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Every year, all Christians celebrate the birth of the Holy Child.
In fact, most Christian denominations agree that Christmas Day is December 25. according to the Gregorian calendar.
But how do we know that this is really the day that the “birth in the flesh of the Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ” took place according to the Gospels?
Which gives us neither a birth certificate nor any reference to the date.
Worse still, the early Christians didn’t even celebrate the birth of Jesus.
So is December 25 a theological convention? An arbitrary admission to the despotic celebration of the omnipresent Christian world?
The three theories
The payments of both Christmas as well as the date of the birth of Jesus have their roots in ancient Greco-Roman tradition.
The Christmas celebrations probably date back to the 2nd century AD and biblical scholars today have at least three possible theories for the December 25 choice.
The historian and theologian Sextus Julius the African placed the Annunciation on March 25, the same date to which he attributed the creation of the world.
If the archangel Gabriel informed the Virgin Mary that he would incarnate Jesus Christ on March 25, it seemed logical that the Holy Infant would be born on December 25, that is, after 9 months of pregnancy.
During the 3rd century, the Roman empire, who had not yet officially embraced Christianity, celebrated each year the rebirth of the Invincible Sun (Sol Invictus), the winter solstice in short, on December 25.
The festival not only marked the arrival of the great days, but also followed one of the greatest Roman festivals, the Saturnalia. Saturnalia was very similar to the Kronia of the ancient Greeks.
The day was a holiday. The Romans exchanged gifts and then threw them into games of chance and orgies. For this reason, a little later, in the years of Christianity, the hedonistic Saturnalia would be identified in the collective fantasy with obscenity.
The third theory tells us that the December 25 election had to do with the birth of Mithras, the mysterious Indo-European deity worshiped on the borders of Roman territory at least since the 1st century BC.
To what extent did all this play a role until AD 336? C., when Emperor Constantine I began to officially celebrate Christmas on December 25, it is still the subject of historical research.
However, the first official reference to December 25 as the birth of Christ actually comes from a Roman calendar from AD 336.
Along with the lists of the dates of death of bishops and Christian martyrs, the author points out next to December 25: “natus Christus in Betleem Judeae”. Christ is born in Belen of Judea.
Constantine the Great was the first Roman emperor to embrace Christianity. And we also know that a year before the establishment of December 25, the Apostle Constantine convened the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea (325 AD), where, among other things, the date of the celebration of Easter was set.
The Romans who embraced the ancient religion even accused him of deliberately choosing December 25 as it was a religiously laden day for pagans. They saw a political decision behind the date he had chosen for the new religion’s Christmas.
The date was not accepted in Eastern Roman Empire despite 50 years later. Until then, Christians preferred to celebrate Christmas on January 6.
Still, it was by no means a major celebration of Christianity. It would take hundreds of more years, until the ninth century, that is, for Christmas to gain its glory …
When was Jesus born?
Another theologically and historically uncomfortable issue has to do with the very date of Jesus’ birth. After all, in the first three centuries of Christianity, the birth of Jesus was not even celebrated.
In the early years of the new faith, the two most important holidays were Epiphany and Easter. The Epiphany (or Epiphany, as it was called then) was celebrated on January 6 and was sometimes not only the feast of the baptism of Jesus, but also the “revelation of the Lord in the flesh,” according to Saint Cassian.
When was Jesus born? The Bible does not give an exact date, and the Gospel passages even contain contradictory references. As has been argued, even the existence of shepherds with sheep is more reminiscent of spring than winter.
It is well known and well documented that it was Pope Julius I who instituted the ecclesiastical birth of Jesus on December 25. We are now in the middle of the fourth century.
Most 3rd century Christian historians and theologians even tell us that for the Christian church the birth of Jesus was on January 6.
The reason is unknown, however it is speculated that it must have been related to the date they had chosen for Crucifixion, April 6. In those early years of Christendom there was still the ancient belief that prophets were born and died on the same day.
This ancient Jewish belief that prophets leave the world the same day they arrive was even used by third century theologians to prove that Jesus was born on December 25.
Tertullian and Hippolytus of Rome place the Crucifixion on March 25. It seemed appropriate that Jesus had been born again on December 25.
Historical research, however, holds that the choice of December 25 as the date of Jesus’ birth by the Church of Christ in the late third century must have had to do with the pagan customs of both the Romans (Saturnalia) and the cult. of Mitra.
Maybe the Christendom However, to become the official religion of the empire, people had to be persuaded to accept it wholeheartedly. Common festivals with older pagan religions may have shown common ground.
Even today there are Christian doctrines that consider Epiphany and Easter as the most important holidays.
The Puritans of colonial New England even banned Christmas (in the Anglican Church) because it was so closely associated with pre-existing pagan cults.
Even in America’s early years, the celebration of Christmas seemed like a British custom and fell into oblivion after the American Revolution.
It wasn’t until 1870 that Christmas became a federal holiday on the other side. Atlantic.
Brief Christmas story
In comparative theology and religion, it is now widely believed that the December 25 election was an explicit attempt by the Christian church to embrace and assimilate ancient pagan worship traditions.
Christmas was called the Feast of the Nativity at that time and this is exactly how the custom passed in Egypt in 432 AD, reaching the end of the 6th century in England.
After the middle of the 8th century, the celebration of Christmas was established even on the Scandinavian peninsula. Nobody remembered that the peoples of northern Europe used to celebrate Yule, the winter solstice, from December 21 for 12 days. And they celebrated it in a similar way.
In the Middle Ages, Christmas had completely replaced the old pagan festivals of December 25. The date now belonged exclusively to Christianity.
The Biblical Archaeological Society, however, describes the December 25 adoption as “problematic”, speaking of a completely arbitrary admission.
Both because such date is not mentioned in any paternal text (neither month nor even season) as because the analogies with the pagan festivals are still striking. Especially with the winter solstice of the Romans.
Saint Ambrose himself, the Christian bishop of Milan and a very important ecclesiastical figure of the fourth century, described Jesus as the true Sun, whose radiance eclipsed all the fallen gods of the ancient faith.
The ecclesiastical writers of the time do not, of course, speak of the calendar tricks of Christianity. They believe that the election on December 25 was not the work of the official religion, but a divine coincidence, a divine omen that the Jesus he was chosen above and beyond the false gods of the pagans.
Rebuilding the celebration of Christmas is a difficult and twisted task and we may never finally know how and why.
What is important to mention, however, is that from the end of the 4th century Christian bishops conducted services at the end of Rome December 25. And the more Christianity established itself in the consciences of the world, the more the old customs and traditions receded.
Today, Christmas is not only an important religious holiday for Christians, but also a real cultural and commercial phenomenon on a global scale.
And of course no one thinks of celebrating them another day …
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