Happy Birthday SAVVY18, daa84, & JChrist!

[knightni]

[DaTank]

Happy Birthday you guys! Have good ones!

[TheBlackSox8]

fyi....if you care...technically it isn't jesus' birthday

[knightni]

fyi....if you care...technically it isn't jesus' birthday

 

Day of birth

 

Determining the exact day of Jesus' birth is even more problematic than the year. Some say that the birth could not have happened in the deep winter, because the Bible says that shepherds spent the night outdoors with their flocks when Jesus was born (Luke 2:8). [11]

 

[edit] November/January

 

Mediterranean climates such as Judea's have mild winters reaching their coolest in late February. [3] Thus December nights can be quite balmy and warm enough to graze sheep. Moreover, December/January would have been an ideal time to graze sheep to take advantage of the winter rains. During the hot months, conditions can be quite barren and the grasses dry. But the end of December was the time when the perennial grasses began to turn green again and the annual grasses had sprouted anew. Thus, climatically the ecclesiastical practice of placing Christ's birth between December 25 and January 6 is possible. Controversy over whether Christmas ought to be celebrated on December 25 or January 6 underscores the perceived importance of the day of Christ's birth and the determination of church fathers to be accurate.

 

It is believed that Christmas' date was chosen to take advantage of the imperial holiday of the birth of the Sun God Mithras, more specifically Sol Invictus, which coincided with the "return of the sun" after the shortest day of the year. According to this theory, the reason was to replace the popular pagan holiday with a Christian celebration of holy communion. For example, the Catholic Encyclopedia states: "Natalis Invicti, celebrated on 25 December, has a strong claim on the responsibility for our December date."[12]

 

According to one tradition[citation needed], Jesus was born during Hanukkah (25 Kislev into the beginning of Tevet). Under the old Julian calendar, the popular choice of 5 BCE for the year of Jesus' birth would place 25 Kislev at November 25.

 

Kislev 25, 3757 AM is reported in error as the Julian date of November 25, 5 BCE, not December 25, 5 BCE. After the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE the Jews of the Diaspora used a rule-based calendar of the Pharisees to calculate dates, this being formalized into the present fixed calendar by Maimonides in 1178 CE. Extending this calendar back to 5 BCE does not adjust for the precession of the equinoxes, and this gives dates too early according to the Vernal Equinox and beginning of spring.[citation needed]

 

Extending the present fixed calendar back to Nisan 1, 3756 AM, which precedes the birth of Jesus and yields the bogus November 25, 5 BCE date, is March 9, 5 BCE. This is too early before the equinox and is actually Adar II. Nisan 1 shifted a month and actually began on April 6, 5 BCE.[citation needed]

 

By contrast, in today’s 19-year metonic cycle Jewish calendar, the earliest that Nisan 1 appears is on March 12 in 2016 CE. This date is by the Gregorian calendar, which has adjusted for the precession of the equinoxes. If the new moon was observed as early as March 9 it would have been Adar II, additionally declared that month because of the premature state of the corn crop and fruit trees (Sanhedrin 2:2)

 

Early Christians sought to calculate the date of Christ's birth based on the idea that Old Testament prophets died either on an anniversary of their birth or of their conception. They reasoned that Jesus died on an anniversary of his conception, so the date of his birth was nine months after the date of Good Friday, either December 25 or January 6. Additional calculations are made based on the six-year almanac of priestly rotations, found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Some believe that this almanac lists the week when John the Baptist's father served as a high priest. As it is implied that John the Baptist could only have been conceived during that particular week, and as his conception is believed to be tied to that of Jesus, it is claimed that an approximate date of December 25 can be arrived at for the birth of Jesus. However, most scholars (e.g. Catholic Encyclopedia in sources) believe this calculation to be unreliable as it is based on a string of assumptions.

 

The apparition of the angel Gabriel to Zechariah, announcing that he was to be the father of John the Baptist, was believed to have occurred on Yom Kippur. This was due to a belief (not included in the Gospel account) that Zechariah was a high priest and that his vision occurred during the high priest's annual entry into the Holy of Holies. If John's conception occurred on Yom Kippur in late September, then his birth would have been in late June (the traditional date is June 24). If John's birth was on June 24, then the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin Mary, said by the Gospel account to have occurred three month's before John's birth, would have been in late March. (Tradition fixed it on March 25.) The birth of Jesus would then have been on December 25, nine months after his conception. As with the previous theory, proponents of this theory hold that Christmas was a date of significance to Christians before it was a date of significance to pagans.

 

At least as early as 354 CE, Jesus' birth was celebrated on December 25 in Rome, according to Chronography of 354. Other cities had other traditional dates. The history of Christmas is closely associated with that of the Epiphany. If the currently prevailing opinion about the compilation of the gospels is accepted, the earliest body of gospel tradition, represented by Mark no less than by the primitive non-Marcan document (Q document) embodied in the first and third gospels, begins, not with the birth and childhood of Jesus, but with His baptism; and this order of accretion of gospel matter is faithfully reflected in the time order of the invention-of feasts. The church in general adopted Christmas much later than Epiphany, and before the 5th century there was no consensus as to when it should come in the calendar, whether on January 6 or December 25.

 

The earliest identification of 25 December with the birthday of Jesus is in a passage, otherwise unknown and probably spurious, of Theophilus of Antioch (171-183), preserved in Latin by the Magdeburg centuriators, to the effect that the Gauls contended that as they celebrated the birth of the Lord on the December 25, whatever day of the week it might be, so they ought to celebrate Easter on 25 March when the resurrection occurred.

 

The next surviving mention of December 25 is in Hippolytus' (c. 202) commentary on Daniel. Jesus, he says, was born at Bethlehem on December 25, a Wednesday, in the forty-second year of Augustus. This passage also is almost certainly interpolated. In any case he mentions no feast, nor was such a feast congruous with the orthodox ideas of that age. As late as 245, Origen, in his eighth homily on Leviticus, repudiates as sinful the very idea of keeping the birthday of Jesus "as if he were a king Pharaoh." Thus it was important to the early Christians not to have indecorous parties on that day, but to keep it a time of devotion, reflection, and communion.

 

The first early mention of December 25 is in a Latin chronographer of 354 CE, first published in complete form by Mommsen. It runs thus in English: "Year I after Christ, in the consulate of Augustus Caesar and Paulus, the Lord Jesus Christ was born on 25 December, a Friday and 15th day of the new moon." Here again no festal celebration of the day is attested.

 

[edit] October

 

Another argument [4][5], that relies only on dates named in the Bible, places Jesus' birth on the 15th day of the seventh Jewish month during Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles. This is based on the time when Zechariah, father of John the Baptist, was ministering in the temple, and received an announcement from God of a coming son. The Bible states that Zecariah's term of ministry was in the "eighth course of Abia", a period dated according to Hebrew calendar in the Old Testament.[6] If John was conceived soon after, and Jesus' conception was six months after John, then Jesus was born during the first day of the feast of the tabernacles. This is an engimatic reference because the Gospel of John introduces Jesus in this manner: "the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us" (KJV). The word used for "dwelt" literally means "tabernacled" - i.e. God's Word became flesh and put his tent up among ours. ([13])

 

[edit] Other Dates

 

There were many speculations in the 2nd century about the date of Jesus' birth. Clement of Alexandria, towards its close, mentions several such, and condemns them as superstitions. Some chronologists, he says, alleged the birth to have occurred in the twenty-eighth year of Augustus, on the 25th of Pachon, the Egyptian month (May 20). These were probably the Basilideans. Others set it on the 24th or 25th of Pharmuthi (19th or 20 April). Clement himself sets it on November 18, 3 B.C.

 

The same symbolic reasoning led Polycarp (before 160) to set his birth on Sunday, when the world's creation began, but his baptism on Wednesday, for it was the analogue of the sun's creation. On such grounds certain Latins as early as 354 may have transferred the human birthday from January 6 to December 25 and is by the chronographer above referred to, but in another part of his compilation, termed Natalis invicti solis, or birthday of the unconquered Sun. (Under the Julian Calendar, the winter solstice occurs on December 24, so starting with December 25, the days begin to get longer again.) Cyprian invokes Christus Sol verus, Ambrose Sol novus noster, and such rhetoric was widespread. The Syrians and Armenians, who clung to January 6, accused the Romans of sun-worship and idolatry, contending with great probability that the feast of 25 December had been invented by disciples of Cerinthus and its readings by Artemon to commemorate the natural birth of Jesus. Ambrose, On Virgins, writing to his sister, implies that as late as the papacy of Liberius 352 - 356, the Birth from the Virgin was feasted together with the Marriage of Cana and the Feeding of the 4000, which were never celebrated on any other day but January 6.

 

Chrysostom, in a sermon preached at Antioch on December 20, 386 or 388, says that some held the feast of December 25 to have been held in the West, from Thrace as far as Cádiz, from the beginning. It certainly originated in the West, but spread quickly eastwards. In 353 - 361 it was observed at the court of Constantius II. Basil of Caesarea (died 379) adopted it. Honorius, emperor (395 - 423) in the West, informed his mother and brother Arcadius (395 - 408) in Byzantium of how the new feast was kept in Rome, separate from January 6, with its own troparia and sticharia. They adopted it, and recommended it to Chrysostom, who had long been in favour of it. Epiphanius of Crete was won over to it, as were also the other three patriarchs, Theophilus of Alexandria, John II of Jerusalem, Flavian I of Antioch. This was under Pope Anastasius I, 398 - 400.

 

John or Wahan of Nice, in a letter printed by François Combefis in his Historia monoizeii tarurn, affords the above details. The new feast was communicated by Proclus, patriarch of Constantinople (434 - 446), to Sahak, Catholicos of Armenia, about 440. The letter was betrayed to the Persian king, who accused Sahak of Greek intrigues, and deposed him. However, the Armenians, at least those within the Byzantine pale, adopted it for about thirty years, but finally abandoned it together with the decrees of Chalcedon early in the 8th century. Many writers of the period 375 - 450, e.g. Epiphanius, Cassian, Asterius, Basil, Chrysostom and Jerome, contrast the new feast with that of the Baptism as that of the birth after the flesh, from which we infer that the latter was generally regarded as a birth according to the Spirit. Instructive as showing that the new feast travelled from West eastwards is the fact (noticed by Usener) that in 387 the new feast was reckoned according to the Julian calendar by writers of the province of Asia, who in referring to other feasts use the reckoning of their local calendars. As early as 400 in Rome an imperial rescript includes Christmas among the three feasts (the others are Easter and Epiphany) on which theatres must be closed.

 

Australian astronomer Dave Reneke puts the date of Jesus of Nazareth's birth at June 17, 2 BCE.[7]

 

 

It seems that opinions vary.

[TheBlackSox8]

It seems that opinions vary.

you'll get that with no certain date....but you can be certain Dec. 25th shouldn't be suggested. And really if you look at it from a Christian stand point....Christmas shouldn't even be celebrated....but that's another argument for another board.

[Flash Tizzle]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JESUS!