How December 25 Became Christmas

On December 25, Christians around the world gather to celebrate the birth of Jesus. Joyful songs, special liturgies, brightly wrapped gifts, festive foods — all of this characterizes the celebration today, at least in the northern hemisphere. But how did the Christmas festival originate? How did December 25 come to be associated with the birthday of Jesus?

The Birth in the Bible

The Bible offers few clues: the celebrations of the Nativity of Jesus are not mentioned in the Gospels or Acts; the date is not given, not even the time of year. The biblical reference to the shepherds tending their flocks at night when they hear the news of Jesus' birth (Luke 2:8) may suggest the lambing season in spring; in the cold month of December, on the other hand, the sheep could very well be penned up. However, most scholars would advise caution in drawing such a precise, albeit incidental, detail from a narrative whose focus is theological and not calendrical.

Extrabiblical evidence from the first and second centuries is equally sparse: there is no mention of birth celebrations in the writings of early Christian writers, such as Irenaeus (c. 130–200) or Tertullian (c. 160–225). Origen of Alexandria (c. 165–264) goes so far as to mock Roman birthday celebrations, dismissing them as "pagan" practices — a strong indication that the birth of Jesus was not marked with similar festivities in that place and time. As far as we can tell, Christmas was not celebrated at all at this point.

This stands in stark contrast to the very ancient traditions surrounding the last days of Jesus. Each of the four Gospels provides detailed information about the timing of Jesus' death. According to John, Jesus is crucified at the moment when the Passover lambs are being sacrificed. This would have occurred on the 14th day of the Hebrew month of Nisan, just before the Jewish holiday begins at sunset (considered the start of the 15th day because in the Hebrew calendar days begin at sunset). In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, however, the Last Supper is held after sunset, at the beginning of the 15th day. Jesus is crucified the following morning — still, on the 15th day.

The Passover

A development much earlier than Christmas was simply the gradual Christian reinterpretation of Passover in terms of the Passion of Jesus. Its observance could even be implied in the New Testament (1 Corinthians 5:7–8: “Our Passover lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed. Therefore, let us celebrate the feast...”); it was certainly a distinctly Christian feast by the mid-2nd century CE, when the apocryphal text known as the Epistle to the Apostles has Jesus instructing his disciples to “celebrate [his] death, that is, Passover.”

The ministry, miracles, Passion, and Resurrection of Jesus were often of greater interest to early Christian writers of the first and early second centuries CE. But over time, the origins of Jesus would become an increasing concern. We can begin to see this shift already in the New Testament. The earliest writings — Paul and Mark — make no mention of the birth of Jesus. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke provide well-known, but quite different accounts of the event — although neither specifies a date. In the second century CE, more details of Jesus' birth and childhood are reported in apocryphal writings, such as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Protoevangelium of James. These texts provide everything from the names of Jesus' grandparents to the details of his upbringing — but not the date of his birth.

Finally, around 200 CE, a Christian teacher in Egypt makes reference to the date when Jesus was born. According to Clement of Alexandria, several different days were proposed by various Christian groups. As surprising as it may seem, Clement does not mention December 25. Clement writes: “There are those who have determined not only the year of our Lord's birth but also the day; and they say that it occurred in the 28th year of Augustus, and on the 25th day of [the Egyptian month] Pachon [May 20 in our calendar]... And concerning His Passion, with great precision, some say that it occurred in the 16th year of Tiberius, on the 25th of Phamenoth [March 21]; and others on the 25th of Pharmuthi [April 21]; and others say that on the 19th of Pharmuthi [April 15] the Savior suffered. Furthermore, others say that He was born on the 24th or 25th of Pharmuthi [April 20 or 21].”

Clearly, there was great uncertainty, but also a considerable amount of interest in dating the birth of Jesus by the end of the second century. However, by the fourth century, we find references to two dates that were widely recognized — and now also celebrated — as the birthday of Jesus: December 25 in the Western Roman Empire and January 6 in the East (especially in Egypt and Asia Minor). The modern Armenian church continues to celebrate Christmas on January 6; for most Christians, however, December 25 would prevail, while January 6 eventually came to be known as the Feast of Epiphany, commemorating the arrival of the Magi in Bethlehem. The period between them became the holiday season later known as the 12 days of Christmas.

First Mention of December 25 as Jesus' Birthday

Comes from a Roman almanac from the mid-fourth century that lists the dates of death of various bishops and Christian martyrs. The first date listed, December 25, is marked: natus Christus in Betleem Judeae: “Christ was born in Bethlehem of Judea.” By around 400 CE, Augustine of Hippo mentions a local dissident Christian group, the Donatists, who apparently held Christmas festivals on December 25 but refused to celebrate Epiphany on January 6, considering it an innovation. Since the Donatist group only emerged during the persecution under Diocletian in 312 CE and then stubbornly clung to the practices of that moment in time, they seem to represent an older North African Christian tradition.

In the East, January 6 was not initially associated only with the Magi, but with the Christmas story as a whole.

So, nearly 300 years after the birth of Jesus, we finally find people observing his birth in the midst of winter. But how had they decided on the dates of December 25 and January 6?

There are two theories today: one extremely popular, the other less heard outside academic circles (though much older).

The Widely Disseminated Theory

About the origins of the Christmas dates is that they were borrowed from pagan celebrations. The Romans had their Saturnalia festival in the middle of winter at the end of December; barbarian peoples from the north and west of Europe held holidays at similar times. To top it off, in 274 CE, the Roman Emperor Aurelian established a festival for the birth of Sol Invictus (the Unconquered Sun) on December 25. Christmas, according to the argument, is actually an offshoot of these pagan solar festivals. According to this theory, early Christians deliberately chose these dates to encourage the spread of Christmas and Christianity throughout the Roman world: if Christmas seemed like a pagan holiday, more pagans would be open to both the holiday and the God whose birth it celebrated.

Despite its popularity today, this theory of the origins of Christmas has its problems. It is not found in any ancient Christian writing, to begin with. Christian authors of the time note a connection between the solstice and the birth of Jesus: the church father Ambrose (c. 339–397), for example, described Christ as the true sun, who eclipsed the fallen gods of the old order. But the early Christian writers never suggest any recent calendrical engineering; they clearly do not think the date was chosen by the church. Instead, they see the coincidence as a providential sign, as natural proof that God had selected Jesus over the false pagan gods.

It was not until the twelfth century that we find the first suggestion that the celebration of Jesus' birth was deliberately set at the time of pagan festivals. A marginal note in a manuscript of the writings of the Syriac biblical commentator Dionysius bar-Salibi states that in ancient times the Christmas holiday was actually transferred from January 6 to December 25 to fall on the same date as the pagan holiday Sol Invictus. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Bible scholars spurred by the new study of comparative religions seized upon this idea. They argued that since the early Christians did not know when Jesus was born, they simply assimilated the pagan solstice festival for their own purposes, claiming it as the time of the Messiah's birth and celebrating it accordingly.

Recent Studies

Have shown that many of the modern trappings of the holiday reflect borrowed pagan customs much later, as Christianity expanded into northern and western Europe. The Christmas tree, for example, was associated with Druidic practices from the late Middle Ages. This only encouraged the modern public to presume that the date must also be pagan.

There are problems with this popular theory, however, as many scholars recognize. Most significantly, the first mention of a date for Christmas (c. 200) and the earliest celebrations we know of (c. 250–300) come in a period when Christians were not borrowing much from pagan traditions of such obvious character.

It is true that Christian belief and practice were not formed in isolation. Many early elements of Christian worship — including Eucharistic meals, meals in honor of martyrs, and much early Christian funerary art — would have been quite comprehensible to pagan observers. However, in the early centuries CE, the persecuted Christian minority was very concerned with distancing itself from the larger public pagan religious observances, such as sacrifices, games, and holidays. This was still true until the violent persecutions of Christians conducted by the Roman Emperor Diocletian between 303 and 312 CE.

This would only change after Constantine converted to Christianity. From the mid-fourth century, we find Christians deliberately adapting and Christianizing pagan festivals. A famous advocate of this practice was Pope Gregory the Great, who, in a letter written in 601 CE to a Christian missionary in Britain, recommended that local pagan temples not be destroyed but converted into churches, and that pagan festivals be celebrated as feasts of Christian martyrs. At this late point, Christmas may very well have acquired some pagan trappings. But we have no evidence of Christians adopting pagan festivals in the third century, when the dates for Christmas were established. Thus, it seems unlikely that the date was simply selected to correspond to pagan solar festivals.

The celebration of December 25 appears to have existed before 312 — before Constantine and his conversion, at least. As we have seen, the Donatist Christians in North Africa seem to have known it before that time. Moreover, by the mid to late fourth century, church leaders in the Eastern Empire were not concerned with introducing a celebration of Jesus' birthday but with adding the December date to their traditional celebration on January 6.

There is another way to explain the origins of Christmas on December 25: as strange as it may seem, the key to dating the birth of Jesus may lie in the dating of Jesus' death at Passover. This view was first suggested to the modern world by the French scholar Louis Duchesne in the early twentieth century and fully developed by the American Thomas Talley in more recent years. But they certainly were not the first to notice a connection between the traditional date of Jesus' death and his birth.

Around 200 CE, Tertullian of Carthage reported the calculation that the 14th of Nisan (the day of crucifixion according to the Gospel of John) in the year Jesus died was equivalent to March 25 in the Roman (solar) calendar. March 25 is, of course, nine months before December 25; it was later recognized as the Feast of the Annunciation — the commemoration of the conception of Jesus. Thus, it was believed that Jesus was conceived and crucified on the same day of the year. Exactly nine months later, Jesus was born, on December 25.

This idea appears in an anonymous Christian treatise entitled On Solstices and Equinoxes, which seems to come from fourth-century North Africa. The treatise states: “Therefore, our Lord was conceived on the eighth day of the calends of April, in the month of March [March 25], which is the day of the Lord's passion and of his conception. For on that day he was conceived on the same day he suffered.” Based on this, the treatise dates the birth of Jesus at the winter solstice.

Augustine was also familiar with this association. In On the Trinity (c. 399–419), he writes: “For he [Jesus] is believed to have been conceived on March 25, the day on which he also suffered; then the womb of the Virgin, in which he was conceived, where no mortal was generated, corresponds to the new tomb in which he was buried, where no man was laid, either before him or after. But he was born, according to tradition, on December 25.”

In the East, too, the dates of Jesus' conception and death were linked. But instead of working from the 14th of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar, the Easterners used the 14th of the first month of spring (Artemisios) in their local Greek calendar — April 6 for us. April 6 is, of course, exactly nine months before January 6 — the Eastern date for Christmas. In the East, too, we have evidence that April was associated with the conception and crucifixion of Jesus. The bishop Epiphanius of Salamis writes that on April 6, “The lamb was enclosed in the immaculate womb of the holy virgin, he who took and takes in perpetual sacrifice the sins of the world.” Even today, the Armenian Church celebrates the Annunciation in early April (on the 7th, not the 6th) and Christmas on January 6.

Thus, we have Christians in two parts of the world calculating the birth of Jesus based on the fact that his death and conception occurred on the same day (March 25 or April 6) and arriving at two close but different results (December 25 and January 6).

Connecting the conception and death of Jesus in this way will certainly seem strange to modern readers, but it reflects ancient and medieval understandings that all salvation is linked. One of the most poignant expressions of this belief is found in Christian art. In numerous paintings of the Annunciation of the angel to Mary — the moment of Jesus' conception — the baby Jesus is shown gliding from heaven on or with a small cross (see the above photo of the detail from the Annunciation scene by Master Bertram); a visual reminder that conception brings the promise of salvation through the death of Jesus.

The notion that creation and redemption should occur at the same time of year is also reflected in the ancient Jewish tradition, recorded in the Talmud. The Babylonian Talmud preserves a dispute between two rabbis from the early second century CE who share this view but disagree on the date: Rabbi Eliezer asserts: “In Nisan the world was created; in Nisan the Patriarchs were born; at Passover Isaac was born... and in Nisan they [our ancestors] will be redeemed in the time to come.” (The other rabbi, Joshua, dates these same events to the following month, Tishri.) Thus, the dates of Christmas and Epiphany may very well have resulted from Christian theological reflection on such chronologies: Jesus would have been conceived on the same date he died and born nine months later.

How Did December 25 Become Christmas?

In the end, we are left with a question: how did December 25 become Christmas? We cannot be absolutely certain. Elements of the festival that developed from the fourth century to modern times may very well derive from pagan traditions. However, the actual date may indeed derive more from Judaism — from the death of Jesus at Passover and the rabbinic notion that great things may be expected, repeatedly, at the same time of year — than from paganism. Then again, in this notion of cycles and the return of God's redemption, perhaps we are also touching on something that pagan Romans celebrating Sol Invictus, and many other peoples since then, would have understood and claimed for themselves as well.