i am sparticus: Part One: In Which We Find That For 300 Years, No-One Really Cared That Much

Part One: In Which We Find That For 300 Years, No-One Really Cared That Much

Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the man considered to be the Son of God, God and the Saviour of the world by Christians and so it may come as a slight surprise to find that for the first 300 years after the birth of Jesus Christ no-one seemed to put much importance on the dating or celebrating of his birth. Really, no-one much cared, the writers of the Bible included. The Bible mentions nothing about His date of birth; hell, the Gospel of John effectively doesn't mention anything to do with Jesus's birth and the Gospel of Mark just plain doesn't mention anything to do with Jesus's birth . Luke and Matthew are the only two Gospels to speak of the birth and neither of them give much away about the date of the event. In fact the only thing that narrows it down is that Luke talks about shepherds in the fields and so we can assume that Jesus was born during the season for sheep to be out on the hills. That narrows it down to the very small period of anytime between March and November. In short, the only thing we can drawn from the Bible on the subject of dating Jesus' birth is that it wasn't on December the 25th.

There are some manuscripts exist from the 3rd Century that talk of the date of Jesus' birth but all of them are very speculative about when it actually happened. No-one seems to know when it is and so everyone decides to invent clever mathematical formulae to try and work out when it happened, ingenuity and originality are the order of the day and consistency and common-sense are dutifully ignored. Why let simple logic get in the way of a good theory? A good example is the dating of the birth to the 28th of March. This was done on the grounds that the Roman Calendar recognised the Vernal Equinox (the day in which night and day are the same length) as the 25th of March and therefore this must have been that date that God created the world as on the first day of creation he split light from darkness (presumably into equal parts). As Jesus is referred to as the "Sun of Righteousness" in Malachi 4:2 it follows (somehow) that Jesus must have been born on the same date as the fourth day, the day in which God created the Sun. Therefore Jesus must have been born on the 28th of March. If you don't buy that theory other suggested dates you can pick from are January 6th, March 25th, April 2nd, April 19th, May 20th, November 17th and December 25th. Interestingly enough December 25th was probably first suggested because it was nine months after March 25th which was considered to be a good date for conception (probably due to similar logic as the example above). Clement of Alexandria at the end of the second century mentions the attempts to date the birth of Jesus and labels them as vain and stupid, though he himself seems to be a fan of November 17th.

The reason no-one seems to care about Jesus' Birth is that for the first 300 years people were primarily concerned with the Cross and what Christ's death and resurrection meant, his birth just wasn't seen as important. In theological terms for the first while people were concerned with Soteriology not Christology. Only as the understanding of the Cross solidified did people start to look more seriously at the issue of the birth of Jesus and how that affected their beliefs. But that'll have to wait for later, as right now we need to deal with the issue of the other festivals.

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