Think what you like..but the december date was chosen because of the pagan celebration of the winter solstice.it was Pope Julius as a day to celebrate Christ’s birthday for that reason.
Did the pope make this statement infallibly,or is it like so much Rome does human supposition taken as scripture by its folks?
The date of Christmas is not a matter of doctrine. And Scripture does not help us very much. We cannot use it to set even the year of His birth just as we cannot absolutely set the year of His death, because even secular history is not precise about the persons and the chronology.
Not necessarily true. The Roman pagan feast to the Unconquered Sun was not instituted until 274 AD and by that time, orthodox Catholics in the West had already been trying to come up with the date of CHristmas going back to the late 2nd century when St. Hippolytus of Rome, writing around 205 AD noted that December 25 was a likely date of Christ Birth. This was because the CHurch first tried to fix the date of Pasch/Easter, which the Church throught was 25 March to April 6, using the Roman Julian Solar Calander, which was the equivalent dates to the Jewish Nissan Calander, which based on it, the likely dates of CHrist death would have been in either 30 AD or 33 AD since those were the only 2 days that Passover occurred on a Friday.
So, based on Christ Death as being between 25 March to April 6, the Church picked up on the tradition that a prophet’s Death coincided with his conception, thus the Feast of the Annuniciation was set on March 25, which was the date the Latin Church set as being his Death [later studies of the calander would put the date likely at 29 March, since the calcuations of the Julian/later Gregorian calanders have shown that 29 March 30 or 33 AD would have been a Friday, not 25 March]. THus, using this methodology, Christmas would fall on December 25 in the West and January 6 in the Eastern Church, using the March 25 to April 6 [12 day period] and moving it 9 months after.
In the Eastern Church, St. John Chrystostom reasoned 12/25 based on the following {see David Bennett article at http://www.ancient-future.net/christmasdate.html) excerpt cited in the following 2 paragraphs.:
Luke 1 says Zechariah was performing priestly duty in the Temple when an angel told his wife Elizabeth she would bear John the Baptist. During the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, Mary learned about her conception of Jesus and visited Elizabeth “with haste.”
The 24 classes of Jewish priests served one week in the Temple, and Zechariah was in the eighth class. Rabbinical tradition fixed the class on duty when the Temple was destroyed in A.D. 70 and, calculating backward from that, Zechariah’s class would have been serving Oct. 2-9 in 5 B.C. So Mary’s conception visit six months later might have occurred the following March and Jesus’ birth nine months afterward.
Thus, the writing of the great orthodox theologian of the Eastern Church again shows that Christians were not just following some pagan holiday. Now, when the pagan emperor Aurelius set 25 December as the feast of the unconquered Sun God, Christians just said this feast is the feast of the Son of God as the light of the world coming to quench the darkness, hence the timing of Christmas based on it being the darkest time of the year in that part of the world has significance as the Cosmos points to the coming of Christ as the Light extinquishing the darkness and thus the prophecy of Malichi 3:20 “Sun of Justice/Righeousness” is fullfilled in the person of Christ and his incarnation.
So while the Church eventually universally settled on 25 December as the feat of the Nativity of Christ, it was to sort of compete against the paga feast, instituted in 274 AD, and point out to the pagan Romans that Christ is true “Sun of Justice” prophesized in Malichi 3:20 and that he is “the Word was God....the light of the human race, the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it....The True light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world...And the word became Flesh” (c.f. John 1:1-14; which was the Gospel text read in Christmas Mass’s in the afternoon around the Catholic world) pointing to the deep theological and Liturgical reasons why the Church, in addition to the Biblical and theologicl scholarship of the Early Church Fathers [ST. Hippolytus and ST. John Christostyom], chose 25 December as the date of Christ birth. Relatedly, the CHurch celebrates the birth of John the Baptist on 25 June for the reason “he must increase and I must decrease” (c.f. John 3:30) as from the begginning of Summer, the longest day of the year, the days are getting shorter pointing to the coming of Christ.
So, you and your “fundalmentalist the world is flat types” can think what you want, but the reasons for 25 December reflect both theological study by the early Church and in fact reflect in visible ways [i.e. in the Cosmos and in the signs of the earth] the theological realities about Christ bith.