The Bible doesn’t
directly explain why Christmas takes place in the winter. Was the Dec. 25 date
really just a way to convert pagans? A story last year, republished below,
examined the longstanding dispute about when and how to celebrate Jesus’ birth.
Here’s a thought
for the harried among us who are unready for the arrival of another Christmas
season: There was a time when some scholars argued that the holiday should be
observed in the spring. Just imagine three more months of shopping!
The Bible offers
little help in resolving the question: No dates are offered in the Gospel stories.
There isn’t even a reference to the season of the year. Some readers have
thought they detected a clue in the evangelist
Luke’s mention of shepherds tending their flocks at night as they hear the news
of Jesus’ birth. To some, this suggests not a December birth,
but one during the spring lambing season, when the animals would be free to
roam out of their corrals. But wait: Advocates for a December Nativity answer
that sheep reserved for temple sacrifices would have grazed unfettered even in
deepest winter.
Clearly, any
dispute that hinges on knowledge of Middle Eastern livestock practices of
antiquity is not going to be resolved easily.
Why should it
matter? The earliest Christian writers were more interested in Jesus’ death and
resurrection than in his birth. The oldest of the Gospels, Mark’s, makes no
mention of Jesus’ birth. Later, Matthew and Luke offered extravagant
detail—stars, wise men, mangers—but no specifics about timing.
This didn’t stop
others from making their own guesses. The theologian Clement of Alexandria,
writing around 200, mentions some of the dates that had by then already been
proposed as the true date of Jesus’ birth. Spring Nativities were popular, with
dates in May, April, and March being proposed. Dec. 25 is not mentioned as a
possibility.
So how did we end
up celebrating a wintry white Christmas? The church only settled on a Dec. 25
Christmas in the fourth century. The standard explanation is that the early church
conflated its celebration of the Nativity with pre-existing pagan festivals.
Romans had their Saturnalia, the ancient winter festival, and northern
European people had their own solstice traditions. Among the features: parties,
gift-giving, dwellings decorated with greenery
The
reasoning goes that the growing church, recognizing the popularity of the
winter festivals, attached its own Christmas celebration to encourage the
spread of Christianity. Business historian John Steele Gordon has described the
December dating of the Nativity as a kind of ancient-world marketing ploy.
But
some put forward another, less well-known explanation for the Dec. 25 date—one
with appeal for anyone uncomfortable with a connection between Christmas and
the old solstice festivals. According to some scholars, Christmas was set near
the winter solstice not because of any pagan traditions but based on a series
of arcane calendrical computations. This argument hinges on an ancient Jewish
tradition that had the great prophets dying on the same dates as their birth
or, alternatively, their conception. Thus, to follow this peculiar assumption,
the first step in dating Jesus’ birth would be to date his death, which the Gospels
say happened at Passover. The early Christian writer Tertullian calculated that
the date given for Jesus’ death in John’s Gospel corresponds to March 25 in the
Roman calendar. Many Christian churches came to celebrate the Feast of the
Annunciation, marking the angel Gabriel’s visit to the Virgin Mary to tell her
that she would become the mother of Jesus, on this date. Adding nine months to
this date produces a Dec. 25 Christmas.
This
alternative explanation is sometimes deployed to dismiss the notion that the
holiday had pagan roots. In a 2003 article in the journal Touchstone,
for example, historian William Tighe called the pagan origin of Christmas “a
myth without historical substance.” He argued at least one pagan festival, the
Roman Natalis Solis Invictus, instituted by Emperor Aurelian on Dec.
25, 274, was introduced in response to the Christian observance. The pagan
festival “was almost certainly an attempt to create a pagan alternative to a
date that was already of some significance to Roman Christians.” According to
Tighe, the pagans co-opted the Christian holiday, not the other way around.
But
even to some Christians, Christmas has always seemed like a version of a pagan
feast—and therefore unworthy of observance. The early church father Origen
argued against celebrating Jesus’ birthday: “It is only sinners like Pharaoh and Herod who make great
rejoicings over the day on which they were born into this world.” The Puritans
of 17th-century Massachusetts famously banned the holiday, in part
because they found no Biblical authority for celebrating the Nativity on Dec.
25. (They also feared the Saturnalia-esque disorder and rowdiness that seemed
to go with the holiday.) Quakers, too, abstained from celebrating. Harriet
Beecher Stowe has a character in her 1878 novel Poganuc People explain why his family doesn’t observe
Christmas: “Nobody knows when Christ was born, and there is nothing in the
Bible to tell us when to keep Christmas.”
There
is something familiar about all these erstwhile Christmas controversies. The
holiday is still prime time for disputation. At this time of year, more than
any other, the sacred and the secular spend a lot of time jostling for space,
and eventually, accommodating each other. So, believers need not be threatened
by Christmas’ putative pagan roots. If the church repurposed the old solstice
feasts, it only goes to show its power to bend the broader culture to its
pastoral purpose.
Andrew Santella's essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review andGQ.
