Christmas

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Christmas is the Christian feast commemorating the birth of Jesus, observed in most of the Western church on December 25 and across much of the Eastern church on January 7, where older calendars still govern the date. It is among the central celebrations of the liturgical year, and one of the few whose origins the tradition itself never recorded.

The Gospels supply the story without the date. Matthew and Luke narrate the Nativity — the manger, the shepherds, the magi, the star — but neither names a day, nor a season, nor a year that the rest of the evidence can pin down. Mark opens with a grown man at the Jordan and never mentions the birth at all; John reaches behind it entirely, to a Word that was in the beginning. The New Testament thus gives the event and withholds its hour. For the first Christian centuries the birth went largely unmarked. What the earliest churches kept was Easter — the Pascha, the death and rising, around which the whole early calendar turned — and a culture that timed its year by a man’s death felt little pressure to fix the day of an infancy no one had dated. There is even a strand of early opinion, voiced among others by some who thought birthday-keeping a heathen indulgence, that regarded marking the nativity at all as faintly improper. December 25 surfaces as a feast only in the fourth century. The oldest secure witness is a Roman almanac compiled in 354 by the calligrapher Furius Dionysius Filocalus for a wealthy Christian named Valentinus; in its list of martyrs’ commemorations the year opens, against December 25, with the bare notice that Christ was born in Bethlehem of Judaea. The underlying list looks older than the manuscript that carries it — its martyr entries name no one after about 336, so the feast was very likely already kept at Rome a generation before the almanac wrote it down. Within a few generations the observance had spread through the Latin West and, with its own dates and emphases, the Greek East.

Why December 25

Why that day was chosen has been argued for more than a century, and the scholarship has not closed the question. Two explanations hold the field, and the honest position is to lay them side by side and weight neither.

The older and more often repeated account is borrowing. On this reading the church laid its feast over the winter solstice and the solar cult of the late Roman empire — the Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun, whose worship the emperor Aurelian raised to imperial prominence in 274, dedicating a great temple to the god and setting a dies natalis, a birthday of the Sun, in the dead of winter. Christ, the true light dawning at the year’s darkest turn, displaces the sun that men had taken for divine; the popular holiday is captured and recast. The picture is intuitive and has the gravity of long repetition behind it. It also carries a documentary weakness that is easy to overlook: the December 25 date for the solar festival itself is attested chiefly by that same fourth-century almanac, the very document that gives us the Christian feast, and some scholars have questioned whether the solar entry even stood in the original. There is no early Christian writer who says the feast was moved onto a pagan day. The first explicit claim to that effect is a marginal note added by an unknown hand to a twelfth-century manuscript of the Syriac commentator Dionysius bar Salibi — almost a thousand years after the event it purports to explain. The borrowing thesis as a settled scholarly doctrine is largely the work of the modern comparative study of religion, the history-of-religions school, rather than a memory the tradition itself preserved.

The competing account, the calculation hypothesis, holds that the date was reasoned rather than absorbed. Its root is a rabbinic intuition that a perfect life is a whole one, closing on the day it opened — that the great figures of sacred history died on the anniversary of their conception. Apply that to a tradition placing the crucifixion at the Passover of 14 Nisan, reckoned in the West as March 25, and the conception falls on the same March 25; nine months carry it to December 25. The same arithmetic, run on an Eastern reckoning that set the Passover at April 6, yields a birth on January 6 — which is precisely the day the Eastern churches long kept. The hypothesis thus does what the borrowing account cannot: it explains both dates at once, from inside the tradition’s own chronology. Its threads run early. Around the turn of the third century Hippolytus of Rome, in his commentary on Daniel, already names the birth as falling eight days before the kalends of January — December 25 — though he writes as a chronologist fixing a date, not as a witness to any feast. The hypothesis was sketched by Louis Duchesne early in the twentieth century and worked out in full by Thomas Talley, whose study of the liturgical year remains its standard statement.

The evidence is read both ways. The solar context is real — the cult, the solstice, the imagery of returning light are all documented features of the world the feast grew up in. The internal Christian reckoning is real too, attested in calculations that predate any solstice borrowing anyone can point to. Which carried the most weight in the fourth century, when the feast actually crystallized, the sources do not let us see, and a responsible account presents both and adjudicates neither.

What the feast holds

What the feast came to mean is clearer than how its date was chosen. Christmas marks the Incarnation — the claim that the divine entered the world as an infant, the abstraction of theology made flesh in a particular child of a particular mother. The doctrine itself, the union of God and man in Jesus Christ, belongs to a longer argument that ran from the Logos of John’s prologue through the great councils; the feast is its annual enactment, the moment the tradition turns from the idea of the Word becoming flesh to the night it is said to have happened. The infant’s mother stands at the center of the scene as Mary, and the place at its geographic center, the cave beneath Bethlehem, would in time be enclosed by the Church of the Nativity.

The two halves of Christendom built the feast differently. The Eastern churches long bound the Nativity together with Epiphany and the baptism — festivals of divine appearing, of God made manifest, kept as a single sweep of theophany; the baptism of the adult Jesus at the Jordan, the moment of public manifestation, was folded into the same season of showing-forth rather than set apart. The West drew the strands apart and built Christmas into a season of its own: an Advent of waiting before, and after the feast the twelve days that run to Epiphany, Christmastide proper. The split of dates — December 25 against January 6 — is partly this same difference of architecture, partly the later divergence of calendars that left much of the Eastern church, and the Byzantine empire whose liturgy it inherited, keeping the old Julian count against the reformed Western one, so that its December 25 now falls on the West’s January 7.

Across both, the older solar imagery was never quite discarded so much as turned. The shortest day, the light returning at the year’s nadir, read now as sign rather than rival — the sun a figure for the Son, the cosmos rhymed with the event. That solar reading proved durable enough to outlast antiquity and surface again in the modern esoteric reception of Christianity: Rudolf Steiner, drawing on the older imagery, treated the Nativity as a turning of cosmic light rather than a mere commemoration. The solar theology of the pagan schools, for which the visible sun was an image of an intelligible source, supplied much of the vocabulary the church inherited and redirected — the language of light made to serve a different center.

The trimmings

The customs accreted later and locally. The midwinter greenery, the gift-giving, the carols, the tree — much of it medieval or early modern, much of it absorbed from the seasons it overlay rather than handed down from the first churches. Evergreens carried over from older midwinter practice; gift-giving drifted in from the festive license of the Roman year and from the gifts of the magi in the story itself; the tree is a comparatively recent arrival, German in origin and nineteenth-century in its spread across the rest of the Western world. These are the feast’s clothing, not its body. The day that anchors them is older than its trimmings and younger than the event it keeps — a date the tradition chose long after the fact and has observed ever since as though it had always been so.

Sources and scholarship

The documentary anchor is the Chronograph of 354, the illustrated Roman almanac whose two relevant lists — the Depositio Martyrum, with its December 25 notice of Christ’s birth, and the Filocalian calendar, with its December 25 Natalis Invicti — are the oldest evidence on both sides of the question at once; the work survives through later copies and is gathered, with apparatus, in the online edition maintained at tertullian.org. The two competing accounts of the date are surveyed most thoroughly by Susan K. Roll, Toward the Origins of Christmas (Liturgia Condenda 5; Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1995), catalogued at Open Library, which names them the calculation hypothesis and the history-of-religions hypothesis and reads the fragmentary evidence both ways. The calculation account received its fullest development in Thomas J. Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year (2nd emended ed.; Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1991), published by Liturgical Press, which derives both December 25 and the Eastern January 6 from the conception reckoning. Andrew McGowan’s widely read essay How December 25 Became Christmas (Biblical Archaeology Society, drawn from his 2002 Bible Review article) lays the case for the calculation hypothesis before a general readership and traces the borrowing claim back to its twelfth-century marginal note. For the solar cult’s own attestation, and the scholarly doubt over whether its December 25 festival predates the Christian one at all, the relevant survey is Steven Hijmans’s work on Sol and the Roman calendar, summarized in the entry on Sol Invictus.

→ In the library: Steiner — Christianity as Mystical Fact (1910)

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