Jesus' Birth

I did an interview for ABC's Good Morning America a few nights ago on the date of Christmas. It was triggered by an astronomer's claim to have nailed down the date to a day in June. The origins of this date are worth discussing, since the gospels do not give us a specific day or even the season Jesus was born. The most we can get for the biblical data is a range of years. Here is the gist of what I told ABC in an email before the interview:

The CNN news release on the web that Paul Verhoeven, the Hollywood director and Jesus Seminar participant, has written a biography of Jesus that attributes Jesus' birth to a rape of Mary by a Roman soldier is old news. In dealing with the theories of Jim Tabor in Dethroning Jesus (pp. 178-79) I wrote the following about this claim that goes back to Celsus and the late second century.