If the birth of Jesus is celebrated on December 25, this does not reflect historical reality. The year is not exact either.
If Christmas has become a traditional holiday, in the Christian religion it celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ. This is how at midnight between December 24 and 25, families are supposed to add little Jesus to the crib, but not before. This date was set by the monk Dionysius the Small at the beginning of the 6th century, however it has never been fully confirmed. The day and year of birth of Jesus of Nazareth remains the subject of debate. There is also a certainty shared by historians: “He was not born on December 25 of the year I”, underlined the historian Jean-Christian Petitfils for Europe 1.
The only sources available are the stories of Jesus’ childhood, taken from the beginning of the gospels according to Matthew and Luke. They indicate that the birth of Christ took place during the reign of King Herod the Great. “Jesus being born in Bethlehem in Judea, in the time of King Herod,” it is inscribed. The latter would have been king from -37 to -4. The majority of historians consider the most likely to be the birth of Jesus at the end of the reign of Herod I, several years before the famous year 1. The monk Dionysius the Small would have made a calculation error.
In the 17th century, the astronomer Johannes Kepler focused on the “star of Bethlehem” which would have announced the birth of Jesus to the wise men to estimate a precise date. According to him, it is an alignment of the planets Jupiter and Saturn, creating a point of light visible to the naked eye. He determined according to the trajectory of the planets that this alignment could only have taken place around April 12, October 3 or December 4 of the year -7. More recently, in 2008, Craig A. Evans, in theEncyclopedia of Historical Jesus, joins the scholarly consensus, but giving additional precision on the period and it is not at all that of Christmas. The work evokes a birth between the year -6 and the year -4 and “precisely in the spring”.
December 25 would in fact have been chosen to coincide with the Roman festival of the birth of Sol Invictus, a solar divinity, allowing an assimilation of the coming of Christ to the rise of the sun after the winter solstice. This would have made it possible to Christianize a Roman festival.
Furthermore, Jesus was born in Bethlehem in a stable. Once again, historians have some doubts. On the location, Thomas Romer, archaeologist, assuredEurope 1 that “whether Jesus was born in Bethlehem can also be doubted”. The version of the coming into the world described in the gospels is even more called into question. “We are much more in the symbolic than in the historical” and it is “a way of showing that this future Messiah is not as we imagine, but that he is born in very precarious conditions”.