LFC,
Do you care or just like stirring the pot?
I can’t answer for why the ancient church selected Dec 25th over any other day, and any attempt to change it at this late date seems to me to be immaterial.
What the church has always believe is that Jesus was born, and that is what is being celebrated. I know many people who celebrate their “birthday” on a different day then when they were born.
I think you should look at the larger issue of obeying the teaching of Jesus and the NT writers, and less on the trivia of the Christian faith.
Grace and Peace,
K51
Please stay on the discussion at hand and not use a Red Herring and deflect this to a discussion about me as a way to change the topic. Thank you.
The ancients did not select the best and only evidence that was around 200 AD - which would have led them to go with March or April - and thus we would not have Christmas being torn up because of their actions in choosing a celebration of Christ’s birth that was too close to comfort to certain pagan holidays. Blame them, not me.
What wisdom they had in choosing the 25th of December, instead of going with the best evidence they had, which Clement provided!!!!
BTW, by bring in people celebrating their birthday on other days other than the one they were born on, is an apples to oranges argument, as these “many people” aren’t Christ the Lord, and the day chosen for his birth was not in keeping with the evidence they had then to go with from 200 AD.
That is dead on. Liturgical calendars have always had some flexibility to them. For almost 2000 years feasts have been moved, added, dropped, changed, shifted temporarily and permanently. We know, for example, that St. Kateri Tekakwitha died on April 17, 1680. But that date very often conflicts with Holy Week and Easter Week, so in this country the American bishops moved it to later in the summer.
The rabid insistence on a historically correct date is symptomatic of misplaced modern priorities.