Does Christmas Have Pagan Origins? | Catholic Answers

Does Christmas Have Pagan Origins?
Each December, as we approach Christmas, there are articles proclaiming that the “real reason” we celebrate Christmas on December 25th is because of pagan holidays. So is Christmas based on the pagan feast of Saturnalia? Or is it based on the feast of Sol Invictus? And if not either of these, how did Christians end up celebrating Christmas on December 25th?
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You are listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.
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Hi, and welcome to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. If you’re listening to this when it gets first released, happy advent. If you’re listening to it very soon thereafter, Merry Christmas. If you’re listening to it a long time in the future. Happy 4th of July, happy whatever. I don’t know, it’s hard to tell on this end what holiday you may or may not be celebrating. In any case, where I am in this point in time, we’re about to celebrate Christmas, and every advent as we approach Christmas, the same really dumb debate breaks out, and it’s, is Christmas pagan? And I think it’s a really dumb debate because I’m not sure that term even means anything, and I can explain as we go what that means. But moreover, it’s always this atheist gotcha. Like, oh, you think you’re celebrating a Christian holiday, but actually it comes from a Pagan one.
And one of the things that makes it really frustrating is, not just as a Christian, as someone who actually has studied history, and knows some of the history behind this, it’s just not true. This is based on really outdated 19th century scholarship. I want to explore a couple of the most common myths around the idea of a pagan Christmas, and you can see for yourself why they shouldn’t be taken particularly seriously. So there are several variations that float around, but again, I’m going to focus on two of the ones that are the most popular. The first being that Christmas is really just Saturnalia, and the second being that it’s the Feast of Sol Invictus. So let’s start with Saturnalia. I found even in history.com, the History Channel’s website, this claim: that Saturnalia, held in mid-December is an ancient Roman pagan festival honoring the agricultural God Saturn.
So far so good. Because of when the holiday occurred, near the winter solstice, Saturnalia celebrations are the source of many of the traditions we now associate with Christmas, such as wreaths, candles, feasting, and gift giving. Now, a few things about this should be, I don’t know, alarming or at least eye-opening? First, the idea that we hadn’t thought about gift giving or feasting until Saturnalia is just, on its face, a really implausible theory. Do you think it took paganism, you think it took a particular feast like Saturnalia, to convince people like, “Hey, wouldn’t it be fun to eat a lot of really good food sometimes, and maybe give each other gifts?” I mean, the idea is almost as ridiculous as saying, “Well, the pagans wore clothes, so I guess Christians stole that from Paganism.” I’m like, no. Some things are just universal human things.
And if you go across culture, any culture, it doesn’t have to be Roman culture, it doesn’t have to be anything Christian. It could be anywhere in the world. You’ll find feasting, you’ll find gift giving. These are universal human expressions. So that’s one of the first red flags this is bogus. The second is that throwaway line, that this was a feast celebrated in mid-December. That is, it’s not celebrated at the end of December. It’s not a feast from December 25th. We’ll get into that in a second, but that should be the second red flag, like wait a second, how strong is this Saturnalia connection? The third connection, frankly, you could be forgiven for not making it, which is, well, this is getting the history of wreaths all wrong. Now, if you’re a normal person, you probably have never given a lot of thought to where the wreath comes from.
But Teddy Colbert has an entire work called The Living Wreath where he explores this, and he’s a gardening kind of guy. He just has an introduction. A lot of it’s just pretty gardening stuff. Martha Stewart, you may notice, is right there, giving a blurb on the cover. It’s that kind of work. And there is actually a pretty fascinating history of wreaths in Rome. I mean fascinating for a history of wreaths, I guess. So for instance, the phrase Nobel laureate, that phrase laureate comes from this ancient crowning with a laurel wreath on the head. So the idea that wreaths may have been a Roman thing, there’s nothing particularly shocking or objectionable about that as such, it just happens in this case not to be true. Meaning that the oldest reference we have suggests that Lutherans actually came up with the idea of using an advent wreath, back in the 16th century.
So it’s not a slam dunk KC, it’s not something that for, I think, obvious reasons, historians have spent a ton of time on. But the idea that you can trace this another 1500 years back to Roman paganism, there just does not seem to be a basis for that. So for the Saturnalia theory, as the History Channel lays it out, to work, you would need to see all these elements of Saturnalia that are repeated on the Christian calendar, or in the Christian festivity of Christmas. And other than really generic things like gift giving, we just don’t see that at all. So I want to go back to the article from history.com. It says, “Is Christian, is Christmas,” excuse me, “a pagan holiday? Pagans and Christians coexisted, though not always happily during this period, and this likely represented an effort to convince the remaining pagan Romans to accept Christianity as Rome’s official religion.”
So we don’t really have a clear dating for this, but this appears to be a fourth century claim. Maybe the idea of Christmas was a fourth century invention. Before the end of the fourth century, many of the traditions of Saturnalia, including giving gifts, singing, lighting, candles, feasting and merrymaking had become absorbed by the traditions of Christmas, as many of us know them today. And again, I would just stress there’s nothing there that is specific to Saturnalia. Now, if you want to know the actual history, it’s kind of interesting. Some elements of Saturnalia were preserved as a separate feast day, well, or festivity anyway, earlier in December. So this is the real kicker to why the Saturnalia theory doesn’t work. And here I would turn to the very provocatively titled Roman Festivals: October to December from the Classical Outlook. This is the 1990 fall edition, by a professor of emeritus of Latin by the name of Agnes Mitchells.
And she just goes through over all of the Roman festivals from October to December, it’s just what’s on the package. And she gets to December 17th, notice not the 25th, and says it’s Saturnalia. And she goes into a little bit of the history, that Saturnalia was originally a one day feast, and became a three day and then a five day. She doesn’t go into all of that. Other sources will trace more. It was actually cut back a day, and then another emperor added a day. But either way, it’s not a December 25th festival. In fact, she goes on to say, “The Saturnalia does not mark the winter solstice, which came then on December 25th,” and then mentions that the Republican calendar, meaning the calendar of the Republican of Rome, was so bad that it wouldn’t have been a reliable solstice anyway, to do it on December 25th.
So this idea that Saturnalia was a winter solstice festival on December 25th, which is the variation you’ll often hear, just not true. It is December 17th. And so there were feasts, there were parties. Turns out there are a lot of parties in a lot of places. And so just saying another time people had a party is not enough to show that party was the inspiration for this party. Hopefully you get that idea. There are feasts on the Jewish calendar. That does not automatically mean Christmas is just a regurgitation of those feasts. And if you consider all the places where Christianity is, and all the pagan religions it was interacting with from very early on, you could fill out most of a calendar, where if you’re willing to go half a month in either direction, as the people making the Saturn theory are apparently, well, you could find a feast day in one direction or another for almost any day you choose on the calendar.
And so just as we wouldn’t say, oh, well President’s Day is obviously just an extension of Christmas, it’s a wintertime holiday that… No, it doesn’t work like that. So the Saturnalia theory doesn’t have any teeth to it. But I promised to flesh out one part, which is that in a fifth century calendar mentions a festival of the slaves. Now if you know anything about the way Saturnalia was celebrated, some of it was just wild craziness, drinking and the like, but they had certain things where the peasants or the slaves would be elevated in positions where they got to be king for a day. And so that was fun. And you don’t have to worship Saturn to say that’s fun. Society benefits from those kind of things. And so it is a separate festival, no longer called Saturnalia, but called the Feast of the Slaves.
December 17th remained on the calendar even after the legalization and establishment of Christianity in the Roman Empire. It was not December 25th, it was not Christmas. It was a separate thing. So the Saturnalia idea, maybe Christians liked things in Saturnalia enough they wanted to keep it, is true, it just is not about Christmas. It’s an unrelated festival, an unrelated holiday, and it was never as big as Christmas. So that’s the first idea, that Christianity is really just stealing from Saturnalia. The other, and maybe the bigger one, is the idea we’re just stealing from Sol Invictus. Now here I was shocked to see the Encyclopedia Britannica making this claim. In its entry on the Roman God Sol, it says, well, there were two distinct sun gods at Rome. The original Sol, or Sol Indiges, had a shrine and then later on, we’ll jump down, the worship of Sol assumed an entirely different character with the later importation of various sun cults from Syria.
The Roman emperor Elagabalus in 218 to 222 built a temple to him as Sol Invictus, the invincible sun. And then Aurelian… Oh sorry, and then attempted to make his worship the principle religion at Rome. The emperor Aurelian, 270-275, later reestablished the worship. And so that’s the claim then. And the worship of Sol as special protector of the emperors and of the empire remained the chief imperial cult until it was replaced by Christianity. So this is a common argument, and you will find variations of that. So I want to just, before we address it, I want to be clear what’s going on here. First is the idea that there were two different Gods named Sol in the Roman pantheon. There is the old God, Sol Indiges, and then there’s a new God, Sol Invictus. And second, there’s this very specific claim, and Encyclopedia Britannica, to its credit does not make this, but a lot of people who recite the Sol Invictus theory will that Aurelian creates the nativity of the invincible sun, the nativity of Sol Invictus on December 25th, and on its face that seems pretty plausible.
I don’t know if you noticed a minute ago, but December 25th was the day of the winter solstice. And so you think, well yeah, it makes sense that that’d be when you would celebrate the Sun God, right? Except that none of that is true. That the whole theory about there being two different gods named Sol is discredited 19th century research. The actual feast days for Sol are well known. They were not December 25th. The first time we find a nativity of Sol Invictus is in 354 from a seemingly Christian source after the legalization of Christianity, suggesting that there wasn’t any major Roman devotion on December 25th one way or the other. And you don’t have to just take my word for it, there’s a really fascinating, in my view, article, that Steve Hijmans has, called Sol Invictus: The Winter Solstice and the Origins of Christmas. And he traces all of this, and basically shows why this is a bad theory.
But first he lays out the theory. Now I already did that, but just to see, Franz Wollheim, he repeats this basically 19th century position. And Sol Invictus was an oriental newcomer to Rome. Oriental there does not mean East Asia, it means in this case, Syria. According to this view, Rome had no sun god since the disappearance of the traditional but unimportant Sol Indiges in the first century. And so we’re told first Elagabalus brings him from Syria in 219, and then he tries to impose this oriental cult onto Rome. That doesn’t work, and so he dies in 222, the Sol Invictus cult is discredited. It’s reintroduced in 274 by Aurelian. And so that’s the claim. We saw something very, very similar to that just made by Encyclopedia Britannica. And then this is then connected to the fourth century with Julian. So that’s the idea.
And so Hijmans has really strong words for it. He says, “This synopsis of the history and development of the cult of Sol in Rome and the Roman Empire is simply untenable, in light of the extensive archeological, iconographic, epigraphic, numismatic,” like stamp related, “and literary evidence,” or coin related, excuse me, “and literary evidence that documents the continuous presence in Roman of the sun god in some form or another, from as far back in history as we can trace Roman religion at all.” Now that is a small point. That’s not really the heart of what we’re going to try to show here, but it’s just to point out this theory about Sol Invictus, this newcomer God in 270, is not true. Everything we know about Roman religion shows there is an ongoing devotion to Sol, large or small, in an unbroken way. From the beginnings of Roman religion as far back as we find them, all the way down.
And so you see it in everywhere you look, whether you’re looking at literature, whether you’re looking at fact or fiction, whether you’re looking at coins, whether you’re looking at icons or art. And he points this out, that the Roman tradition was that Cassius, who’s like the Republican co-ruler with Remus and Romulus, is the one who introduced Sol and Luna. So the Romans were under the impression that this dated back to the founding of Rome, and the coins minted by Rome had Sol on them for 500 years, basically unbroken, and then sporadically until the late second century, almost annually. So this idea that Sol is a newcomer to the Roman pantheon isn’t true. Now that by itself doesn’t tell us whether Christianity is ripping off Sol Invictus. In fact, you could say, well that proves Sol Invictus was even more important than we realized before.
But it should at least raise the red flag that hey, maybe this historical scholarship is not quite as sound as the people proclaiming it have led you to believe. Maybe it’s not quite as clear-cut as all that. And in fact, that’s exactly what Hijmans is going to argue. He said it’s not like they didn’t know this stuff in the 19th century. He said that this paradigm of a third century AD oriental origin for Sol Invictus was established. The evidence was ignored, not as a result of poor superficial scholarship, because of a racistly tainted ideological bias against solar cults, in general and in particular against its postulated corollary, ruler worship. So in other words, it wasn’t that any of the evidence that he’s offering in the article wasn’t available in the 19th century, people just didn’t have any way of knowing better, or even though they were sloppy about. It’s that they’d come at this with a certain set of lens, that, oh well this isn’t advanced, civilized worship, this is that weird esoteric Asian stuff.
And so they just looked down on Syrians and solar worship, and so they blame the Syrians for the solar worship. Now to be sure there is solar worship that goes on in Syria, I’m not denying that. In fact, we’re going to see a little more evidence of that later on, that this was popular in Syria. But the idea this hadn’t been found in Rome or that this had died out in Rome, none of that is true. And at least none of that is true based on the evidence that we actually have. If you don’t come at it with a certain set of biases about what to expect from civilized religion and uncivilized religion, then you’re not going to come to these kind of conclusions.
So again, at this point we have not shown that Christianity didn’t just steal this holiday from Sol Invictus. We’re going to get there, but we are at least seeing there’s deeper problems with this historical theory than the people who very confidently declare it every December may be even aware of. This is not the uncritical truth with a capital T that you may have been led to think that it is. But we’re going to go on because there’s deeper problems with it.
So he just says, “We must be aware not to take established views on the origin and nature of Sol Invictus at face value,” and that’s really all I’m trying to say. But then he gets to the kicker. “It must be stressed that December 25th was neither a longstanding nor an especially important official feasting of Sol,” under either name. Sol Indiges, Sol Invictus, any other title for Sol. The first time that we hear it mentioned is the calendar of 354, and there’s no evidence that Aurelian had established it in 270. That’s just a modern theory, not actually found in the evidence. This is people just claiming this. He says, “In fact, there’s no firm evidence this Feast of Sol on December 25th, antedates,” meaning predates, “the feast of Christmas at all. The traditional feast days of Sol were August 8th, August 9th, August 28th and December 11th.” That’s from the early Imperial records.
August 8th, August 9th, August 28th, and December 11th. And of those, August 28th is the only one still mentioned in the calendar of 354 along with two new ones, October 19th and October 22nd, the latter being the most important, judging by the 36 chariot races with which it was celebrated. So you might be thinking, how did Christianity on December 25th steal that from Sol Invictus, if Sol Invictus has a bunch of holidays that are nowhere near December 25th? We were a little off with the Saturnalia, it was December 17th. We’re at least in the ballpark. This is also why I said, by the way, anywhere you could throw a dart at a calendar, and you would end up within a week or two of a pagan holiday, chances are. But as we can see here, not in the case of December 25th, anywhere close to the Feast of Sol Invictus.
The first time we get any evidence of Sol Invictus being celebrated is 354. It’s on a calendar that also mentions Christmas, has no indication which one came first just on that calendar alone. And so there’s no reason on the evidence itself to say that Christians stole December 25th from the pagans instead of the other way around. But I’ll continue, I’m going to let Hijmans do more of the talking. Because you might be saying, “What about Aurelian? Where did this theory come and went around?” And it’s true, Aurelian had a devotion to Sol Invictus and in 274 he does establish quadrennial [inaudible 00:19:23], so these festivals that would’ve happened every four years in honor of Sol. The problem is they’re not on December 25th, they’re on October 19th until October 22nd. And that’s where you get the October 22nd, the 36 chariot races that were mentioned on the calendar of 354. That’s at the end of that. So that was a late addition to the devotion to Sol, but again, it’s off by more than two months, if you’re saying this is a Christmas thing.
Now he goes onto there and he points out something that is really interesting. And what he points out is, well notice none of the feast days of Sol, Sol Indiges and Sol Invictus, are anywhere near the solstice for any major obvious solar feast. You don’t have the equinox, you don’t have the solstice. What’s going on with that? And this causes him to pivot, because he’s already shown like, okay, the Sol Invictus theory, historically not really tenable. The dates don’t line up, it doesn’t match up, it doesn’t really make sense. It’s based on a certain theory of how we expect Roman paganism to look, it’s not based on the actual records of Roman paganism that we find. And so then he’s going to introduce a really important distinction. That in Rome you find the sun used in two different ways.
One is people actually worshiping Sol as a God, but that seems to actually be fairly rare. The other is people having almost a playful devotion to the sun, and I’ll get to what I mean by that. But I think we have a similar thing, if you look at images of the sun with sunglasses where it is a recognizable image of the sun. It’s a playful way of acknowledging the sun. And there is even a certain human appreciation we wouldn’t be here without the son. We’re not demonizing the son, we’re not claiming the son’s a God, there’s nothing like that. But he’s going to say there’s this duality, that you’ve got people for whom the worship of Sol is a serious thing, and then you’ve got people who just have maybe an honoring of the sun as the sun.
And so he suggests that this is a certain duality or ambiguity in the nature of Sol in Roman religion. And that you see this even in the difference between what we would now do is a capital S, Sol and a lowercase S sol. Sol just means sun. He says on the one hand there’s a deity, there’s a cult, temple, festivals and rituals. On the other, there’s a heavenly body which rises in the morning in the east, sets in the evening in the west at fixed times, and according to a never changing pattern. And he says this is just true of Sol and Luna, Luna being the moon, but we don’t find anything like that with the other gods, at least not to that extent. And so then when you look at things like icons, like Roman iconographic art, the image of Sol is ambiguous. Sometimes Sol appears as a God among the gods, but these are rare. And instead it’s much more common to see Sol just as a cosmic and a temporal symbol.
So again, think about the sun as just like the sun with sunglasses, or any of those playful depictions of the sun. Looking at those, you wouldn’t say, “Oh, Americans worship the sun,” or if you did say that, you’d be wrong. There’s a playful embrace of the sun. All that’s to say that when we’re talking about December 25th, oh, I want to pivot here. So Sol Invictus as a God is not the reason why Christianity celebrates Christmas on December 25th. And we can say this for really good reasons. Remember the theory is that Aurelian establishes this in 270. The evidence doesn’t point to anything before 354. That’s for Sol Invictus. For Christians celebrating Christmas on December 25th, or at least thinking December 25th is when Jesus was born, that actually predates those Roman festivals under either system.
So even if you believe, in spite of the lack of evidence, that Aurelian does establish in the 270s a feast to Sol Invictus and the birth of Sol Invictus on December 25th, you’re still faced with this problem. We have Christian sources talking about December 25th before this. So this is going to put into doubt that Sol Invictus theory, and to do something else, it’s going to suggest, well if December 25th becomes the feast of the nativity of the sun, the invincible sun, it seems much more likely on the evidence that this is Romans copying rising Christian popularity, and not the other way around. We’ve already seen plenty of evidence of Roman emperors establishing new holidays, or changing the dates of holidays, or making the holidays shorter or longer. It’s much easier to see the evidence, if anything, for the Romans copying Christians rather than the other way around.
But this is why it’s important to keep the sun as a God distinct from the sun as the sun, because there is a connection here, meaning this. We’re going to see two major reasons why December 25th seems to have been chosen. One involves the dating of Jesus’ death, but the other does seem to be tied in some way to the winter solstice. Now whether they said, let’s have Christmas on the winter solstice, or whether good preachers just noticed this is the winner solstice and made use of that, is a little unclear. But there’s plenty of references to sun imagery in the Bible, in both the old and the New Testament. And some of it radically predates Roman paganism, in terms of Sol Invictus, like when we’re going back to the book of Isaiah. So let’s explore Christianity and solar imagery, just to give you a few.
This is by no means a comprehensive layout of this. But Isaiah nine, I mentioned Isaiah, “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. Those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness on them has light shined.” So there’s that imagery, you’re walking in the darkness and then the light shines upon you. Matthew four then applies that to Jesus, and makes it explicit. “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light and those who sat in the region in the shadow of death, light has dawned.” So this application to Jesus is quite explicit in the Bible. Moreover, Luke, this is in Luke one, Zacharias’s prayer over John the Baptist. “The day shall dawn upon us from on high, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”
So the idea of Christianity is the sun appearing on a darkened world. You don’t need to be a sun worshiper to understand that imagery. It’s universal. If you’ve ever been unable to sleep at night, or had a long scary night, or anything like that, the experience you have at dawn, the experience you have at the rising of the sun, is a universal human experience. So just like you don’t have to create some elaborate theory of paganism to understand why people give each other gifts, or why they have big feasts when they’re celebrating, you don’t need to do that for why people appreciate the sun, which gives them life, which warms them when it’s cold in the winter, which brings light when it’s dark. And so to give just two more examples, 2 Peter 1:19.
St. Peter says, “We have the prophetic word made more sure. You’ll do well to pay attention to this, as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.” So this is a really interesting one because it captures something which is that there’s a lot of lamp imagery as well in the New Testament. And so it’s this idea is, right now things are often really dark, the world around you, not particularly Christian. You’ve got this little lamp, you’ve got the truth, you’re supposed to shine into others, you’re supposed to lead them to the light. And then just as one candle can light another candle, you share that light with others. But a day is coming that’s like the dawn, in which it’s no longer going to be Christians holding up some candles in the dark. It won’t be dark anymore, it’s going to be bright.
And so that is something very clearly taught. Revelation 22:16, Jesus says, “I, Jesus, have sent my angel to you with the testimony for the churches. I’m the root in the offspring of David, the bright morning star.” So again, it’s that kind of thing, either the morning star heralding the dawn, or the dawn, or the rising sun, those images are used pretty consistently throughout the Old and the New Testament and early Christian commentaries to describe Jesus. To describe the Messiah, to describe the coming dawn, and the second coming as well. So that idea is really baked into Christianity, and it has nothing to do with Roman paganism. It doesn’t have anything to do with this theory of two Sols, Sol Invictus, it doesn’t have anything to do with the Emperor Aurelian, doesn’t have anything to do with any of those things. It’s much, much older than the 200s.
Okay I also have, sorry, I wanted to touch base on that in one other way because Tertullian in… We’re going to get to Tertullian from several different angles, but he points out that the early Christians were accused of being sun worshipers. Now notice here, they were not accused of being sun worshipers by Romans who thought, “Oh yeah, we believe the same thing.” They were accused of being sun worshipers by Romans who thought they were weird Persians. He said “Others, again, certainly with more information and greater verisimilitude, believe that the sun is our God. We should be counted Persians perhaps, though we do not worship the orb of day painted on a piece of linen cloth, having himself elsewhere in his own disc. The idea no doubt has originated from our being known to turn to the east in prayer.”
In other words, Tertullian is like, “Okay, I’m giving you guys a lot of benefit of the doubt here. Maybe you’ve noticed, we turn east when we pray, and so therefore you thought we were sun worshipers. Nah.” And he also says, “Well, if we devote Sunday to rejoicing, we do it for a far different reason than sun worship.” And then he points out that some of the Roman pagans took off Saturday to ease in luxury because of their devotion to Saturn, but they weren’t doing this because they were secretly Jewish. So just because you take off Saturday because you’re worshiping Saturn, doesn’t mean you take off Saturday because you’re a Jewish person who’s celebrating the Sabbath. It’s possible, in other words, Tertullian’s just got a dose of common sense, that two different religions for unrelated reasons might celebrate on the same day. Especially when you’re looking at something like weekly worship, you’ve got seven choices. Odds are two of you are going to choose the same one.
So that’s the idea, just because you see a commonality, a similarity, it’s really not that strong of evidence. And Tertullian, again, if the idea is supposed to be that Christians were madly trying to copy paganism, they’re saying, “No, no, that’s not what we’re doing at all. We’re not stealing this stuff from paganism. We’re not trying to copy the…” And in fact, Tertullian’s going to have some strong words encouraging people to resist even celebrating on the same days. If you can avoid celebrating on pagan feast days, he wants you to. Okay. This is another of his work called On Idolatry. And he goes into this, and he actually points out here that the Christians don’t celebrate on Saturnalia. And so he points out the Saturnalia, New Year’s, Midwinter’s Festival, and the Matronalia are frequented by Pagans. And so he says, just stay away from them.
He’s writing to Christians here, and he says to stay away from them. And he said, “We’ve got the Lord’s Day, we’ve got Pentecost, and we don’t share it with them, and they don’t share it with us because they’d be mistaken for Christians.” He says, “We are not apprehensive lest we seem to be heathens. If any indulgence is to be granted to the flesh, you have it. I will not say your own days, but more too; for to the heathens each festive day occurs but once annually; you have a festive day every eighth day.” Meaning Sunday. “Call out the individual solemnities of the nations, and set them out into a row, they will not be able to make up a Pentecost.”
So the Christians already had a lively system of feast days and festivals. You have a whole season of Pentecost in which it’s a time of celebration. So it wasn’t as if we needed to invent a bunch of holidays to try to rival paganism. Nevertheless, on a human level, I don’t doubt that there are people who were tempted to say, “Oh, they’ve got these cool holidays,” but we don’t see evidence that Christians were just like, well, let’s line ours up so they match up with theirs. If anything, we see evidence that that seems to point in other direction, that we mourn on the days they feast, we feast on the days they mourn.
So having said all that, why is it on December 25th? I mentioned that there were two reasons. One of them seems to be related to the winter solstice. There’s a lot of sun imagery. They may not have chosen it for the reason of the winter solstice, we don’t actually have any evidence that they do that intentionally. But there’s plenty of evidence that preachers made good use of that, which you would expect them to. You don’t have to be a sun god, to appreciate the solstice. But the second reason, and this one we do have evidence of, is a weird one. It has to do with the dating… You know what, I’m going to quote Candida Moss. Candida Moss teaches at the University of Birmingham. She’s writing into the Washington Post about certain myths about Christmas. And one of them is the one we’re looking at.
And she says, “Some have argued the date of Jesus’ birth was selected to supplant pagan festivals that were held at the same time. But while Pope Julius first set the date of Christmas for Western Christians in the fourth century, Christians did not deliberately adopt pagan rituals until the seventh century, when Pope Gregory the Great instructed bishops to celebrate saints’ feast days on the days of pagan festivals.” Now that is an interesting claim, and there is a lot of truth to that. And so I want to unpack that. When Christianity is first rising to prominence in a very, very pagan world, the Christians are really hesitant to do anything that might have them be mistaken for pagans. And so to give just one example, after Christianity’s legalized, you’ve got all these old pagan temples, and for a long time they refused to make them churches. And they don’t refuse to make them churches because they can’t be consecrated, they can, and eventually many of them are made churches. But we’re talking about centuries later.
And we’re talking about centuries later because they wanted to be very clear, we are not pagans. We don’t believe what you believe. We believe a different thing. And they show that very decisively. Later on, a few centuries later, like seventh century, the 600s, so 400 years later, when you’ve got the Christian missionaries to the British Isles, when you’ve got all of these pagan lands in the far north of Europe, Gregory says, “If you find some legitimate feast that they have, you don’t have to just quash everything good that culture has. You can preserve it.” Because what’s different now? What’s different is now Christianity is in a position of strength, and it’s not likely that a bunch of Angles or Saxons, well I guess Angles at that point, are going to see these foreign Romans who come in and say, “Oh yeah, these guys worship the same God we do.” Their foreignness, the foreignness of Christianity is already very well established. And so you can take these legitimate, local, indigenous feast days, of the English or whoever, and say, okay, well what can we keep here?
What isn’t contrary to God? What isn’t contrary to Christianity? And you see little bits of that before. I mentioned Saturnalia being stripped of the Saturn part, but you keep the festivity without. But you just do not see a big practice of what people assume. You don’t see the early Christians in the 200s, the 300s, the 400s, just wholesale taking the Pagan calendar and slapping saints’ names over Roman gods. The evidence isn’t there. It doesn’t happen. Later, like I said, you will find, “Oh, you’ve got this God you worship. Let me tell you about this saint who has a similar story, or let me tell you about what Jesus did. It’s a little bit like whatever it is you celebrate.” Those things do happen later on in places like England. It does not explain the Roman history at all.
And so I’m going to go back to Candida Moss. She says, “The real reason for the selection of December 25th seems to have been that it is exactly nine months after March 25th, the traditional date of Jesus’ crucifixion, which can be inferred from other dates given in the New Testament. As Christians developed a theological idea that Jesus was conceived and crucified on the same date, they set the date of his birth nine months later.” Now, I find this super fascinating, and I think it’s a shame that more people don’t know this, because it’s actually a really cool way of understanding the Christian story. So what I want to do first is give just a little bit of evidence that yes, this is what the early Christians were doing, and then I want to explore theologically why this is really cool. So I mentioned we were going to go back to Tertullian.
So Tertullian. He says very explicitly that Jesus is killed, he’s exterminated, in the month of March at the time of the Passover, on the eighth day before the Kalends of April. The Kalends is the first day of April, on the first day of unleavened bread. And that is March 25th. And Tertullian says that about 197, Saint Hippolytus of Rome, who lived from 170 to 235, in his commentary on Daniel, says, “The first advent of our Lord, the first coming of our Lord in the flesh, when he was born in Bethlehem, was December 25th.” He said, “It’s a Wednesday, while Augustus was in his 42nd year and it’s 5,500 years from the time of Adam.” He’s got a very specific calendar that he understands to be true. He suffered in the 33rd year, March 25th, Friday, the 18th year of Tiberius Caesar. Now that is really fascinating stuff.
One of the reasons it’s fascinating, again, 170 to 235 is when Hippolytus lives. This is way too early for him to be stealing this from Aurelian, who is not yet emperor. It’s way too early for it to be stolen from the calendar of 354. It’s much too early. So we see the idea of a December 25th date just way earlier than any of these pagan theories would allow. And when the Christians explain why they’re connecting it to the idea that Jesus died on March 25th. And here I’m only going to scratch the surface of what I think is really theologically beautiful and brilliant about this. In three of the four gospel accounts of Jesus’s death, we’re told that Jesus was laid in a tomb in which no one had ever been laid. And I think when you and I read that, we’re tempted to just say, “Okay, yeah, sure, whatever.”
What does that matter? Do you normally reuse burial plots? Yes, you do. But this one had never been reused. And the early Christians saw in this, this idea that some places are just holy. So holiness in the original Jewish sense of the term is to be set aside for God. And so the tomb is holy, it has no one before Jesus, and no one’s buried in there after Jesus. This is a sacred place. And fascinatingly, there’s this connection that they see between the tomb and the womb. That the womb of Mary is also this sacred place, where no one before Jesus is ever living in her womb, and no one after Jesus ever lives in her womb because of the perpetual virginity of Mary. That Mary, it would be unfitting for her to have other children for much the same reason it would be unfitting to bury someone else in the empty tomb.
That these are places that are consecrated by God. And again, this is not something they’re stealing from Roman paganism. This is not something they’re just making up. This is a deeply Jewish understanding. You go back and look at Ezekiel 44, and the last eight chapters of Ezekiel have this prophecy of the coming temple. And one of the prophecies is that there’s an east facing gate, and this gate will be closed forever because the Lord himself passes through it. And so these eight chapters that appear on the surface to be talking about a building, but a building with some miraculous properties like streams of living water flow from it. Well, in John two, Jesus applies these passages seemingly to himself. He says, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I’ll rebuild it,” and John tells us he was speaking about the temple of his body.
If this prophecy of Ezekiel, it’s not about a building, but is instead about a person, Jesus Christ. He is the temple, that in the past you had to go to Jerusalem to worship. Now you go to Jesus Christ to worship. That’s the really critical shift. And if that’s true in Ezekiel 44, the gate that our Lord passes through, the gate around the temple, well that starts to sound a whole lot like Mary, especially when Jesus is living and growing in her womb, and then comes forth to the world. So there’s this beautiful parallelism between the womb and the tomb, in that Jesus at the start and the end has… And really the start and the restart because he goes forth from the womb into the world on Christmas. He goes forth from the tomb into the world on Easter, that there’s this beautiful parallel between them.
And so it’s fitting to have these be connected, that March 25th being both the date on which we celebrate the death of our Lord, and the date on which we celebrate the annunciation. So the womb and the tomb are connected. And if you do that, well, nine months after that is Christmas, nine months after that is December 25th. So that’s the thing that’s really fascinating. They don’t start with, here’s all the archeological evidence we know about it being in December and blah, blah, blah. It’s nothing like that. This is based on a theological understanding that there’s a connection between the womb and the tomb, and that nine months after the date that they understood Jesus to have died, March 25th, is Christmas. So I hope you enjoyed that. I hope that was eye-opening. I should, I guess, add as a final note, it’s not wrong to take things from paganism or anywhere else if they’re good, true and beautiful.
If there’s a really great festivity that the pagans invent, by all means take that. If they have a cool article of clothing you want to wear, by all means wear that. As long as you are not offering something demonic by that. I saw a person who said, is it Christian you can have a bonfire? It doesn’t matter if pagans have used bonfires in worship. It just doesn’t matter. A bonfire’s cool. You’re going to have a bonfire, you’re going to have a celebration. You are not subject to, well, someone else used this thing in a bad way before. This should be clear to any Christian if you read what St. Paul says about food sacrificed to demons, and food sacrificed to these pagan altars, he’s like, “Fine, you can eat it. Idols are nothing.” As long as you’re not going to scandalize somebody, as long as somebody’s not going to see you eat it and think that you worship demons, that you worship idols, then fine, go ahead. Eat it.
Well, likewise, a celebration, unless someone’s going to see you doing something that looks so very pagan that they’re going to be scandalized and think you’re not a Christian, don’t fall into this trap of being like, “Oh, well, 600 years ago maybe someone meant something else.” No, it’s usually fake history. It’s not a good reason not to do something. And so as this episode is going to come out on Thursday, that’s literally Thor’s Day, I can say that without worshiping Thor. And so just have a little bit of sanity about it. So all that’s to say Christianity is not coming from paganism. December 25th not coming from Paganism. Christmas is not stolen from paganism. But nevertheless, if there are elements that are really good elements that different cultures have, including pagan cultures, Christianity is strong enough to take those things in without compromising anything we actually believe. Hope that helps, at the advent, Merry Christmas, happy whatever it is you’re celebrating right now, and God bless you.
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