The birth of Christ has long been a parlor game among historians, at least those who accept the Matthew and Luke nativity narratives as having any historical saliency. This often includes conjecture over the Star of Bethlehem, nowadays assumed to have been one of many planetary conjunctions in the late first century BC, or an otherwise unrecorded supernova.
Unlike the crucifixion, which can be anchored to Passover dates, Christmas lacks an unambiguous scheduling mainstay on the calendar, and provides only tenuous references to the year of the heralded birth. The paucity of records during that period on the Roman Empire's frontier raises doubts about the census described in Luke's second chapter. The only reference commonly adopted remains the death of Herod the Great, and even the year of its occurrence engenders controversy.
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