When Was Jesus Born?
When I was a child, I (like most children of Christian parents) was told that Jesus was born on December 25th in 0 or 1 A.D. This remains a common belief even among adults, but what reason do we have to believe it?
The first and most easily dismissed claim is that Jesus was born on December 25th, because there is simply no evidence for it. Even the Bible doesn’t give a birth day for him, and we know that December 25th was chosen by the Catholic church more than 300 years after the time Jesus was believed to have been born. The date seems to have been chosen in an attempt to replace the pagan Saturnalia and Solstice celebrations which were already set on or around that date.
There has been speculation from many different people about potential birth dates of Jesus, so much in fact that depending on who you ask it could be in any month of the year, but the truth is that we just don’t have very good evidence to place it at any specific time.
What is much more difficult to figure out is the year…