Over the years I’ve heard a lot of folks make a lot of claims about Christmas. One I hear often is that it’s a pagan holiday and has nothing to do with Jesus. So more than a decade I decided to do some digging and find the truth. This is what I found, do with it what you will.

There are those who claim Jesus could not have been born in December. It turns out the arguments against a December birth are far from conclusive ¹. However, the issue is not when Jesus was actually born. If we want to know if Christmas is pagan, we need to know if those who started it thought Jesus was born on December 25th. Because if they thought it was so, then regardless of their being right or not they set the date for Christmas based on the belief it was the day Christ was born.

The Jews at the time of Christ did not celebrate birthdays and some suggested it was pagan to celebrate the birthday of the Messiah. I find this odd given the number of celebration days God gave the Jews to commemorate what He’d done for them. Surely the giving of the Saviour would be a day to commemorate! However, this belief may be why we don’t have a date for the birth of Christ found in the earliest church writings. 

We do know the early church was much more concerned with the date of Jesus death than His birth. The earliest records that mention His birth put the date as April 2nd or December 25^th, with the latter eventually becoming commonly accepted.

Why December 25th? Two good reasons:

• Some early Christians estimated the date of Jesus’ crucifixion as March 25th. They then applied the Jewish concept of “integral age”, which said great prophets died on the same date on which they were conceived. If Jesus was conceived on March 25th, He would have been born nine months later on, December 25^th.
• Early Christians believed the world was created on March 25th. Many reasoned Jesus would be conceived in the flesh on the same date. Again, this would put his birth on December 25th.

What of the Pagan Claims?

• Some say the 25th was chosen to coincide with the winter solstice. Even if this is true (and there is zero evidence it is), that doesn’t make it pagan. To the Jews of old, it would have made perfect sense for the light of God to come into the world on the shortest and thus darkest day of the year.
• One common claim for the supposed pagan roots of Christmas is it was chosen to line up with the Saturnalia feast in ancient Rome. However, this festival ended by the 23rd of December.
• In 274 AD, Roman Emperor Aurelian proclaimed December 25th the day for the festival of the “Birth of the Unconquered Son”. This festival was an attempt to bring together various pagan groups and was primarily a political move. However, this happened long after early Christians has decided December 25th was the birth date of Jesus. Some have suggested Aurelian chose the date to give pagans an alternative celebration. While we can’t know if this was the case, it’s clear Christians “claimed” the 25th before the pagans did. Christians didn’t celebrate the birthday of Christ until later, but they had established the date before anyone else was using it for a celebration.

I’m not going to tell you Jesus was born on the 25th of December. We don’t know and it seems God doesn’t feel we need to know. However, the evidence convinces me early Christians chose the date for “Christian reasons”.  Paganism had no part in the choice of December 25th as Christmas.

In the tradition of the feast days God gave in the Old Testament, I see good reasons to set aside one day to celebrate the greatest gift ever given.

1 Christmas – Was Jesus born on December 25th?

For more detailed information see:
Touchstone Archives: Calculating Christmas 
Why is Christmas Celebrated on December 25? 

~ Paul – I’m XY, and greatly enjoy this season!

Photo by Dieter K on Unsplash
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