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suitable date?
    Search ing for Clues
    The Bible offers few clues . Celebrations of Jesus’ Nativity are not mentioned in the Gospels or in Acts and the date of his birth is not given, not even the time of year. The biblical reference to shepherds tending their flocks at night when they hear the news of Jesus’ birth (Luke 2:8) might suggest the spring lambing season . Yet we have to be cautious when extracting precise meanings from what is generally a theological narrative.
    This is also a good place to point out that references to cold and snow in Christmas Carols such as The First Noel , “On a cold winter’s night that was so deep…” or Still, Still, Still , “One can hear the falling snow…” are the result of moving an event which occurred in the Middle East to the less temperate climes of Northern Europe.
    In reality, the first Christians cared little about when Jesus was born. There is no mention of birth celebrations in the writings of the Christian Fathers such as Irenaeus or Tertullian. Origen of Alexandria even m ocks the Roman celebration of birthdays, calling them pagan practices . Everything seems to indicate that Jesus’ birth was not even celebrated by the Early Christian believers; their focus remained squarely on, as Paul said, “Christ crucified.”
    The earliest writings , Paul and Mark , make no mention of Jesus’ birth. Only t he Gospels of Matthew and Luke provide accounts of the event although , unlike the Passion narrative, neither attempts to anchor it in time . F urther details of Jesus’ childhood don’t appear until the Second Century in apocryphal writings such as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Proto-Gospel of James . And, though they provide the names of Jesus’ grandparents and details of his education , they ignore the issue of his birth date .
    Accounting for the Date
    Perhaps there is a different, and better, way to account for the origins of Christmas on December 25 th — the Jewish tradition that creation and redemption should occur at the same time of year . The Babylonian Talmud preserves a dispute between two early S econd C entury rabbis who share this view, but disagree d on the date . Rabbi Eliezer states , “In Nisan the world was created; in Nisan the Patriarchs were born; on Passover Isaac was born...and in Nisan they (the Patriarchs) will be redeemed in time to come.” The other rabbi, Joshua, dates these same events to the following month, Tishri .
    Establishing the Date of the Nativity
    Could it be that the dates of Christmas and Epiphany may well have resulted from Christian theological reflection on such chronologies ? Could Jesus have been conceived on the same date he died, and thus born nine months later ?
    Around 200 AD Tertullian reported his calculation that the 14 th of Nisan, the day of the crucifixion according to the Gospel of John, equated to March 25 th in the Roman (solar) calendar. March 25 th , which comes nine months before December 25 th , was later recognized as the Feast of the Annunciation, the commemoration of Jesus’ conception. If the ancient Christians believed that Jesus was conceived and crucified on the same day of the year, then the logical thing to do would be to establish his day of birth exactly nine months later…on December 25 th .
    This idea appears in an anonymous Christian treatise titled On Solstices and Equinoxes , which come s from fourth-century North Africa. It states, “Therefore our Lord was conceived on the eighth of the kalends of April in the month of March (March 25 th ), which is the day of the passion of the Lord and of his conception. For on that day he was conceived and on the same he suffered.”
    Augustine, too, was familiar with this idea. In On the Trinity he wrote, “For he is believed to have been conceived on the 25 th of March, upon which day also he suffered; so the womb of the Virgin, in which he was conceived, where no one of mortals was begotten, corresponds to the new grave in which he