Why isn't New Years Eve the day of Jesus' birth?
Asked by
JLeslie (
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September 18th, 2009
We us in the Common Era the Gregorian Calendar, also known as the Christian Calendar, or at least based on it. So, from my understanding our calendar year 2009 is supposed to represent years from the birth of Christ. If that is the case, why is the new year not celebrated on his birthday?
I know that most hold that Christ was not really born on that day, but that is the day we celebrate it. Why is New Years when it is?
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17 Answers
We have had periodic calendrical adjustments in the past 2,000 years, so great holidays tend to become conflated with previous great holidays: the Birth of Christ with an end-of-Winter pagan festival, The Last Supper (Easter) which drifted with the Lunar calendar has now merged with the feast of Ostoroth. We humans aren’t too rigid about these tyhings.
because jesus isn’t self centered
@pdworkin ”...the Birth of Christ with an end-of-Winter pagan festival…”
Not so much the end of winter, as the winter solstice.
In Sweden we still call it the pagan viking name. “Jul”, which has nothing to do with Christianity. Interesting that it survived, and wasn’t called something christian.
It’s called Yule here, too, but people have forgotten why.
@pdworkin Now that is interesting. I always thought yule was a Christian reference and attached to Christmas not New Years. Here is the link I just read on yule http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yule
on a side note Shana tova umetukah :)
@pdworkin Oh, how interesting! Is that around N.Y. or generally in the US?
Why isn’t my birthday everyday ???
Jesus wasn’t born then why celebrate it ?
@oratio yule tide greeting is a common phrase to me. But I grew up around New Yorkers. Good question.
January first was considered the first day of the year for at least a couple of centuries before Christ, but over the intervening centuries until our day, several other dates have been observed in Christian cultures as the start of the new year, including Dec. 25.
But actually, any potential conflict between the Roman and Christian way of counting dates was prevented by some temporal slight of hand by a 6th century Scythian monk named Dionysius Exiguus. He did a lot of calculations to make a series of tables to help track the date of Easter. In the process, he decided to use Jan. 1 as the date of Jesus circumcision, in keeping with the Jewish custom of figuring a Jewish boy’s life from the date of his circumcision, not from his birth. He thus aligned the “start” of Jesus life with the traditional Roman start of the year. Counting back the traditional 8 days from this event led to a date of Dec. 25th for Jesus’ birth. Counting back nine months from there led to March 25, which became the Annunciation (this date was actually used by the British and by the American colonists for a while as the start of the year). January 1 is still the Feast of the Circumcision on the ecclesiastic calendar.
Because even Jesus can’t have two birthdays in one year.
@Harp GA very interesting.
@oratio Everywhere in the Anglo-Saxon world. We imported it from Great Britain in the 17th C.
The 25th was picked by the blossoming Roman church because the festival of Saturnia (a huge deal to the pagan Romans), which celebrated the rebirth of the sun, led up to that date (The festival ended on the 24th). This was just one of many ways the church acclimated the public into accepting Christian holidays.
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