Christmas, is it 25th December or 7th January By: Ekladious Ibrahim Christmas is a celebration to remember the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ who we all the Christians believe He is the Son of God. So whenever you celebrate Christmas, remember that God sent his Son into the world for the salvation for everyone. Christmas nowadays is celebrated by the majority of people around the world, whether they are Christians or not. Its a time when family and friends come together and remember the good things they have. Children are also like Christmas as it is a time when they give and receive presents. No one exactly knows the real day of the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, the actual date of His birth was and still unknown, even the year of His birth is not known as well, which probably didnt happen in the year 1AD but slightly four years earlier. There is no fixed date for the birthday of Jesus is given in the Bible, some people celebrate it on 25th December while others celebrate on 7th January? How celebration started?: We all know that the Winter Solstice is the day where there is the shortest time between the sun rising and the sun setting. It happens on December 22nd. The pagans had a festival to celebrate and worshipped the sun for winning over the darkness of winter. The Roman celebration called the Festival of Saturnalia which took place between December 17th and 23rd and honoured the Roman god Saturn. They celebrated it as it was the birthday of the Pagan Sun god Mithra, the holy day called Sunday. Early Christians might have given this festival a new meaning to celebrate the birth of Jesus the Son of God as He called at the bible “Sun of Righteousness”. In the middle of the 4th century it was agreed by the Church all over the world to celebrate the nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ on 25 December which is 29 Kiahk in the Coptic calendar, most probably to take the place of a pagan feast. So the whole world continued to celebrate on that day until sixteenth century. Until the sixteenth century, the civil calendar in use was the Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Thomas Caesar in the year 46 B.C. This calendar considered the year to be 365.25 days, and had a leap year every four years, just like the Coptic calendar. Therefore, until the sixteenth century, 25 December coincided with 29 Kiahk, as the date of the celebration of the Lords nativity. How the difference happened? In the year of 1582, Pope Gregory XIII of Rome who was interested in studying astrology, noticed that the vernal equinox, the point at which the sun crosses the equator, making day and night of equal length, starting the spring, used to fall on 21 March around the time of the council of Nicea (A.D. 325) which set the times for the ecclesiastical feasts. The vernal equinox at his time fell on 11 March. Pope Gregory consulted his scientists and astronomers, and learned that the equinoctial year (or solar year), which is the time the earth takes to revolve around the sun from one equinox to another, was slightly shorter than the Julian year. It was 365.2422 solar days (approximately 11 minutes and 14 seconds shorter). This makes a difference of a full day every 128.2 years, hence the difference of 10 days in the beginning of spring between the fourth and sixteenth centuries. Then Pope Gregory XIII decreed the following: 1- In A.D. 1582, October 5th will be called October 15th. 2- The Julian calendar should be shortened by 3 days every 400 years, by making the centenary year a normal 365-day year, not a leap year, except if its number is divisible by 400. Thus year 1600 remained a leap year as usual, while 1700, 1800 and 1900 had only 365 days each and the year 2000 was a leap year of 366 days. 3- This new calendar came to be known as the Gregorian calendar, and is the common civil calendar in use in our world today. Most of the world uses the Gregorian Calendar implemented by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582. When the switch was made in 1582 by the Astronomers of pope Gregory, 10 days were lost, so that the day that followed the 4th October 1582 was 15th October 1582. In the UK the change of calendars was made in 1752. The day after 2nd September 1752 was 14th September 1752 as the difference was 11 days on that time. There are 13 days in difference nowadays between the two calendars. Due to that difference, many Orthodox churches and Christmas in the East celebrate on 7th January which coincided with 29 Kiahk of the Coptic Orthodox Church, while the western churches still celebrate on 25 December. * I prepared a book about 25 December or 7 January published in Arabic.
Posted on: Thu, 25 Dec 2014 09:52:02 +0000
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