Christmas and Paganism Part 1: December 25th was not an Ancient Pagan Holiday

Part 1: December 25th was not an Ancient Pagan Holiday
Part 2: Jesus’ Death, Christmas and the Early Church
Part 3: The Winter Birth
Part 4: Should Christians Celebrate Christmas?

Originally published on our old site, Throwback Christianity, in 2014.

According to popular myth, Christmas was an ancient Pagan Holiday.

As the myth goes, Christmas is linked to ancient pagan celebrations for the false deities such as Mithras, Sol Invictus or the winter solstice celebration of Saturnalia. Some believe that the Emperor Constantine and his Imperial Church appropriated one of these three celebrations as Jesus’ birth date to counteract paganism, therefore, historically December 25th had nothing to do with Christianity or Christ.

Historically, no one related Christmas to paganism until the 12th century when a Syrian bishop named Jacob Bar-Salibi wrote this in reference to the nativity being moved from January 6th to December 25th:

It was a custom of the Pagans to celebrate on the same 25 December the birthday of the Sun, at which they kindled lights in token of festivity. In these solemnities and revelries the Christians also took part. Accordingly when the doctors of the Church perceived that the Christians had a leaning to this festival, they took counsel and resolved that the true Nativity should be solemnized on that day.[1]

Since this myth is so prevalent today, it leads to the assumption that there must exist ancient text which predates Christianity, showing that the December 25th date for Jesus’ birth was grounded in paganism. Yet no such proof exist.. There are only two pagan sources linked to December 25th. Both postdate Christianity. The first is from 274 A.D. when the Emperor Aurelian inducted the games of Sol. These games took place in August, October, and December. However, the December games took place on December 14th, not the 25th.

This leaves us with the second and remaining sole source—the Chronography of 354 A.D.—which lists Natalis Invicti on December 25th:

…on December 25 “N·INVICTI·CM·XXX” = “Birthday of the unconquered, games ordered, thirty races”[2]

The Chronography is likewise predated by early Christian writings that listed December 25th as the birth date of Christ. Furthermore, Scholars state that the title,  Natalis Invicti, could have been used in reference to Christ rather than Sol,  since some Roman Christians titled Jesus the Unconquered.

You may be wondering where this myth came from since there is no ancient proof to support it? For that we come to Alexander Hislop and Hermann Usener, who are two of the most frequently cited sources for the December 25th paganism myth. However, their research was not based on the actual ancient texts from the cults of Sol, Mithras, or the festival of Saturnalia. During the 18th and 19th centuries authors like Hislop and Usener assumed that Sol and Mithras were the same deity. Therefore, if the Chronography of 354 listed an observance for Sol on December 25th, these authors presumed that there must have been an observance for Mithras long before this time on the same date. No ancient text to support this assumption has ever been found.

Many modern encyclopedias, including the Encyclopedia Britannica, reflect this fact in their updated works:

This view presumes—as does the view associating the origin of Christmas on December 25 with pagan celebrations of the winter equinox—that Christians appropriated pagan names and holidays for their highest festivals. Given the determination with which Christians combated all forms of paganism, this appears a rather dubious presumption.[3]

The idea, particularly popular in the 18th and 19th centuries, that the date of 25 December for Christmas was selected in order to correspond with the Roman festival of Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, or “Birthday of the Unconquered Sun”, is challenged today.[5]

In Scholarship it has been found that paganism appropriated Christmas from Christians:

In point of fact, the evidence for a religious festival of any kind for the sun god on December 25 is not only meager but also exceptionally late, as it dates to the second half of the fourth century AD. In fact, it postdates our earliest evidence for the celebration of Christmas.[6]

In short, we have no firm evidence for a festival for Sol on December 25 until Julian wrote his hymn to Helios in December of 362.[7]

The contention that December 25th was an especially popular festival for Sol in late antiquity is equally unfounded.[8]

There is no evidence that a religious celebration of Sol on that day antedated the celebration of Christmas … The traditional feast days of Sol, as recorded in the early imperial fasti, were August 8 and/or August 9 , possibly August 28 , and December 11. These are all dates that are unrelated to any important celestial alignment of Sol, such as the solstices and equinoxes.[9]

This means that in the early fourth century, when Christmas was established by the church on December 25, anyone surveying the calendar of festivities in honour of Sol would identify the period from October 19 to October 22 as far more important than December 25, and the festival of August 28 as far older. If the aim was to “neutralize” the cult of Sol by “taking over” its major festival, December 25th seems the least likely choice.[10]

There is quite simply not one iota of explicit evidence for a major festival of Sol on December 25th prior to the establishment of Christmas, nor is there any circumstantial evidence that there was likely to have been one.'[11]

The specific nature of the relation of Christmas to the then-contemporary feast of the birth of the sun, Natalis Solis Invicti, has up to now not been conclusively proven from extant texts, no matter how much some sort of causal relation might make perfect sense.[12]

‘There is no evidence of any kind, not even a hint, from within the cult that this, or any other winter day, was important in the Mithraic calendar. Although three seasonal zodiacal signs are singled out in the iconography (Taurus, Leo and Scorpius), Aquarius, the sign that would correspond to notional mid-winter, being diametrically opposite to Leo, is never paid special attention. No Mithraic votive is dated 25th December (VIII A.D. KAL. IAN.). Nor is there any mention among the dipinti in the mithraeum of S. Prisca of Mithras’ birthday, though the first line of a zodiacal poem was written up on the wall, starting, quite unconventionally, with Aries, the first sign of Spring.[13]

Of the mystery cult of Sol Invictus Mithras we know little with certainty, and even if we leave aside the problem of the relationship between the Mithraic mysteries and the public cult of Sol, the notion that Mithraists celebrated December 25th in some fashion is a modern invention for which there is simply no evidence.[14]

Polemicists (and The Da Vinci Code) frequently state that 25 December was Mithras’ birthday, yet the renowned Mithraic scholar, Dr. Richard Gordon has corresponded to me that he is unaware of ‘a single date on a Mithraic inscription that falls in the winter, let alone late in December… We know nothing about the cycle of rituals in the cult…’ So, Christmas owes nothing to Mithraism.[15]

Even those who claim that December 25th was the birth date of Mithras or Sol admit there is no evidence to prove it:

That an important Mithraic feast also fell on December 25th can hardly be doubted, although there is no direct evidence of the fact.[16]

Both the sun and Christ were said to be born anew on December 25. But while the solar associations with the birth of Christ created powerful metaphors, the surviving evidence does not support such direct association with the Roman solar festivals. The earliest documentary evidence for the feast of Christmas makes no mention of the coincidence with the winter solstice. Thomas Talley has shown that, although the Emperor Aurelian’s dedication of a temple to the sun god in the Campus Martius probably took place on the ‘Birthday of the Invincible Sun’ on December 25, the cult of the sun in pagan Rome ironically did not celebrate the winter solstice nor any of the other quarter-tense days, as one might expect. The origins of Christmas, then, may not be expressly rooted in the Roman festival.[17]

Sol is linked to Mithras and Mithras to Tammuz. However, a pagan observance on December 25th for any of these ancient false deities has not been found.

Saturnalia

Another pagan festival is often cited as the precursor to Christmas. This celebration of the winter solstice was called Saturnalia. However, history and Scholarship once again prove that Saturnalia was not celebrated on December 25th, thus debunking the myth that Christians adopted this pagan holiday as the birthday of Christ:

But all our surviving calendars that preserve the month of December mark 17 December as the date for the Saturnalia. In his discussion of the origins of the Saturnalia, Macrobius explains that the Saturnalia was often celebrated over three days from 14 to 17 December, since the former was the date given by the Numan calendar, the latter the date given by the Julian calendar after Caesar added two days to the month[18]

The Saturnalia occupy a position exactly between the Consualia of the 15th and the Opalia of the 19th of December.[19]

Saturnalia was not a festival held on December 25th. Not even in the latter times of this festival when it was moved to December 17th through the 23rd:

Eventually, the carnival expanded to a full seven days, December 17 to 23.[20]

Although Saturnalia was close to December 25th, it was never on the same day. Thus,  Christmas is a distinct date from that of Saturnalia.

Conclusion

Christians did not borrow the birth date of Sol, Mithras or even Tammuz for Jesus. Nor did they appropriate the festival of Saturnalia, but rather Jesus’ birth date was appropriated by pagans, after the date of His birth was established on December 25th,  to counteract Christianity.

Part 1: December 25th was not an Ancient Pagan Holiday
Part 2: Jesus’ Death, Christmas and the Early Church
Part 3: The Winter Birth
Part 4: Should Christians Celebrate Christmas?

Footnotes:
[1] Quote taken from Toward the Origins of Christmas by Susan K. Roll, p. 151
[2] Chronography of 345, Part 6 via Tertullian.org
[3] Encyclopedia Britannica: Easter
[4] Hijmans, Steven, Sol Invictus, the Winter Solstice, and the Origins of Christmas, Mouseion, Number 47/3 (2003), 277-298.
[5] Wikipedia: Sol_Invictus
[6] Steven Hijmans, Assoc. Professor of  Roman Art and Archaeology at the University of Alberta,  quote taken from, Usener’s Christmas: A Contribution to the Modern Construct of Late Antique Solar Syncretism, in Die Metamorphosen der Philologie. Hermann Usener und seine Folgen, (2011) p 139-152.
[7] Ibid
[8] Ibid
[9] Ibid
[10] Ibid
[11] Ibid
[12] Roll, Susan K., Toward the Origins of Christmas, (1995), p. 107.
[13] Ezquerra, Jaime Alvar. Romanising Oriental Gods: Myth, Salvation, and Ethics in the cults of Cybele, Isis and Mithras, in Gordon (ed. trans.), Religions in the Graeco-Roman World, p. 410 (2008).
[14] Hijmans, Steven. Usener’s Christmas: A Contribution to the Modern Construct of Late Antique Solar Syncretism
[15] Christmas: Pagan Festival or Christian Celebration? answering-islam.org quoting Dr. Richard Gordon
[16] Chambers, Edmund Kerchever. The Mediaeval Stage, Volume 1, (1903).
[17] Anderson, Michael Alan. Symbols of Saints, pp. 45
[18] Newlands, Carole E. Statius’ Silvae and the poetics of Empire, p. 236 (2006).
[19] Versnel, H.S. Inconsistencies in Greek and Roman Religion: Transition and Reversal in Myth, p. 165 (1993).
[20] Littleton, C. Scott. Gods, goddesses, and mythology, volume 11, p. 1255 (2005).

Additional resources on Christmas and Paganism:

For more information on the historicity of Christmas as a Christian celebration and Scholarship proving it to have no pagan connections please see:
Biblical Archaeology – How December 25th became Christmas
Answering Islam – Christmas: Pagan Festival or Christian Celebration? Dr. Anthony McRoy
Mere Christian – How the Pagans Stole Christmas!
Lutheran Satire – Horus Ruins Christmas
Dr. Taylor Marshall – Yes, Christ Was Really Born on December 25: Here’s a Defense of the Traditional Date for Christmas
LogosApologia – Christmas on December 25th is not from Paganism!
Steadfast Lutherans – Redeeming Holy Days from Pagan Lies-Christmas

Image by ?Merry Christmas ? from Pixabay