Every year at Christmastime, you hear people trying to debunk aspects of the holiday and the biblical accounts behind it.
One of the most common allegations is that Christmas is based on a pagan holiday, and so it is really “pagan” in origin.
Not only is this particular claim made by secularists who don’t like Christianity in general, it’s also made by some in the Protestant community. Before I was Catholic, some members of my Protestant congregation didn’t celebrate Christmas because of its “unbiblical,” pagan origins.
Other allegations charge the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ birth with contradictions, and almost every aspect of the Christmas story and the Christmas celebration has been challenged.
So let’s take an objective look and see what the historical evidence has to say.
Not a Matter of Faith
First, we should point out that Jesus being born on December 25th is not a matter of faith.
Those who delight in saying that he wasn’t sometimes seem to take pleasure in the idea that they’re somehow undermining Christianity, but they’re not.
The Church may celebrate Jesus’ birth on this day, but it’s not a matter of Catholic doctrine. It’s not a teaching of the Faith but a matter of custom.
In fact, as we’ll see, there were a number of dates for Jesus’ birth proposed in the early Church, and it is still celebrated on other days in some parts of the Christian world.
For example, some Eastern Christians celebrate Christmas on January 6th.
December 25th?
One of the most commonly repeated claims is that Jesus wasn’t born on December 25th, and that this date was chosen to subvert a pagan holiday.
Further, it’s claimed that Jesus couldn’t have been born on this date because the Gospel of Luke reports that shepherds were out tending their flocks on the night Jesus was born (2:8). It would have been too cold for that in December, so Jesus must have been born in a warmer time of year.
This latter claim is absolute nonsense. First, winters are quite mild in Israel. Bethlehem is just six miles from Jerusalem, and the temperature in Jerusalem on December 25th ranges from an average of 55 degrees in the day to 43 degrees at night. It’s still well above freezing, even in the coldest part of the night.
Second, sheep do just fine in the cold. That’s why they’re covered in wool! As a species, sheep grew up outdoors, and they haven’t lost their cold resistance due to domestication. (If anything, humans have bred them to have even thicker wool.)
If you google “winter sheep care,” you’ll find websites advising you not to keep your sheep indoors all day (they will go crazy if they’re locked up all the time) and not to be afraid of having them outside (they’re covered in warm, water-resistant wool). You’ll also find lots of pictures of domesticated sheep casually strolling around in the snow.
Another charge I’ve seen is that Jesus couldn’t have been born in December because the shepherds had lambs in their flocks, but lambing season is in the springtime.
There are multiple problems with this. First, while some breeds of sheep lamb in the spring, other sheep breed all year round and do not have a consistent lambing season.
Second, at least in English, a sheep is still considered a lamb until it is one year old, meaning lambs could be present any time of the year, even for breeds that have a lambing season.
Thirdly, and most importantly, Luke nowhere mentions lambs. They’re just not in the text. This idea is simply a product of people’s imaginations.
Finally, the shepherds around Bethlehem do keep sheep outdoors, even on December 25th. “William Hendricksen quotes a letter dated Jan. 16, 1967, received from New Testament scholar Harry Mulder, then teaching in Beirut, in which the latter tells of being in Shepherd Field at Bethlehem on the just-passed Christmas Eve, and says: ‘Right near us a few flocks of sheep were nestled. Even the lambs were not lacking. . . . It is therefore definitely not impossible that the Lord Jesus was born in December’” (Jack Finegan, Handbook of Biblical Chronology, 2nd ed., §569).
A Pagan Holiday?
What about the claim that the celebration of Christmas on December 25th is based on a pagan holiday?
My first reaction to this charge would be, “Well, supposing that’s true, so what?”
In the face of a popular holiday that people find objectionable, it is common to create an alternative, wholesome celebration.
For example, some Protestant churches hold “Reformation Day” or “harvest festival” celebrations as alternatives to Halloween, and some Catholics have their children dress up as saints rather than ghosts and monsters.
If early Christians decided to place the celebration of Christ’s birth in opposition to a popular pagan holiday as a way of subverting it and giving Christians an alternative, wholesome thing to celebrate, then that would be a good thing.
Subverting paganism is good, and so is providing wholesome alternatives.
Further, if Christmas was timed to oppose a pagan holiday, that would not mean that Christmas is “really” pagan. It would mean that Christmas is really anti-pagan.
When a Protestant church celebrates Reformation Day to commemorate the publication of Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses on October 31, 1517, they are not “really” celebrating ghosts and monsters. They’re really celebrating the Reformation; they’re just doing it in opposition to a pop culture ghosts-and-monsters festival.
The same thing goes for those who celebrate harvest festivals. What they’re “really” celebrating is the harvest season—as an alternative to celebrating the pop culture version of Halloween.
In the same way, if Christians timed Christmas to compete with a pagan holiday, they weren’t celebrating a pagan deity. They were celebrating Christ’s birth! And by competing with a pagan holiday, they would be doing something anti-pagan.
So Christmas is just not pagan, no matter what pagans were doing on December 25th.
Which Pagan Holiday?
If Christmas was timed to compete with a pagan holiday, which would it have been?
Some sources try to link it with the Roman holiday Saturnalia, which was a festival in honor of the god Saturn.
For Saturnalia people would shut their businesses, wear festive clothing, have a banquet, get drunk, gamble, reverse roles (such as having masters serve slaves), give each other gifts (often inexpensive gag gifts), and elect a mock “king of Saturnalia” to preside over the festivities.
But there is a major problem claiming that Christmas is an alternative to Saturnalia. This Roman festival was originally celebrated on December 17, though by the time of the Republic it extended through December 23.
Christmas wasn’t held until after Saturnalia was over, making it a poor alternative. To be a true alternative, it would need to be taking place at the same time.
Sol Invictus?
Many sources link Christmas with a different holiday—the birth of Sol Invictus—that is, the sun god Sol, who was nicknamed Invictus or “the Unconquerable.” This was celebrated on December 25th.
The first thing to say is that we have no early Christian sources saying, “We decided to celebrate Christmas on December 25th in order to compete with Sol Invictus.” That means that the idea is sheer speculation, not something that we have evidence for.
It’s not even particularly good speculation, because the only thing the two celebrations have in common is the date December 25th, but just because two things happen at the same time doesn’t mean one is based on the other.
For Christians to want to compete with Sol Invictus, the latter holiday would have to be something worth competing with.
That might be the case if Sol Invictus was a major Roman god, if the December 25th celebration was a popular one, and if it was longstanding and deeply entrenched in Roman culture—thus creating social pressure for Christians to find an alternative to it.
But none of those things are true. In the first place, Sol Invictus was not a major Roman deity. The Sol wasn’t even the most popular solar deity (that would be Apollo), and scholars today don’t know a great deal about the worship of Sol because the Romans didn’t talk about him that much. He simply wasn’t that important.
Furthermore, December 25th wasn’t a major festival of the god Sol. It was a single-day celebration, but Sol had multi-day celebrations in August and October.
Neither was December 25th a longstanding festival of Sol. His oldest celebration was in August, and we have no evidence of December 25th being celebrated as the birth of Sol Invictus before A.D. 274. In fact, some scholars have argued that the celebration was instituted by the Emperor Aurelian when he dedicated a temple to Sol in that year.
Sol Invictus thus appears to be a recent holiday. It was one of Sol’s lesser holidays. And Sol was not a major deity. Christians would not have felt the need to compete with it by placing Jesus’ birth on it.
Christmas First?
If it is correct that Sol Invictus was not instituted until A.D. 274, then we have evidence that the timing of Christmas could not have been based on it.
The reason is that we know Christians were already celebrating on December 25th at this time.
Around A.D. 204, St. Hippolytus of Rome wrote a commentary on the book of Daniel, and in it he states: “For the first advent of our Lord in the flesh, when he was born in Bethlehem, was December 25th” (Commentary on Daniel 4:23:3).
We also have an ancient statue of Hippolytus—rediscovered in 1551—that has inscriptions of calendrical calculations, and this also mentions Christ’s birth as being on December 25th.
These pieces of evidence indicate that some Christians were already commemorating Christ’s birth decades before the institution of Sol Invictus.
Could the causal arrow be pointing the other way, then? Could Romans have based Sol Invictus on the date of Christmas?
Why December 25th?
Probably not. There was another, every obvious reason why Romans would dedicate a temple to Sol or celebrate his birth on December 25th—it was the day of the winter solstice.
The winter solstice is the shortest day of the year, after which the days begin growing longer, and that makes it an important day for worshippers of the sun all over the world. The same would have been true for the Romans.
Technically, because the Julian calendar is slightly off in reckoning the length of the year, the astronomical winter solstice had drifted slightly from December 25th, but the latter date was the conventionally recognized date by tradition, so it was the ritually important one in Rome.
What about Christians? Could the fact that December 25th was the winter solstice have played a role in their celebrating it as Jesus’ birth?
Malachi 4:2 says that for those who fear God, “the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings,” and early Christian authors saw this as a symbol of Jesus Christ.
One might thus speculate that, understanding Jesus as “the sun of righteousness,” they chose to place his birthday on the winter solstice for the same reason Romans did.
However, another view has been proposed in scholarly circles.
The Calculation Theory
The easiest date in Jesus’ life to calculate is actually the date of his death, because the Crucifixion occurred on a Friday in conjunction with Passover.
Scholars have calculated that the most likely date for it is April 3, A.D. 33, though some have argued for April 7, A.D. 30.
However, in the ancient world, many early Christian sources reckoned that it was March 25th.
One reason for this is clear: Just as December 25th was the winter solstice, March 25th—3 months later—was the spring equinox, and the timing of Passover was determined by the spring equinox.
Even if you didn’t have other knowledge to calculate with besides Jesus being crucified at Passover, it would be easy for ancients to conclude he died around March 25th, and that became the standard date.
Easter was a much more important holiday for early Christians than Christmas, and so many scholars have proposed that it was actually the date of Jesus’ death that was used to calculate the date of his birth.
How would they have done that?
Integral Age Theory?
We have evidence that—at least in certain periods of history—various Jewish and Christian sources held to what is sometimes called the “integral age” theory.
This is the belief that important figures like prophets and saints lived “perfect” lives—perfect in the sense of being made of complete years.
If you were such a figure, you would die on the same date that you were born on, so you lived to be exactly so many years old, with no overage or underage.
For integral age advocates, Jesus would have been born—or perhaps conceived—on the same day that he died.
This may well be why we celebrate March 25th as the Annunciation, which is commonly taken to be not only when Gabriel appeared to Mary but also the date of Jesus’ conception.
Add 9 months to March 25th, and what do you get? December 25th.
Some scholars have thus proposed that the date of Christmas was calculated from what was regarded as the day of Jesus’ death.
The Tradition Theory
It should be pointed out that the calculation theory is speculative, and it depends on a number of unprovable assumptions.
Just like we don’t have Christian records saying, “We set Christmas on December 25th to compete with a pagan holiday,” we also don’t have ones that say, “We calculated the date of Christmas using the date of Christ’s death.”
Further, we don’t have evidence of Christians holding to the integral age theory before the celebration of December 25th started—only afterwards. And one would have to reckon Christ’s integral age not from birth but from conception.
The calculation theory is possible, but so is another view—that early Christians simply had a tradition that this was the day on which Jesus was born.
If so, it was not the only tradition. From the late second century, we have other dates that were proposed as well, including January 6 and 10, April 19 and 20, May 20, and November 18.
The two dates that attracted the most support, though, were December 25th and January 6th, which was another date sometimes reckoned as the winter solstice, and both went on to be celebrated as Christmas in different parts of the world. (Note that January 6th is still celebrated as the feast of the Epiphany, or visit of the Magi, on the Roman calendar.)
We thus do not have a definitive way of establishing the day on which Christ was born.
However, what we can say is that it certainly could have been December 25th (the sheep do not rule that out), that we have early Christian sources supporting this date, and that it was definitely not based on a pagan holiday.
The early Christians who support December 25th do so because that is when they sincerely believed Christ was born.
Looking at the Gospels
While the calendar date of Jesus’ birth is something that we cannot know definitively, the Gospels present us with solid information about Jesus’ birth.
Matthew and Luke inform us that it took place in Bethlehem, and Luke states that, when the time came, Mary “gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn” (2:7).
This statement has given rise to popular images of the birth, such as Christmas cards depicting Jesus being born in a barn (because of the manger) and Joseph and Mary being turned away from the ancient equivalent of motels (because of the mention of the inn)—often in a cold, snowy environment.
However, all of these images are probably wrong.
As we mentioned earlier, the average temperature in the Jerusalem area on December 25th is well above freezing, and so although snow is possible, it is unlikely.
Further, the Greek term that is translated “inn” is kataluma, and it refers to a place where people live. It’s a general term that can refer to any such place and does not mean an inn, specifically.
There is a more definite term for inn—pandocheion—and Luke uses that term in the parable of the Good Samaritan (10:34).
What most people don’t know is that a kataluma could refer to a place where people stayed within a home—a living room or guest room. Thus the “upper room” where Jesus eats the Last Supper is referred to as a kataluma (Mark 17:14, Luke 22:11).
Since Joseph’s family was from Bethlehem (Luke 2:3-4), he and Mary were likely staying with family. But there were so many family members there for Caesar’s enrollment (2:1) that the living area was full, and so Mary chose to give birth in another part of the house.
Family rooms tended to be on the upper floor of a house, so Mary would have gone to the lower part of the house, which is where animals were kept, as indicated by the presence of the manger.
What kind of animals were they? We cannot say, though cows, sheep, and goats were commonly kept.
In any event, the image of Jesus being born in a barn is probably wrong. It was likely the lower part of a house, and—specially—it was likely in a cave.
In regions with caves, Israelites often would take advantage of them by building their homes over them, and we have sources from the second century indicating that Jesus was born in a cave. Thus, the Grotto of the Nativity in Bethlehem is celebrated as Jesus’ birthplace to this day.
The Visit of the Magi
Our Christmas cards often depict the magi as showing up on the night of Jesus’ birth—just like the shepherds did (Luke 2:8-10). However, they did not.
We also should mention that—despite them being referred to as “three kings”—the magi were not kings. “Wise men” comes closer, but Matthew uses the specific term magoi for them (2:1).
The magi were originally a Persian tribe with priestly duties (like the Jewish tribe of Levi), but over time the term had broadened and was used for anyone who performed ritual activities that were thought to be in some way similar to those of the magi. Thus we read about Jewish magi like Elymas bar-Jesus (Acts 13:6-8).
The magi who visited Jesus came from a country in “the East” (2:2, 9)—perhaps Babylonia or Persia—and they arrived as much as two years after Jesus’ birth.
We know this because, when they failed to report back to Herod the Great, he killed “all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had ascertained from the magi” (2:16).
The magi had told Herod when they had first seen Jesus’ star (2:7), and this would have been between one and two years earlier. (Herod likely rounded the figure up to two years in an attempt to ensure that his effort would result in the death of the correct child.)
In any event, the magi did not arrive on the night of Jesus’ birth but considerably afterward, and the Holy Family was either still in Bethlehem or had returned for another visit. Likely they were staying with the same family members, and Matthew does indicate that the magi found the baby Jesus with his mother in a “house” (2:11).
Conclusion
There are a large number of myths about Christmas. Some come from skeptics, such as those who say Jesus couldn’t possibly have been born on December 25th and that this date was chosen to compete with a pagan holiday.
Other myths come from Christians themselves, such as in artistic representations that tend to compress everything about Jesus’ birth into one scene, with the shepherds and the magi present together, in a barn, on a snowy evening.
Of course, it’s natural for Christians to represent the birth of our Savior in art, but we should be aware of the difference between what the Gospels actually say and when artistic license is being taken.
Myths aside, it remains true that our Savior really was born into the world, and on Christmas we honor the truth of this event.
