![]() When a child’s life was not so secure due to sickness and disease, it is likely that a family did not want to mark the passing of the years until the child was older.īirthdays, as we understand them, were not something a poor Nazareth family would have been able to afford. You may not have celebrated your birthday until there was something very definite to celebrate. ![]() However, if you live in the country of Cambodia you probably don’t really celebrate birthdays until you are past fifty. Although children there do celebrate being one year older, they all celebrate it at the same time at Cambodia's New Year, which falls in April. It takes precedence over any other celebration. If you live in Holland, for example, your birthday is one of the most important dates of the year. Just because there isn’t an actual date printed in the pages of your Bible doesn’t mean that the story of Jesus’ birth didn’t happen.ĭifferent cultures, tribes, and even families look at birthdays in different ways. So, we do know that the account of the nativity is factual because it directly refers to the rule of Caesar Augustus and Quirinius the Governor of Syria. But there are intricate family trees and clear references to actual points in history, such as the reigns of kings and emperors. We don’t see dates like June 5 th or October 11 th written in the Bible. How you think about dates and birthdays depends on where you are in the world and when you existed in history. But Christmas also marks the beginning of a story … the earthly story of heavenly redemption. What is it that birthdays celebrate? I think there is a simple answer to that…īirthdays celebrate beginnings, and the celebration of Christmas is both a birthday and a beginning in more ways than one.Ĭhristmas marks a first breath, in the way that every one of our birthdays mark the first day that a member of our family lived outside the womb. To learn more read this excerpt from "When Was Jesus Born and Why Do We Use December 25th?" It was not until the third century that various pockets of Christians began to show interest in the date of Christ’s birth, and it would take another century for the Church to begin celebrating it with some uniformity. This makes it hard to conclude when Jesus was really born. Though it may sound strange to our modern minds, it is likely that early Christians did not place any particular value on birthdays. Though the gospels of Matthew and Luke both give an account of Christ’s birth, neither one provides a date for this great event. Meanwhile, in the Eastern Church, January 6th was the date followed.īut in the fourth century, John Chrysostom argued that December 25th was the correct date and from that day till now, the Church in the East, as well as the West, has observed the 25th of December as the official date of Christ's birth. Hippolytus, in the second century A.D., argued that this was Christ's birthday. The tradition for December 25th is actually quite ancient.
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