The Nativity of Christ

On 25 December the Church celebrates the Nativity in the flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ — the Incarnation, “the Word made flesh” born in Bethlehem of the Virgin. This file treats the Gospel event, the long-debated origin of the 25 December date, and the feast as the Church’s sung confession of the Christological dogma the councils defined: that the child of the manger is true God and true man in one person.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Gospel and the dogma

The Nativity rests on the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke: the birth of Jesus at Bethlehem in the days of Herod, the manger and the swaddling clothes, the shepherds and the angelic host, the star and the Magi from the East (Luke 2:1–20; Matthew 1:18–2:12). But the feast is never merely a birthday. Its subject is the Incarnation — that “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14) — the entry of the uncreated Creator into his own creation, the union of the divine and human natures in one person. The kontakion of St Romanos the Melodist compresses the whole mystery into a single sentence: “Today the Virgin gives birth to him who is above all being, and the earth offers a cave to the Unapproachable One” (kontakion, Tone 3; The Festal Menaion, trans. Mother Mary and Ware, Faber, 1969, p. 279). The paradoxes are not rhetorical excess but exact Christology: the eternal is born in time, the infinite is contained in a cave, the one who feeds all creation is fed at the breast — because in Christ two whole natures, divine and human, are united without confusion in a single hypostasis.

This is why the Nativity is, precisely, the feast of the Ecumenical Councils sung. What Nicaea confessed of the Son — “true God from true God… of one essence with the Father” — and what Ephesus and Chalcedon defended — that the one born of Mary is God the Word, so that she is truly Theotokos, “God-bearer,” and that in him Godhead and manhood are united without confusion or division — is exactly what the Nativity hymns proclaim (see The Seven Ecumenical Councils and Orthodoxy: The Nicene Creed). St Gregory the Theologian’s great Nativity oration, from which the feast’s canon by St Cosmas draws, states the soteriological point: the Son of God becomes son of man “that he might make us gods,” taking what is ours to give us what is his (Gregory Nazianzen, Oration 38, “On the Theophany,” 3–4, 13; trans. NPNF II/7; the canon of the feast, The Festal Menaion, pp. 254–289). The troparion names the same knowledge as light: “Your Nativity, O Christ our God, has shone upon the world the light of knowledge” (troparion, Tone 4; The Festal Menaion, p. 278).

The disputed origin of 25 December

Why 25 December? The date is not given in Scripture, and its origin is one of the classic problems of liturgical history. Two explanations have long competed, and the honest position is that the question is not settled.

[Disputed: the origin of the 25 December date. (a) The "History-of-Religions" hypothesis holds that the Church fixed the Nativity on 25 December to supplant or baptize the Roman celebration of the *Natalis Solis Invicti*, the birthday of the "Unconquered Sun" at the winter solstice, established by the emperor Aurelian in 274 — Christ the "Sun of Righteousness" (Malachi 4:2) replacing the sun-god. This view, associated with the older History-of-Religions school, remains widely held (see the survey in Talley, *The Origins of the Liturgical Year*, 2nd ed., Collegeville, 1991, pp. 88–91). (b) The "Calculation" (computation) hypothesis holds that the date derives instead from an early tradition fixing the conception (and, by another reckoning, the Passion) of Christ on 25 March; adding nine months yields 25 December for the birth. On this view the Nativity date is generated from the Annunciation/Passion date by internal Christian computation, not borrowed from the solar cult (Talley, *Origins*, pp. 91–99, presenting and partly favoring the calculation theory; Susan K. Roll, *Toward the Origins of Christmas*, Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1995, weighing both). Modern scholarship is genuinely divided, and this collection does not adjudicate between them.] The earliest firm evidence for 25 December as the Nativity is the Roman Chronograph of 354 (the “Philocalian Calendar”), which lists it, reflecting Roman usage of the early or mid-fourth century (Talley, Origins, pp. 85–88). In the East the Nativity and the Baptism were originally kept together as one feast on 6 January (Epiphany); the separate 25 December feast was received at Constantinople, Antioch, and elsewhere only in the later fourth century — St John Chrysostom at Antioch in the 380s speaks of it as a recent introduction from the West (Chrysostom, homily In diem natalem; Talley, Origins, pp. 137–141; and see Theophany).

The shape of the feast

The Nativity is the second-ranking of the Great Feasts after Pascha in solemnity, and it is preceded by the forty-day Nativity Fast (from 15 November on the Julian calendar) and by a five-day forefeast from 20 December (Ware, in The Festal Menaion, Introduction; and see Fasting and Feasting). On the eve the Royal Hours are read and the Liturgy of St Basil the Great is served with Vespers (or on the feast itself when the eve falls on a Saturday or Sunday), with a long series of Old Testament prophecies read to show the whole of salvation history converging on Bethlehem (Bulgakov, Nastolnaya Kniga, 1900, on the Nativity rubrics; The Festal Menaion, pp. 199–289). The day after the feast is the Synaxis of the Theotokos (26 December), which honors the Mother through whom the Incarnation came — the liturgical instinct that a feast of the Lord is immediately followed by a commemoration of the one who served the mystery (ODB = The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Kazhdan, Oxford, 1991, s.v. “Christmas”). The Sunday after the Nativity commemorates the ancestors of Christ, Joseph the Betrothed, and the flight into Egypt, continuing to unfold the infancy narratives.

The icon

The icon of the Nativity is dense with theology and holds joy and Passion together. The Theotokos reclines at the center; the Christ Child lies not in a wooden crib but in a manger set within a dark cave, wrapped in bands that resemble both swaddling clothes and a burial shroud — so that the birth already foreshadows the tomb, and the cave of Bethlehem rhymes with the cave of the Anastasis (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, SVS Press, 1982, on the Nativity icon; and see The Icon of the Feast). Angels praise above; shepherds approach on one side and the Magi with their star on the other, so that the first witnesses — the simple of Israel and the wise of the nations — are both present. Joseph sits apart in perplexity, sometimes tempted by a bent old figure (a personification of doubt), guarding the truth that this birth is not by the will of man. Below, midwives prepare to bathe the infant — a detail that insists on the full reality of the Incarnation: the God who is born is a true human child who must be washed. The whole image is the Nicene faith rendered visible: he “came down from heaven, and was incarnate… and became man” (see Orthodoxy: The Nicene Creed).

See Also

References

  • The Festal Menaion. Trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1969. (The propers of the Nativity, pp. 199–289; the troparion and kontakion.)
  • Thomas J. Talley. The Origins of the Liturgical Year. 2nd ed. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991. (The Sol Invictus and calculation hypotheses; the Chronograph of 354; the Eastern reception.)
  • Susan K. Roll. Toward the Origins of Christmas. Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1995.
  • Gregory Nazianzen. Oration 38, “On the Theophany.” Trans. NPNF II/7.
  • The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Ed. A. Kazhdan et al. Oxford, 1991 (s.v. “Christmas”).
  • Ouspensky, Leonid, and Vladimir Lossky. The Meaning of Icons. Rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1982.
  • Bulgakov, Sergei V. Nastolnaya Kniga. 2nd ed., 1900.
  • Scripture: Luke 2:1–20; Matthew 1:18–2:12; John 1:14; Malachi 4:2.