DATING CHRISTMAS Andrew McGowan

Introduction
Where did Christmas come from? Many have heard the explanation that Christians
appropriated a pagan festival, date and customs and all, and simply renamed or
reinterpreted it for their own purposes. While there are certainly connections between
Christmas customs, ancient and modern, and various other winter holidays with their
trappings, the truth seems likely to be more complex. Scholars are inclined to look
beyond the links with the solstice or sun holidays for at least part of the explanation
for this complex feast.
1


Before Christmas
Christmas as such was probably not celebrated at all in the first couple of centuries
after the birth of Jesus. Marks Gospel, apparently the earliest written, does not
mention Jesus birth, nor does Paul, author of the oldest documents of the New
Testament. Interest in Jesus human origins emerges in the Gospels of Matthew and
Luke, which provide well-known but quite different accounts, and continues in
second-century apocryphal writings such as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the
Proto-Gospel of James, which claim to elaborate on much of the detail that might
have occurred to the curious - everything from Jesus grandparents to his education.

This human interest angle did not reflect or immediately spur a ritualized
observance of the events, however. For the purposes of ordering worship and time, the

1
Scholars of liturgical history in the English-speaking world are particularly sceptical of the solstice
connection; see Susan K. Roll, The Origins of Christmas: The State of the Question, Between
Memory and Hope: Readings on the Liturgical Year (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2000), 273-
290, especially 289-290.
last climactic events of Jesus ministry were far more interesting to the first Christian
communities than the poignancy of his beginnings. Jesus death and resurrection had
been the central issues for the canonical Gospels, and since Jesus last great conflict
with the Roman authorities and their collaborators had taken place around Passover,
his death was from a very early stage interpreted along lines suggested by the great
Jewish festival, and his resurrection celebrated annually in relation to it.

Most prominent among other early Christian festivals were the commemorations of
martyrs - not attempts to map the rest of the life of Jesus onto the year in the now-
familiar cyclical fashion, but echoes of the Easter motif, continued into the life of the
persecuted Church. Celebrating the anniversaries of the deaths of heroes like Polycarp
of Smyrna (d. 155?) or the young African convert Perpetua (d. 203), offered hope of
resistance to the authority that had taken their lives but given them as effective
imitators of Christ. These feasts were actually referred to as birthdays, but
ironically. Origen of Alexandria (165?-264?) could write scornfully of the custom of
celebrating the actual anniversaries of human birth (Hom in Lev. 8) as a heathen idea.

Christmas comes
If the human interest aspect of curiosity about Jesus birth emerged relatively early,
the actual observance of Christmas as a feast appeared only rather later, in the fourth
century or perhaps at the end of the third.

The proliferation of holidays that allowed Christians to go through the year in
connection with the life of Jesus has often been seen as linked to the end of
persecution, In the fourth century particularly, evidence about liturgical development
such as that recorded by the pilgrim Egeria, who visited the Churches of newly-
Christian Jerusalem, documents the emergence of a complex sanctification of time
still reflected in the Christian calendar today.

The fourth century also saw greater emphasis placed by Christians upon belief in
Gods personal presence in Jesus throughout his life - the incarnation or
enfleshment of God, as teachers such as Athanasius of Alexandria put it. While this
was not a new doctrine, fierce debates about the specifics, reflected in documents
such as the Nicene Creed (325 CE/380 CE) indicate how Jesus own conception and
birth could become matters of even greater concern and curiosity in popular belief,
and ritual also.

Yet the choice of a specific date for this new feast, appearing centuries after the event
it commemorated, is curious at least. The lack of specific information about the
timing of Jesus birth has never kept the enthusiastic and the ingenious, ancient and
modern alike, from speculating about the exact date of the first Christmas.

Extracting
supposed hints from the Gospels about issues such as the time of year, however,
2

involves the risk of asking questions they were not attempting to answer -

even the
year of Jesus birth is unclear.
3


When interest in observing Christmas emerged, there were two dates, December 25

and January 6

(now generally known as the Feast of the Epiphany) kept in different

2
According to Luke 2:8, shepherds were tending their flocks at night when they heard news of Jesus
birth. If this detail were regarded as historical, it would suggest the warmer months in the middle of the
year.
3
Both Matthew and Luke connect Jesus birth with the time of Herod the Great (d. 4 BCE). Luke,
however, identifies the Roman Governor of Syria at the time of the birth as Quirinius, whose only
certain tenure of that office was in 6 CE. Few have been inclined to date Jesus birth as late as this.
parts of the world; the first was observed in the western provinces of the Roman
Empire, and the second further East, in locales such as Egypt and Asia Minor. In time,
each of these competing dates was transferred to the other areas too; December 25

prevailed as the primary commemoration of the birth of Jesus, and January 6

eventually became associated specifically with the story of the coming of the Magi
(Matt 2:1-12),
4
and the period between the twelve days of Christmas became a
holiday season, preceded by the fasting period known as Advent.

Solstices and Saturnalia
Where did these dates come from? Both were of course fairly close to the winter
solstice - December 21 in our modified Gregorian calendar. Mid-winter festivals had
already been common - the Romans had their Saturnalia, and peoples of northern and
western Europe kept holidays at similar times. In 274 CE the Roman Emperor
Aurelian had established a feast of Sol Invictus (the Unconquered Sun) on December
25 itself. When one of his successors, Constantine, converted to Christianity just a
few decades later, imagery and popular practice associated with these observances
were easily and readily adaptable to the Christian holiday that took their place.

Was this connection also the explanation for the actual date chosen to celebrate Jesus
birth? Ancient Christian authors of the time had already noted this connection
between solstice observances and Christmas Church fathers such as Ambrose
reveled in using the imagery of Christ as true sun, using the natural symbolism to its
full potential while vaunting over fallen gods of the old order. For these, however, the

4
The Armenian Church, less influenced by western Christianity during the period in question, retains
the January 6
th
date.
coincidence was not a deliberate or recent piece of calendrical engineering, but a
providential sign.

More recently, however, the parallel came to be treated as key to explaining the
choice of an actual date. The idea first appears in a marginal note on a 12
th
century
manuscript, to explain not the emergence of the incarnation feast but its transfer from
January 6 (taken by the scribe to be the real date) to December 25, because of the sun
holiday.
5
Scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, spurred on by new
studies of comparative religion, seized upon this conjunction as a complete
explanation for the Christian feast, or rather feasts.
6
Since these dates were clearly not
related to the birth date of the historical Jesus, which was unknown, were they not
thinly-veiled pagan festivals, appropriated and Christianized only superficially? After
all, it was no secret that later Christian leaders, such as Pope Gregory the Great, had
encouraged the baptism of local religious observances for evangelistic purposes
(Bede, Ecclesiastical History 1.30), and this connection could not have been ignored
or avoided in the expansion of the Christmas feast.

Problems
There are perhaps two key objections to the popular solstice theory for the actual
date or dates of the Christmas feasts: both the holiday itself and knowledge of the
dates appear a little too early to fit neatly.


5
A gloss on an MS of Dionysius Bar Salibi, d. 1171; see Thomas J. Talley, The Origins of the
Liturgical Year (2
nd
ed.; Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1991), 101-102.
6
Prominent among these was Paul Ernst Jablonski; on the history of scholarship see especially Roll,
The Origins of Christmas, 277-283.
Christian belief and practice were certainly not formed in isolation from their cultural
setting, and often seem to have parallels with ancient Greek and Roman religion. The
sacred meal of the Eucharist and the honors paid to martyrs on their festivals would
have been quite comprehensible to contemporary observers. Yet in the first few
centuries, the persecuted Christian minority had at least as great a concern to distance
itself from the most important religious observances, such as sacrifices, the games,
and holidays. It was in the fourth century and after, following the conversion of the
first Christian Emperor Constantine and the resulting peace of the Church, that
strategies shifted more clearly to accommodation and Christianization of such
practices.

Yet the first evidence for Christmas as a feast is slightly too early to make sense as
one instance of newly-triumphant Christianity. It had already developed by 300 CE or
so, at least; about a hundred years after that time, Augustine of Hippo reports on a
local Christian group, the Donatists, liturgical conservatives who had split from the
wider Church in 312. and who celebrated Christmas (December 25), but not Epiphany
(January 6).
7
That is, Christmas had already been well-established in North Africa in
312. In the East on the other hand, efforts by theologians and preachers late in the
fourth century to introduce the December 25 date clearly presume that the January 6
feast was already well-entrenched there, not an innovation in living memory.
8


The second and perhaps more telling problem is that although these actual liturgical
feasts of the incarnation were indeed late in achieving recognition and widespread
celebration, the actual dates or one of them at least might have been identified

7
Sermon 202.
much earlier. Clement of Alexandria, a Christian teacher who wrote around 200 CE
long before the first evidence for celebration of Christmas as a holiday knows of a
tradition dating Jesus birth to January 6

(Stromateis 1.21.145).
9
So in some places at
least, there was certainly an interest not just in birth stories, but in the date of Jesus
birth, long before the Christmas feast emerged.

There is no exact equivalent of this early evidence when it comes to December 25,
which was to become the prevalent Christmas date in western provinces first. Yet
there was speculation as far back as 200 CE by the Carthaginian Christian writer
Tertullian about the date of Jesus death that landed on the surprising and suggestive
date of March 25

(Adversus Iudaeos 8) later to be kept as the Feast of the
Annunciation, the point of Jesus conception.
10


From Death to Birth
Is there a connection? The key to understanding the emergence both of January 6

and
December 25

as specific dates for Jesus birth seems strange as it may seem initially
possibly to lie in the dating of Passover and of Jesus death. Tertullian had
calculated that in the year Jesus died, March 25

was, according to the Roman
calendar, the day the lambs for the Passover Seder were slaughtered (Nisan 14).
Following the chronology implied by the Gospel of John, Tertullian took this also to
be the date of Jesus death. But how could this be connected with the rather different

8
E.g., Gregory of Nazianzen, Oratio 38; John Chrysostom, In Diem Natalem.
9
In addition, Christians in Clements native Egypt seem to have known a commemoration of Jesus
baptism sometimes understood as the moment of his divine choice, and hence as an alternate
incarnation story on the same date (Strom. 1.21.146). See further on this point Talley, Origins, 118-
20, drawing on Roland H. Bainton, Basilidian Chronology and New Testament Interpretation,
Journal of Biblical Literature 42 (1923) 81-134, and now especially Gabriele Winkler, The
Appearance of the Light at the Baptism of Jesus and the Origins of the Feast of the Epiphany, in
Johnson, Between Memory and Hope, 291-347.
question of Jesus birthday? Tertullian does not help us much here, but if we travel
back to the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, we may find the link.

In provinces further to the East, efforts to establish the date of Easter each year (and
not just the first Easter) had led Christians to seek a firmer place in the solar Julian
calendar for their Christian celebration. Instead of using the Jewish lunar calendar to
find Nisan 14, they chose the fourteenth day of the first Spring month (Artemisios)
in the local Greek calendar April 6

to us. The loyalty of these eastern Christians to
their custom of keeping Easter on the actual fourteenth day rather than on the Sunday
following (as others then held, and eventually all Christians came to practice) became
a major debate within the Church - they themselves were sometimes referred to as
Quartodecimans, or Fourteenthers.

So in the eastern provinces we have evidence not only for a birth date for Jesus on
January 6, as Clement indicates, but for Easter exactly nine months before. This may
shed light on the December 25

date as well. These two dates for the Passover when
Jesus died, March 25

and April 6, are of course nine months before the original
eastern and western dates for Christmas. The implication is fairly clear, if distinctly
odd: second-century Christians in different areas had apparently calculated the birth
of Jesus on the basis that his death and conception took place on the same day and
had come up with two close, but different, results. These calculations preceded any
clear evidence for the actual liturgical celebration of Christmas but may have been

10
There are other relevant texts for this element of argument, including Hippolytus and the (pseudo-
Cyprianic) De pascha computus; see Talley, Origins, 86 and 90-91.
there, already known, when the interest in Jesus birth led to establishment of a
festival.
11


Aside from the wildly complicated calculations involved, the connection between
Jesus conception and death seems odd to modern readers, of course. Yet it was not so
odd in ancient terms. Rabbinic writings contemporary with the emergence of
Christian liturgical practice reflect a similar belief that the great events of creation and
salvation had taken, and would take, place on the same dates. The Babylonian Talmud
records the view that the world was created, the Patriarchs born, and the world would
be redeemed, all in the month of Nisan (b. Rosh Hashanah 10b-11a). This sort of
speculation could go back as early as the second or third centuries. Thus the dates of
Christmas and Epiphany may well have resulted from Christian theological reflection
on chronology, continuing such Jewish models; Jesus would have been conceived on
the same date he was to die, and born nine months later.
12


This account of the origins of Christmas as computed from the presumed date of his
death was first proposed in modern times by Louis Duchesne,
13
and has fairly recently
been restated with nuances by Thomas Talley. While questions remain, and gaps in
the evidence still allow different scholarly interpretations on this question as on so
many others, specialists worth reading no longer trot out the explanation of Christmas
as a borrowed pagan festival in an unqualified way.


11
Talley, Origins, 79-155.
12
Talley, Origins, 81-82.
13
Origines du culte chrtien (5
th
ed.; Paris:Thorin et Fontemoing, 1925), 275-279.
Computations and Coincidences
Hundreds of popular works slavishly repeating the idea that Christmas as a
Christianized midwinter festival do have to be taken with salt. Yet the connection
drawn with the winter solstice is not irrelevant. First, it was more than a coincidence,
since Passover itself was a Spring festival or sorts, and the connection with the
passing of seasons in the year still has its place in the view that computes Christmas
from this rather different earlier holiday.

Second, the connection between the date of Christmas and the solstice made the
expansion of the feast of the nativity more strategically important and possible. In the
new world of a Christian empire, the fourth-century Church was not backward in
appropriating symbols already known. The various forms of Christmas observance
across time and space have always and obviously owed much to local traditions and
lore that preceded or grew alongside Christian faith. Although the traditional date(s)
of Jesus birth may have come from elsewhere, the actual feast of Christmas emerged
in a way not entirely removed from the now-traditional account of borrowing earlier
traditions.

Finally, if the date of Christmas came about via rather surprising means, it still
reflects traditions older than itself. The actual date, however, could really derive more
from Judaism than Greco-Roman sources, both in the relation between dates in Jesus
life and death and the time of Passover, and in the rabbinic notion that great things
might be expected, again and again, at the same time of year. In this notion of cycles
and the return of Gods redemption again and again, we may perhaps be touching
upon something that the Romans who celebrated Sol Invictus, and many other peoples
since, would have understood and claimed for their own too.
14



14
On the two theories as false alternatives, see Roll, Origins of Christmas.