Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire.” “On December 5 and 20, Fum, Fum, Fum.” “In the Bleak Midwinter.”

Throw these and most other wintry Christmas carols out the window. Jesus was not born on Christmas. December 25 is a date preferred to attain pagan sun worshippers.

Bethlehem? Probably not. Jesus said he came from Nazareth. “We Three Kings”? Mistaken again. They were not kings but Persian magicians. Moreover, there may not have been three of them.The decorative stories and songs interlaced surrounding Christmas are all part of a complex set of myths and folklore that has little to do with the biblical account of Jesus’ birth.

The English word “Christmas” literally means “Christ’s Mass,” the festival of the Christ’s birth. The initial discussion of December 25 as the feast day of the “Nativity,” dates to 354 CE. In ancient times, December 25 was the date of the winter solstice, a pagan holiday celebrating the sun god. In Rome, the week preceding the solstice was the Saturnalia, an orgiastic festival that concluded with gift giving and candle lighting, doesn’t that sound like a familiar holiday?

Early Roman Christians apposited the date and then used it to gain converts from paganism, a expression for the Roman Empire’s state religion, fulfilled with its set of god and goddesses who had been expropriated from Greek mythology. The word “pagan” was coined by early Christians, loosely meaning “civilian.” In other words, anyone who had not enrolled in “Jesus’ army” was a pagan. Early Christians did not think Jews were “pagan,” however, because they still worshipped the same God.Christians then as now agreed on hardly any point. Ensuing the dissection of the Roman Empire into eastern and western halves in 340 CE, Christianity was also basically split between East and West. Eastern Christians employed a calendar in which the solstice fell on January 6, when the birthday of Osiris was still celebrated at Alexandrian, Egypt. By about 300 CE, January 6 had cultivated into the date of the “Epiphany” (Greek for “manifestation&rdquo, a extensive meal narrowly associated with Christmas in the Roman Catholic calendar as the day on which the “wise men” or Magi visited Jesus.

In the Eastern Orthodox Church, Epiphany is even more widely held than Christmas and commemorates the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River.Okay, so Jesus was not born on Christmas. At least the New Testament tells us what year Jesus was born. Right? Sorry again. The New Testament actually proposes several probable birth years. Pick the one you like. First, we have to compete with the “Shifting Calendar” glitch. Since they were in Rome and did as the Romans do, early Christian writers calculated historical dates from the legendary foundation of Rome in 753 BCE. This Roman-based calendar was then substituted by one found on the estimations of a Greek monk who was appointed to coordinate the festivals of the church. Around 532 CE, the monk, Dionysus Exiguus, dated the birth of Christ to March 25 of the Roman year 754, this transformed into the Christian Year 1, starting January 1. This is where “anno Domini,” “in the year of the Lord,” comes from.

However, Dionysus Exiguus slipped a bit. Since Matthew dates the birth of Jesus to the days of King Herod, and he died in 4 BCE, the “Year One” fixed by Dionysus Exiguus could not have been the Year One.Like many ancient dating systems, early Christian calendars also referred to the number of years during which a contemporary ruler had been governing. In a modern sense, 1998= the sixth year in the “reign” of Bill Clinton. Luke says John the Baptist, a close relative of Jesus, was born six months before Jesus and started preaching in the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, which corresponds to between 27 and 29 CE. At that time, Luke provides an approximate date for Jesus’ birth falling between 4 and 1 BCE. That is a little vague and becomes even vaguer if “about thirty” was Luke’s way of saying “thirty something.” Was Jesus exactly thirty when he started preaching? Thirty-five? Thirty-Eight? Or maybe only twenty-five, that’s about thirty too. And we’re not done yet. This slippery chronology gets even slicker.Surely, Herod’s life must offer some clues about Jesus’ birth date.

The Bible says when Herod was king a big census was taken by the Romans. Somebody must know when that happened. Wrong again. Matthew explicitly connects the birth of Jesus with the government of King Herod. In addition, a reference to King Herod’s successor, his son Archelaus, proves that the author meant Herod the Great, not one of his several sons who also took the royal name of Herod. The years during which Herod the Great was king of the Jews are precisely known: the Roman Senate in 40 BCE made Herod king of Judea, and he died thirty-six years later, which gives us the exact year 4 BCE. So according to Matthew, Jesus was born sometime before the year 4 BCE.In Matthew (but no other Gospel), when Herod was told of rumors of the birth of a “messiah” who might threaten his rule, he issued a royal order to kill all the Jewish male infants in Bethlehem.

The famed “Slaughter of the Innocents,” depicted in great art over the centuries and films like The Greatest Story Ever Told, was meant to remind Jews of the Pharaoh who had ordered the Jewish babies killed in the time of Moses. When did Herod issue this terrible order? Sorry. Herod did some appalling things in his day and his track record for eradicating opponents was on a par with that of King David, his forerunner as king of the Jews. In 7 BCE, Herod executed two of his sons. Before he died, Herod had a group of religious leaders and their students burned to death for desecrating a Roman symbol that had been placed in the Jerusalem Temple.

But there are no records of Herod issuing that ghastly order to slaughter innocent children, and even if there were, the understanding was to kill the babies under two, entailing that Jesus might have been born two years earlier, pushing the date back to 7 or 6 BCE. But outside the Bible there is no historical mention of a massacre of infants that surely would have attracted someone’s notice, even though Herod’s other brutal acts are well recognized. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but there is no way to confirm Matthew’s story of this massacre.What about the worldwide census that the Roman Emperor Augustus ordered, as reported in Luke? Like Matthew, the author of Luke agrees that Jesus was born under Herod. In his narrative, however, Luke also connected the birth of Jesus with an enrollment for taxation ordered by Emperor Augustus and carried out under Quirinius, the Roman governor of Syria. Sorry Again. According to historical records, no such census of the entire Roman world ever took place in 6 CE, ten years after Herod died. This census, made to gather taxes from Roman citizens, caused a revolt in Judea but did not involve the population of Galilee, where Joseph and Mary lived and where one of Herod the Great’s other sons, Herod Antipas, was in charge. Did Luke, writing his Gospel some seventy-five years later, simply get his Herods confused?So Matthew has Jesus born between 7 and 4 BCE. Luke has him born before 4 BCE, while Herod the Great is alive, and then in 6 CE, ten years after Herod the Great died. These two Gospels disagree by about ten to twelve years. The date is wrong and the year is a mystery. In other words, the birthday of the “Son of God” is a moveable feast. If this is divinely inspired, couldn’t God get the year right?I
 supplied by Colin Browder