History Of Nativity Dates: Finding Jesus' Birthday (Part 2)

When was Yeshua born? Many guesses and calculations have been made over time. But how well do these calculations line up with scripture or even the presumed traditions they are based on?

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The earliest identification of the 25th of December with the birthday of Christ is in a passage, otherwise unknown and probably spurious, of Throphilus of Antioch (A.D. 171-183), preserved in Latin by the Magdeburg centuriators (i. 3, 118), to the effect that the Gauls contended that as they celebrated the birth of the Lord on the 25th of December, whatever day of the week it might be, so they ought to celebrate the Pascha on the 25th of March when the resurrection befell.
The next mention of the 25th of December is in Hippolytus' (c. 202) commentary on Daniel iv. 23. Jesus, he says, was born at Bethlehem on the 25th of December, a Wednesday, in the forty-second year of Augustus. This passage also is almost certainly interpolated. In any case he mentions no feast, nor was such a feast congruous with the orthodox ideas of that age.
As late as 245 Origen, in his eighth homily on Leviticus, repudiates as sinful the very idea of keeping the birthday of Christ "as if he were a king Pharaoh."
The first certain mention of Dec. 25 is in a Latin chronographer of A.D. 354, first published entire by Mommsen [Abhandlungen der sachsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1850. It runs thus in English: "Year 1 after Christ, in the consulate of Caesar and Paulus, the Lord Jesus Christ was born on the 25th of December, a Friday and 15th day of the new moon." [Note that in A.D. 1, Dec. 25 was a Sunday and not a Friday.]
Here again no festal celebration of the day is attested.

"Christmas." Encyclopedia Britannica. 11th ed. Vol. 6. 1910. p 293.