THE HISTORY OF THE DATING OF CHRISTMAS AND THE ANNUNICIATION
There are many myths surrounding the celebration of Christmas and Easter as well as the
dating of the Feast of the Annunciation. Every spring just before Easter or just before the
Christmas season, major news organisations run stories debunking the tenets of the Christian
faith. Some take the form of an interview with a supposed biblical expert who puts forth
reasons to doubt the Gospels’ veracity concerning the Resurrection; others breathlessly report
some archaeological “discovery” that supposedly disproves the Resurrection, such as an
ossuary that contains Jesus’ bones. Whatever form these attacks take, their objective is
always the same: to sow doubt in the minds of believers, and confirm those in the minds of
unbelievers.
It is especially the celebration of Christmas that draws the most comparisons to pagan rites,
specifically ancient Roman celebrations for the gods Saturn and Sol Invictus.
The feast of the Roman god of agriculture, Saturn, was a two-day celebration of the end of
the planting season and was known as the Saturnalia. During the reign of Emperor Augustus
(B.C.–A.D. 14), the festival would begin on December 17, but that date was later moved by
Emperor Domitian (51–96) to December 25. By the second century A.D. the celebration
encompassed an entire week.
The cult of Sol Invictus (the “Unconquered Sun”) was introduced in A.D. 274 by Emperor
Aurelian (270–275), but it was not associated with an annual event. Although the date for the
celebration of Sol Invictus’ birthday was December 25, the only documentary source for that
date is a fourth-century illustrated calendar for a wealthy Christian known as the
Chronography of 354. It is easy for Skeptics to claim Christmas was borrowed from
paganism, because Scripture does not provide a date or even a time of year for Christ’s birth.
But the lack of calendar specificity in the Bible does not prove the Church decided to
“baptize” a pagan celebration with the Nativity of the Lord. There is no early Christian or
pagan writing that indicates December 25 was picked because of its correspondence with the
Saturnalia or the birthday of Sol Invictus. In fact, early Christians went out of their way to
demonstrate how different they were from the pagans. They recognized that the Nativity
merited a place in the liturgical calendar, so by the third century Christmas was celebrated on
December 25 in the West and January 6 in the East
So what is the Real Story:
Fixing the date for Christmas on December 25 had more to do with Jewish tradition than
pagan custom. In Jewish tradition, March 25 was celebrated as the date of Abraham’s
sacrifice of Isaac, when the Lord promised to send a lamb to complete the sacrifice. It also
marked the first day of the creation, when God brought forth light. The early Christians easily
recognized the connection between Christ the Lamb and the Light, and dated both his
conception and death to March 25. If the Incarnation occurred on March 25, (The Genesis of
Salvation History) then it follows that the Nativity occurred nine months later on December
25. For the early Christians “the decisive factor was the connection of creation and cross, of
creation and Christ’s conception,” not the desire to baptize pagan celebrations.
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, in his book The Spirit of the Liturgy, mentions that Tertullian
calculated that the date of the Crucifixion in the Hebrew calendar (14th Nisan) was
equivalent to March 25 in the Roman calendar (Adversus Iudaeos,).
St. Augustine wrote, “For he [Jesus] is believed to have been conceived on the 25th of
March, upon which day also he suffered; so the womb of the Virgin, in which he was
conceived, where no one of mortals was begotten, corresponds to the new grave in which he
was buried, wherein was never man laid, neither before him nor since. But he was born,
according to tradition, upon December the 25th” (On the Trinity, IV, 5.9).
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, in The Spirit of the Liturgy, 108. (Later Pope Benedict XVI) also
points out the fittingness of celebrating the nativity of John the Baptist on June 24, “the date
when the days begin to shorten just as the birthday of Christ takes place when they begin
again to lengthen” (The Spirit of the Liturgy, 109). Dating the celebration in this manner
makes present in the Church’s liturgical calendar what St. John the Baptist said of Jesus: “He
must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30)
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