Note 3 — II. SOLAR MYTHS AND CHRISTIAN FESTIVALS

(3) “There is however a difficulty in accepting the 25th December as the real date of the Nativity, December being the height of the rainy season in Judaea, when neither flocks nor shepherds could have been at night in the fields of Bethlehem” (!). Encycl. Brit. art. “Christmas Day.” According to Hastings’s Encyclopaedia, art. “Christmas,” “Usener says that the Feast of the Nativity was held originally on the 6th January (the Epiphany), but in 353-4 the Pope Liberius displaced it to the 25th December... but there is no evidence of a Feast of the Nativity taking place at all, before the fourth century A.D.” It was not till 534 A.D. that Christmas Day and Epiphany were reckoned by the law-courts as dies non.