The Nativity According to the Flesh of Our Lord, and God, and Saviour Jesus Christ.
The incomprehensible and inexplicable Nativity of Christ came to pass when Herod the Great was reigning in Judea; the latter was an Ascalonite on his father’s side and an Idumean on his mother’s. He was in every way foreign to the royal line of David; rather, he had received his authority from the Roman emperors, and had ruled tyrannically over the Jewish people for some thirty-three years. The tribe of Judah, which had reigned of old, was deprived of its rights and stripped of all rule and authority. Such was the condition of the Jews when the awaited Messiah was born, and truly thus was fulfilled the prophecy which the Patriarch Jacob had spoken 1,807 years before: “A ruler shall not fail from Judah, nor a prince from his loins, until there come the things stored up for him; and he is the expectation of the nations” (Gen. 49:10).
Thus, our Saviour was born in Bethlehem, a city of Judea, whither Joseph had come from Nazareth of Galilee, taking Mary his betrothed, who was great with child, that, according to the decree issued in those days by the Emperor Augustus, they might be registered in the census of those subject to Rome. Therefore, when the time came for the Virgin to give birth, and since because of the great multitude there was no place in the inn, the Virgin’s circumstance constrained them to enter a cave which was near Bethlehem. Having as shelter a stable of irrational beasts, she gave birth there, and swaddled the Infant and laid Him in the manger (Luke 2:1–7). From this, the tradition has come down to us that when Christ was born He lay between two animals, an ox and an ass, that the words of the Prophets might be fulfilled: “Between two living creatures shalt Thou be known” (Abbacum 3:2), and “The ox knoweth his owner and the ass his master’s crib” (Esaias 1:3).
But while the earth gave the new-born Saviour such a humble reception, Heaven on high celebrated majestically His world-saving coming. A wondrous star, shining with uncommon brightness and following a strange course, led Magi from the East to Bethlehem to worship the new-born King. Certain shepherds who were in the area of Bethlehem, who kept watch while tending their sheep, were suddenly surrounded by an extraordinary light, and they saw before them an Angel who proclaimed to them the good tidings of the Lord’s joyous Nativity. And straightway, together with this Angel, they beheld and heard a whole host of the Heavenly Powers praising God and saying: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will towards men” (Luke 2:8–14).
Rest from labor for three days. All foods allowed from this day until the eve of Theophany.
The above account is taken from the Great Horologion,
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A Note on the date of the feast. The Feast of our Lord’s Nativity was originally kept in the East as a double feast conjointly with that of His Baptism in the Jordan on January 6. Known together as the Theophany, that is, the manifestation of God, it celebrated God become man – the Nativity; and man revealed as God – at the Jordan where the Father’s voice called Him His Son. It was at Rome that these were first kept as two separate feasts, the Nativity being kept on December 25. In the year 386, some ten years after this custom had also been introduced in the East, Saint John Chrysostom gave a sermon in Antioch to answer those who objected to this as a novelty. He gives scriptural foundations for which we may be certain that December 25 is the date on which our Lord was born. Saint John begins with the appearance of the Archangel Gabriel to Zacharias (Luke 1:5–20). Since it says that Zacharias was not at the altar of sacrifices, but the altar of incense, and that the people were waiting without, and that the Archangel appeared to Zacharias alone, Saint John concludes that this was the one time in the year when the priest entered alone into the Holy of Holies, the Feast of Tabernacles, on the tenth day of the seventh month (Lev. 16:29–34). The “seventh month” is our September, in which month we celebrate the Feast of the Conception of Saint John the Baptist on the 23rd. Saint Luke refers to the appearance of the Archangel Gabriel to our Lady the Theotokos as occurring “in the sixth month” (Luke 1:26): he means the sixth month after Elizabeth conceived following the appearance of Gabriel to Zacharias. Thus our Lady’s conception of our Lord (March 25) follows the conception of Saint John the Baptist (September 23) by six months, following the chronology given by Saint Luke. From March 25 it is exactly nine months to our Lord’s birth on December 25.
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