Was Jesus really born on December 25 or did the christians just hijack a pagan holiday?
No. Scholars believe the actual date of Jesus’ birth is around Feb-March. It is not uncommon to have two dates associated with an event. One is the actual date the other is the "observed" date. Jesus’ birthday is observed on 12/25. An example in modern times is the observance of holidays on a Monday or Friday, for the benefit of a three day week-end instead of on the actual day. As for it being a pagan holiday, the solstice occurs on the 21st, not the 25th. Still in BC is was not uncommon to attach important events to important dates, to give a sense of added importance. The observance of Jesus’ birthday is a modern phenomenom. We have to assume those living in His time knew when Has born!
Christians fully hijacked a pagan holiday to get the pagans to ‘convert’ because they still wanted to worship their gods and still wanted to have all their celebrations and traditions, basically, they took a pagan holiday and changed nothing, but stuck the name Jesus into it. He was probably born in the fall – some people say September 11th because of things in the Bible, google it, definatly, because I am not studied on that part exactly. But the only people born on December 25th (other than random people, who are definatly not evil just because of their DOB) are pagan gods, and actually there are a long list of pagan gods born on that day. Our loving God wouldn’t let Jesus be born on the same day as so many pagan gods and be grouped in with them, celebrating his birth on that day is terribly wrong in my opinion, also, celebrating our God with pagan traditions, is sooo bad also. Here are some sites, I didn’t read through them all, but they look interesting and are on topic:
It is not now, nor has it ever been, a teaching of Christianity that Jesus was born on December 25. In the society of the early Church, there were any number of pagan celebrations falling on or around the winter solstice. The early Church (in its entirety, not only the Church in Rome) instituted Christ’s Mass on December 25 as a comemoration of Jesus’ birthday so that Christians would have a holiday of their own, and would not feel compelled to participate in the pagan observances of the same time. Some time later, the Church instituted the Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist. According to the New Testament, John the Baptist would have been born six months before Jesus. The Nativity of St. John the Baptist is therefore celebrated six months before Christ’s Mass, and falls on the summer solstice. .
Jesus was not born on December 25, most Chrisitians are well aware of that. I am amazed how many people like yourself think they are not aware of it. The date coincided with Saturnalia that was associated with Roman/Greek religion related to the winter solstice. Some think that early Christians celebrated Christ’s birth on that day because they could do so ‘anonymously’ so to speak without fear of retribution, it is more likely that Emperor Constantine, after his conversion, replaced Saturnalia with a celebration Christ’s birth gving the pagan celebration a Christian twist. He did that with many other things asociated with Roman religion. I.e in the Roman temples – statues of Zeus became Peter, Hermes Paul, etc…
