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While the official date of the birth of Jesus Christ, the messiah and Christian savior, is the 25th of December, there’s a good chance he wasn’t born on that day at all. I’m not trying to be blasphemous or insult the Christian religion in any way. The fact is recognized by the Catholic Church, which adopted the 25th of December for symbolic reasons.

To be exact, even the highest of Christian authorities do not know the real, historical date of the birth of Jesus.
December 25th was chosen as the official date of the messiah’s birth as late as 354 A.D., by Pope Liberus, because it corresponded with the pagan festival of the winter solstice, called Natalis Invicti in Latin, which means ‘‘birth of the invincible sun.’’

The French word ‘‘Noël’’ comes from the combination of two Celtic words, noio and hel, which mean ‘‘rebirth of the Sun.’’

Thus the birth of Christ is compared to the birth of the Sun, which plays a very important role in many ancient religions and pre-Christian pagan cults. In places where Christianity was on the rise, church authorities tried to give pagan festivals already being celebrated a Christian connection, in this case the birth of the Saviour. For the same reason, Christian churches were often constructed over the ruins of ancient Roman and pagan temples, or in natural locations used for occult practices that were consecrated as holy by the Church.

The choice of December 25th was actually quite logical when you consider that Christianity took hold mainly in the the formerly polytheistic Roman Empire. The Romans worshipped many gods, but their main festival, the Saturnalia, celebrating the god Saturn, took place on or around December 25th.

Proof Against December 25th
There are other troubling facts, aside from being chosen in 354 A.D., that put in question the date of December 25th as being the real birth date of Christ.

Many historians place it much earlier in the year. Others say it occurred years before day-one of our era.
They rely on elements from the Bible itself, which seems to contradict the theory that Jesus was born on December 25th. For example, the Bible states that Christ was born during a census conducted by the Romans, who occupied Palestine at the time. For the census to take place, all citizens were ordered to return to the place of their birth. But why would the Romans have conducted a census in the middle of winter, the coldest time of year?

According to the scriptures, Jesus was born before the death of King Herod. History tells us that Herod died in the year 4 B.C. – i.e. 4 years before the official birth of Christ. And there are other factors that put the date seriously in question, and throw a troubling light on the official version of Jesus being born on December 25th.

Augustus Caesar
To return to the famous population census supposedly carried out the year Jesus was born, there’s more than the climactic problems mentioned earlier to consider. There’s also the question of dates, based on historical documents.

On the wall of a temple in Ankara Turkey dedicated to Augustus Caesar (63 B.C. to 14 A.D.), the Roman emperor at the time, a stone slab was found called the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, which recounts all the exploits of the emperor during his reign.

Mention of the three censes was found: the first in 28 B.C., the second in 8 B.C., and the third 14 years after the death of Christ. If we look at the biblical and historic accounts, we must conclude that Jesus was born 7 or 8 years before the start of our era, since conducting a census took over a year to complete.

The Mystery of the Guiding Star
There’s another event marking the birth of Christ that allows us to specify the date more precisely: the famous Star of Nativity that guided the shepherds and the three Kings to the stable where the infant Jesus lay sheltered.

The Three Kings were actually three Magi, astronomers and astrologers from Mesopotamia and Persia (present-day Iran).

They arrived in Bethlehem, the town where Christ was born, by following a star that shone more brightly than the others, and seemed to move across the sky. In fact, they weren’t being guided by a single star, but by a rare planetary conjunction that occurred between Saturn and Jupiter.

The conjunction was so bright the Three Wise Men were under the impression they were following a single star. But astronomical calculation show that the phenomenon lasted for only one year, and took place between the years 7 and 5 B.C.

The hypothesis was confirmed by the famous astronomer Johannes Kepler, who concluded that, because of the alignment of Saturn and Jupiter, they looked like a single bright star moving across the heavens. He also specified that the event happened in the year 7 B.C., in the constellation Pisces.

All this, and especially what we know about Roman census dates, leads us to conclude that the real birth of Jesus took place sometime in the year 7 B.C.