CALCULATING CHRISTMAS: THE STORY BEHIND DECEMBER 25
by William J. Tighe
Virtue Online, PA
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Dec 21 2007
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 Son"
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.
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.
A By-Product
It is true that the first evidence of Christians celebrating December
25th as the date of the Lord’s nativity comes from Rome some years
after Aurelian, in A.D. 336, but there is evidence from both the
Greek East and the Latin West that Christians attempted to figure
out the date of Christ’s birth long before they began to celebrate
it liturgically, even in the second and third centuries. The evidence
indicates, in fact, that the attribution of the date of December 25th
was a by-product of attempts to determine when to celebrate his death
and resurrection.
How did this happen? There is a seeming contradiction between the date
of the Lord’s death as given in the synoptic Gospels and in John’s
Gospel. The synoptics would appear to place it on Passover Day (after
the Lord had celebrated the Passover Meal on the preceding evening),
and John on the Eve of Passover, just when the Passover lambs were
being slaughtered in the Jerusalem Temple for the feast that was to
ensue after sunset on that day.
Solving this problem involves answering the question of whether the
Lord’s Last Supper was a Passover Meal, or a meal celebrated a day
earlier, which we cannot enter into here. Suffice it to say that
the early Church followed John rather than the synoptics, and thus
believed that Christ’s death would have taken place on 14 Nisan,
according to the Jewish lunar calendar. (Modern scholars agree, by
the way, that the death of Christ could have taken place only in A.D.
30 or 33, as those two are the only years of that time when the eve
of Passover could have fallen on a Friday, the possibilities being
either 7 April 30 or 3 April 33.)
However, as the early Church was forcibly separated from Judaism,
it entered into a world with different calendars, and had to devise
its own time to celebrate the Lord’s Passion, not least so as to be
independent of the rabbinic calculations of the date of Passover.
Also, since the Jewish calendar was a lunar calendar consisting of
twelve months of thirty days each, every few years a thirteenth month
had to be added by a decree of the Sanhedrin to keep the calendar
in synchronization with the equinoxes and solstices, as well as to
prevent the seasons from "straying" into inappropriate months.
Apart from the difficulty Christians would have had in following-or
perhaps even being accurately informed about-the dating of Passover
in any given year, to follow a lunar calendar of their own devising
would have set them at odds with both Jews and pagans, and very
likely embroiled them in endless disputes among themselves. (The
second century saw severe disputes about whether Pascha had always
to fall on a Sunday or on whatever weekday followed two days after
14 Artemision/Nisan, but to have followed a lunar calendar would have
made such problems much worse.)
These difficulties played out in different ways among the Greek
Christians in the eastern part of the empire and the Latin Christians
in the western part of it. Greek Christians seem to have wanted
to find a date equivalent to 14 Nisan in their own solar calendar,
and since Nisan was the month in which the spring equinox occurred,
they chose the 14th day of Artemision, the month in which the spring
equinox invariably fell in their own calendar. Around A.D. 300,
the Greek calendar was superseded by the Roman calendar, and since
the dates of the beginnings and endings of the months in these two
systems did not coincide, 14 Artemision became April 6th.
In contrast, second-century Latin Christians in Rome and North Africa
appear to have desired to establish the historical date on which
the Lord Jesus died. By the time of Tertullian they had concluded
that he died on Friday, 25 March 29. (As an aside, I will note that
this is impossible: 25 March 29 was not a Friday, and Passover Eve
in A.D. 29 did not fall on a Friday and was not on March 25th, or in
March at all.)
Integral Age
So in the East we have April 6th, in the West, March 25th. At this
point, we have to introduce a belief that seems to have been widespread
in Judaism at the time of Christ, but which, as it is nowhere taught in
the Bible, has completely fallen from the awareness of Christians. The
idea is that of the "integral age" of the great Jewish prophets:
the idea that the prophets of Israel died on the same dates as their
birth or conception.
This notion is a key factor in understanding how some early Christians
came to believe that December 25th is the date of Christ’s birth. The
early Christians applied this idea to Jesus, so that March 25th and
April 6th were not only the supposed dates of Christ’s death, but of
his conception or birth as well. There is some fleeting evidence that
at least some first- and second-century Christians thought of March
25th or April 6th as the date of Christ’s birth, but rather quickly the
assignment of March 25th as the date of Christ’s conception prevailed.
It is to this day, commemorated almost universally among Christians as
the Feast of the Annunciation, when the Archangel Gabriel brought the
good tidings of a savior to the Virgin Mary, upon whose acquiescence
the Eternal Word of God ("Light of Light, True God of True God,
begotten of the Father before all ages") forthwith became incarnate
in her womb. What is the length of pregnancy? Nine months.
Add nine months to March 25th and you get December 25th; add it to
April 6th and you get January 6th. December 25th is Christmas, and
January 6th is Epiphany.
Christmas (December 25th) is a feast of Western Christian origin. In
Constantinople it appears to have been introduced in 379 or 380. From
a sermon of St. John Chrysostom, at the time a renowned ascetic
and preacher in his native Antioch, it appears that the feast was
first celebrated there on 25 December 386. From these centers it
spread throughout the Christian East, being adopted in Alexandria
around 432 and in Jerusalem a century or more later. The Armenians,
alone among ancient Christian churches, have never adopted it, and
to this day celebrate Christ’s birth, manifestation to the magi,
and baptism on January 6th.
Western churches, in turn, gradually adopted the January 6th Epiphany
feast from the East, Rome doing so sometime between 366 and 394. But
in the West, the feast was generally presented as the commemoration
of the visit of the magi to the infant Christ, and as such, it was
an important feast, but not one of the most important ones-a striking
contrast to its position in the East, where it remains the second most
important festival of the church year, second only to Pascha (Easter).
In the East, Epiphany far outstrips Christmas. The reason is that
the feast celebrates Christ’s baptism in the Jordan and the occasion
on which the Voice of the Father and the Descent of the Spirit both
manifested for the first time to mortal men the divinity of the
Incarnate Christ and the Trinity of the Persons in the One Godhead.
A Christian Feast
Thus, December 25th as the date of the Christ’s birth appears to
owe nothing whatsoever to pagan influences upon the practice of the
Church during or after Constantine’s time. It is wholly unlikely to
have been the actual date of Christ’s birth, but it arose entirely
from the efforts of early Latin Christians to determine the historical
date of Christ’s death.
And the pagan feast which the Emperor Aurelian instituted on that date
in the year 274 was not only an effort to use the winter solstice
to make a political statement, but also almost certainly an attempt
to give a pagan significance to a date already of importance to
Roman Christians. The Christians, in turn, could at a later date
re-appropriate the pagan "Birth of the Unconquered Sun" to refer,
on the occasion of the birth of Christ, to the rising of the "Sun of
Salvation" or the "Sun of Justice."
The author refers interested readers to Thomas J. Talley’s The Origins
of the Liturgical Year (The Liturgical Press). A draft of this article
appeared on the listserve Virtuosity.
—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.
"Calculating Christmas" first appeared in the December, 2003 issue
of Touchstone.