Why December 25?
No doubt you’ve heard the widely repeated story that the Christian celebration of Christmas is a form of syncretism, where the church decided to accommodate the celebration of Christ’s birth to the pre-existing pagan holidays. Commonly cited precedents are either the feast of Saturnalia or the celebration of Sol Invictus. The theory goes that by this accommodation, assimilation of pagans into the church would proceed with less difficulty.
Indeed, this notion may have its root in the ideas of later Christians, specifically the Puritans who often seem too zealous to root out any joy they found in the practices of the perhaps too Romish (but at least nominally Protestant) church of their day. In The Battle for Christmas, author Stephen Nissenbaum says, “The Puritans were correct when they pointed out — and they pointed it out often — that Christmas was nothing but a pagan festival covered with a Christian veneer. The Reverend Increase Mather of Boston, for example, observed in 1687 that the Christians who first observed the Nativity on December 25 did not do so ‘thinking that Christ was born in that Month, but because the Heathen Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian [ones].’”1
The question is, is this true? According to several sources, the earliest official church celebration of Christmas occurred on December 25, 336. The date falls in the reign of Constantine, and the celebration occurs just after the long-standing Roman celebration of Saturnalia and on the very day when Sol Invictus (“the Unconquered Sun”) was celebrated. Britannica.com says, “Indeed, after December 25 had become widely accepted as the date of Jesus’ birth, Christian writers frequently made the connection between the rebirth of the sun and the birth of the Son.”
Yet… this story has always bothered me. In the days when men like Athanasius stood strong for the deity of our Lord Jesus Christ, was the church so weak as to let pagan celebrations set the tone for their own celebrations? Indeed, the Britannica article goes on to say, “One of the difficulties with this view is that it suggests a nonchalant willingness on the part of the Christian church to appropriate a pagan festival when the early church was so intent on distinguishing itself categorically from pagan beliefs and practices.”
The Britannica follow-on sentence surprised me, considering the source! Yet it resonates with my preconceptions!2
I was glad to see my latest issue of Biblical Archaeological Review show up a few weeks ago, with an article by T. C. Schmidt called “Calculating Christmas: Hippolytus and December 25th.” T. C. Schmidt, it turns out, is an elder in a Southern Baptist Church and a professor at Fairfield University. You can read the article for yourself, but here are the key facts to note.
In translating a commentary by Hippolytus on the book of Daniel, Dr. Schmidt came across this line,
“For the first advent of our Lord in the flesh, when he was born in Bethlehem, was December 25th, Wednesday, while Augustus was in his forty-second year, but from Adam, five thousand and five hundred years.”3
A quick note: the literal words of Hippolytus for December 25 are “Eight days before the Kalends of January,” i.e., December 25.
Hippolytus was a church father in Rome from AD c. 170-235. In the article from BAR, you will also see a photo of a statue of Hippolytus seated on a chair. The chair has inscribed various calculations on its side panels, including one declaring “the ‘Genesis of Christ’ occurred on the Passover of April 2, 2 BC”4 The interesting thing about this inscription is that it is dated by archaeologists at about AD 222.
Why does this matter? The time from April 2 to December 25 is about nine months. Thus, Hippolytus arrived at his date for Christ’s birth due to his belief that the “genesis” (conception) of Christ (see Mt 1.18) occurred on or near April 2 — the date of the Passover.
Hippolytus is not alone in this view. Brittanica.com also names Sextus Julius Africanus as identifying the date of Christ’s birth as December 25. We note that there are various dates in these early years for Christ’s birth, ranging between December 25 and January 6. Any of these days is about nine months from the previous Passover.
Can the conception of Christ be proven to coincide with Passover? No, but there is a long-standing and early tradition for a conception at Passover. Schmidt explains:
The oldest and strongest tradition, however, concerns the date of Jesus’s conception, which all the earliest sources agree occurred on Passover. And this very consistency explains the diversity of calendrical dates for Jesus’s birth. This is because the lunar Passover drifts back and forth between late March and mid-April. Given this, the dates for Jesus’s conception (and his birth nine months later) would differ in proportion to the date which an ancient Christian chose for the Passover of Jesus’s conception—for the ancients had much trouble calculating lunar phases far into the past or future and consequently often arrived at slightly different dates. This is why some ancient Christians give the date for Jesus’s birth in mid-December, others December 25, and still others early January, since all those dates are about nine gestational months removed from when they each thought the Passover of Jesus’s conception happened to occur.5
What does this study prove? It doesn’t prove the actual date of Christ’s birth. That date is shrouded in mystery. It is not recorded in the Bible (and as such, the date doesn’t really matter much), and the references in the Church Fathers are not conclusive.
What it does prove is that there is a long standing tradition of December 25 as the date that many early Christians thought was the date of Christ’s birth. This day did not coincide with Saturnalia, which always began on December 17 and ended on December 23. Saturnalia never occurred on December 25. As for the celebration of Sol Invictus, this festival began on December 25, 274, when the Emperor Aurelian elevated Sol to be one of the premier deities of the Empire, instituting regular celebrations of the “birth of the Sun” after that date — over fifty years after Hippolytus named December 25th as the date of Christ’s birth.6 Thus, Hippolytus is not influenced by paganism in his choice of a date for the Lord’s birth.
What can we say then? The church view of Christ’s conception at Passover is longstanding, with no known source or explanation. The calculation of the birth of Christ on December 25 falls in line with a Passover conception. I hear the objection that “shepherds wouldn’t be keeping lambs in the fields in late December,” but I search Luke in vain for any mention of lambs.
Lk 2.8 ¶ In the same region there were some shepherds staying out in the fields and keeping watch over their flock by night.
And for me, the bottom line is this — while many cultures have a winter festival around the time of the Winter Solstice (for obvious reasons), that in itself is no proof that the church attempted to syncretize one of their most precious doctrines (the incarnation of Christ) with the foolishness of paganism as a cheap attempt to bring reluctant pagans into the church.
Whether Jesus was born on December 25 or some other date, it matters not. What matters is that our glorious God chose to enter our world, suffer the humiliation of incarnation and death, to provide for us a sacrifice bearing our sins and offering us the opportunity to call on him for eternal life.
Praise the Lord!
Don Johnson is the pastor of Grace Baptist Church of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada.
Photo by Marco Verch Professional Photographer, licensed under Creative Commons 2.0.
- Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 4. — Increase Mather’s words as quoted by Nissenbaum come from A Testimony against Several Prophane and Superstitious Customs Now Practiced by Some in New-England (London, 1687), 35. [↩]
- So, it must be true!! [↩]
- Hippolytus, Hippolytus of Rome’s Commentary on Daniel, trans. T. C. Schmidt, Gorgias Studies in Early Christianity and Patristics 79 (Piscataway, NJ, USA: Gorgias Press, 2022), 140. [↩]
- T. C. Schmidt, “Calculating Christmas: Hippolytus and December 25th,” Biblical Archaeology Review, Winter 2022, 53. [↩]
- Schmidt, 53–54. [↩]
- See “Sol Invictus – Aurelian” on Wikipedia. [↩]