i am sparticus: Part Five: In Which People Overcome Their Differences With Drink

Part Five: In Which People Overcome Their Differences With Drink

if you wish to recap

So after all this kerfuffle, at some point in the early fourth century Christmas started happening on the twenty-fifth of December. Why the 25th? Two theories abound. The first is that when the then emperor Constantine realised that Church leaders wanted to move the festival of Christmas to another date he recommended it be moved back to the 25th to coincide with various existing feasts, not least of which was the feast of the 'Sol Invictus', the feast of the unconquerable Sun. Constantine was a big fan of the sun and a big fan of Christianity, so to get them both working together seemed like a good way of having one big mega festival which sounded like a right laugh. The second theory on how the date was decided is that when faced with moving Christmas, church leaders worked out Christ's birthday through some of the aforementioned awkward calculations and arrived quite handily at the nearby date of the 25th of December.

So those are the two theories. The problem is that no-one seems to agree on which one is true. Of the first theory and the feast of the 'Sol Invictus' one book says "it is not, in the absence of direct evidence, probable that the date [of Christmas] was chosen in order to compete with this feast, though as soon as an equation began to be made between Christ and the sun, it was natural to celebrate a Christian feast on the day previously consecrated to the sun"(1) and on The Saturnalia (the other big feast of the season) "It has sometimes been thought that Christmas was intended to replace the Saturnalia. this is, however, very improbable, because the coincidence of date is not perfect, and, in the second place, there seems to be little evidence that Christian writers connected the two feasts."(ibid) Which is all well and good until you read things like this about the second theory "I should say at once that the calculation which assigned the birth to December 25th, which we come upon occasionally among many other similar calculations, can scarcely have given the initiative [for the new date]."(2)

Gosh, two separate theories standing opposite each other, who will decide one way or another and so bridge this enormous gap? Luckily for you I'm a firm believer in sticking my neck out, so I'll give it a shot. Given the above and other books, I'd hazard a guess that they're both at least somewhat right. That Constantine wanted the festival to be moved to the 25th (or nearby) is fairly irrefutable, that Christian theologies could with some legwork 'prove' that Jesus was born on the 25th is also fairly irrefutable. Therefore it seems likely that something along the lines of this conversation happened. "We need to move Christmas" "The emperor likes the idea of merging it with the celebrations of the sun on the 25th" "that's not bad, I'm sure someone said they reckoned that Christ was born on that day" "well, that's that resolved. Another glass of mulsum?".

1) Lake, K. (1910). Christmas. In Hastings, J. (Ed.), Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics. Edinburgh, UK: T & T Clark.
2) Cullman, O. (1956). The Early Church. Norwich, UK: SCM.