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| Image source: ancientfaith.com |
Dear Parish Faithful,
To this day it remains uncertain as to how exactly December 25 was eventually chosen to be the date on which Christians worldwide celebrate the Birth of Christ (the Armenian Apostolic Church remains an exception, still celebrating the Lord's Nativity on January 6). Scholars and historians have studied the issue deeply and have come to somewhat different tentative conclusions. There is no doubt that December 25 was already circulating as one choice among very early Christian writers before the 4th c. as the date on which Christ was born. Of course, this was based on a "symbolic" reading of ancient ideas about such themes as the creation of the world, and not on historically verifiable data.
One early Christian idea was that since the creation of the world occurred on March 25; then, the "new creation" in Christ began with his birth on the same day. Yet, it was understood that the actual incarnation of the Son of God occurred when he has conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary. That conception would precede his birth by exactly nine calendar months, thus demonstrating that his actual birth in the flesh must have occurred on December 25. This was the theory of a certain Sextus Julianus Africanus, in the 3rd c. However, it was not universally accepted and there is no indication that December 25 was celebrated as a feast day before the 4th c. Yet, an ancient work known as the Chronograph of 354, informs us that in Rome, the birth of Christ on December 25 was first celebrated in 336. As it spread throughout Western Europe, we also know that that date was eventually accepted in Constantinople in 379, and in Antioch in 386. But not in Jerusalem until 6th c.!
There appears to be good evidence that the Nativity of Christ on December was very much influenced by various other celebrations around or on the date of December 25 - "pagan" as we would say - in Rome in the fourth c. Christians could very well have finally settled on December 25 as a Christian response to these celebrations, even if initially conceived as a polemical response to non-Christian Roman traditions. At this point, I will simply provide a summary paragraph from the book of a prominent historian, Joseph F. Kelly, PhD (chair of the Theology and Religious Studies of John Carroll University) on the origins of Christmas. In fact, his very well-received and fairly detailed study of the issue is known simply as The Origins of Christmas. Synthesizing and summarizing a great deal of historical research, he writes the following in the chapter entitled "Creating Christmas Day and the Christmas Season:"
“The Roman Christians did not tell us why they finally chose December 25 to celebrate the dies natalis Christi (the “natal day of Christ”), but it was not because they believed it to be the exact date of Jesus’s birth. While no one piece of evidence finalizes the case, most likely the cult of the Unconquered Sun and the Christian struggle against it along with the tradition of identifying Christ with the prophet Malachi’s “Sun of Righteousness” and the dating of Christ’s birth to the day that was also the winter solstice, itself a consequence of dating his incarnation to March 25, all united in Rome to make December 25 an appropriate if not chronologically certain date for Christ’s birth. When this was combined with the birthday of Mithra and the proximity of Saturnalia and New Year’s, the Roman Christians chose a date which had already achieved some acceptance and which could counter several major pagan feasts.”
The Origins of Christmas, p. 83-84 by Joseph Kelly
Could that be understood as "baptizing" a culture and bringing it within a Christian understanding of time and salvation?
