I was just reading a book that discusses lunar and solar cycles, in reference to how fish choose when to migrate and how grapevines grow. It suddenly occurred to me that Easter "moves with the moon" each year but Christmas is fixed on one date. How can that be?

If Christ was definitely born on Dec 25th, then his death date should be X days/months/years after that. Shouldn't his death date also be on a set date? Why would one be stationary and the other move? Is his lief short in some years in long in others? Why wouldn't his birth date move, too?

Lisa,

This is from memory, so don't quote me. But I believe that we know Jesus was actually born in March. Constantine decided the church needed a Christian reason to celebrate at the Winter Soltice and declared Jesus' birthday to be December 25.

Oh right I wasn't even getting into that whole thing But you bring up an excellent point. The end of the year celebrations in the pagan world were incredibly well loved and powerful, as in essence people prepared to survive one of the nastiest tests nature could throw at them. The Christians wanted to take advantage of all of this positive energy and use it in a church-worthy manner So they sort of took it over in the name of Christ.

So does that make it better? Worse? If they're going to take over an event, why not tag it onto the Winter Solstice (which isn't Dec 25th) instead of randomly choosing Dec 25th as "The Day"? And if they're going to choose A Day why not choose A Day for Easter too? Now I'm going to have to do more research to find out why those two situations occurred

Easter moves with the moon's cycle because Passover moves with the lunar calendar. That's why Holy Thursday is (usually) the start of Passover- its a Seder. Unfortunately, the fact that Easter also [|]has[/|] to be on a sunday makes this arrangement precarious at best. Its an awkward sort of compromise isn't it?

Well, but Passover was 3,500 years ago and deals with the Hebrews escaping from Egypt. It has nothing to do with Christ being slain. Unless you say that Christ was slain ON Passover Day, which is one way of reading the Bible. In that case it should be on the date that Passover was in the year 33 - which apparently was on a Friday.

So to put it NEAR passover but then to put it ON a Sunday which isn't even the real sabbath makes no sense in 3 different ways

The problem is that we do not know exactly how the Hebrews counted days. The things most Christians agree on it that Christ was ressurected on the Sunday after the Passover, the first day of the week. "Sunday" actually began for them Saturday night at sunset. Depending on how the Hebrews actually counted days, Jesus could have been crucified on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. For example, I once was told in China to buy my train tickets for Saturday three days in advance. Ok, I thought, three days before Saturday is Wednesday. So I took the hour long cab ride to the station Wednesday morning. They told me i couldn't buy tickets that day and that I'd have to come back the next day. They had included Saturday in their counting whereas I hadn't. It was then I realized how different cultures count days differently. The earliest Christians were Jews who kept their holy days according to their customs and calendars.

Christmas, however, was instituted as a holiday much later, after most of the church was composed of Romans. Therefore, Christmas was given an arbitrary date (the Da Vinci Code is probably correct about Christians assigning Jesus' birthday to the same date as other gods) according to the calander used by the Romans.

Well, but Jesus lived in historical times - i.e. in times that very good records were kept in general. There are trillions of records left by the Romans, who were quite into documenting things.

I'm pretty sure that everyone agrees that Jesus died on a Friday - the day before the Jewish sabbath (Saturday). It's not a matter of counting days, it's a matter of "the day before" ...? They also say that Friday was a Passover day. So between those two facts, you can pinpoint it to particular years ...

IMO, it's a simple matter of Easter being a lunar holiday, and Christmas being a solar holiday. I don't think either holiday had much to do with Christ's birth or death... that is, until they were co-opted by Christians.

Thats a big 'if'.

These dates are chosen as a date to celebrate the birth & death, not because the were the actual date. They were also chosen to replace the popular pagan festivals. So Easter (which even takes its name from the pagan with its eggs & rabbits) replaces the spring festival and christmas replaces the winter festival (with its holy tree and holly).

Here in St Albans there are the remains of an underground Mithraic temple in the ruins of the Roman city of Verulamium.

Mithras was a big religion in Roman time with several similarities with the upcoming Christianity.

December 25th was the date of the Mithraic big celebration, the Sun Gods birthday.

Co-incidence that much later the Christians chose it for the birthday of their 'son god'?