No, Christmas Isn't Pagan
Christians Calculated December 25 From the Cross — Not the Sun. The Pagan-Origin Story Rests on a Single Marginal Note From the 12th Century.
<sets down eggnog>
You know the guy. Every family has one. It’s the second day of Christmas, the wrapping paper is still on the floor, somebody’s auntie is asking if anyone wants more ham, and from the corner of the couch, between bites of shortbread, he clears his throat.
“You DO know … Christmas is just a stolen pagan holiday, right? December 25th was the birthday of the Sun god. Saturnalia. Mithras. Constantine made the whole thing up to keep the pagans happy. It’s not even in the Bible.”
And everyone kind of nods, because it sounds like the sort of thing that’s probably true, it has that delicious flavor of forbidden knowledge, the History-Channel-at-2 am feeling, the sense that you’ve peeked behind the curtain and seen the gears. It’s a great story. It has a villain, a cover-up, and a smug little payoff.
It’s also almost entirely false, and — like its cousin, the “Constantine paganized the Sabbath”1 myth I took apart in an earlier piece — it’s a relatively recent invention dressed up as ancient history. So pour yourself some more of whatever you’re drinking, because we’re going to do something the couch-guy never does: check. We’re going to trace exactly how the Church arrived at December 25, dig into the strange and beautiful date of the Annunciation, and then take every single pagan-origin theory, Sol Invictus, Saturnalia, Mithras, the whole crew — and put each one in the ground, one at a time.
I was raised Latter-day Saint (LDS aka Mormon.) Go be clear what we are about to dig into is not formal LDS/Mormon Sunday school teaching, but I heard it enough over the years, from various people (mostly my mother, who was once a Jehovah's Witness) for it to stick.
What did I hear? That December 25 had nothing to do with the real Jesus and everything to do with pagan compromise — and that the real date was some time in early April.2 So believe me: I get the appeal. I just went and scrutinized that position instead of accepting it at face value.
First, the Honest Part: the Bible Gives No Date
Let’s concede the couch-guy his one true point and get it out of the way, because it costs us nothing.
The Gospels do not tell us when Jesus was born. Not the day, not the month, not even the season. Luke mentions shepherds in the fields (Luke 2:8), which people love to wield as proof — “see, no shepherd would be out in December!” — but that argument is weaker than it sounds. Bethlehem winters are mild, and flocks were often kept outdoors, and more importantly, it’s beside the point. Nobody seriously thinks December 25 was arrived at by meteorology.3
In fact, the earliest Christians weren’t celebrating Jesus’ birthday at all. Around the year 200, Clement of Alexandria runs through a whole menu of proposed dates that various Christian groups had floated, May 20, April 20 or 21, others, and December 25 isn’t even on his list. His contemporary Origen openly mocked the idea of celebrating birthdays as a pagan, vainglorious habit fit for Pharaohs and Herods, not Christians. For the first two centuries, the question of when Jesus was born simply wasn’t a liturgical priority. The cross was the priority. The empty tomb was the priority. Everyday christians weren't terribly concerned with when he was born.
Hold onto that: December 25 didn’t start as a guess about the weather on the night of the Nativity. It started as the answer to a math problem — and the math began at the cross.
