Cribs, carols, cards, nativity plays and films — they all have something to say about the birth of Christ just over 2,000 years ago.
But sometimes the message they present is quite different from what really happened. Here we look at some of the most common myths and compare them with what the Bible tells us about Jesus’s birth.
Myth 1: Jesus was born on December 25.
The Truth: No one knows the date on which Jesus was born and there is no record of any date being set apart to mark his birth during the first 300 years of the history of the church. It was not until the 4th century that Christians started to celebrate the birth of Christ on December 25 in an attempt to Christianise the pagan celebration of the birthday of the sun.
