Calculating Christmas by William J. Tighe | Touchstone: A Journal of ...

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Calculating Christmas
Many Christians think that Christians celebrate Christ’s birth on December
25th because the church fathers appropriated the date of a pagan festival. Almost
no one minds, except for a few groups on the fringes of American Evangelicalism,
who seem to think that this makes Christmas itself a pagan festival. But it
is perhaps interesting to know that the choice of December 25th is the result
of attempts among the earliest Christians to figure out the date of Jesus’
birth based on calendrical calculations that had nothing to do with pagan festivals.
Rather, the pagan festival of the “Birth of the Unconquered Sun”
instituted by the Roman Emperor Aurelian on 25 December 274, was almost certainly
an attempt to create a pagan alternative to a date that was already of some
significance to Roman Christians. Thus the “pagan origins of Christmas”
is a myth without historical substance.
On the Origins of the Primary Feast of the Christian Church by William J. Tighe
A Mistake
The idea that the date was taken from the pagans goes back to two scholars
from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Paul Ernst Jablonski,
a German Protestant, wished to show that the celebration of Christ’s birth
on December 25th was one of the many “paganizations” of Christianity
that the Church of the fourth century embraced, as one of many “degenerations”
that transformed pure apostolic Christianity into Catholicism. Dom Jean Hardouin,
a Benedictine monk, tried to show that the Catholic Church adopted pagan festivals
for Christian purposes without paganizing the gospel.
In the Julian calendar, created in 45 B.C. under Julius Caesar, the winter
solstice fell on December 25th, and it therefore seemed obvious to Jablonski
and Hardouin that the day must have had a pagan significance before it had a
Christian one. But in fact, the date had no religious significance in the Roman
pagan festal calendar before Aurelian’s time, nor did the cult of the
sun play a prominent role in Rome before him.
There were two temples of the sun in Rome, one of which (maintained by the clan
into which Aurelian was born or adopted) celebrated its dedication festival
on August 9th, the other of which celebrated its dedication festival on August
28th. But both of these cults fell into neglect in the second century, when
eastern cults of the sun, such as Mithraism, began to win a following in Rome.
And in any case, none of these cults, old or new, had festivals associated with
solstices or equinoxes.
As things actually happened, Aurelian, who ruled from 270 until his assassination
in 275, was hostile to Christianity and appears to have promoted the establishment
of the festival of the “Birth of the Unconquered Sun” as a device
to unify the various pagan cults of the Roman Empire around a commemoration
of the annual “rebirth” of the sun. He led an empire that appeared
to be collapsing in the face of internal unrest, rebellions in the provinces,
economic decay, and repeated attacks from German tribes to the north and the
Persian Empire to the east.
In creating the new feast, he intended the beginning of the lengthening of the
daylight, and the arresting of the lengthening of darkness, on December 25th
to be a symbol of the hoped-for “rebirth,” or perpetual rejuvenation,
of the Roman Empire, resulting from the maintenance of the worship of the gods
whose tutelage (the Romans thought) had brought Rome to greatness and world-rule.
If it co-opted the Christian celebration, so much the better.
William J. Tighe is Associate Professor of History at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and a faculty advisor to the Catholic Campus Ministry. He is a Member of St. Josaphat Ukrainian Catholic Church in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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