Was Jesus born on December 25?

What the Gospels say, and don’t

Only Matthew and Luke tell the birth at all. Luke gives the setting: an enrollment ordered by Caesar Augustus, the walk from Nazareth to Bethlehem and a baby laid in a feeding trough.

She gave birth to her firstborn son. She wrapped him in bands of cloth and laid him in a feeding trough, because there was no room for them in the inn.

He adds shepherds “staying in the field, and keeping watch by night over their flock” (Luke 2:8). Some readers take that as a hint of a warmer season, but Luke never says when it was. Matthew gives no date either. Neither Gospel mentions snow, a timber barn or an innkeeper, and neither says it was winter.

Where December 25 comes from

The first record of December 25 as the birthday of Jesus is a Roman calendar list for the year 336, preserved in a collection of documents from 354. By then Christianity had just become legal under Constantine. Historians give two main explanations, and they may both be partly true:

• A Roman festival. The same calendar of 354 marks December 25 as the birthday of the Unconquered Sun, Sol Invictus, whose temple the emperor Aurelian had dedicated in 274. It fell near the winter solstice. Christians may have set Christ, “the light of the world” (John 8:12), against it.
• A calculation. Some early Christians dated Jesus’s conception, and his death, to March 25. Nine months later is December 25.

Not every church landed on the same day. The Armenian Apostolic Church still celebrates the birth on January 6. Orthodox churches that keep the old Julian calendar celebrate December 25 on what most of the world calls January 7.

What year was he born?

The year is a puzzle of its own. In 525 a monk named Dionysius Exiguus counted the years from Jesus’s birth, and missed by a few. Herod died in the spring of 4 BC, and Matthew and Luke both put the birth in his reign. So the calendar most of the world uses has Jesus born, oddly, around 6 to 4 BC.

Luke adds one more complication. He ties the birth to the census of Quirinius, which the historian Josephus dates to AD 6, ten years after Herod’s death. Scholars have proposed answers for centuries; none settles it.

So why does it matter?

For most Christians it doesn’t, much. Christmas marks that Jesus was born, not the exact day. The story Luke tells is less about a date than about a contrast: an emperor counting the world, and a baby sleeping where the animals eat.