On which date was Christ born?

Question

Most Christians celebrate the birth of Christ (Christmas) on December 25. But was this really the day of Christ's birth? What was the actual date of Christ's birth?

Answer 1

We Armenians do informally celebrate the birthday of Christ on December 25th, but to celebrate his birth on the 6th of January is religiously accurate.

The historical reasoning behind this is that until the fourth century, Christ's birth was celebrated on January 6th across all Christian faiths, but for most was moved to December 25th in order to cleanse Christianity of all pagan traces (leftover from former pagan practices). Armenia was not included because as a nation it didn't adopt the pagan practice to begin with (and Armenia was the first to accept Christianity as a nation).

Most Christian faiths now recognize December 25th as Christ's birthday and January 6th as the Feast of Epiphany. However, both used to be celebrated—and currently are, by most Armenian religions—on January 6th.

_Source

Answer 2

As far as I know there is no proof of any certain date of Christ's birth. And it is only by tradition that we accept it as the 25th of December. Now I'm not one for following tradition for traditions sake, but according to this site a lot of the evidence that people provide to rule out December as Christ's birthday is not rooted in fact. I don't think the exact day is important to salvation myself, but the fact that He was born. According to the author of that site the movement to suggest he couldn't have been born in december was started by the Jehovah's Witnesses, I don't know if that's true but that's what he claims.

The author dosen't claim that Jesus definitely was born on Dec. 25th. But claims that we just can't rule that out. Here are a couple of his points:

• Those against the December date claim that it was too cold for shepherds to be out in the field in winter; However it didn't seem to actually get that cold in Bethlehem in December, and even if it did shepherds would in fact stay out in the fields even in colder weather.
• Claims are made that tradition puts it in December beacause of the pegan winter solstice, the problem with that argument is that the winter solstice is on the 21st to the 22nd, not the 25th, and there are thousands of pegan holidays so ANY day is some pegan celebration in some part of the world.

So can it be proved that it was the 25th of December? No. Can it be disproved? Probably not.

Does it matter more that it happened on a certain day or just the fact that it happened?

Answer 3

This is a question which has plagued me for many decades. I am truly shocked that a similar question received such little response during this season.

In other discussions here, we all can agree that no one can answer the question directly. No one knows the actual date of Christ's birth.

To know what one does not know is a sign of scholarship. Sometimes, the wisest answer to a question is "I don't know." To continue rambling in the answer is to address issues not identified in the question. (As the previous sentence just demonstrated.)

end of answer

Answer 4

Indeed, the question of when the Christ was born (remember, "Christ" is an epithet, not a personal name) presupposes that he was born and that he ever had a literal physical existence. Certainly, this is taken for granted within Pauline Christianity, but step away from that and you get Christians such as myself who hold that no physical Christ ever existed; rather, the Christ is merely an ideal of universal love and brotherhood as the means of saving man from destroying himself, and that Jesus was but an imperfect manifestation of this ideal Christ.