St. Luke records that when Jesus was born an angel of the Lord directed a group of shepherds to go find him.
Luke introduces this group of shepherds by saying:
And in that region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night [Luke 2:8].
This has led to a common argument that Jesus couldn’t have been born on December 25th.
Why? Because it was supposedly too cold for the shepherds to be pasturing their flocks at night in late December.
Is this true?
Not on your life.
Shepherds’ Fields
Sheep definitely were pastured in the vicinity of Bethlehem. Luke is correct about that. In fact, they are pastured there today.
There are even two fields (one Catholic, one Greek Orthodox) that are known as the “Shepherds’ Field,” where pilgrims go to commemorate the events that Luke records. Both have shrines today.
The Orthodox one is pictured above.
You can read more about the Shepherds’ Fields here.
Neither can be established as the site Luke mentions. (Indeed, the site may have been at another nearby location entirely.)
Now about the argument that it was too cold to be grazing sheep on December 25th. . . .
Too Cold?
You know those fashionable fleece jackets that are really popular that people wear to keep from being too cold?
The ones that return between five and six million hits on Google?
Yeah those!
You know where the stuff those fleece jackets are made of comes from?
That’s right! Sheep! (And/or goats.)
It turns out that God decided to have sheep grow this amazing stuff called wool.
This wool stuff not only makes sheep soft and fun for children to touch at petting zoos, it also keeps them warm—just like it keeps us warm once we shear it off them.
In fact, wool is one of the main reasons that we keep sheep in the first place.
Sheep also need us to shear them, because if we don’t then their wool will overgrow and make it very difficult for the sheep to go about its normal sheep business.
Here’s a picture of a sheep whose wool has been allowed to grow to the point that, when it was finally sheared, it produced enough wool for twenty men’s suits . . .
Anybody want to say it was too cold for that sheep to withstand the rigors of a December night in the vicinity of Jerusalem, where the average nightly low for such nights (today) is 43 degrees Fahrenheit?
Of course, average temperature changes over times, but the first century was well after the close of the last Ice Age.
So maybe we want to be a little careful about declaring it “too cold” to keep sheep outdoors in the Jerusalem-Bethlehem area without, y’know, actually checking the facts.
Speaking of which . . .
Let’s Check the Facts!
Whether or not Jesus was born on December 25th, the claim that sheep were not being grazed at this time of year is false. In fact, sheep are still grazed there at this time of year.
In biblical circles, there is a famous letter written in 1967 in which a visiting scholar noted that sheep were, in fact, being pastured in Shepherds’ Field on Christmas Eve itself.
Biblical chronologer Jack Finegan writes:
William Hendriksen quotes a letter dated Jan. 16, 1967, received from the New Testament scholar Harry Mulder, then teaching in Beirut, in which the latter tells of being in Shepherd Field at Bethlehem on the just-passed Christmas Eve, and says: “Right near us a few flocks of sheep were nestled. Even the lambs were not lacking. . . . It is therefore definitely not impossible that the Lord Jesus was born in December” [Jack Finnegan, Handbook of Biblical Chronology (2nd ed.), no. 569, quoting Hendriksen, New Testament Commentary: Matthew (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1973), 1:182].
So the idea that Jesus couldn’t have been born on December 25th because of Luke’s reference to the pasturing of sheep on this night is false.
What about the shepherds?
Of course, Luke also says the shepherds were out in the fields. Would it have been too cold for them?
After all, shepherds are not naturally covered in wool. (Well, not most of them.)
But they do tend to have access to wool clothing and wool blankets, and they can lie down together to keep warm (Eccles. 4:11; cf. Eccles. 4:9-12) and build fires (John 18:18), etc.
And, y’know, 43 degrees.
So yeah. Not too cold for them, either.
(from 30 Days, an Italian Catholic publication n.d.)
“December 25 is an historical date,” Professor Tommaso Federici, Professor at the Pontifical Urbanian University and a consultant to two Vatican Congregations, has stressed. In an article in the Osservatore Romano on December 24, he wrote: “December 25 is explained as the ‘Christianization’ of a pagan feast, ‘birth of the Sol Invictus’; or as the symmetrical balance, an aesthetic balance between the winter solstice (Dec. 21-22) and the spring equinox (March 23-24). But a discovery of recent years has shed definitive light on the date of the Lord’s birth. As long ago as 1958, the Israeli scholar Shemaryahu Talmon published an in-depth study on the calendar of the Qumran sect [Ed. based , in part, on Parchment Number 321 — 4 Q 321 — of the Qumran Dead Sea Scrolls, see picture at left], and he reconstructed without the shadow of doubt the order of the sacerdotal rota system for the temple of Jerusalem (1 Chronicles 24, 7-18) in New Testament times. Here the family of Abijah, of which Zechariah was a descendant, father of John the herald and forerunner (Luke 1, 5), was required to officiate twice a year, on the days 8-14 of the third month, and on the days 24-30 of the eighth month. This latter period fell at about the end of September. It is not without reason that the Byzantine calendar celebrated ‘John’s conception’ on September 23 and his birth nine months later, on June 24. The ‘six months’ after the Annunciation established as a liturgical feast on March 25, comes three months before the forerunner’s birth, prelude to the nine months in December: December 25 is a date of history.”
In other words, according to the evidence of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Sacred Scripture, our liturgical calendar is accurate:
end of September
Zechariah “executed his priestly function” (Luke 1:8) according to his class. His wife, Elizabeth, conceived (the Church traditionally holds St. John’s conception to have taken place on 23 September) just as Gabriel said (Luke 1:24) and hid herself away for 5 months.
25 March, the Feast of the Annunciation
In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy (Luke 1:26), Gabriel appears to Mary to tell her she is to have a child
24 June, the Feast of John the Baptist
Three months after the Annunciation,
John the Baptist was born, at a time when the days were becoming shorter
25 December
Nine months after the Annunciation, Jesus was born, at a time when the days were becoming longer.
To rebut the idea that Jesus had to have been born (rather than conceived) in the Spring because the shepherds were in their fields, which wouldn’t have been so in the Winter, there’s this, from the Jewish convert scholar, Alfred Edersheim, in his “The Life and Times of Jesus The Messiah”:
And yet Jewish tradition may here prove both illustrative and helpful. That the Messiah was to be born in Bethlehem, was a settled conviction. Equally so, was the belief , that He was to be revealed from Migdal Eder, ‘the tower of the flock.’ This Migdal Eder was not the watchtower for the ordinary flocks which pastured on the barren sheepground beyond Bethlehem, but lay close to the town, on the road to Jerusalem. A passage in the Mishnah leads to the conclusion, that the flocks, which pastured there, were destined for Temple-sacrifices, and, accordingly, that the shepherds, who watched over them, were not ordinary shepherds. The latter were under the ban of Rabbinism, on account of their necessary isolation from religious ordinances, and their manner of life, which rendered strict legal observance unlikely, if not absolutely impossible. The same Mishnaic passage also leads us to infer, that these flocks lay out all the year round, since they are spoken of as in the fields thirty days before the Passover — that is, in the month of February, when in Palestine the average winter rainfall is nearly greatest.
Thus, Jewish tradition in some manner apprehended the first revelation of the Messiah from that Migdal Eder, where shepherds watched the Temple-flocks all the year round. It was, then, on that ‘wintry night’ of the 25th of December, that shepherds watched the flocks destined for sacrificial services, in the very place consecrated by tradition as that where the Messiah was to be first revealed.
Skeptics have always tried to poke holes in the biblical narrative. Of course, they are put off because of the miraculous elements, that as the song goes, God came as a little child to suffer and to die.
This is a great explanation! Do you talk anywhere about the validity of the census? I’ve heard that there was no census of any kind taken that would have required Joseph and Mary to travel to Bethlehem.
Missy: There are several solutions to the issue of the enrollment of Quirinius.
I talk about one of them here (tho there is another solution I find very interesting and hope to write about before long):
https://www.jamesakin.com/reels_squares/2014/09/does-luke-contradict-himself-on-when-jesus-was-born.html
My favorite response to this is by someone whose name I can unfortunately not remember.
Imagine if someone started a story by saying, “Remember in 1944 when they took a census of the entire world? No? Never mind.” The evangelists were addressing people no more divorced from the census than we are from 1944. If the census had never actually happened, the evangelist’s credibility would be immediately shot. The fact that the Gospels weren’t immediately dismissed is actually evidence that the census happened.
Really, the main reason people make this objection is, not to set the historical record straight, but to attack the date on which Christians celebrate Christmas. That’s why many people you hear this objection from are Jehovah’s Witnesses who are against celebrating any Christian holiday (or birthdays too, for that matter). Some atheists have also picked this up, again, not in the interest of accuracy, but as a way to try and make Christians look silly by showing they are ignorant of history (and other factual information). As this article shows, both groups are on the wrong side of the facts.
Osservatore Romano article I cited was December 24,1998.
Sounds like Common Sense to me! Where did Common Sense go?
Hi Jimmy!
As far as the date of Christ’s birth, I think you’d be interested in this sermon from Fr. Phil Wolfe, FSSP.
http://youtu.be/eMypL4N2R9w
God Bless!