Dante
 cocks in my mouth
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Reply 17 of 30 (Originally posted on: 12-25-05 03:28:33 PM)
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According to one tradition, Jesus was born during Hanukkah (25 Kislev into the beginning of Tevet). Under the old Julian calendar, the popular choice of 5 BC for the year of Jesus' birth would place 25 Kislev at November 25.
Early Christians sought to calculate the date of Christ's birth based on the idea that Old Testament prophets died either on an anniversary of their birth or of their conception. They reasoned that Jesus died on an anniversary of his conception, so the date of his birth was nine months after the date of Good Friday, either December 25 or January 6.
St. Hippolytus, who was already knowledgeably defending the faith in writing at the start of the third century, said that Christ was born Wednesday, December 25, in the 42nd year of Augustus' reign (see his Commentary on Daniel, circa 204, Bk. 4, Ch. 23).
Additional calculations are made based on the six-year almanac of priestly rotations, found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Some believe that this almanac lists the week when John the Baptist's father served as a high priest. As it is implied that John the Baptist could only have been conceived during that particular week, and as his conception is believed to be tied to that of Jesus, it is claimed that an approximate date of December 25 can be arrived at for the birth of Jesus. However, most scholars (e.g. Catholic Encyclopedia in sources) believe this calculation to be unreliable as it is based on a string of assumptions.
The apparition of the angel Gabriel to Zechariah, announcing that he was to be the father of John the Baptist, was believed to have occurred on Yom Kippur. This was due to a belief (not included in the Gospel account) that Zechariah was a high priest and that his vision occurred during the high priest's annual entry into the Holy of Holies. If John's conception occurred on Yom Kippur in late September, then his birth would have been in late June. If John's birth was on the date ascribed by tradition, June 24, then the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin Mary, said by the Gospel account to have occurred three month's before John's birth, would have been in late March. (Tradition fixed it on March 25.) The birth of Jesus would then have been on December 25, nine months after his conception. As with the previous theory, proponents of this theory hold that Christmas was a date of significance to Christians before it was a date of significance to pagans.
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