No day, no month, not even a season. December 25 arrives in the fourth century, and the pagan-origins story is weaker than almost everybody thinks.
The Bible gives no date for Jesus birthday. No day, no month, not even a season. The gospels that record the birth are not interested in when it happened in the year.
December 25 first shows up in the record in the fourth century, and how it got there is genuinely debated. The confident version you have probably heard, that it was lifted from a pagan festival, is weaker than it sounds.
The year is easier. Jesus was almost certainly born between 6 and 4 BC, since Matthew places the birth during Herod's reign and Herod died in 4 BC.
Two of the four record the birth at all. Mark starts with an adult Jesus and John starts before creation. And the two that tell the story date it by politics rather than by calendar.
Caesar Augustus, a census, Quirinius governing Syria. Luke wants you to know it happened inside verifiable history, and says nothing about the time of year.
Born during the reign of Herod the king. Same instinct, anchoring it to a named reign rather than a date.
Birthday celebration was not a Jewish practice in that period, and the only two birthdays in the Bible belong to Pharaoh and Herod, both ending badly.
Worth naming honestly. Josephus dates Quirinius's census to AD 6, which does not fit Herod's reign. This is a real unresolved difficulty and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
The writers cared enormously that it happened and apparently not at all when in the year. That priority is worth copying.
Two theories, and most people have only heard one of them.
Christians picked the date to overlap with Saturnalia and with Sol Invictus, the sun festival established by Aurelian in AD 274, making the faith easier to adopt. This is the version everybody knows.
Early Christians believed prophets died on the date they were conceived. They dated the crucifixion to March 25, so conception went there too, and nine months later lands on December 25.
Andrew McGowan of Yale Divinity School lays out the problems with the popular version. It appears nowhere in early Christian writing, the earliest surviving argument for it comes from a twelfth century manuscript note, and the date was circulating before Constantine's conversion made borrowing from imperial festivals a plausible strategy. His summary is direct: “the date might derive more from Judaism than from paganism”.
Clement of Alexandria lists several proposed birth dates that people were arguing about. December 25 is not among them.
A Roman almanac gives the first clear record of December 25 as the date. That is the earliest hard evidence we have.
Parts of the church used January 6, which fits the calculation theory too, since the eastern date for the crucifixion was April 6.
That December 25 is correct. The calculation theory explains how the date was chosen. It does not make the underlying assumption about prophets true.
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Manage My Giving"Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver."2 Corinthians 9:7
This is the argument people reach for to rule out December. Luke has shepherds living out in the fields keeping watch over their flocks at night, and the reasoning goes that nobody would be doing that in winter.
Shepherds were never in the fields in winter, therefore the birth was in spring or autumn, therefore December is definitely wrong.
It is suggestive and not decisive. Winters around Bethlehem are mild, some flocks were kept out year-round, and Luke never says how cold it was.
We would rather give you a weaker argument that is true than a strong one that falls over. The honest position is that the season is unknown and the shepherds lean slightly away from midwinter without settling it.
When was Jesus born, according to the Bible?
Luke and Matthew anchor the birth to rulers and a census rather than to a calendar. December 25 first appears in the record in the fourth century, and the shepherd detail is suggestive rather than decisive.
The first is that Christmas is pagan and Christians should not keep it. The historical evidence for the borrowing theory is thinner than the people repeating it realise, and the argument also proves too much. Our days of the week are named after Norse and Roman gods. Wedding rings, birthday candles and the months of the calendar all have non-Christian origins. Nobody proposes abandoning Thursday.
The deeper problem is the logic. It assumes meaning is permanently fixed by origin, which is not how anything works. A date does not own you. What a person is doing on it does.
Pretending December 25 is the actual anniversary, or that anyone in the first century marked it, is equally untrue. Nobody knows. The church picked a date so that the event could be remembered annually, which is a sensible thing to do and does not require the date to be accurate.
We keep Christmas at Sound of Heaven, and we are clear about what we are doing. It is a chosen date for remembering something that actually happened on a date we do not know. That is not a compromise and it is not a secret.
If your conscience says not to keep it, Romans 14 covers you and nobody should pressure you. What we will not do is let a shaky historical claim be used to tell other believers they are worshipping wrong.
Read Luke 2 looking for what he does tell you, and the priorities are obvious and none of them are calendrical.
He tells you who was in power, because he wants the event located in real history under named rulers. He tells you there was no room, because the circumstances matter. He tells you the first people told were shepherds, who were not respectable and whose testimony was not valued, because that is the point he is making about who this is for.
And he tells you what the angel said, which is a message for all the people. Luke is writing to a Gentile, in Greek, about a Jewish baby, and he keeps widening the frame on purpose.
So the date is missing because the date was never the load-bearing part. What the account insists on is that it happened, in a particular place, under a particular emperor, to people nobody was watching.
For related ground, see what AD means, the origin of Christmas, whether Christians should celebrate Christmas, the wise men, Joseph and the incarnation.
No date is given anywhere in Scripture, December 25 shows up in the fourth century and probably came from a calculation rather than a pagan festival, and Luke was interested in the emperor rather than the month.
Plenty of families have this argument every year and it is rarely really about the date. Send it here and somebody at Sound of Heaven will pray over it with you.
Scripture gives no date at all. No day, no month, not even a season. The two gospels that record the birth date it by politics instead: Luke names Caesar Augustus, a census and Quirinius governing Syria, and Matthew says it happened during the reign of Herod the king. Both writers wanted the event located in verifiable history, and neither shows any interest in the time of year.
Almost certainly between 6 and 4 BC. Matthew places the birth during Herod the Great's reign, and Herod died in 4 BC, so the birth has to precede that. This produces the oddity that Jesus was born several years Before Christ, because the sixth century monk who built the AD system made a good-faith miscalculation.
Two theories exist and most people have heard only one. The borrowing theory says Christians picked a date overlapping Saturnalia and the Sol Invictus festival. The calculation theory says early Christians believed prophets died on the date of their conception, dated the crucifixion to March 25, and counted nine months forward. Andrew McGowan of Yale Divinity School notes the date might derive more from Judaism than from paganism.
It is suggestive rather than decisive. Luke has shepherds living out in the fields keeping watch at night, and the argument is that nobody would do that in December. But winters around Bethlehem are mild, some flocks were kept out year-round, and Luke never describes the weather. The honest position is that the season is unknown and this detail leans slightly away from midwinter without settling it.
The evidence for that is thinner than the people repeating it realise. It appears nowhere in early Christian writing, the earliest surviving argument for it is a twelfth century manuscript note, and the date was circulating before Constantine's conversion made borrowing from imperial festivals plausible. The logic also proves too much, since our days of the week are named after Norse and Roman gods and nobody proposes abandoning Thursday.