cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/10008769
this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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Clever Comebacks
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We don't actually really know.
One idea is that Jesus's conception was said to have been in March for assorted reasons, and December is 9 months after March.
Another is that it appropriated Roman solstice celebrations.
One of the main reasons to believe that the birth date of Jesus is not reliable is because we have historical records of when there were censuses, and they tended to not to be in the winter months for fairly obvious practical reasons. There is no record of one occurring in December or anywhere near that time around the supposed date of his birth, so how could Jesus have been born on the way to a census if there wasn't one in December?
The only option is that the date of the birth is out by about 10 years (there was a census in December 10 years earlier) or the month of his birth is out by about 6 months. Which of those two options we don't know but we definitely know he wasn't and couldn't be born at the date that the bible says. The reason people go for the summer birth hypothesis is it's easier to understand how the date could have been moved six months a lot less easy to understand how people could have thought he was 10 years younger than he actually was.
That's a pretty good reason.
The story of the census appears in the gospel of Luke, which was written around 100 CE and edited for a while afterwards.
It places Jesus' birth during the census of Quirinius, which happened in 6 CE.
That's flatly contradicted by the earlier gospel of Matthew, which has Jesus being born during the time of Herod the great who died in 1CE.
There's no historical evidence that Roman censuses required people to go to the town they were born in; it'd be such a big disruption that it seems fairly implausible. It's more likely that the story about the census was made up by early Christians who were trying to edit details of the story to make Jesus fulfill more prophecies.