No, Christmas Wasn't a Pagan Holiday
Dec 25: The Nativity of the Lord
As noted in my personal, um, note, I’ve been a little out of practice for the last couple of weeks.
Christmas is one of the two days even the most lax Catholics attend mass; it’s hard to think of anything that you probably haven’t heard a million times already. The Incarnation is when God entered space and time at a particular place and moment. It’s kind of weird to think about, like the author of a book appearing in his own book.1
Also, there are four different sets of readings today, and I’m not sure which to write about anyway. So instead, I’ll just point out some fun facts I recently learned.
Debunking the “Appropriation”
Evangelical atheists and their ilk like to claim that Christmas is actually a pagan holiday that Christians appropriated.
Which kinda, sorta, superficially makes sense. December 25th used to be the winter solstice,2 and that seems like a good time for a Bacchanalia, right?
Sure, but Christians were there first. Let Fr. Casey explain:
Tl;dw: Christians have been celebrating the birth of Christ on December 25th at least as far back as 202, while the celebration of Saturnalia wasn’t established until over 70 years later. So, the theory that a dominate culture was appropriating a particular holiday in order to suppress a minority is true; just not in the way it’s usually presented on atheist subreddits.
So how did we get this date? Math!
It’s actually all there in the Gospels, if you know where to look.
As we learned in Monday’s readings, Zechariah, who was of the class of Abijah, was “serving as priest in his division’s turn before God,” when the Archangel Gabriel appeared to tell him that he would soon be a father. Because these rituals happen on a regular schedule, it’s possible to determine retroactively that the priestly class of Abijah would have been on duty during the second week of the Jewish month Tishri, the week of the Day of Atonement or in our calendar, between Sept. 22 and 30.
Later, at the Annunciation,3 Gabriel told Mary that Elizabeth was six months pregnant, which means Jesus was conceived in late March. Add nine months to that, and you wind up with a birthday in late December.
The Gospel of Luke was written before the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. So even before Christmas was a feast day, anyone familiar with the Jewish calendar and priestly customs could’ve done the math to figure out Jesus’ birthday.
Birthday’s weren’t really recorded and celebrated back then the way they are now, so we’ll probably never know if Jesus was born on the 25th of December, or the 23rd, or the 28th. In fact, if anyone did claim to know when a carpenter was born in the far corner of the Roman empire in the first century, it’d be pretty suspect.
Still, you gotta pick some day, and we’ve been celebrating on the 25th for over 1,800 years. Works for me.
Which, admittedly, Stephen King does a lot, but I wouldn’t take the comparison much further than that.
Thanks to something called “axial precession,” the date of the solstice has shifted a few days in the last couple of thousand years.