Christmas: How It All Started

The easy answer is that Christmas Day is when we celebrate the birth of Jesus. The complicated answer is that Jesus wasn't actually born on the 25th of December, or in the year 1AD, and that most of the traditions of Christmas had very little to do with Jesus!
So let's start with the complicated origins of Christmas!

The Bible doesn't specifically say WHEN Jesus was born, but there is evidence to suggest it is likely to have been in September or October sometime between 7 and 4BC.



What Year?

It was over 500 years after the birth of Jesus that a monk called Dionysius Exiguus introduced a new way of numbering years, according to whether they were "before Christ" or "Anno Domini", meaning "in the year of the Lord", and another 200 years after that before another monk, called Bede, made it a popular way of recording a date. There were also discrepancies between when one year was considered to have ended and another begun; the 46BC Julian calendar and the 1582AD Gregorian calendar were attempts to resolve these differences and set a standard number of days per year, but with these complications you can imagine how a few years might get "lost" in the calculations, which explains why Jesus' birth is now reckoned to have been between the years 7 and 4 "Before Christ"!! It would be helpful if we could find a date in historical records for the census that led to Mary and Joseph going to Bethlehem, but although this is estimated to have begun in 7BC, back then a census could take years to complete, so more vagueness! However, the date range 7-4BC does fits in with the reign of King Herod (remember his role in the Christmas story? - he's the bad guy), who died in 4BC.


richmondparkchurch.org.uk an evangelical pentecostal church in Boscombe, Bournemouth, Dorset, UK