Was Jesus Born on December 25th?

by Sea Breeze 34 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  cha ching

  WT loves to distract so they will look superior!

  Most people dont even care about that, or if pagans had celebrations like it.

  Family, fun and love. An excuse to have a good time.
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  Sea Breeze

  I believe that the sheer logistics of caring for a flock of sheep shows that shepherds would have been grazing their flocks in all but extreme weather. Consider:

  An adult sheep eats between 3-6 lb. forage a day and can drink up to a gallon of water. So lets put this in perspective of the labor to tend to a flock of 100 sheep that are not abiding in the fields:

  Water: 7lb, a gallon of water weighs just over 7 lb.
  Feed: 3-6 lb., lets use the lower limit, 3 lb.
  Total per sheep, per day: 10 lb.

  Flock (100 sheep) total per day: 1,000 lb.
  For December-February: 90 days at 1,000 lb. per day - 90,000 lb. or 45 tons.

  So if you were a shepherd with a flock of 100 sheep and it was not so cold that it was life threatening, would you take your flock to the fields and let them eat and drink on their own - OR - would you want to haul 45 tons of food and water to their enclosure?

  Putting this is relative human manual labor terms. If a sturdy shepherd could haul 50 lb. a trip and had to only go an average of a quarter mile to gather forage or water:

  50 lb. per trip and 90,000 lb. needed:

  1,800 trips, a total of 90 miles.

  1,800 trips over 90 days would be 20 per day.

  I believe that hardy, pragmatic ancient shepherds would rather bundle up on chilly nights where the average Low is only 44 degrees F, rather than do all this extra work.

  Bringing the flock in only when absolutely necessary just makes more sense.

  This image was taken on a Dec. 25th near Bethlehem:

  
  
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  Rivergang

  Mid-winter grazing of livestock in open fields is one thing (that happened all the time where I grew up.

  However, sleeping out on the bare ground is quite another matter, when the ground temperature can often be 4 to 5 degrees Celsius less than the “standard” air temperature - and thus near to freezing.

  Bloody hell - have you ever tried it!
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  Sea Breeze

  I'm out in it twice a week right now for my son's soccer games. We are out till 9-10 pm with the temp in the upper 40's to 50's. I'm sitting on the ground at some locations.
  
  It gets chilly on the ground. That's why the parents bring a blanket or matte to sit on. Do you think hardy shepherds who do this for a living would do no less? To this day Shepherds use movable "shepherd huts" for this very purpose. Again we are talking about average lows of only 47 degrees F. Weather has been handled for thousands of years by travelers, professional outdoorsmen, hunters, adventurers, cattle herders and shepherds. It is unreasonable to think this would be a problem.

  
  
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  Phizzy

  Jeffro has provided the definitive answers for this Thread, the Jesus Myth is exactly that, we have no facts to go on, the Gospels etc are all Fiction.

  It may be fun to debate things about the Stories, as it is about Tolkien stories or whatever, but if you want Facts and Truth about the Historical Jesus, there are none, and I doubt there ever will be.
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  Sea Breeze

  Phizzy,

  That is most radical position a person could take. And, one that goes against much evidence.

  Bart Ehrmann, a very prominent atheist bible scholar vigorously defends the historicity of Jesus, and provides a very critical portrait of the man from Nazareth.

  No scholar of any repute would deny it. It is just gaslighting to suggest otherwise. The entire world counts time by this mans birth. Your position is the equivalent of flat-earthers.

  Additionally, these 12 facts are agreed upon by the vast majority of scholars (up to 95%), atheist and believer alike:

  The facts:

  1. Jesus died by Roman Crucifixion.
  2. He was buried, most likely in a private tomb of Joseph of Arimathea
  3. Soon afterwards, the disciples were discouraged, bereaved, and despondent having lost hope.
  4. Jesus’ tomb was found empty very soon after his burial
  5. The disciples had experiences which they believed were actual appearances of the risen Jesus.
  6. Due to these experiences, the disciple’s lives were thoroughly transformed, to the point of being willing to die for this belief.
  7. The resurrection message was the center of preaching in the early church.
  8. This message was especially proclaimed in Jerusalem, where Jesus died and was buried shortly before.
  9. As a result of this preaching, the church was born and grew.
  10. Sunday became the primary day of worship.
  11. James, who had been a skeptic, was converted to the faith when he believed he saw the resurrected Jesus.
  12. A few years later, Paul became a Christian believer due to an experience which he believed was an appearance of the risen Jesus.
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  millie210

  Jeffro

  
  Millie210:
  JWs do say that, but it completely misrepresents Daniel. The ‘leader’ in that passage was Antiochus IV Epiphanes. But aside from the specifics, the passage indicates the ‘leader’ to be an enemy of Jerusalem and not the same person as the ‘messiah’. Verse 26 says ‘messiah’ is cut off at the end of 62 weeks, not at ‘the half of the week’ as falsely claimed by JWs.
  JWs use the same passage to falsely claim that Jesus died in 33CE (counting ‘62 weeks’ from an invalid starting point), which also has no basis in fact. It is more likely that he was born in 4BCE and died 30CE.

  Wasn't there also a line of reasoning from Daniel 9:27 about gift offerings to cease at the half of the year. The times being mentioned there was 7 years. and apparently, it had a greater application in the death of Jesus at which time there would be no more need for gift offerings.

  Thank you Jeffro, I love learning new things!
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  Anony Mous

  @Sea Breeze: There is a difference between biblical/religious scholarship and archeological scholarship. The biblical and religious scholarship, even the atheist ones, do not deny that a Jesus-character existed in Abrahamic mythology, nobody really does, but that character is also tied to other characters that came before, similar messianic figures came both before and after.

  The archeological scholarship however does not presume a real Jesus existed (at least not since the 1900s) when the Bible said he did. There is no archeological evidence of the person Jesus existing, his birth place of Bethlehem did not exist until decades later, there is no evidence of a person named Jesus of Nazareth being crucified in Roman records, there is no evidence of him or his family (Josef, Mary etc) in any Jewish records either, there is no evidence of any notable magician or prophet in contemporary writings either and all of the gospels were written generations later than when they were supposed to be. Even the lineage of David has recently been proven to be completely mythical, there are no other records than the Bible to prove David existed or any of his children down to Mary.

  Jesus is commonly accepted to be an amalgam of several Jewish scholars and the stories based on sectarian writings from the era with heavy influences from other religions. Jesus has always been a myth based on older myths.
  

  If someone finds a Tolkien book in the 30th century, they would be able to make pretty much all the same arguments that Christians use to defend Jesus to defend the existence of Frodo and Sauroman, actually, the Tolkien books, even those written after his death, are much more coherent than the Bible stories.
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  GregW

  Mythological figures can be born anytime, even the most greatest and most believed.
  
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  Sea Breeze

  More gaslighting.