Why is Christmas on December 25th?

on December 25th Christians all over the world celebrate the birthday of Jesus Christ's mass or Christmas but the stories in the New Testament never talk about the date when Jesus was born there are only two gospels that talk about the birth of Jesus Matthew and Luke and both of them agree on a lot of things they agree on the place of Jesus's birth Bethlehem they agree on the name of his mom and dad Joseph and Mary and they generally agree on the time when he was born under the reign of Herod the Great but there is no mention when in the calendrical year this occurred so why December 25th a super popular Theory today is that the ecclesiastical authorities chose December 25th to coincide with a Roman Holiday either to help spread Christianity or to put a Christian label on an already popular pagan holiday today we're going to look a little bit more closely at the pagan origins theory of December 25th for Christmas parts of this Theory may actually be historical but there are a few problems with it that should make us a little skeptical so here are the main arguments for the pagan origins Theory the of a December 25th Christmas first of all by the time Christianity started becoming popular in the third and fourth centuries the Romans had already been celebrating a huge festival at the end of December for centuries called the saturnalia now the saturnalia shows up all throughout Roman literature but no single text describes the festival in its entirety so ancient historians are left trying to piece together a fragmentary record to try to get an idea what this Festival was really like to make matters even worse the ways people celebrated the saturnalia differed wildly depending on your region or era so that is to say if you celebrated it in Italy in 100 BCE you're going to celebrate it differently than if you lived in Gaul in 100 CE the saturnalia was the Festival of the God Saturn and was at its height celebrated between 200 BCE and 200 CE celebrations began on December 17th and they could go for either 3 or S days depending on the historical period and the festivities could include public Banquets or sacrifices at local temples of Saturn but the biggest part of the saturnalia was Private household feasts and I'm not talking about small kinship groups some Roman households were huge like IAL about in another video the Roman household could include the male head of the household called the potra familias along with all his kids his slaves and his slaves kids and these salian family dinners were pretty weird because they ritually enacted rooll reversal the Roman author senica writes that the Masters dined with their slaves during satalia which is a huge deal for a society as socially stratified as the Roman Empire and these festivals were pretty wild Plutarch writes that the feasting goes on for days and Marshall writes about Roman freed men hanging up their toas and putting on brightly colored party garments for the festival other Roman authors write about freed men and slaves alike getting drunk gambling and arguing about philosophy the argument goes that by the time the Roman Empire was being christianized the saturnalia was so deeply entrenched in Roman society that it couldn't simply disappear from the calendar no matter what the Romans would be celebrating something in the month of December so either to convert the population or to Cave to popular demand the church authorities relabeled late December specifically December 25th as Jesus's birthday and not something special for Saturn a second line of evidence comes from the third century when Emperor aelan declared December 25th as the official Festival day for Solen vicus the Roman Sun God and the argument is very similar that the church authorities would have been very quick to relabel this Pagan solar festival with their own Heavenly God Jesus as early as the 13th century people have theorized that Christians started celebrating December 25th as Jesus's birthday because it was already popular with the Pagan population a on a manuscript from the Syrian Bishop Jacob bareli says it was a custom of the pagans to celebrate on the same December 25th the birthday of the son in these solemnities and revelries the Christians also took part accordingly when the doctors of the church perceived that the Christians had a leaning to this Festival they took counsel and resolved that the true Nativity should be solemnized on that day now this isn't all that unbelievable most Christians had no problem celebrating Roman festivals and it makes sense that as the traditional Greco Roman Cults disappeared from the Mediterranean old older Greek and Roman Traditions would have been assimilated into Christian practice but this theory has a few problems with it that should make us a little skeptical my biggest problem with the pagan origins theory of a December 25th Christmas is that the church authorities chose the date that they somehow had the power and the political wherewithal to say all right everyone today we are worshiping Jesus and not Saturn but more and more research coming out from this past decade has shown that the Bishops of the fourth and fth century were actually not that powerful outside of their immediate Urban spheres of influence one of my favorite AR chologist Dr Kim Bose has wrote a lot on this as much Recent research is beginning to suggest the run of the mill Bishop in the West Was a rather anemic creature with neither resources nor the impetus to police the countryside and certainly not to build or even control estate churches she goes on to say that it was the landed nobility of the countryside that decided what was going on religiously among the populace they were the ones deciding to build churches or not and and they were the ones deciding whether to force their workers or families to follow the lurgical calendar or not so we should should be really careful to assume that it was the Bishops deciding on December 25th as Jesus's day of birth if anything they were responding to a popular majority that was already celebrating it on December 25th rather than dictating that day as the official day of Jesus's birth now my second problem with the pagan origins theory is even more serious half of Christianity back then didn't celebrate Christmas on December 25th Christians living in the Eastern Empire especially in Asia Minor in Egypt celebrated Christmas on January 6th in fact The Armenian Church of to still celebrates Christmas on January 6th but there is no saturnalia or Soul en victus Festival to blame January 6th so we need another explanation some Scholars have suggested that Christians celebrated Christmas on December 25th because it was exactly 9 months after March 25th when Christians had calculated Jesus to have died according to the Gospel of John it was believed that Jesus was conceived and crucified on the same day of the year that is to say Gabriel visited Mary on March 25th and some 30 years later Jesus was crucified on March 25th and since humans justatee for around 9 months a simple calculation reveals December 25th as Jesus's birth and we find this in a few Christian sources for example in a Christian Trea is titled on solstices and equinoxes it says therefore our Lord was conceived on the eth of the calend of April and the month of March which is the day of the passion of the Lord and of his conception from on that day he was conceived and on the same day he suffered St Augustine also writes for Jesus is believed to have been conceived on the 25th of March March upon which day also he suffered in the Eastern Empire they did the same calculation but they were calculating from April 6th instead of March 25th which results in the date of January 6th as Jesus's birthday so in both the East and the West we have Christians calculating Jesus's birth to be 9 months after when they thought he had died which depending on your calculation could either be March 25th or April 6th the discrepancy probably comes from trying to translate the Jewish calendar in the Gospel of John it yields different dates depending on how it was calculated back back then so it may well be the case that December 25th was not chosen because of some pagan holiday but because it happened to fall 9 months after the traditionally accepted day of Jesus's death which happened to be the traditionally accepted day of his conception March 25th or April 6th so all this to say next time someone says December 25th was chosen for Christmas because of a pagan holiday whether it's the soralia or the Soul Invictus Festival you can say well why did half of Christianity celebrate it on January 6th then the pagan Origins theory of a December 25th Christmas doesn't account for one the lack of power the Bishops had over their local populations most of our archaeological research suggests to us that the Bishops were not able to control what was happening religiously out in the countryside two the theory doesn't account for regional differences not everyone celebrated the saturnalia or the Soul Invictus festivals and these celebrations differed depending on where you lived in the Empire not only that Christians in the west celebrated Christmas on the 25th and Christians in the East celebrated Christmas on the 6th a more robust theory has to account for these geographical differences and a third problem is the theory doesn't account for the fact that no Christian text says anything about assimilating satalia or the Soul Invictus Festival but several Christian texts do talk about calculating his birth date as taking place 9 months after his accepted conception day either late March or early April ultimately we just don't know why Christmas came to be celebrated on December 25th it's perfectly reasonable to say that both of these theories have some truth to them but simple historical theories that try to explain complex human phenomena are never going to be 100% accurate especially when those human phenomena are occurring 1,500 years ago in a society without mass media or instant communication as always thanks for watching subscribing and have a happy [Music] saturnalia

Channel: ReligionForBreakfast

Views: 290,947

Keywords: December 25 (Day Of Year), Christianity (Religion), Paganism (Religion), Saturnalia (Holiday), Sol Invictus (Deity), Roman Empire (Country), December (Month), Why December 25th?, Why is Christmas on December 25?, Is Christmas Pagan?, Is Christmas Saturnalia?, Why is Christmas on December 25th?

Id: 3DHbOpS-N0c

Length: 8min 55sec (535 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 09 2015