The odds of Jesus of Nazareth being born on December 25th are exactly 1/365—precisely the same as any other day of the year selected at random.
Tim Keyes
The Question-
“How do we know Jesus wasn’t born on December 25th?” is a question I am asked frequently. The question implies that the issue of Jesus being born on December 25th is already settled and the burden of proof falls on me to disprove an established fact. But the truth of the matter is that it is not an established fact. Although hardly scientific, a simple survey of believer and non-believer alike asking, “Do you believe Jesus of Nazareth was born on December 25th?” will readily demonstrate this, because significant numbers (again) of believer and non-believers will respond “no” (I don’t believe he was born on December 25th).
Therefore, when asked, I usually respond to this question with a question of my own. “How do you know that he was?” The responses I get are mostly variations of a few common themes that go like this…
- Everyone (already) “knows” Jesus was born on December 25th.
- We’ve been celebrating Christmas (axiomatically associated with his birth) for “thousands” of years…
- How could millions of people (celebrating his birth on December 25th) be wrong?
- Early historical records verify that he was born on December 25th.
- The Bible says so.
Tradition in Not Evidence-
Ironically, if “the Bible [really] said so,” then this conversation would already be over—therefore either the Bible doesn’t say so, or at least not explicitly. I will address this in more detail later. For the moment, let’s start with the first three responses: 1) “Everyone already knows”; 2) “Celebrating for thousands of years”; and 3) “Millions of people can’t be wrong”—as stated earlier, implying that a December 25 birthdate is an established fact, and the burden of proof rests on those who disagree, and they are the ones who need to disprove it.
The rebuttal to these “answers” is that they are anecdotal evidence at best. In scientific and legal parlance, “anecdotal evidence” means:
• Casual observations or indications rather than rigorous analysis.
• Information passed along by word-of-mouth but not objectively documented.
• Evidence based on an individual experience.
All five of the reasons I cited above fit this definition to a “T”—they are based on casual observation, word of mouth transmission, and personal experience. In other words, what they lack is some kind of documentation.
In summary, of the people who ask me this question, it seems most who believe Jesus was born on December 25th believe so because “everyone else does”—a favorite reason of children everywhere. The bottom line is that anecdotal evidence isn’t really evidence at all. Or, as I have been saying for years, “Tradition is not evidence.” Real evidence is what truly matters in this and all historical questions. You show me your evidence, and I’ll show you mine.
But if this weren’t enough, these anecdotal answers are factually inaccurate. First, as mentioned earlier, everyone does not know that Jesus was born on December 25th. Intramural debate regarding the dating of his birth has been part of the Christian community for (at least) hundreds of years, with certain denominations celebrating his birth on one date and other denominations celebrating it on another, or not celebrating it at all. Along these lines, Ezra Stiles, the seventh president of Yale College, one of the founders of Brown University, and a Congregationalist minister and theologian, astutely noted in his diary, December 25, 1776:
This day the nativity of our blessed Savior is celebrated throughout three quarters of Christendom… [what about the other quarter?] but the true day is unknown. On any day I can readily join with my fellow Christians in giving thanks to God for his unspeakable gift and rejoice with them in the birth of a Savior. Tho’ [if] it had been the will of Christ that the anniversary of his nativity should have been celebrated, he would have at least let us have known the day.”1
Ezra Stiles, 7th President of Yale College, personal diary, December 25, 1776, comments added.
Additionally, no we haven’t been celebrating “Christmas” for thousands of years. While acknowledging that the word “thousands” could be being used in a figurative sense, the celebration of “Christmas” is not as old as everyone thinks and has not remotely been uniform throughout its history. The word Christmas is not found in the Bible. It is not there—ever. This should be obvious, but the word Christmas simply did not exist at the time the Bible was written. The single word Christmas, which is a contraction of Christ’s mass, started to be used somewhere around the middle of the 14th century. The oldest written use of the phrase “merry Christmas” is in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1534. The phrase, however, was not likely used by Protestants, and was surely avoided by the Puritans. The Puritans did not celebrate Christmas because they sought a more biblically “pure” faith, and Christmas is simply not in the Bible. Plus, the word merry in historical context is at least a strong allusion, if not a direct reference to, intoxication. Puritans in England and colonial America shunned and suppressed Christmas as unbiblical. Oliver Cromwell banned Christmas festivities in England between 1649 and 1660. It was also illegal in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1681. George Washington specifically chose Christmas night to cross the Delaware River and attack Trenton during the American Revolution because he knew that British and Hessian troops celebrated Christmas while Americans did not—over-indulgence in food and drink would make them unprepared to fight.
The modern Christmas tradition, that of a long-standing domestic holiday, is an invented tradition and has only been around for a couple of hundred years. The real history of the holiday known as “Christmas,” which for most is axiomatically associated with the birth of Christ, has been a veritable catalog of licentiousness and debauchery.
Finally, “How could millions of people be wrong?” Just look around. Even a casual survey of top world religions by population reveals four religions with over a billion followers, four more with over 100 million followers, and a dozen with over a million followers. Granted, relativism is becoming more and more common even within established religions, but multiple independent claims of truth are by definition mutually exclusive. If one major world religion proves to be “The Truth,” then billions, not just millions of people have been wrong for a very long time.
Early Historical Evidence-
The claim that “early historical evidence confirms a December 25th birthdate” is infrequent in rigorous debate, and is often treated as more of an assumption or question, “Early historical evidence confirms a December 25th birthdate—doesn’t it?” Based upon the anecdotal evidence that Jesus was born on December 25th, some people just assume there must be (other) evidence to support the hypothesis and simply open their mouth before investigating.
The simple fact of the matter is that early historical evidence is inconclusive. First, there just isn’t much to go on—period. I am unaware of any historical references to a December 25th birthdate until the early 3rd century.2 This means nearly 200 years passed before anyone wrote anything down about the subject. Is it as if, for the first 200 years after Christ, the apostles, and their disciples (and their disciples), didn’t know, didn’t care, or didn’t bother to record when Jesus was born. Then, once someone did write something down, it was not recorded testimony from an earlier source, but a standalone hypothesis taking a stab at when Jesus may have been born based off a possible Hebraic interpretive technique. In other words, the earliest historical records of a possible December 25 birthdate are demonstrably not due to a chain of evidence descended from eyewitness testimony as might be assumed.
The few early historical records that claim a December 25 birthdate are too few in number, from too long after the fact, based on unsubstantiated hypotheses, and of too questionable documentary evidence to be considered credible. The only conclusion one can reach about these documents is that are inconclusive. One cannot reasonably conclude that they demonstrate that Jesus was born on December 25th. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t, but the early historical records are inconclusive.
The Bible Says So-
Which brings us back to “The Bible Says So”. But as stated earlier, if the Bible said so, this discussion would already be over. The fact of the matter is that the Bible does not explicitly or implicitly give a birthdate for Jesus of Nazareth in the gospel narratives. And again, our assumptions play a central role. What we assume we know about the birth of Christ usually comes from a twisted form of reverse engineering. Because we are familiar with “Christmas” related resources such as Christmas carols, Christmas cards, and the ubiquitous Christmas pageant with a live nativity scene, we tend to look backwards at the biblical record through a “Christmas” colored viewfinder and correspondingly “find” what we expect to find. The obvious problem is that this is a biased as opposed to critical examination of the evidence.
The flip side however is that there is a plethora of credible evidence if you know where and how to look. The infancy narratives (Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2), have more chronological markers than pretty much any other biblical records—the Gospel of Luke in particular. These markers include references to historical figures and events, plus events in the Jewish religious calendar. These kinds of chronological markers make it possible for us to at least estimate when Jesus was born. And if the markers are accurate enough, and we have enough of them to cross reference with each other, maybe even pinpoint some candidate dates.
And finally, there is the astronomical data. When the wise men from the East visited Herod in Jerusalem, they cited the observation of a celestial event as their reason for traveling to Jerusalem to pay homage to the new king of the Jews. The text implies that this celestial event not only informed the wise men that a king had been born, but also told them at least approximately when he had been born. Furthermore, the text implies that Herod used this information to narrow down the timeframe of the Messiah’s birth to use for his nefarious scheme.
These astronomical markers are extremely provocative because if they can be identified, they are accurate—very accurate—a kind of cosmic clock so-to-speak. A unique celestial event could potentially pinpoint the birth of “he who is born King of the Jews”—possibly to within hours, let alone days, weeks, months or years.
The problem of course, is that we are (again) not explicitly told what the celestial event was—or at least so it seems. But to anyone who has studied the Bible for any length of time, we are aware that the Bible is full of unsuspected surprises. According to Hebrew hermeneutics (biblical interpretation), the Bible can contain codes or cyphers. What this could mean, is that although the date of Jesus’ birth may not be cited explicitly or implicitly, it may in fact be cited, with spectacular accuracy, cryptically. That is, if we can decipher the code.
The point of this article has not been to cite and critically examine the evidence—that is the purpose of many of the other articles I have written. The purpose of this article has been to share, in broad strokes, why the often perceived as unassailable belief that Jesus was born on December 25th is really a house of cards.
In conclusion, is it possible that Jesus was born on December 25th? Sure, it’s possible. But the odds of Jesus of Nazareth being born on December 25th are exactly 1/365—precisely the same as any other day of the year selected at random.
Again. It is possible? Of course, it’s possible. But the real question isn’t whether it is possible, but whether it is probable, or reasonable?
The simple fact of the matter is that there is very little credible positive evidence that points us towards a December 25th birthdate—only tradition, which is anecdotal evidence at best. When positive evidence regarding alternates dates is introduced into the investigation, we quickly discover that these theories should at least be examined if not entertained.
When we consider these two assertions, that there is little to no positive evidence that points towards a December 25th birthdate, and significant positive evidence that points us elsewhere, the answer to the question “Is it probable or reasonable?” is a resounding “no”.
God Save the King
- Nissenbaum, Stephen. The Battle for Christmas: A Cultural History of America’s Most Cherished Holiday (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 36, citing (fn 74) F.B Dexter, ed., The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, (3 vols., New Yor, 1901), II, 103.
- Hippolytus of Rome, Commentary on Daniel 4.23 (~210 CE).