Although it is not a historiographic source , although it is historical, the Gospel of Luke places the birth of Jesus -whose celebration will fill the world with joy 2000 years later-, at the time of the realization of a universal census by Publius Sulpicius Quirinus, governor of Syria. Some inscriptions of the time also allude to this census and the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus refers to it in some detail. Although the critics do not agree agreement, this event must have taken place around 6 B.C., before the death of Herod the Great, vassal king of Rome for the administration of Judea, or around 6 A.D., after his death, when his son Archelaus reigned and Judea had already become a province by the will of Rome. In 6 A.D. there was, in addition, the astral conjunction of Venus and Jupiter that could correspond - although there are other possible options - to the star that the Magi saw and that would guide them towards Bethlehem, as the Gospel of Mark tells and represents the primitive Christian iconography since the third century A.D. 

Apart from the doubts about the date, the first Christmas - the "fullness of time" as Paul would baptize it in his letter to the Galatians - took place during the reign of Emperor Augustus, who reigned from 27 B.C. to A.D. 14. Augustus, who was several times in the Iberian Peninsula, inaugurated with his mandate the Roman political model of the Principate, the "government of the principal citizen" and, with it, put an end to a political, military, economic and social crisis that had been affecting the Roman state since at least the last decades of the second century BC. Inaugurated five centuries earlier, by then the Republic had reached a critical impasse: civil wars (such as that of Sertorius, with an impact on our land, since the city of Pamplona was founded in its context); wars with foreign peoples; tension and social fracturing; constant episodes of vandalism, street terrorism and occupation of other people's lands; polarization of political life between optimates and populars, openly closed to dialogue; impoverishment of the middle classes of peasants and merchants; and weariness and absenteeism of the citizens of Rome with respect to political life. Augustus, however, was able to overcome these crises and, with his coming to power, a time of peace was ushered in, brief but unusual and unknown since the 90s of the first century B.C. With him, also for the first time, the Greco-Roman dream of a "common house", of an oikoumene, in which all the inhabitants of what is now Europe could feel safe, move, trade, communicate and live in unity, became a reality.

The monumental take-off that already Roman cities of our Navarre, such as Cara, Pompelo, Andelo or Santa Criz de Eslava, experienced at that time sample in an extraordinarily striking, architectural, visual, very Roman way. As Benedict XVI insisted years ago in his work The Infancy of Jesus, that moment was indeed "the fullness of time" and was greeted by the Roman intelligentsia of the time as a time of hope, of future, as a "new era", the same one that the poet Virgil had sung about in his eclogues some years before, longing for that "new progeny" that was to "descend from heaven", as he wrote. 

Christmas, once again, also from a historical point of view, reminds us that where there is hope, life grows and that, no matter how tense -as in the last century of the Roman Republic- our political life and our social diary may be, if we keep that hope, and the contemplation of the Nativity Scene gives us plenty of reasons to do so and if we sow peace and joy in our hearts and around us, that ancestral "fullness of time" will also fill ours, apparently as rough and tense as those of the crisis at the end of the Roman Republic. Merry, historical and Roman Christmas to all.