I always did believe that the day the baby was born counted as the first day. However, I do not have the credentials that you’re waiting for. So I went to AskMoses and spoke with a rabbi there, LIVE. Here is the session transcript:
Rabbi Shlomo T. Chein was ordained at the Institute for Rabbinic Studies in Melbourne Australia and then spent time teaching various subjects in Judaism at the Mayanot Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. He is the Director of Chabad @ UC S. Cruz in California ;j
There is an annual cycle in the Church’s liturgical calendar revolving around the birth of Jesus.
March 25 - The Annunciation: The angel, Gabriel, announces to Mary that she’s going to bear a son. This is reckoned the moment of conception and exacty nine months before Jesus’ birth. At this time, Mary was also told that Elizabeth, her kinswoman, was six months pregnant. Mary then goes to visit Elizabeth and three months later…
June 24 - Birth of John the Baptist: Luke alone makes Jesus and John the Baptist related. (Why not the 25th? I have no clue.)
December 25 - Birth of Jesus: aka Nativity of The Lord, or, the Mass of Christ otherwise known as Christmas.
January 1 - The Circumcision of Christ, i.e., his Bris: This is just a one verse mention in Luke’s Gospel. And as mentioned above, the eighth day after birth. Vatican II toyed with making January 1st a day of Prayer for World Peace instead, but then settled on making the day a Holy Day of Obligation (all Catholics should go to Mass on that day) celebrating “Mary: Mother of God.” The title of “Mother of God” is one of the ancient dogmas of the early Church (the other one being her {perpetual} virginity). So the current practice is to give the circumcision a mention, but to make Jan 1 a Marian feast day.
February 2 - The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple and/or The Purification of Mary: Forty days later. This gets a lengthy story in Luke’s Gospel (2:22-39). Two old people who liked to hang out in the Temple (you know the type), Simeon and Anna, both prophecy upon seeing the baby Jesus. Simeon mentions that Jesus will be a “light for revelation to the Gentiles.” This brings up a theme of light for this feast. And so, it used to be a big thing to bless candles and come into church in procession with them, just as Christ our Light came into the Temple. Thus, the feast was also called Candlemas (the Mass of Candles). Today, the Church sticks with “The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple” as the main theme and official name for the feast day.
Now, lest we leave it out: January 6 – The Epiphany: The Orthodox and Eastern Rite Catholics celebrate this day as the Nativity of the Lord (IOW, their Christmas). The Latin Rite Church makes this a celebration of the visitation of the magi (the so called historically inaccurate ‘three kings’). This is the Twelfth Day of Christmas and at one time officially ended the liturgical Christmas season (in the West). Today the Christmas season extends to the following Sunday which is the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord.
Touchstone magazine ( a conservative magazine for Christians: Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopal, Orthodox) has an online article ** Calculating Christmas** (read it it is fairly short) at http://www.touchstonemag.com/docs/issues/16.10docs/16-10pg12.html on the same topic. The author says that Dec 25th and Apr 6th were already good candidates for Jesus’ birthday BEFORE the whole “invincible Sun” thing. In fact he claims that what happened was that the “Sun” festival was put up to counter the Chritian celbration.
Of course it really is not important, for Christians, to know the exact day (it’d be jolly good if we did) but to temember the our Saviour was born. (extremely minor witnessing)
Interesting that he quotes this as the date of solstice. Most of the “pagan” ceremonies were for the return of the sun. Stonehenge, etc. designed to tell those important cycle times.
The idea of Christ’s birth preceeding the Roman celebration of Saturnalia is a bit off, though. Of course some people will come up with whatever theory supports their own belief.
When last I looked, the only stars that tend to hover over even a large area persistently do so over the poles. Everywhere else (including any portion of the sky that could be directly overhead, however briefly, in the Middle East) the stars tend to rise in the east, ascend to overhead, then scoot off to the west and set.
Now, insofar as these were supposed to be wise men, I’m inclined to think that they’d have more sense than to see a star literally “in the east” and ride in that direction until the normal rotation of the earth caused the same star to be overhead (a more or less inevitable occurrence, give or take fluctuations of latitude and whatnot, and having virtually nothing to do with their own motion unless those were some damn fast camels) and then hop off and say “aha, this is where that star was shining all along”.
I find the “astrology” theory a lot more compelling – i.e., that they had their star readers who read meanings and significances into the presence of objects when they appeared in constellations. The nomenclature may not have distinguished between actual star (which might or might not have been a nova or supernova), comet, meteor (shooting star), or planet (wandering star)-- it could have been any of these – but whatever it was, I suspect that it was the presence of it in whatever passed for constellations at the time, and like modern Astrology was interpreted symbolically. “Oho, new star in the Throne of David constellation, with a tail as big as a kite, and, lo, the Wandering Star of the Red Eye is just leaving the Escape from the Bondage of Egypt constellation. That means a new king is born to us. And oh, lookie, the moon is a waning crescent, that could represent Bethlehem”
The idea of Christ’s birth preceeding the Roman celebration of Saturnalia is a bit off, though. Of course some people will come up with whatever theory supports their own belief.
Had to quote that, it ws put much more kindly than what I was thinking.
I always figured the most important thing Jesus did was to die. That his birth is essentially just a means to this end (although he is reported to have made a few dogmatic adjustments between the two events). Why should anyone CARE when he was born?
And another thing, since his death date is so dang important, wouldn’t it seem appropriate to nail IT down (pun intended) to a steady date as opposed to the current lunar calendar rigermorole currently used to determine Easter? (Easter celebration gets its own thread!). More fuel to the argument that Christians were making up dates to meet the needs of an expanding religion…not that there’s anything WRONG with that, just don’t try & deny that’s what happened.
Actually, Easter does have a fixed date. It’s the first Sunday after the first Full Moon after the Vernal Equinox (there’s adjustments due to time zones and such; see here for more details). Of course that doesn’t give a fixed day and month within our calendar system; instead it’s using a lunar calendar.
Incorrect. Eastern Orthodox, whether they use the Julian calendar or the Gregorian one, celebrate Christmas on Dec. 25. If they use the Julian calendar, then the Gregorian date turns out to be Jan. 7.
Jan. 6 is the feast of Theophany, wherein the Orthodox celebrate Christ’s baptism in the Jordan, and also perform the service of the great blessing of waters (i.e. holy water is consecrated for use during the year). Theophany is also significant because it celebrates the manifestation of the Trinity: Christ was baptized, while the Father spoke from heaven and the Holy Spirit descended in the form of a dove. At one point, Theophany also commemorated the Nativity, but at an early date the Nativity celebrations were moved to December 25. I believe that only the Armenians still celebrate Nativity along with Theophany on Jan. 6.
That is assuming that the story about a star appearing is real (then you can indeed search for a nova/comet/whatever apearing roughly around the time the Christ is supposed to be born)…IOW that any detail mentionned in the gospels are true. Big assumption, IMO…
Total immersion in a body of a water plays a significant role in Judaism for purification from various types of impurities (such as those caused by bodily flows, e.g., menstraution or seminal flow). The time around the end of the Second Temple era featured the rise of a number of sects in Judaism, of which the Baptists were one. They believed in the usage of immersion in water on a regular basis even without the intent to purify from any specific contamination (I believe the Essenes did this also - and to a limited extent, some modern Jews do, too). Maybe try Googling some of these terms for more infomation.
First off, in Orthodox Christianity, Christ was God, so one would presume that the ultimate reason that He was baptized was because He wished to be.
More helpfully, Christ was baptized for a number of reasons: it was an opportunity to manifest the Trinity and also marked Christ’s first manifestation to the world at large, it sanctified the waters by having them poured on Christ God, and most importantly, it fulfilled the prototype of baptism found in Judaism (the mikvah) which was for physical purity, and instituted it in the New Covenant as the means of man’s regeneration and entrance into new life.
For Christians, more important than Jesus’s death was his resurrection. And yes, his death and resurrection is more important than his birth. Though many put more effort and time into the Christmas celebration, any Christian theologian will tell you that Easter is more important and it is the most important feast in the Christian calendar.
That being said, his birth is not unimportant. It defines that Jesus was indeed human. And the Virgin Birth establishes that he was the Son of God (even if one regards the Virgin Birth as a fabricated story to explain belief - it’s the point of the story that counts).
And so, the celebration of Jesus’s birth took on special significance in the Early Church debates over the humanity and divinity of Christ. And once you are itching to emphasize the miraculous birth through a birth day celebration, you run up into the practical problem of when to celebrate that birthday.
It’s the anal types that get all uptight over ‘the right date.’ Most are happy that one stable date is picked.
[Though, IMO, I’d really like it if the date was transferred to a Sunday each year with Monday being a day-off holiday.]
I don’t have any personal primary sources, but I will note that in the Catholic Encyclopedia entry to which I linked on 12-13-2003 06:24 PM, there is no general indication of a Christian use of December 25 prior to around 350 (with one rather suspect reference dating to 336 or, more likely, 354) while Aurelian’s promotion of Mithra dates to 274. (The C.E. notes that Mithraism reached its “height” under Aurelian rather than Touchstone Magazine’s claim that he established it in 274.)
Actually, Tighe makes no mention at all of Saturnalia, no doubt because 25 December never fell within it. The real argument is instead about the festival of Sol Invictus (or rather one of its festivals - there were other, more important festivals of the cult at other times of the year). What Tighe is trying to highlight is a genuine oddity implicit in the Christmas-is-just-a-pagan-festival theory.
It is perfectly true that there is no authentic evidence that Christians linked 25 December to any event in Jesus’ life before 274, the year the worship of Sol Invictus became part of the state religion. However, what is undeniable is that some Christians had already been linking other events in Jesus’ life to 25 March. As Tighe explains, this was largely because of its presumed association with the Crucifixion. Now, the choice of that date may have been influenced by the date of the spring equinox, although, as the Gospels give some (albeit contradictory) clues as to the date of the Crucifixion, the range of dates they could have settled on for that was always going to be extremely limited.
Tighe wants to argue that some Christians deduced 25 December as the date of the Nativity from this and that they had done so before 274. What he doesn’t note is the third possibility - that they settled on the date after 274, but that they nevertheless deduced it on that basis. In other words, that they settled on a date associated with Sol Invictus was little more than a coincidence. Bear in mind, if you want to assume that the date was chosen because of that association, you’ll still be left with the converse coincidence that this neatly fell nine months after 25 March, a date already of some significance to some Christians. In fact, such coincidences are just what one would expect once they began playing about with the quarter days and a nine-month cycle. It therefore doesn’t necessarily follow that the Christians settled on 25 December because it was the winter solstice and/or a festival of Sol Invictus
