No one knows exactly when Jesus was born because the Bible doesn’t give us a specific date.

And the Bible doesn’t tell us, in large part, because the first generations of Christians just didn’t really care. Celebrating births was seen as more of a pagan tradition and something that, for the first few centuries, the church tried to distance itself from.

The Epiphany, the date that commemorates the coming of the wise men, was actually a much more significant day for much of Christian history, even after people started celebrating Christmas.

For example, the old English carol “The Twelve Days of Christmas” actually begins on December 25 and culminates on January 6, with the largest celebrations historically reserved for the latter date.

But if the Bible doesn’t tell us when Jesus was born and it took Christians a few centuries to start celebrating his birth, how did Christmas end up on December 25?

Was Jesus born in the fall?

There are good reasons to believe that Jesus was actually born sometime in late September to early October.

For example, it is thought that Zacharias—the Father of John the Baptist—likely entered the temple to burn incense in mid-June, which would have put John’s conception later that month.

Given that Elizabeth was six months pregnant when the angel came to see Mary (Luke 1:26), that would put Christ’s birth in the fall of the next year. However, because Scripture doesn’t tell us when Zacharias encountered the angel and we are left to rely on tradition for that dating, there is room for disagreement.

The earliest dating of December 25 goes back to the 200s, when a tradition began to circulate that Jesus was conceived on the same day that he was crucified.

Since Tertullian dated the crucifixion to March 25, nine months after that would have meant that Jesus was born on December 25. The idea that Jesus was conceived on the same day that he died is also not found in Scripture, but it became popular enough that most accepted it without giving it too much thought. By the time of Augustine, that belief had become common knowledge, and he incorporated it into his treatise On the Trinity.

However, our celebration of Christmas on December 25 is not due solely—or even primarily—to this theological quirk.

Sharing a birthday with the gods

In addition to the dating from Christian sources, December 25 has been an important day for cultures throughout much of human history.

The winter solstice was often celebrated around that time—which is the origin, in some ways, of our Christmas trees—and, by the first century, two significant Roman feasts occurred on December 25.

The first was the Feast of Saturnalia. Saturn was the Roman sun god, and, since the solstice commemorated the days beginning to get longer, people feasted and shared gifts in his honor.

The second major feast was the birthday of Mithra.

By the third century, Mithraism was quickly becoming one of the most popular mystery cults in the Roman world and was especially significant in the army. Mithra was their sun god, and they actually had several traditions in common with Christians.

For example, they practiced baptism—though by the blood of a bull instead of water—as a way of initiating new members. They believed in the “unconquered one” who served as a mediator between the light and the darkness, while also functioning as a revealer of truth. And they had a fairly well-developed theology of the afterlife, which was not overly common back then.

Both of these celebrations are important for the dating of Christmas because when Constantine—the Roman emperor who legalized Christianity—ascended to the throne and began encouraging people to convert, making a bigger deal out of Christmas was part of his approach. Because Romans already had significant festivals in place worshiping the birth or rebirth of some of their gods on December 25, it was easier to ask them to keep the parties but make them about Jesus than give up a popular celebration altogether.

So, in 336, Constantine formally declared that the celebration of Christ’s birth would occur on December 25. For the most part, it’s stayed that way ever since.

Accommodating the culture for Christ

Does knowing a bit more about the pagan and theologically questionable background to our celebration of Christmas on December 25 change the way you see the holiday?

For some, it might.

The Puritans, for example, essentially banned any large celebrations of Christmas because of those connections, and their hesitance persisted until the mid-to-late 1800s for most Americans.

But Christians have been taking pagan or cultural beliefs and recontextualizing them in ways that point people back to Jesus for much of our history, often to great effect.

Rather than dwelling on the degree to which Constantine’s motivations for setting the date diminish Christmas, let’s focus instead on whether aspects of our culture could be used for a similar purpose.

With Halloween, for example, giving out tracts with candy—and note I said with candy rather than in place of candy—or hosting trunk-or-treats the weekend before at our churches can be a great way to take a fun celebration that has little to do with Jesus and use it as a way to share the gospel.

It’s certainly possible to go too far with such efforts and cross into heresy—which is why allowing God to guide our plans is so important—but we could do far more for the kingdom if we looked for ways to accommodate the culture rather than asking the culture to accommodate us.

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited Washington, DC, yesterday on his first trip outside his homeland since it was invaded by Russia exactly three hundred days ago.

He met with President Biden in the afternoon and addressed a joint session of Congress last night. Prior to his arrival, President Biden announced that he is sending nearly $2 billion in additional security assistance to Ukraine. Congress is poised to pass more than $44 billion in additional military and economic aid to Ukraine as part of its omnibus funding bill.

I thought President Zelensky’s address to Congress was especially stirring. He spoke movingly of the sacrifices his people are making: “In two days we will celebrate Christmas. Maybe candlelit. Not because it’s more romantic, no, but because there will not be—there will be no electricity.”

To those who question our financial support of Ukraine, he said, “Your money is not charity. It’s an investment in the global security and democracy that we handle in the most responsible way.” He also declared, “The struggle will define in what world our children and grandchildren will live in.”

The same day, Russian President Vladimir Putin presided over the launch of a major new Siberian gas field to help drive a planned surge in supply to China. His country is obviously an existential threat to Ukraine and its neighbors, and his nuclear capacities make him a danger to the world. However, Russia is not yet the clear and present danger to the United States that the old Soviet Union represented.

This is good news for our country. But is it bad news for our faith?

Three reasons for the decline of American Christianity

Pew Research Center estimates that Christians could make up a minority of Americans by 2070. According to sociology professor Stephen Bullivant, a practicing Catholic who teaches in London and Sydney, there are three main reasons for this decline in religious commitment and the concomitant rise of the nonreligious: the Cold War, 9/11, and the internet.

The Cold War pitted Christian America against godless communism in the eyes of many Americans. However, in response to 9/11, a “new atheism” rose to prominence: public figures such as Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins claimed that religion produces terrorists and gave intellectual respectability to religious skepticism. Along the way, the internet has provided support for people who are questioning their faith by offering community with fellow doubters.

Bullivant admits that cultural issues such as abortion and gay marriage have played a factor in the current exodus from the church, but he notes that denominations such as the Episcopal Church have adopted progressive theological positions but still lost members in droves.

His analysis aligns with a narrative we have seen in the decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union: the USSR gave the US an external enemy that united our disparate cultural blocs in a common cause. Confronting the existential threat of nuclear annihilation forced our political parties to work together in ways we have not since the USSR fell. Apart from a brief moment of patriotism after 9/11, we have not experienced such unity for decades.

If, in fact, our unity was based on external enemies more than internal cohesion, it’s hard to see what could unify us again apart from a cataclysmic crisis.

How the world changes

Architect, writer, and inventor Buckminster Fuller observed, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

From the printing press to the iPhone, cultural history has proven him right. But Fuller’s thesis was never more powerfully demonstrated than it was twenty centuries ago in a manger in a tiny town south of Jerusalem.

The world into which Jesus was born was as divided and divisive as ours. While the “Pax Romana” prevailed through military force and subjugation to the Empire, the culture of the first century was conflicted and confused in the extreme.

A plethora of religions and worldviews competed with each other, including Greek and Roman mythology, mystery cults, Judaism, and philosophical schools such as neo-Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Cynicism, and Skepticism. Jewish society was divided into supporters of Rome such as the Sadducees, zealots plotting to overthrow the Empire, legalists like the Pharisees, and those who were caught in the midst of their conflicts.

Into this dark and divided culture came the “light of the world” (John 9:5). His movement transcended the cultural and spiritual divides of his day with a new hope unlike any the world could offer. He promised his followers, “Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12).

Of course, the key is to “follow” Jesus.

The only path to true peace

St. Ambrose (340–397) was one of the greatest theologians in Christian history and a seminal contributor to the conversion of St. Augustine. Referring to our bodies as God’s temple, he urged us to “maintain this house, sweep out its secret recesses until it becomes immaculate and rises as a spiritual temple for a holy priesthood, firmly secured by Christ, the cornerstone.”

Ambrose also noted: “Christ is the image of God and so any good or religious act that a soul performs magnifies that image of God in that soul, the God in whose likeness the soul itself was made. And thus the soul itself has some share in its greatness and is ennobled.”

Billy Graham made the same point more simply but no less profoundly: “In the same proportion that the world has trusted Christ, it has peace.”

Is your heart at peace today?

If not, why not?

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