i am sparticus: The Origins Of Christmas

The Origins Of Christmas

In which I decide to investigate the history of Christmas

• The Origins of Christmas
• Part One: In Which We Find That For 300 Years, No-One Really Cared That Much
• Part Two: In Which We Find Out That Stealing Other People's Festivals Scores Low On The Novelty Scale For Christians
• Part Three: In Which We Find Out More About Epiphany Than Ever Thought Necessary
• Part Four: In Which December 25th Barely Gets a Mentioned
• Part Five: In Which People Overcome Their Differences With Drink
• Part Finished: Some Final Thoughts

The Origins of Christmas

There's a lot of talk about how Christmas isn't originally a Christian festival, but rather a Pagan festival that was Christianised and made holy and how this was an important step in the Church's plan to brainwash the heathen and take over the world. Most of the people who say this sort of thing are very confident of this fact, but would be hard-pressed to tell you where this knowledge of theirs has actually come from. It's one of those 'but that's what everyone says!' things. As of late at iamsparticus.com though we've started to take an interest into fact checking and corroboration of stories, old skool style journalism if you will, and in and among our studies of just about everything we've found out some relevant information. So for your intellectual pleasure, over the next few days, we'll be telling you the ever so fascinating story of the origins of the festival known as Christmas

Part One: In Which We Find That For 300 Years, No-One Really Cared That Much

Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the man considered to be the Son of God, God and the Saviour of the world by Christians and so it may come as a slight surprise to find that for the first 300 years after the birth of Jesus Christ no-one seemed to put much importance on the dating or celebrating of his birth. Really, no-one much cared, the writers of the Bible included. The Bible mentions nothing about His date of birth; hell, the Gospel of John effectively doesn't mention anything to do with Jesus's birth and the Gospel of Mark just plain doesn't mention anything to do with Jesus's birth . Luke and Matthew are the only two Gospels to speak of the birth and neither of them give much away about the date of the event. In fact the only thing that narrows it down is that Luke talks about shepherds in the fields and so we can assume that Jesus was born during the season for sheep to be out on the hills. That narrows it down to the very small period of anytime between March and November. In short, the only thing we can drawn from the Bible on the subject of dating Jesus' birth is that it wasn't on December the 25th.

There are some manuscripts exist from the 3rd Century that talk of the date of Jesus' birth but all of them are very speculative about when it actually happened. No-one seems to know when it is and so everyone decides to invent clever mathematical formulae to try and work out when it happened, ingenuity and originality are the order of the day and consistency and common-sense are dutifully ignored. Why let simple logic get in the way of a good theory? A good example is the dating of the birth to the 28th of March. This was done on the grounds that the Roman Calendar recognised the Vernal Equinox (the day in which night and day are the same length) as the 25th of March and therefore this must have been that date that God created the world as on the first day of creation he split light from darkness (presumably into equal parts). As Jesus is referred to as the "Sun of Righteousness" in Malachi 4:2 it follows (somehow) that Jesus must have been born on the same date as the fourth day, the day in which God created the Sun. Therefore Jesus must have been born on the 28th of March. If you don't buy that theory other suggested dates you can pick from are January 6th, March 25th, April 2nd, April 19th, May 20th, November 17th and December 25th. Interestingly enough December 25th was probably first suggested because it was nine months after March 25th which was considered to be a good date for conception (probably due to similar logic as the example above). Clement of Alexandria at the end of the second century mentions the attempts to date the birth of Jesus and labels them as vain and stupid, though he himself seems to be a fan of November 17th.

The reason no-one seems to care about Jesus' Birth is that for the first 300 years people were primarily concerned with the Cross and what Christ's death and resurrection meant, his birth just wasn't seen as important. In theological terms for the first while people were concerned with Soteriology not Christology. Only as the understanding of the Cross solidified did people start to look more seriously at the issue of the birth of Jesus and how that affected their beliefs. But that'll have to wait for later, as right now we need to deal with the issue of the other festivals.

Part Two: In Which We Find Out That Stealing Other People's Festivals Scores Low On The Novelty Scale For Christians

By far and away the most celebrated Christian festival in the early church was Easter. The dating of the current Easter festivities is another series of (far less interesting) posts but in the early church it was initially celebrated at the same time as the Jewish festival of Passover (March / Aprilish depending on the Moon). In fact, in all probability the first Christians, who were for the vast majority Jews, still continued to celebrate Passover but celebrated it in the light of what Christ has done. They saw Christ's death and resurrection as the fulfilment of everything celebrated at Passover and celebrated it accordingly. This would probably have happened the first year after Jesus's death. Only a year old and already Christians are stealing other religions' festivals! You'd probably want to argue that reinterpreting a Jewish festival so as to fit with the modern developments in God's plan to save the world isn't the same as stealing a Pagan festival and you'd certainly be right in doing so. However that argument doesn't stand with the next festival that Christians are about to steal.

For the first hundred odd years the dates Christians celebrated were as follows. Passover, Pentecost, probably for some at least the Feast of Booths and the Day of Atonement (those are all Jewish festivals) and then the dates of the death of various Apostles and Martyrs. So no real shortage of occasions to take the day off work. However by the second century on the 6th (or possibly 10th) of January a group of people in Egypt had started to celebrate a new and highly exciting festival, the festival of Epiphany. Epiphany is a bit of an odd festival in that it eventually came to remember two unrelated things; the visitation of the Wise Men to Jesus (age 3ish) and Jesus's baptism (age 27ish), initially though it was just Jesus baptism that was remembered. The people who started celebrating epiphany were a heretical Christian sect led by a Gnostic teacher called Basilides who was based in Alexandria, Egypt. I call the group heretical because they believed that Jesus Christ wasn't both one hundred percent man and one hundred percent God but rather God living inside a human body. God the body-snatcher as opposed to God the Son. They believed that Jesus was not God from birth but rather that God came down to earth and took over Jesus's body at Jesus's baptism. So for them, the celebration of Epiphany became a rather important date, being the date that God came down to earth and was made manifest (the root Greek word that gives us Epiphany, epiphaneia, means 'appearing'). Obviously a whole bunch of people didn't like this idea, but those people will have to wait. What's relevant now is why people were celebrating Epiphany on the 6th of January. The reason for this is that January 6th was a very pagan festival, with at least three different Pagan celebrations, included one in which a virgin gave birth, occurring on it. On the night before the 6th the Nile was supposed to gain miraculous powers. This seemed like a suitable time to stand up and proclaim that the real God had already come down to earth and that's what the followers of Basilides did, even if they got the nature of His coming down to earth very wrong.

Part Three: In Which We Find Out More About Epiphany Than Ever Thought Necessary

You'd be excused for thinking at this point that we at iamsparticus.com have lost track of things a bit, after all, wasn't this series supposed to be about the origins of Christmas? Epiphany is all well and good and the such but why should we care? Christmas is what's important! Christmas and baby Jesus in a manager in swaddling^* clothes! Christmas and shepherds and wisemen from the East! Christmas and God in human form coming down to earth to save humanity. (And for the more irreligious; Christmas and food and drink and pillowcases full of presents!) Oh ye of little faith! Take heed and see that soon everything will make sense.

Up until this point Epiphany was overwhelmingly a celebration of God's manifestation on Earth. It was associated with Jesus's baptism because wrongly some people believed that Jesus became inhabited by God at the baptism. Remember back a few sections to the part about people not caring about Jesus's birth?

"...For the first 300 years people were primarily concerned with the Cross and what Christ's death and resurrection meant, his birth just wasn't seen as important... Only as the understanding of the Cross solidified did people start to look more seriously at the issue of the birth of Jesus and how that affected their beliefs. But that'll have to wait for later."

This is later, and people are starting to be concerned about how Jesus was God and how Jesus was human and how, in some way, that meant that He was both God and human. And while this is all going on, towards the start of the fourth century, Epiphany has managed to spread its way to being a festival celebrated by the Eastern European Church.

Now the Eastern European Church were a fairly sound bunch, and they fell down on the side of the Bible when it came to thinking about who Jesus was. They believed that Jesus was God at His birth and human at His birth, that He didn't just get God at his baptism. So obviously their Epiphany celebrations were slightly different, as they could hardly celebrate Jesus becoming God at His baptism, they were still celebrating God becoming manifest and so if they weren't going to be celebrating it in relation to Jesus's baptism, they were going to be celebrating it in relation to His birth. Celebrating God coming down to Earth, At. Jesus's. Birth. Three hundred or so years after Jesus is born and finally someone gets around to throwing the most famous person in the world a party. Gosh, isn't that exciting? So exciting that I think, on the note we'll have a pause.

Footnotes

* Swaddling: Clothes used to swaddle. Swaddle: wrap (someone, esp. a baby) in garments or cloth. Just so you know.

Part Four: In Which December 25th Barely Gets a Mentioned

So to catch up with what's been said, first no-one seemed to care about Jesus' birth, then some people started to care about when He appeared on earth but decided that didn't happen till His baptism. Then some slightly less confused people started to connect celebrating when Jesus appeared on earth with his actual birth. Now some clever people realise that actually celebrating Jesus' baptism and His birth on the same day may not really be that helpful. Which means that Jesus' birthday celebrations get moved! Only they don't get moved to December 25th just yet. Rather logically given the normal order of birth and baptism, the celebration for Jesus' birthday get moved back to the night before the Baptism celebrations. So on the 5th January people stay up late (and in some cases all night) to celebrate Jesus' birth and then reconvene the next day for more celebrations, but this time of Jesus' baptism. On top of these two things other early stories of Jesus' appearing on Earth are also celebrated, so His much celebrated water into wine miracle gets a mention.

This is all very exciting, but it does make the January 5th/6th Birth/Epiphany festival quite full up and it still leads to confusion between Jesus' birth and baptism. Then in 325 AD the bishops of churches met together to discuss the on going problem of Jesus being fully human and fully God. After some deliberation they decided that actually maybe it wasn't such a huge problem and that the idea of Jesus being both fully human and fully God made quite good sense. So all the bishops go home feeling contented (apart from the heretical bishops who go home feeling, one can only hope, duly chastised and repentant) with how it all turned out only to realise that if they are going to clearly teach that God came down to earth in Jesus' conception then maybe they shouldn't be doing it at the same time they were teaching about Jesus' baptism. Being typical Christians they decided that as Epiphany had been around for a hundred years or so it was a tradition that was engraved in stone and could never be altered. Therefore the Christmas part of the festival had to be moved.

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.

Part Finished: Some Final Thoughts

And so ends our fantastic series on the origins of Christmas. To recap, at first no-one cared about when Jesus was born because it wasn't important, then when they decided to celebrate it they decided to celebrate it based upon its religious significance, not on the basis of its date and then when they finally firmly decided on a date, they only used the date of a Pagan festival for convenience and to make a point. In no way can it be said that Christmas was a pagan festival. It may have taken the date from Paganism, but it didn't take the meaning or the celebration.

Which leads me to make some pithy one line conclusion that'll make you all think and go "hmm". So here we go. In all of this, if you take away one thing from all this, take away this; while the date that Jesus was born on is fairly irrelevant to anything, that He was born is of fundamental importance to the entire planet.