Why Is Christmas on December 25?
Part 1: Scope, Stakes, and Saturnalia
Author: K. R. Harriman
It’s that time of year again, one of the most wonderful times of the year. It’s that time of year when The Real Christmas Story™ gets rolled out by an array of people online who will give you various, contradictory stories about why we really celebrate Christmas on December 25th.
The debate about the origins of this date as it continues today — although the date itself was discussed in the early church — goes back to the Reformation era, when some Protestants denied the accuracy of the liturgical calendar of the Roman Catholic Church. According to C. P. E. Nothaft, this is when the two approaches that dominate the discussion to this day originated: the History of Religions Theory [HRT] and the Calculation Theory [CT] (“The Origins of the Christmas Date,” 903–4; on this earliest era of the debate, which is a story unto itself, see his “From Sukkot to Saturnalia”). According to the former — popularly advocated by some skeptics, pagan copycat theorists, and some non-liturgical Christians — December 25 was chosen as the date to celebrate Jesus’s birth in order to substitute and supplant a pre-existing pagan festival, usually Saturnalia on a popular level or the birth of Sol Invictus. According to the latter — popularly advocated by liturgical traditions and Christian apologists — the Church determined December 25 to be Jesus’s birth date on the basis of independent calculation. As you might imagine, the HRT has been especially popular in online articles and arguments, but it has also been a popular theory in the world of scholarship since the late nineteenth century. It has come to be so widely accepted that — in both worlds of scholarship and popular press — it is usually assumed. Naturally, this has caused no small consternation among non-liturgical Christians who are concerned about the supposed pagan associations with the date of Christmas and thus about the apparent idolatry enshrined in Christmas festivities.
Before I continue, I want to note the restrictions on my scope here. First, I will not be addressing the supposed pagan connections of various traditional ways of celebrating Christmas. I am more interested specifically in the matter of the date. Second, while New Testament studies — especially Gospel studies — is my specialty, I will not be engaging in-depth with the biblical material as it concerns the date of Jesus’s birth (which I have done elsewhere in “Could Jesus Have Been Born on December 25?” on my academia.edu page [https://www.academia.edu/44692002/Could_Jesus_Have_Been_Born_on_December_25_An_Analysis_of_the_Gospel_Evidence]). But because the Gospel material does not supply a specific date in any case, we will be addressing here the post-NT era.
Why Does the Backstory of December 25 Matter?
In any case, it is prudent to ask what is actually at stake in this debate about the date of Christmas. Like many denizens of the Internet, let us assume for now that Christmas did indeed originate from an effort by the early Christians to substitute and supplant a pagan festival and claim it in the name of Christ. Let us assume that this was indeed the impetus to suddenly start celebrating the birth of Christ, which the Church had apparently never done before. So what? If we Christians believe that God is the Creator and King of all space and time, that Jesus is Lord of all space and time, that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the living God at work in some way in all spaces at all times (so that God has not left himself without a witness anywhere), and that the kingdom of God has a claim now that will yet be fully consummated on all space and time, why we should we cede any day to those who would seek to oppose our God and his kingdom? If that day was once claimed by pagans for the worship of other gods, should that day then be surrendered to them for worship of false gods for all time? If Christ is victorious over the devil, why would he leave any such day for the devil as his possession? The harvest festivals and new moons that the Israelites celebrated were commemorated at overlapping times by surrounding cultures for other gods. But that does not mean it was supposed to keep the Israelites from telling the story on these given days of what God had done for them and from keeping the hope alive on these given days of what God would yet do for them.
These points do not necessarily settle the debate about what symbols in what contexts should be set aside from being used (such as the bronze snake of Moses or the poles at the high places) or should be renewed for proper use (such as the wealth of Egypt and Jericho that were put to use for the worship of God). The larger debate is a complex one that requires wisdom for discernment. But it will not do to say that simply because something has been misused, abused, and perverted by idolatry that it can never be properly used for the worship of the true God. This factor alone does not put the celebration of Christ’s birth on December 25 (or January 7, for those who use the Julian calendar and are not Armenian) — or at all — at stake in this debate.
What then is at stake? To put it briefly: historical accuracy and how we treat our Christian predecessors. It could be that they took over this day from pagan festivities in order to claim it for the purposes of our God and King, but if they did not and we say that they did, why should we lie about what they did? Especially for those of us who are Christians and make claims about our brothers and sisters before us who have run the same race that we are running and who are waiting for the consummation of their hope even as we are, why would we say that they blindly adopted idolatrous practices and thus tainted the celebration of Christ if this is not in fact true (and would not necessarily be true even if they took over a pagan festival)? It behooves those of us who follow the Way, the Truth, and the Life to be truthful, including about our forebears and the history of which they were a part. So we must ask ourselves: Is it accurate/truthful to say that the Christians took over a pre-existing pagan festival on December 25 in order to use that day to celebrate Christmas?
Is the Date of Christmas Dependent on a Pagan Precedent?
To answer this, we must first look at the proposed possibilities for the alleged pagan festival. I have simplified the options, but pagan copycat theorists, who insist that the early Christians copied one or more mythologies in constructing their story of Christ (such as Horus, Mithra(s), Osiris, Dionysus, and so on), multiply the options further. This has been thoroughly debunked elsewhere and so I will not go into it here. Interestingly, in almost every case the god who was allegedly copied in making Christ is said by the proponent of the copycat thesis to have been born on December 25. All of these claims have one thing in common: there is no pre-Christian evidence (or no extant evidence period) for any of them having a special association with December 25, much less as their date of birth. This is probably most commonly asserted of Mithras, since he is perhaps the most popular figure used for the copycat idea. If anyone has evidence that Mithras’s birthday was December 25 or that it was celebrated as such, please turn that evidence over to scholars of Mithra(s) and Mithraism, because they haven’t heard of it yet. Precisely zero primary sources exist today that would indicate this association. The closest we get to this idea is the association of Mithras with Sol Invictus, so that there are references to Sol Invictus Mithras. By transference, it is thought that if Sol Invictus was celebrated on December 25, then Mithras was celebrated on this day. But there is no evidence for this — or even for the association of Sol Invictus with this day, as I discuss below — and no clear connection has ever been drawn between the practices (much less calendars) of the Mithraic mystery cult with the public cult of Sol Invictus (Steven Hijmans, “Usener’s Christmas,” 144).
Although it is not as popular among the pagan copycat crowd, Saturnalia is surely the most popular purported predecessor for Christmas. Indeed, its popularity is demonstrable from the appearance of this claim on The Big Bang Theory. However, what Sheldon did not tell anybody is that Saturnalia was not celebrated on December 25. According to Macrobius, Saturnalia was originally celebrated on the fourteenth day before the Kalends of January (December 19 on the Julian calendar), but it was lengthened to a three-day celebration (starting on December 17) and the festivities ultimately extended for seven days (December 17–23; Saturnalia 1.10). Notice that, even in its most extended form, it never overlaps with December 25. It is certainly in the neighborhood and it certainly was a popular Roman festival, but it does not explain why December 25 should be chosen.
As for the festival of Sol Invictus, there is much to untangle about this festival and the factoids associated with it that it will require its own separate address. We will explore it in the next entry.
Primary sources:
- Macrobius, Saturnalia
Secondary sources
- Nothaft, Carl Philipp Emanuel. “The Origins of the Christmas Date: Some Recent Trends in Historical Research.” Church History 81 (2012): 903–11.
- Nothaft, Carl Philipp Emanuel. “From Sukkot to Saturnalia: The Attack on Christmas in Sixteenth-Century Chronological Scholarship.” Journal of the History of Ideas 72 (2011): 503–22.
Introducing Our Guest Author:
Name: K. R. Harriman
Titles: PhD candidate
School: Asbury Theological Seminary
Specialization: New Testament and Greek Language
