Did the Church ‘steal’ Christmas from pagans?

Question:  According to my priest, December 25 is not the birthday of Our Lord Jesus, and the Church simply turned pagan festivals into Christmas? Can you explain?

Answer: At this time of the year, Catholics are liable to be lectured with the inaccurate notion that the celebration of Christmas on December 25 derives from an appropriation of pagan feasts. Even some Catholics have bought into that assumption, and repeat it in good faith, as your priest possibly did. More often, however, it is trotted out by people who seek to delegitimise the feast of the Nativity.

In brief, the argument goes, the early Christians deliberately usurped the pagan feasts of Saturnalia (a celebration that fell between December 17 and 23, which at some points in history might have culminated in human sacrifice but also included gift-giving and festivities) and Sol Invictus (worship of the sun god Sol) to create the feast of the Nativity, or Christmas.

Since some of the popular practices of the Christmas celebration that came later — such as the now ubiquitous decorated trees or the use of holly — have pagan origins, the myth has a superficial appearance of plausibility.

However, the canonical dating of Christmas in the 4th century has no relation to the Roman pagan feasts. The early Christians did not attach great importance to the birth of the Lord. For the first three centuries of Christianity, the celebration of Christ’s birth had no official date or form. For the Church, the principal feast was, as it is today, Easter.

The oldest surviving reference to the official celebration of Christ’s birth is in a document from 336, in the Roman Deposito Martyrum. This document was issued before Pope Julius I (337-52) formally set the date for the feast of the Nativity on December 25.

That date most likely had already been widely accepted and marked as Jesus’ “birthday”, based on the calculation by the Jerusalem scholar Sextus Julius Africanus in 221 AD.

Distance from paganism

That was a time when Christians were not yet assimilating pagan traditions into their practices. Indeed, the early Christians were prepared to be martyred rather than to submit to pagan observances. They sought distance from paganism, not to copy or usurp it. This changed only after Christianity had become the state religion of the Roman Empire in the late 4th century.

In the early 3rd century, Africanus affirmed that the Annunciation should be dated March 25, the northern spring equinox and the 14th Nisan in the Jewish calendar, which at the time was believed to be the date on which God created the world. Incidentally, it was also believed that Jesus was crucified and died on the date of God’s creation and of his incarnation at the Annunciation — on March 25.

By simple biology and arithmetic, if we add nine months to March 25, the date on which Mary conceived the Lord by the Holy Spirit, we arrive at December 25 for the date of his birth.

Importantly for the purpose of the present question, the affirmation of the date of the Annunciation on March 25 by Africanus precedes the celebration of the pagan feast Sol Invictus by half a century.

Date of Jesus’ birth

Scripture gives no indication as to when Jesus actually was conceived or born, since the evangelists’ concern was theology, not biography. We know neither the date, nor the season, nor even the year (though the latter must have been before 4 BC, the year of King Herod’s death). The references to shepherds tending their sheep at night would suggest that the birth of the Lord could not have taken place in the northern winter.

Speculation about the authentic date of Jesus’ birth can teach us a lot about the historical, social and religious context of Jesus’ time, but nothing about the meaning of Christmas — which is the birth of God-made-human so that we all may be redeemed.

While we must correct the fallacy that Christmas in some ways usurped pagan feasts — with that assertion’s implied delegitimisation of the feast of the Nativity — it is this truth on which we must keep our eyes.