Christmas is a
much-beloved holiday, celebrated by billions of people across the globe. In the
U.S. Alone, the Pew Center reports that nearly 96% of the population celebrates
Christmas, including eight out of ten non-Christians, including atheists,
agnostics, and those who have no faith commitment.
1
However, Christmas is also a uniquely Christian holiday; its core message is
about a personal God taking humanity upon Himself and stepping into the world to
redeem sinful human beings who could never redeem themselves. The Christian
message is inescapable.
I believe the love of Christmas coupled with the
loathing of Christianity is one reason why atheists continue to repeat the claim
that Christmas is a repurposing of a pagan Roman holiday. Two of the most
popular pagan holidays put forth are the celebration of
Saturnalia, which
honored the Roman god Saturn, or the
Dies Natalis of Sol Invictus, that is the
"Birthday of the Unconquerable Sun." Both of these celebrations were held in the
second half of December, making them somewhat close to Christmas.
Looking at the History of Christmas
The claim
that the roots of Christmas are pagan is one I hear over and over again,
especially in December. The idea isn't even new. The New England Puritans, who
valued work more than celebration, taught such.
2 Puritan
preacher Increase Mather preached that "the early Christians who first observed
the Nativity on December 25 did not do so thinking that 'Christ was born in that
Month, but because the Heathens Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and
they were willing to have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian.'"
3
When one digs into the actual history however, a much different picture arises.
There are two ways to approach the question: one is to see how December 25
became associated with the Nativity, which is how the early church would have
referred to the day of Christ's birth. The other one is to look at the
celebrations of Saturnalia and Sol Invictus. Either approach shows the dubious
nature of the claim that Christmas has pagan roots.
Much of the thrust of the "pagan Christmas" claim
rests on the idea of a Christianized Rome trying to convert a populace that
wouldn't want to give up its feast traditions, akin to the practice of churches
celebrating a "Harvest Festival" instead of Halloween. Yet, scholars like Yale
University's T.C. Schmidt are finding the marking of December 25 to go much
earlier in the Christian history.
When translating Hippolytus'
Commentary on
Daniel, written just after AD 200, Schmidt notes that five of the seven manuscripts
contain December 25 as the date for Jesus' birth and another offers the 25th of
either December or March.
4 Clement of Alexandria in this
same time offers the date of March 25 as the date of the incarnation, that is
the conception of Jesus, in his
Stromata (1.21.145-146).
5
Both works tie the idea that Jesus's death would have happened on the same day
as his conception.
Christmas and Easter are Linked
This is the key to the
December 25th date. As Thomas Tulley works out in his book
The Origins of the
Liturgical Year, there was a belief within the early church that the date of the
death of Jesus would also reflect either his birth or his conception.
6
Augustine wrote of this, saying "For He is believed to have been conceived on
the 25th of March, upon which day also He suffered; so the womb of the Virgin,
in which He was conceived, where no one of mortals was begotten, corresponds to
the new grave in which He was buried, wherein was never man laid, neither before
nor since. But He was born, according to tradition, upon December the 25th."
7
St. John Chrysostom in his writings goes ever further by noting that the Angel
Gabriel's announcement of Mary's conception happened while Elizabeth was six
months pregnant with John the Baptist (Luke 1:26). Chrysostom argues that
Zechariah's service was the Day of Atonement, thus making the conception of John
the Baptist happen in the fall. Add six months and Jesus's conception lands in
the spring, e.g March 25. I don't know that this calculation is historically
accurate, but it does show how much the early church tied the events together.
The idea of randomly choosing a pagan date seems a pretty big stretch.
Here's
the thing. If Christians were recognizing the birth of Christ by the beginning
of the third century, does it make sense to think that this was a fourth century
invention to sway the Roman populous over to Christianity? Christianity was
gaining ground in the time of Clement, but it was by no means out from under the
shadow of persecution. It also wasn't borrowing much from pagan customs at the
time. So why believe they would do so for this date?
In order to get a
fuller picture, we must look at the Roman holidays and their histories.
You can read that post here and
part three is here.
References
