The Back Story on the Real Christmas Pt. 1 by Chris White

When you deal with a topic like the Christmas story, you are standing on holy ground.  First of all we are looking at sacred history.  This means that not only are most of the facts contained solely in the Holy Bible, but also that this event is so sublime and so mysterious that we must treat it with the greatest respect.  Though the world sees Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus lying in a manger, this is not the story of the humble beginnings of the world’s most famous moral instructor, it is the story of God becoming a man for the purpose of redeeming us; and like all men, he starts out as a baby.  Secondly, it is a very well-known and cherished story by millions.  Such stories must be treated with care and if a traditional aspect must be revised, it must be done with gently and with a sound explanation for the known facts.  The opposite of this is the journalistic approach so often employed today that loves to “debunk” everything in the name of truth, yet so often in that process ignores the fact that not all reason is free of personal agenda.  Of course I believe this story.  It’s my religion.  But even if you don’t share my religion I hope you will enjoy my treatment of this well-known story and maybe learn a thing or two you didn’t know before.

With that as prologue, let’s consider the issue of whether or not Jesus was born on the 25^th of December.  I’ll bet you’ve already made up your mind that this was just an arbitrary date chosen by the church to replace a pagan festival and you very well could be right.  The Romans did celebrate a winter festival called Saturnalia which included gift giving, bonfires, and lots of overindulgence.  And it does stand to reason that when the Roman empire became Christianized that they would seek to retain a winter celebration while removing some of its baser elements.  However, if we stick to the concise information of the Gospels, there is no real reason why Jesus couldn’t have been born on December 25^th.  There are no details in the story that would actually preclude this date.  Sacrificial lambs were kept outside in the winters near Bethlehem.  Shepherds did watch their flocks at night, there was still no room for Joseph and Mary, etc. etc.

The date of December 25^th is also recognized very early in the Church’s history.  Some have thought Christmas was not recognized until after Constantine the Great became the first Christian ruler of the Roman empire in the 4rth century, but earlier writings of the Church indicate that this was a long established belief.  One of the early witnesses to the December birthday for Jesus was Tertullian who was a respected leader and theologian in North Africa. Tertullian lived at a time when none of the first Christians or apostles are still alive, but some of their first successors were.  He states that he has knowledge that in the city of Rome there is a birth record that explicitly states Jesus was born on December 25^th.  Of course we don’t know that Tertullian saw this first hand or just heard about it or even if he did see it if it was some sort of well-meaning but still spurious document.

What troubles many with the December birth is that if Jesus was born on the 25^th, then you would have Annunciation of Mary, the Conception of John, the Birth of John and the Birth of Jesus basically corresponding to the change of all 4 seasons.  This seems a bit overly tidy for real life and more in line with arranging things so as to have one large Church festival in each of the four seasons.  However, it is not unreasonable to think that God would orchestrate this as He was keen on Old Testament Israel observing festivals throughout the entire year.  God is not only the creator of time but of rhythm.

Luke’s Gospel does furnish us with the inaugural date of John the Baptist’s ministry which would fall in the winter months.  Assuming he started at the traditional age of 30 and that he was 6 months older than Jesus as the New Testament indicates, this would put the birth of Jesus in the late spring or early summer.  All the events of the nativity work just as well in a summer scenario as they do in winter.  But we must remember this is based on an assumed age for John the Baptist and an assumed year which may vary due to differences in the modern calendars and the ancients reckoning of time.

My point?  As with all ancient events, pinning down an exact date is often based evidence other than the date itself.  There is evidence for both a winter and summer birth of Jesus; both would fit the story.  But for me, the winter birthday is far more poignant because it is the time of year where darkness has overtaken the light.  But Jesus came into the world to overcome its darkness with His Light and that is a fitting reminder no matter what the season.

A Christian View of History by Chris White

What has been is what will be,
    and what has been done is what will be done,
    and there is nothing new under the sun.
 Is there a thing of which it is said,
    “See, this is new”?
It has been already
    in the ages before us.
 There is no remembrance of former things,^[d]
    nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be
    among those who come after.

-- Ecclesiastes 1:9-11

“I heard, but I did not understand. Then I said, “O my lord, what shall be the outcome of these things?”  He said, “Go your way, Daniel, for the words are shut up and sealed until the time of the end.”

    --Daniel 12: 8-9

There is no end to people’s opinions about the subject of history.  For some it is a dull and lifeless pursuit without any relevance.  “I’m living in the present” such would say, “what happened in the past is unimportant to me.”  For others, history is means of moral instruction or problem solving or even a comforting connection with our ancestors.  Recently my wife and I went on a trip to Slovakia and Poland to visit the ancestral villages of my wife’s family.  It was so very interesting and moving to stand in churches where we know family members were baptized and married and worshipped and to see the landscape that they would have looked at for centuries.  For the news media and educational institutions, history is rarely a source of moral instruction, but rather a study in causation which is tracing the root system of current events.  But these points address the uses of history more than a view of history.  What I would like to describe here is a particularly Christian view of history.  I know there are some intervening points, but above I have placed two verses which considered separately represent opposite poles of thinking while taken together form a distillation of reality and Christian truth.

The view of Ecclesiastes is that “there is nothing new under the sun”.  In a broad context what is being said here is that history repeats itself with endless cycles.  In a sense, this point of view is baked into the passage of time as we go through the seasons of any given year or we look at the lifespan of a person.  There is conception, birth, development, decline, and death and seedtime, growth, fruition, and harvest.  This cycle is also seen in the development of civilizations.  Paul in his sermon at Mars Hill says quite specifically that God has ordained seasons where different nations will thrive and inhabit a given locale and then like all things fade away (Acts 17:26).  Of course other civilizations such as the Mayans built their calendars around the idea that catastrophic destruction would take place at the end of a cycle of years and the world would be reconstituted.  This cyclical theme also informs many religions and philosophies which teach variations on reincarnation.  We also see cycles in history where ideas are repeated and reconstituted.  A few years ago I read a book called The Victorian Internet which discussed to development, spread, and use of the telegraph.  Things which we think are new developments in our day like email, internet dating, instant messaging and the like were all practiced in the 19^th century using the technology of the day.  Many social issues we face today are ones that previous generations faced.  Unemployment, immigration reform, rebellious youth, illegitimacy, and the list goes on.  History does repeat itself and there really isn’t anything new under the sun.

I hold the view that part of the reason history repeats itself is the human tragedy known as original sin.  While I won’t take the time to rehearse this Christian dogma (if you are interested there thousands of resources that have been written on the topic), I will say that one of its implications is that humanity’s mind and perception has become quite degraded from what it once was and thus we rarely value things rightly.  What is evil we will declare good, what is good we will consider evil with many points in between.  I have written before on this but I give it again as an example, war is neither good nor virtuous.  This is not to say that war is inappropriate in every circumstance or that individuals involved don’t act heroically or virtuously, but just to acknowledge in the end, our blood and treasure is poured out for the unobtainable.  True peace and justice come from the heart and any compulsion by way of gunpoint, diplomacy, or law are merely temporary measures at best, and exercise in futility at worst.  Another great example is our discovery of atomic energy.  Here we have a great source of energy that if done well could be a blessing to all nations and yet it’s more popular use is as a weapon of mass destruction.  Current statistics (2013) show that America alone has 65 nuclear power plants from coast-to-coast and over 5000 nuclear warheads.  What could be used for good is largely used for evil.  This to say we will do things as a race that are largely counterproductive and then never learn from our mistakes because we have a general inability to do so.  When I read the pages of scripture and the pages of history what I see is humanity recycling the same problems ad infinitum.  We facing the same issues the ancients did because through human generation we inherited their DNA and their folly.

But there is a second dimension of history given in the scripture, namely that history is moving to a specific and desired end.  This idea runs through the entire scope of the Bible from the earliest prophets to Jesus Christ and on through the apostles.  Put another way, history will be swallowed up by eternity and with that will be redemption, judgment, and God’s direct rule here on earth.  It actually will be the mythical “golden age” that so many cultures have longed for or once had and lost.  But as this touches on history, while mankind tends to live in and create cycles, God is acting at the same time in a linear fashion to carry out his plan and bring things to a good conclusion.  In Romans chapter 5, St. Paul writes “at the appointed time Christ died for the ungodly”.  The appointed time here references a season or moment where God in His providence brings something to pass that furthers His purposes.  Put another way, God was moving in human history in such a way that the events of the crucifixion of Jesus and his resurrection happened exactly as he desired.  Humans were certainly thinking and acting and choosing, but God was directing these things to a very specific end.  God’s plan continues to unfold throughout human history, not that He baptizes our evil decisions as His will, but rather He brings good out of them despite their evil intent through his sovereignty and then punishes the evil either in time or eternity (or both).  In other words, God carries on His plan with us or in spite of us depending on the person.

Bringing this full circle, I am of the conviction that the Christian view of history should be cyclically-linear.  Cycles do repeat themselves, but they are moving in a definite direction under the provident eye of a loving and sovereign God.