I only knew when Zechariah's 8th course of duty in the Temple was I would be able to come pretty close to the actual birth date of our Savior and LORD. If someone could help, I would appreciate it.

Answer

You are chasing down a path with no answer!  The date of Jesus' birth is not known.  It is a guess that it was in the winter, but that's a large spread of days. 

“Christmas” does not exist. There is no account of Christians gathering to celebrate the birth of Christ anywhere in the Bible. Even the wise men of Matthew’s account, who came in response to the appearance of His birth star in the sky, did not celebrate together about His birth (MAT 2:1-13); they traveled from their own country bearing gifts in order to worship the child (and the Scriptures indicate that this occurred long after Jesus was born—his family was living in a house, not a stable, and Jesus could have been as old as two years of age.)

Christians did not begin to celebrate the birth of Christ until the 2nd century AD, two hundred years after the fact. Even the word “Christmas” itself is not Biblical; it comes from Roman Catholicism in the 4th century AD. The “mas” of Christmas comes from the Mass or Eucharistic service of western Catholicism; that rite was concluded with the words, “Ite, Missa Est” (Go, as it is ended), with Missa  (dismissal) finally becoming the name of the rite itself. In AD 336 Christmas was declared an official Roman Empire holiday by Emperor Constantine and was celebrated in Rome on the 25th of December by AD 354. In the eastern sections of the Roman Empire the custom was adopted by the middle of the 5th century AD (except in The Church of Jerusalem which has always maintained a January 6th celebration.)

The 25th of December has no relationship to the time of Christ's birth.  Bottom line, if God wanted us to celebrate Jesus' birth then He would have made it clear.  What is clear is that we are not required, nor encourage to celebrate a particular date as the birth of Christ, just the fact that He was born and the implications of that.

Added to Bible Bulletin Board's "Tony Capoccia's Questions and Answers" by:

Tony Capoccia
Bible Bulletin Board
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