#715

Is Christmas A Pagan Holiday?

It Was So Much Easier

Growing up before I was a Christian, celebrating Christmas was so much easier. We’d put up a tree, decorate it and then as young children we’d put out a cookie with some milk for Santa Clause and then go to bed. Magically there would be presents under the tree when we woke up and then we’d have fun ripping off the wrapping paper and seeing what we got. It wasn’t too much different once I was a Christian, but at some point people started telling me how pagan what I just described was. I wasn’t the only person to hear this as we see in an article from thegospelcoalition.org and written by Wes Huff:

Growing up I was taught that the date of Christmas, December 25th, was a borrowed pagan festival. I couldn’t tell you exactly when or where, but I remember being told (more than a few times) that there were a myriad of ancient pagan festivals like Sol Invictus, Saturnalia, Brumalia, and European feasts like Yule, that also took place on the 25th of December.

“The Christians,” the narrative went, “moved the celebration of Christ’s birth to the place of these other pagan festivities in order to make it easier for converts and/or to encourage pagans to convert.”

Huff mentions that, on the surface, that made sense:

In many ways this story made sense. Why not supersede, redeem, and cover-up the former pagan festivals with a Christian celebration? Christen and baptize these already celebrated days with a new meaning that moved new and inquiring Christians away from the darkness of their former heathen worship and fill it with light?

So taking over these pagan celebrations was a way to Christianize them:

I was sometimes told, certain pagan activities were inevitably smuggled in, sometimes purposefully and other times completely unintentionally. Christmas trees, holly, wreathes, and so on, were all grandfathered trappings of a previous pagan context, forgotten and replaced. These decorations were incorporated into Christmas and over time their original meaning was lost and simply associated with the Christian celebration rather than their former pagan beginnings.

All of that, however, is bogus.

So Who Started The Rumors?

It had to start somewhere, right? As it turns out, it wasn’t that long ago:

If you tried to get to the origin of these accusations you would find that their beginnings prove more modern than ancient. A lot of the blame falls on a Free Church of Scotland minister and certain concerns expressed by the Puritans of the 16th and 17th centuries.

The Puritans were well intentioned and undoubtedly pious. However, in their zeal to pursue truth they did not always get it right. The rowdy and undisciplined celebrations that accompanied Christmas concerned the Puritans greatly (probably for the right reasons), but where the Puritans’ motivation might have been well intentioned their solution to the perceived problem, at least on this topic, turned out to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Huff says that one minister pointed to Roman Catholicism as the culprit:

Meanwhile, a Scottish minister named Alexander Hislop, in the late nineteenth century, also waged his own case against Christmas. Hislop wrote a pamphlet in 1853 titled The Two Babylons, which was eventually expanded into a book of the same name. In his book Hislop argued that Roman Catholicism found its beginning as a Babylonian mystery cult, established during the Emperor Constantine’s rule in the fourth century.

His logic was a more opinion that fact, though:

Hislop argued that traditions like Christmas trees found their way into the modern world from Europe, but that the Europeans had adopted them from Roman paganism who in turn appropriated them from the ancient Babylonians. Hislop’s work has a conspicuous lack of citations for any of these assertions and prefers to make statements rather than provide any sources.

Nonetheless, many (if not all) of the detractions concerning modern Christmas celebrations and traditions can be traced to these two sources: Puritan skepticism or Hislopian condemnation.

Next We Blame Martin Luther

The great Protestant reformer is now taking some of the blame for Christmas traditions:

The earliest mention of customs like Christmas trees are actually ascribed to Martin Luther. The story goes that during a winter evening stroll Luther was overcome by the brilliance of the stars in the night sky, painting the background over the evergreen forests. In order to capture that moment Luther cut down and erected a tree in the main hall of their house, covering its branches with lighted candles (Bruce David Forbes, Christmas, a Candid History, 50).

Santa, wreaths, mistletoe, and many other modern Christmas traditions may not necessarily have much to do with the ancient Christian celebration, but they also don’t have anything to do with overt paganism.

Huff makes good points about these Christmas critics while also taking a sly jab at their research:

I don’t doubt that the Reformed Puritans and Alexander Hislop himself were well intentioned in their desire to weed-out paganism from Christian belief and practice (aside, of course, from Hislop’s fabrication of nearly all of ancient history). However, their understandings of many of the traditions they endeavoured to critique were often shallow, misguided, or fabricated wholesale.

He states that some view that nothing in Christianity is original but was borrowed from other cultures, much like the author Dan Brown who used that sentiment in his Davinci Code books. But Huff totally disagrees:

However, if you actually study what really took place within early Christianity that portrayal couldn’t be any further from the truth. To be sure Christianity did stand its ground against paganism and heretical factions, but their portrayal as a proverbial religious bully on the playground is complete fiction. What does the historical record tell us?

The reality is that modern Christmas traditions are far less sensational and nefarious than all that and the date was not stolen from neighbouring pagans. It is true that many other pagan festivals did happen around the Winter Solstice, but correlation does not equal causation and when it comes to paganism and Christmas the evidence for causation is very weak.

And About The Day Used

Huff then gets a tad in the weeds on why December 25th was selected for the birth of Jesus. He makes a case that Christians didn’t use any pagan dates to do that:

The origin of December 25th as the date for Christmas finds its beginnings in the late second and early third century with the historian Sextus Julius Africanus. Africanus, wrote a volume titled Chronographiai, an early Christian treatise that attempted to chronologically cover world history from creation to his own day. Based on calculations from his reading of Luke and Matthew’s Gospels, Africanus concluded that Jesus was conceived on March 25th. For the birth then, he counted nine months ahead which landed him on the date of December 25th (Sextus Julius Africanus, De solstitia et aequinoctiaconceptionis et nativitatis Domini nostri Iesu Christi et Iohannis Baptistae).

And no, I’m not going to try and pronounce all that Latin for you. Here’s more support:

Africanus wasn’t alone on his dating of Jesus’ birth. A contemporary of Africanus, Hippolytus of Rome, wrote a commentary on the book of Daniel in the early third century in which he too states that Jesus was born on December 25th (Hippolytus of Rome, Commentary on Daniel 4.23.3.).

Huff makes a case that it was the Romans who changed their date to compete with Christians:

It is true that Sol Invictus, the festival commemorating the Roman sun God, fell on December 25th. However, our earliest inscriptions concerning this festival place it at the beginning of December not at the end. In his work The Origins of the Liturgical Year, historian Thomas Talley argues that “[i]t is more likely that the Roman Emperor Aurelian moved Sol Invictus to December 25th to compete with the growing rate of Christianity” (The Origins of the Liturgical Year, 88-91).

Thomas Talley then puts more nails in the coffin of Christians absconding with the 25th date:

Talley makes the interesting observation that by the third and fourth centuries Christianity was on the clear rise and adherents to traditional Roman paganism was in a free-fall. The trajectory of this shift in religious practice actually started a century earlier with the Roman magistrate Pliny the Younger. Pliny noted (potentially hyperbolically) that the Roman temples were being left empty due to so many Roman citizens becoming converts to Christianity (P.T.Y. Epistle to Trajan).

I know, this is a lot of dry history, but I think it needs to be used if only to help us make points:

Julian, who was Roman Emperor for three years in the fourth century, writes about his frustration with the lack of Roman religious devotion to idols, and specifically blames the Christians for this pagan crisis of faith (Ammianus Marcellinus, Res Gestae).

So who is right? Huff connects the final dots for us:

All this data leaves us with a quandary: is it more likely that within the third and fourth centuries the growing numbers of Christians copied the pagans, whose adherents were on a sharp decline, in some last-ditch effort to convert holdouts? Or, on the other hand, did the desperate pagans copy the Christians whose faith and practice was growing in popularity? Based on all of the available evidence more and more ancient historians are pointing to the latter conclusion being the reality.

Those Other Feasts

Stay with me on this point, mainly because if you’ve sold the logic that Christmas was attached to other feasts, well, that thinking has holes in it, too:

Apart from Sol Invictus, which appears to have been placed on December 25th after the Christians had already acknowledged that as the date of Jesus’ birth, none of the other ancient pagan feasts and festivals fall on that date. Around it, to be sure, but not on it. Saturnalia, for example, was celebrated 14 days before January. Keeping in mind that the ancient Roman calendar at the time had two more days in their month of December than ours today, that places Saturnalia on December 17th.

The Brumalia and Bacchus feasts were likewise celebrated earlier in the season, in late November. Seeing as all of these would fall before the date of December 25th then if they were an attempt to copy and replace pagan festivals they would have been doing a poor job at it. The pagans could have just as easily celebrated their traditional pagan holidays in the days and months leading up to December 25th and simply tacked Christmas on the end, not a replacement but an addition (which did not happen).

So where did we get the date from? It appears it started very close to the time of Jesus:

In reality the Christians had been recognizing and celebrating the incarnation and Jesus’ birth for decades before we start to see firm designations for other pagan celebrations on December 25th. In AD 386, John Chrysostom says that Christmas was being celebrated on December 25th and describes it as a “long time tradition” (John Chrysostom, Homily on the Date of Christmas). The Philocalian Calendar, a document produced in AD 354 for a wealthy Roman Christian named Valentinus, has Christmas listed as a holiday on December 25th.

So Should We Celebrate Christmas At All?

Apart from the Bible not telling us to celebrate the birth of Jesus, some feel that it isn’t important either. However, just like the Jews celebrate the festivals, Jesus, who was Jewish Himself celebrated Hanukkah as seen in the gospel of John 10:

And it was at Jerusalem the feast of the dedication, and it was winter. (John 10:22, KJV)

Just because it’s not in the Bible doesn’t mean we should avoid doing it. Huff tell us that the birth of Jesus is and should be a big deal:

Jesus has no problem travelling to Jerusalem to celebrate the feast of dedication. Despite it not being commanded in Scripture it is fully consistent with Scripture. Why wouldn’t you make a celebration out of an event that represented God’s work in the world and the preservation and redemption of His people? In a very similar way, why would’t we celebrate the incarnation and the birth of Christ?

Secondly, the incarnation and birth of Christ is — along with Jesus’ death and resurrection — the most awesome event in all of human history. Why wouldn’t we want to carve out some specific time to celebrate such an amazing event? Why wouldn’t we purposefully set aside a time of the year like Advent, to build up to the exception of our coming saviour?

Huff ends with this salient point:

I simply desire to point out that as Christians we are followers of the truth, and the truth of the matter regarding this topic is that no modern Christmas tradition can draw a strait line to any clear and decisive pagan origin.

I know many people will still disagree, but I say, loosen up and say Merry Christmas, anyway.