LIghT ThE WAy


Christians in the Catholic, Anglican and Protestant traditions celebrate Jesus’s birth on 25 December each year. However, we can be reasonably sure that he was not born on that date.


Why?


Firstly, if there were shepherds present on the night of Jesus’s birth, then it did not take place in the middle of winter. Even in first-century Palestine, winter nights could be cold. Animals were sheltered indoors at that time of year. So, Jesus was more likely to have been born in either spring or autumn.


Secondly, that date was not widely used to celebrate Jesus’s birth until the early fourth century CE. Until that time, 25 December was known largely as the birth date of the Roman sun god, Mithra.


Christians may have appropriated (i.e. taken over) the date of 25 December in order to:


¢ Discourage people from continuing to celebrate the older pagan festival honouring Mithra, the sun god.


The worship of Mithra started in Persia before becoming popular in ancient Rome. The Romans referred to Mithra as Sol Invicta or ‘the invincible Sun’. Mithra’s birthdate, 25 December, was celebrated near the winter solstice (i.e. the shortest day of the year). As the hours of sunlight grew stronger after the solstice, his followers believed that Mithra had begun to regain his strength for another year.


¢ Encourage people to believe in and worship Jesus, who is the Son of God.


¢ Emphasise the deep mystery that God so loves human beings that God became one of us in the form of a helpless infant lying in a manger.


Growing up in Nazareth


Jesus grew up in the village of Nazareth in Galilee. Apart from a story Luke tells us about a trip Jesus took to Jerusalem with Mary and Joseph at the age of twelve (See: Luke 2:41-52), we know nothing of Jesus’s childhood or young adulthood. It is likely that he was educated at the local synagogue like other young males and then served his time as an apprentice carpenter/builder in Joseph’s workshop.


Although Joseph was not Jesus’s father, the Gospels present him as a loving and caring husband and parent. We do not know when Joseph died. It may have happened when Jesus was a teenager. Being the family breadwinner would explain why Jesus did not leave home until he was around thirty.


While the evangelists were content to say so little about Jesus’s childhood, others were not. From the second century onwards, some people used their imaginations to fill in these missing details. They wrote books called Apocrypha.


Some of these Apocrypha offer stories about Jesus’s childhood. However, Christians reject them because these stories present Jesus as someone who used his powers to impress and even harm others. This is something the Jesus of the Gospels never did. It would have been completely out of character for him to act in such selfish and destructive ways.


REMEMBER! Apocrypha are books that claim to be authentic sacred texts but are not accepted as genuine by Christians.


Did Jesus grow up in an isolated community, cut off from the rest of the world? No. Nazareth was only three miles from the thriving trading centre of Sepphoris. This city of 30,000 people served as the capital of Herod Antipas, Tetrarch of Galilee. He invested much of his wealth into impressive building programmes and Jesus would most likely have worked on them in Sepphoris. While there he would have met people from far and wide, both Jews and gentiles.


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