christians could do things more in public because what happens in the early 300s is that constantine becomes the first roman emperor to accept christianity and so christians won't be persecuted anymore. so now they can do things more publicly and argue with each other about how to understand jesus. and as a result of that, i think they decided that they wanted to have a celebration about jesus' birth to show how important he was. >> well, you bring up a point that nowhere in the bible does it give a date, right? so that's really interesting because there's a lot of folks who practice biblical literalism but quite frankly we don't even have a reason. so why did we come to celebrate christmas on this day, on december 25th? >> well, i think probably because after 300 years when they couldn't discuss it as much, now they feel more free and can argue with each other. they all believed in jesus but