Was Jesus born in September or October?

[UDS]

*Originally posted by kniz *
**Let’s see a **cite ** for this contention about symbolizing the victory of light over darkness. **

Well, it was conjecture on my part but, amazingly enough, it is supported by the piece to which you yourself linked.

“Ultimately, of course, the holiday is rooted deeply in the cycle of the year. It is the Winter Solstice that is being celebrated, seed-time of the year, the longest night and shortest day. It is the birthday of the new Sun King, the Son of God – by whatever name you choose to call him. On this darkest of nights, the Goddess becomes the Great Mother and once again gives birth. And it makes perfect poetic sense that on the longest night of the winter, ‘the dark night of our souls’, there springs the new spark of hope, the Sacred Fire, the Light of the World, the Coel Coeth”

Here is a cite supporting my contention**
[/QUOTE]

Your contention was that “Christmas was set on that date [25 December], since it made it easier to convert the pagans if they didn’t have to give up their favorite holiday.”

My counter-contention was that Christmas was set on 25 December because the existing symbolism of the celebrations already held on that date seemed an appropriate one to adopt for Christmas.

The piece to which you linked says:

"Ultimately, of course, the holiday is rooted deeply in the cycle of the year. It is the Winter Solstice that is being celebrated, seed-time of the year, the longest night and shortest day. It is the birthday of the new Sun King, the Son of God – by whatever name you choose to call him. On this darkest of nights, the Goddess becomes the Great Mother and once again gives birth. And it makes perfect poetic sense that on the longest night of the winter, ‘the dark night of our souls’, there springs the new spark of hope, the Sacred Fire, the Light of the World, the Coel Coeth.

That is why Pagans have as much right to claim this holiday as Christians. Perhaps even more so, as the Christians were rather late in laying claim to it, and tried more than once to reject it. There had been a tradition in the West that Mary bore the child Jesus on the twenty-fifth day, but no one could seem to decide on the month. Finally, in 320 C.E., the Catholic Fathers in Rome decided to make it December, in an effort to co-opt the Mithraic celebration of the Romans and the Yule celebrations of the Celts and Saxons."

With respect, this seems to me to support my contention at least as well as yours. The passage discusses the symbolism of the existing celebrations, but says nothing about the decision being motivated by a desire to attract converts.

[zev_steinhardt]

*Originally posted by TheLadyLion *
**Enlighten me here, please. Is there a specific Biblical or non-Biblical reference to this? I find it interesting that you have a specific time of year for Zacharias to be doing his job, which according to Luke was burning the incense inside the Temple. Perhaps zev steinhart can help as well? **

The kohanim in the Temple period were divided into 24 mishmaros or watches. Each group served in the Temple one week out of the year. Thus, (according to my calculation) most kohanic families would work in the Temple twice per year. However, since there are 52 weeks in a year (and not 48), the time of year for any particular family would shift through the years (each year each family’s shift would start four weeks earlier).

Zev Steinhardt

[handy]

“September to October.”

That assumes, of course, they were using the same calendar as us, right?

This topic comes up once a year it seems, although more like when, not what month of birth.

The bible states He was born in the time of Herod, King of the Jews for the time (there are a lot of Herods)…I was thinking perhaps if they could plot the starmap & all they might be better able to predict what time of the year.

[Padeye]

*Originally posted by handy *
**“September to October.”

That assumes, of course, they were using the same calendar as us, right?**

I assume you’re being facetious but what the heck. It’s unlikely they were using a calendar that wold not be invented for more than 1,500 years so it’s a safe bet they were using the Hebrew lunar calendar. We just extrapolate backwards with the Gregorian calendar to put the seasons in relation to months we are familiar with.

[kniz]

*Originally posted by UDS *
Well, it was conjecture on my part but, amazingly enough, it is supported by the piece to which you yourself linked.

Well, I wasn’t winging it. What I said I’ve heard/read before.

My counter-contention was that Christmas was set on 25 December because the existing symbolism of the celebrations already held on that date seemed an appropriate one to adopt for Christmas.

If that is true why did Martin Luther and Calvin abhor the date? (that is the reason I included that statement). The answer is they hated it because it was a pagan holiday, with no real connection to Christainity.

in an effort to co-opt the Mithraic celebration of the Romans and the Yule celebrations of the Celts and Saxons.

2 a : to take into a group (as a faction, movement, or culture) : ABSORB, ASSIMILATE <the students are co-opted by a system they serve even in their struggle against it – A. C. Danto> b : TAKE OVER, APPROPRIATE

**With respect, this seems to me to support my contention at least as well as yours. The passage discusses the symbolism of the existing celebrations, but says nothing about the decision being motivated by a desire to attract converts. **

What do you think Paul was running all over the place trying to do? He was trying to convert people. First he was converting Jews, but there weren’t that many of them and they didn’t always buy his product. He came up with the idea of converting gentiles, whose religion was…let me see…oh, yeah the gentiles were pagans. In 320 A.D. Constantine had already made Christainity the state religion, but they had to get the masses to accept it. What better way than to turn a pagan holiday into a Christain holiday?

I still want a cite for

They chose the date because it was (close to) the winter solstice, after which days grow longer and the weather grows warmer, so it symbolised the victory of light over darkness, warmth over cold, life over death, etc. That symbolism seemed appropriate to the early Christians for celebrating the birth of Christ, so the adopted it.

Its not a bad conjecture, but I’d like to see it as a fact.

[DRomm]

December 25 was picked by Constantine because it was his Sol Invictus holiday. See http://www.geocities.com/lilandr/kantoj/diversaj/ditties/solinvictus.htm , though it loads music (which is amusing).

A longer exegesis is found at http://www.crosscircle.com/CH_2f.htm , "In the interests of unity Constantine deliberately chose to blur the distinctions among Christianity, Mithraism and Sol Invictus—deliberately chose not to see any contradictions among them. Thus, he tolerated the deified Jesus as the earthly manifestation of Sol Invictus. Thus he would build a Christian church and, at the same time, statues of the mother goddess Cybele and of Sol Invictus, the sun god. "

By the way, I should point out that there’s this wonderful new invention called “the internet” and has nifty new search engines like google.com , and that a quick check of references will help a great many people answer a great many questions raised in this forum. (Not that everything on the net is true, but many of the questions have been asked and answered previously.)

Hope this helps.

[UDS]

*Originally posted by kniz *
**If that is true why did Martin Luther and Calvin abhor the date? (that is the reason I included that statement). The answer is they hated it because it was a pagan holiday, with no real connection to Christianity. **

Did they abhor the date, or the general nature of the celebration as observed in their time? Lots of Christians today deplore the secularisation and matererialism of Christmas and wish to see it celebrated in a different way, but they have no issue with the date on which it is celebrated. Likewise some denominations do not celebrate it at all - e.g. the Jehovah’s Witnesses - but, again, the date is not an issue for them.

Do you have a cite for your contention that Luther and Calvin were concerned about the date?

*Originally posted by kniz *
What do you think Paul was running all over the place trying to do? He was trying to convert people. First he was converting Jews, but there weren’t that many of them and they didn’t always buy his product. He came up with the idea of converting gentiles, whose religion was…let me see…oh, yeah the gentiles were pagans.

Yes, Paul was trying to make converts, but as that was a couple of centuries before the date of Christmas was fixed, it doesn’t tell us much about the thought process behind the selection of 25 December.

*Originally posted by kniz *
In 320 A.D. Constantine had already made Christianity the state religion, but they had to get the masses to accept it. What better way than to turn a pagan holiday into a Christain holiday?

Christianity has always been willing to take on board not merely festivals but practices, beliefs and rituals from other religious traditions. It is easy to paint this a cynical ploy to attract converts by persuading them that Christianity is not that different from the faith they are already practicing. This does not, however, bear much scrutiny. Roman pagans were unlikely to be fooled into thinking that Christianity was the same as Roman paganism by the retention of a festival at around the time of the winter solstice when in fact virtually every other aspect of the religion was radically different from Roman paganism, starting with the notion that there is only one God, and that He became incarnate in humble circumstances in an obscure middle eastern province of the Empire, and that he is intolerant of the worship of other gods. These notions would have been so foreign and indeed so offensive to Roman pagans that the idea that they would have found the retention of a midwinter festival a reason for becoming Christian is simply laughable.

Better, I think, to look for an explanation in the fact that Christians were (and are) quite willing to accept that God’s revelation of Himself and His truth to the world is not confined to the revelations made in the Scriptures, or to the revelations made to the Jewish people. Even today, any systematic study of theology starts with the Greek philosophers who were, of course, pagans. Thus Christians of the time time would have been perfectly willing to recognise elements of divine truth, or symbolism appopriate to divine truth, in contemporay pagan religions, and co-opt them.

The quote which you give from the piece you linked to earlier

“. . . in an effort to co-opt the Mithraic celebration of the Romans and the Yule celebrations of the Celts and Saxons . . .”

suggests that it was the celebration the Christians were co-opting, not the believers. I still think it supports my position rather than yours. Nothing in the paper you linked to suggests that the motivation was to make it easier to obtain converts, whereas it does discuss the light-over-dark symbolism of the solstice.

Having said that, our positions are not that far apart. We are agreed that the Christians used the date of an existing non-Christian festival to celebrate Christmas. Your own cite says that the existing festival celebrates the victory of light over darkness, so we are presumably agreed on that also. By using the date of the festival, you will agree that the Christians were associating Christmas with the existing symbolism? At the very least, then, they saw nothing objectionable in that symbolism. I suggest that they welcomed it, because it was entirely appropriate to their idea of the significance of the Incarnation. The light-over-dark symbolism still features strongly in Christmas liturgies. Do you disagreem with any of this?

In so far as it might have made Christianity more acceptable to pagans, no doubt they welcomed that also. I doubt myself that it would have had much effect in this regard, for the reasons already mentioned, unless we consider all pagans to have been incredibly superficial.

[RedNaxela]

*Originally posted by zev_steinhardt *
The kohanim in the Temple period were divided into 24 mishmaros or watches. Each group served in the Temple one week out of the year. Thus, (according to my calculation) most kohanic families would work in the Temple twice per year. However, since there are 52 weeks in a year (and not 48), the time of year for any particular family would shift through the years (each year each family’s shift would start four weeks earlier).

Excellent summary, as usual, zev. I should add that all of the mishmaros shared equally in the Temple service during the three pilgrimage festivals: Passover, Shavuot (Pentecost), and Sukkot (Tabernacles).

I’m not so sure about the year-by-year shifting, though:

There’s a Midrashic statement (Yalkut Shimoni, Leviticus 643) to the effect that the “seven complete weeks” of the Omer count (Lev. 23:15-16) are only “complete” (i.e., whole calendar weeks beginning with Sunday) “when Jeshua and Shechaniah are not among them.” Jeshua and Shechaniah were the ninth and tenth mishmaros (as listed in I Chron. 24:7ff), and each mishmar’s Temple service began and ended on Shabbat; only in a year when the 49th and last day of the Omer is on Shabbat would it happen that Jeshua’s shift didn’t begin until the Omer period is over.

So it would seem, then, that the cycle of mishmaros was reset every year on or around the first of Nissan (nine weeks before the end of the Omer), which is the beginning of the Temple’s fiscal year. I don’t know whether that means that the first three or four mishmaros got an extra turn every year, or whether they found some other way to equalize the distribution. In any case, returning to dougie_monty’s analysis: since Abijah was mishmar #8, apparently they would have had their turn every year in late Iyar-early Sivan (around mid-to-late May), as well as again about half a year later.

Note: the Talmud, Arachin 11b, states that when the Temple was destroyed (both times), the officiating mishmar was Jehoiarib, #1. This would seem to contradict the above, since the 9th of Av, the date of the Destruction, is only about 18 weeks after the 1st of Nissan. One possibility is that under siege conditions, not all of the mishmaros had members who were available and able to serve.

[vanilla]

I’ve read He was born Sept-Oct. on teh Jewish New Year.
Why?
Well, it seems to make sense.;j

[Dread_Pirate_Jimbo]

FWIW, I saw a show on A&E a few years ago which suggested the birthday was on or around Sept.15, 12 BC (IIRC). The reasoning was an astrological event which might have come down to us though time as the “Star of Bethlehem.” Specifically, there was a convergence of Jupiter and Saturn in Pisces at dawn, which would have signified to the Babylonian astrologers that a great king of the Hebrews had been born. The Magi would have then made their trip to visit the new-born king, and so on.

I’m sure this theory has plenty of holes in it, but it does support the September/October discussion.

Just my $.02. Carry on.

[dougie_monty]

*Originally posted by UDS]

Christianity has always been willing to take on board not merely festivals but practices, beliefs and rituals from other religious traditions. It is easy to paint this a cynical ploy to attract converts by persuading them that Christianity is not that different from the faith they are already practicing.

Maybe that’s the core of the matter. Constantine had no religious goals–after his own “conversion” he had several members of his immediate family killed–but rather political. He was a pagan through and through. But in the Old Testament we find out what happened with the “golden calf” in the wilderness, and the Baal prophets contending with Elijah on Mt. Carmel.
In short, Christianity does not need to win converts for political or financial purposes. Jesus noted, “Many are called but few chosen”; Peter noted God is no respector of persons; and even the words of Gamaliel at Acts 5:38, 39 come to mind. If religionists compromise the message of the Bible to win converts they are as deserving of contempt as the Israelites who riled Moses with the golden calf.

[handy]

If he was conceived in December around the 25th, he could have been born in September. Maybe they were celebrating Christmas by having a new baby. Oh, wait, that doesn’t make sense.

“Christmas is not a date. It is a state of mind.” - Mary Ellen Chase

[vanilla]

He was conceived on Hanukah!