December 25: no connection with Tammuz, Saturnalia, Sol Invictus & Mithras
Posted December 19th, 2011 at 04:37 PM by Sankari
J. Burke, 2011
Christian writer Julius Africanus suggested December 25 as the birth of Christ long before it was connected with pagan festivities for Sol Invictus or Mithras.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
This date was not connected with the birth of Tammuz. Tammuz's death and descent into the underworld was commemorated during the summer solstice[6] [7] (nowhere near December 25), and there is scant evidence for any commemoration of the god's return;[8] whether or not there are any references to the 'resurrection' (not 'rebirth'), of Tammuz, is a matter of scholarly dispute.[9] [10]
The proposed birthdate of December 25 was the byproduct of the Christian chronologers, who needed to fit all the important dates of their history of the world into a schema.[11]
Africanus' calculation was not based on an equinox. It was driven, as I pointed out earlier, by the necessity of his chronology. Africanus followed the Jewish chronology which held that the world was already around 5,500 years old by the first century CE. He used the chrono-geneaologies of the Hebrew Bible as his reference for historical dates up to the Greek era, at which point he switched to the Olympiads.
In addition, he explicitly fixes the birth of Jesus on the basis of his interpretation of the prophecy of the '70 weeks' in Daniel 9, nothing to do with the equinox.[12] [13] Reinforcing this date was Africanus' belief that the earth itself had been created on March 25, which is a far more obvious influence on his decision to place the conception of Jesus on this date (since he mentions it),[14] than the spring equinox (to which he makes no reference at all).
So we have clear evidence from Africanus' own hand indicating the basis of his selection of March 25 as the date of Jesus' conception, and it has nothing to do with the spring equinox; bear in mind of course that an explanation with evidence is of course always more efficient than an explanation for which there is no evidence at all. Even more to the point, Africanus himself did not even make specific calculation for the birth of Jesus, nor did he make any speciifc reference to December 25 as the birth of Jesus, even though that is the date to which his conception date naturally leads.[15]
Instead the calculations of Africanus were aimed at establishing the date of Jesus' conception, and clearly not aimed at establishing the date of Jesus' birth, still less aimed at deliberately aligning it with December 25 and the winter solstice; as I mentioned previously, this was simply a byproduct of his cumbersome chronological engineering.
Immediately after Africanus, the anonymous Latin work De Pascha Computus gave the date of March 28th for the conception of Jesus, but like Africanus, it did not attempt to identify Jesus' birth specifically with December 25. In addition, the author of this writing didn't even pretend to be doing chronology on the basis of previous histories and records, they simply claimed that they knew from direct divine revelation that the earth had been created on March 28, and Jesus had been conceived on the same date.[16]
What is clear is that even thought the chronology of Africanus and his conception date became popular among some of the Greeks,[17] and even though the date of December 25th became popular in the 4th century as the date of the birth of Jesus,[18] the reasons for fixing on it varied widely.
Africanus didn't even mention it specifically, since his concern was the dates of the conception and crucifixion, not the birth (even though his chronology leads directly to December 25 as the birth date), De Pascha Computus likewise doesn't mention the date at all (again focusing on the date of the conception), Chrysostom dated the birth of Jesus to December 25 on the basis of a complicated calculation involving the service dates of the Jewish High Priest, assuming a specific date for the service of Zachariah (father of John the Baptist),[19] and by the time Augustine is writing on the subject he does not attempt any new calculation to establish a date which he notes is already a matter of tradition,[20] instead using the already established date as the basis of a weird anagogical numerology,[21] with no attempt to derive the date from the equinox, even though he noted (as had others), the appropriateness of the seasonal change to the symbolism of the birth of Jesus.
It is therefore hardly surprising that current scholarship typically dismisses the idea that identification of December 25 as the date of Jesus' birth was predicated on adoption, co-option, or replacement of pagan equinox festivities such as those for 'Sol Invictus',[22] [23] especially given the lack of evidence for such a pagan festival on this date prior to the Christian fixation on December 25 as the birth of Jesus.[24] [25] [26]
Compounding this is the fact that during the very time that December 25 was adopted widely by the Church as the date of Jesus' birth, the key dates for festive activities in celebration of Sol were in October and August, not December.[27] Intriguingly, Hijmans points out that in fact the possibility of the pagans adopting December 25 in response to the already established Christian festivity, cannot be ruled out.[28]
This date was not connected with Saturnalia. Saturnalia wasn't on December 25, it was typically celebrated on December 17, sometimes from December 14 to 17,[29] [30] and even when it was later extended to a week it still ended on December 23, not December 25.[31]
The second is that we don't have any historical evidence indicating that Saturnalia was influential on the choice of December 25 as the date of the birth of Jesus, still less the much later celebration of the feast of the nativity which came to be known as Christmas. This absence of evidence isn't positive evidence that Saturnalia was not influential in such a way (that would be an argument from silence), but it is negative evidence contra-indicating the theory that Saturnalia was influential in such a way.
The date was not connected with festivities for Sol Invictus.[32] Nor was it connected with the birth of Mithras.
The earliest reference I have found to Mithras being born on December 25, is in the anti-Catholic work of Paul Jablonski, an 18th century Protestant attempting to argue that the Catholic Church had become paganized, and that the date of Christmas was simply a heretical adoption of a pagan festivity, specifically the celebration of the birth of Mithras.[33] I am always skeptical of agenda driven claims, especially when they are accompanied by a complete lack of substantive evidence, as they were in Jablonski's case.
Ironically, later in the 18th century the same claim was made by the Catholic cleric Jean Hardouin, who asserted that the Catholic Church had rightly 'Christianized' the celebration of Mithras' birth.[34] Like Jablonski, his argument was without substantive evidence. This blunder was widely popularized in the 19th century literature by Hermann Usener,[35] and has remained influential ever since.[36]
However, Usener's lines of evidence were extremely tenuous,[37] [38] and modern scholarship specifically in the field of Roman religion and Mithraic studies, has debunked his theory comprehensively.[39] [40]
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[1] 'Sextus Julianus Africanus, before 221: 22 March = the (first) day of creation, 25 March = both the annunciation and the resurrection.', Roll, 'Toward the Origins of Christmas', p. 87 (1995).
[2] 'But a North African Christian named Sextus Julius Africanus had a different idea. He contended that the Son of God became incarnate not at his birth but at his conception, so if Mary conceived him on March 25, he would have been born nine months later on December 25.' , Kelly 'The Feast of Christmas', p. 16 (2010).
[3] 'while the winter solstice on or around December 25 was well established in the Roman imperial calendar, there is no evidence that a religious celebration of Sol on that day antedated the celebration of Christmas, and none that indicates that Aurelian had a hand in its institution.', Hijmans, 'Sol, the sun in the art and religions of Rome', pp. 587–588 (2009).
[4] 'It is not until the last decade of the twelfth century that we have documentary evidence of any attempt to derive the Christian from the pagan festival.', Baldovin & Johnson, 'Between memory and hope: readings on the liturgical year', p. 266 (2000).
[5] 'This is in an anonymous marginal gloss on a manuscript of a work of Dionysius Bar Salibi published by Assemani in Bibliotheca Orientalis II, Rome 1721, 164, cited by B. Botte, Les origines de la Noel et de l'Epiphanie, Louvain 1932, 66.', Baldovin & Johnson, 'Between memory and hope: readings on the liturgical year', p. 266 (2000).
[6] 'the rites of weeping for Tammuz, which took place around the summer solstice,', Prosic, 'The development and symbolism of Passover until 70 CE', p. 84 (2004).
[7] 'What is involved is a myth of a god descending to the underworld at the time of the summer solstice in Tammuz, and remaining in the underworld until the winter solstice six months later.', Livingstone, 'Mystical and mythological explanatory works of Assyrian and Babylonian scholars', p. 257 (1986).
[8] 'Wailing for Tammuz at the time of the autumnal festival would mark the end of the summer period. Unfortunately, it is virtually unknown whether such a ritual at that moment of the season existed. Only a few suggestions gleaned from foreign rituals and cultic calendars elsewhere may show that such laments also took place shortly before the expected return of the disappeared god.', Hemmes, Becking, & Dijkstra, 'On reading prophetic texts: gender-specific and related studies in memory of in Memory of Fokkelien Van Dijk-Hermmes', Biblical Interpretation Series , No .18, p. 101 (1996).
[9] Yamauchi, 'Tammuz & the Bible', Journal of Biblical Literature (81.283-90), 1965; Yamauchi, 'Additional Notres on Tammuz', Journal of Semitic Studies (11.10-15), 1966; Kramer, 'Mythology of Sumer and Akkad', Mythologies of the Ancient World', pp. 94-137 (1961).
[10] 'Tammuz was also originally worshipped only as a dying god, and whether the idea of his resurrection was added to his cult before our era is still disputed', in 'Did Jesus Exist?', p. 183 (1975); 'Tammuz was also originally worshipped only as a dying god, and whether the idea of his resurrection was added to his cult in pre-Christian times is still disputed.', Wells, 'J.M. Robertson (1856-1933): liberal, rationalist, and scholar : an assessment', p. 162 (1987).
[11] 'The whole question of the exact date of Christ’s birthday appears to have arisen only when Christian chronographers began writing their chronologies. Obviously, the birthday of Christ had to be established in such chronologies, and numerous dates were proposed.', Hijmans, 'Sol Invictus, the Winter Solstice, and the Origins of Christmas' (2009).
[12] 'Now it happens that from the 20th year of the reign of Artaxerxes (as it is given in Ezra among the Hebrews), which, according to the Greeks, was the 4th year of the 80th Olympiad, to the 16th year of Tiberius Caesar, which was the second year of the 102d Olympiad, there are in all the 475 years already noted, which in the Hebrew system make 490 years, as has been previously stated, that is, 70 weeks, by which period the time of Christ’s advent was measured in the announcement made to Daniel by Gabriel.', Africanus, 'The Extant Fragments of the Five Books of the Chronography of Julius Africanus', fragment XVIII (from Syncellus, 'Chronicles'), in Roberts,Donaldson & Coxe (eds.), 'The Ante-Nicene Fathers Vol. VI : Translations of the writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325', p. 138 (electronic ed. 1997).
[13] 'Similar to Hippolytus, Julius Africanus held that precisely five and a half millennia had separated the creation of Adam from the incarnation and birth of Jesus Christ, meaning that he dated these events to annus mundi or AM 5501. From the extant fragments, we can also conclude that Africanus believed the crucifixion to have taken place in the spring of the second year of the 202nd Olympiad (or Ol. 202.2), in what he designated as the 16th year of Tiberius. The Olympiad date strongly points to the spring of AD 31 (seeing how, according to the regular count, Ol. 202.2 began in the summer of AD 30), although this should already have been the 17th year of Tiberius's, if the latter's reign was counted, in regular fashion, from the autumn of AD 14. As Venance Grumel has observed, the year AD 31 has 25 March fall on a Sunday, which may well have been Africanus's intended date for the resurrection.', Nothaft, 'Dating the Passion: The Life of Jesus and the Emergence of Scientific Chronology', p. 57 (2011).
[14] 'From the extant remains of his Chronographie, one can also infer that Africanus treated the day of the resurrection of Christ as the beginning of a new year of the world, as he seems to have put the Passion in AM 5531, whereas the resurrection, two days later, is already dated AM 5532. This indicates that Africanus, just like Hippolytus and the computist of 243, considered the world to have been created on 25 March and he may well have associated the same date with Christ's incarnation.', Nothaft, 'Dating the Passion: The Life of Jesus and the Emergence of Scientific Chronology', p. 57 (2011).
[15] 'Cullmann (1956, 22 n.5), Kraabel (1982, 274, citing Cullmann), and the EEC s.v. Christmas (p. 206) all claim that as early as 221 Julius Africanus calculated the date as December 25th in his fragmentarily preserved Chronicle, but provide no reference.', Hijmans, 'Sol Invictus, the Winter Solstice, and the Origins of Christmas'; Hijmans cites Wallraff (2001), as arguing that Africanus did not in fact calculate such a date; 'he does not know of any such calculation by Africanus'.
[16] 'The De Pascha Computus, for instance, written in AD 243, argued that Creation began with the vernal equinox, i.e. March 25th, and that the Sun, created on the fourth day, was therefore created on March 28th. This obviously meant that Christ, the new “Sun of Righteousness” must have been born on March 28th. To support these dates the author proclaimed explicitly that he had been inspired ab ipso Deo. Cullmann 1956, 21-2.', Hijmans, op. cit.
[17] 'Other Greek-speakers, however, preferred the higher interval of Africanus, or one close to it, but adjusted so that the Creation should take place on a Sunday; the most favoured was the era of Annianus (early 5th century), in which the Creation took place on Sunday, 29 Phamenoth = 25 March 5492 BC, and the Incarnation, meaning the Conception of Jesus Christ, on Monday, 29 Phamenoth AM 5501 = 25 March AD 9.', Holford-Strevens, 'The History of Time: A very short introduction', p. 161 (2005).
[18] 'None of the dates were influential, or enjoyed any official recognition. Their basis varied from learned calculations to pure guess-work. It was only in the 330s, apparently, that December 25th was first promoted as a feast day celebrating the birthday of Christ. Initially, this happened only in Rome, but in the 380s it is attested as such in Asia Minor as well, and by the 430s in Egypt.10 Nonetheless, other churches, as we have seen, continued to maintain Epiphany – January 6th - as the birthday of Christ, and do so to this day.', Hijmans, op. cit.
[19] 'His third argument follows the approach of the De solstitiis in using the Lucan chronology and the assumption that Zacharia was High Priest during the feast of Tabernacles in the year John the Baptist was conceived. Chrysostom counts off the months of Elizabeth's pregnancy, and dates Mary's conception from the sixth month of Elizabeth's, Xanthikos on the Macedonian calendar, then counts off another nine months to arrive at the birthdate of Christ.', Roll, 'Toward the Origins of Christmas', pp. 100-101 (1995).
[20] 'But He was born, according to tradition, upon December the 25th.', Augustine, 'On the Trinity' (4.5), in Schaff (ed.), 'The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers Vol. III', p. 78 (electronic ed 1997).
[21] 'If, then you reckon from that day to this you find two hundred and seventy-six days which is forty-six times six. And in this number of years the temple was built, because in that number of sixes the body of the Lord was perfected; which being destroyed by the suffering of death, He raised again on the third day. For “He spake this of the temple of His body,”48 as is declared by the most clear and solid testimony of the Gospel; where He said, “For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly, so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth."', Augustine, 'On the Trinity' (4.5), in Schaff (ed.), 'The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers Vol. III', p. 78 (electronic ed 1997).
[22] 'The specific nature of the relation of Christmas to the then-contemporary feast of the birth of the sun, Natalis Solis Invicti, has up to now not been conclusively proven from extant texts, no matter how much some sort of causal relation might make perfect sense.', Roll, 'Toward the Origins of Christmas', p. 107 (1995).
[23] 'History of Religions proponents who try to demonstrate further that the young Christian church consciously chose to adopt festal dates and practices from heretofore abhorrent pre-Christian (and even heterodox Christian) sects run up against the sharp polemics of the top church administrators of the time. Moreover, some standard arguments found in the literature up to approximately the 1970's which drew analogies with putative pre-Christian solar antecedents for Epiphany in Egypt and elsewhere have run aground with the definitive refutation of these theories.', Roll, 'Toward the Origins of Christmas', p. 107 (1995).
[24] 'All this casts doubt on the contention that Christmas was instituted on December 25th to counteract a popular pagan religious festival, doubts that are reinforced when one looks at the underlying understanding of Sol and his cult. ', Hijmans, op. cit.
[25] 'The contention that December 25th was an especially popular festival for Sol in late antiquity is equally unfounded, as is as the notion that this festival was established by Aurelian when he supposedly instituted a new cult of the sun.', Hijmans, op. cit.
[26] 'In short, while the winter solstice on or around the 25th of December was well established in the Roman imperial calendar, there is no evidence that a religious celebration of Sol on that day antedated the celebration of Christmas, and none that indicates that Aurelian had a hand in its institution.20 One might think that celebrating the sun on the winter solstice is so self-evident that we need hardly doubt that such a festival had a long tradition, but what evidence we have actually belies that notion. The traditional feast days of Sol, as recorded in the early imperial fasti, were August 8 and/or August 9 , possibly August 28 , and December 11. These are all dates that are unrelated to any important celestial alignment of Sol, such as the solstices and equinoxes.', Hijmans, op. cit.
[27] 'This means that in the early fourth century, when Christmas was established by the church on December 25, anyone surveying the calendar of festivities in honour of Sol would identify the period from October 19 to October 22 as far more important than December 25, and the festival of August 28 as far older. If the aim was to “neutralize” the cult of Sol by “taking over” its major festival, December 25th seems the least likely choice.', Hijmans, op. cit.
[28] 'On the evidence currently available we cannot exclude the possibility that, for instance, the 30 chariot races held in honor of Sol on December 25 were instituted in reaction to the Christian claim of December 25 as the birthday of Christ. In general, the extent to which late pagan festivals copied, incorporated, or responded to Christian practices, elements, and dates deserves far more attention than it has received; cf. Bowersock 1990, 26-7, 44-53.', Hijmans, op. cit.
[29] 'But all our surviving calendars that preserve the month of December mark 17 December as the date for the Saturnalia. In his discussion of the origins of the Saturnalia, Macrobius explains that the Saturnalia was often celebrated over three days from 14 to 17 Decemver, since the former was the date given by the Numan calendar, the latter the date given by the Julian calendar after Caesar added two days to the month', Newlands, 'Statius' Silvae and the poetics of Empire', p. 236 (2006).
[30] 'The Saturnalia occupy a position exactly between the Consualia of the 15th and the Opalia of the 19th of December.', Versnel, 'Inconsistencies in Greek and Roman Religion: Transition and reversal in myth', p. 165 (1993).
[31] 'Eventually, the carnival expanded to a full seven days, December 17 to 23.', Littleton, 'Gods, goddesses, and mythology', volume 11, p. 1255 (2005).
[32] 'In short, we have no firm evidence for a festival for Sol on December 25th until Julian wrote his hymn to Helios in December of 362. The entry in the calendar of 354 is probably for Sol, although only the epithet invictus is used (above, n. 4), and probably dates to 354, although it was possibly added later. Circumstantial evidence suggests that a festival of Sol on the winter solstice was not yet included in such calendars in the late 320s. As the Christian celebration of Christmas on December 25th can be attested in Rome by AD 336, at which point it may already have been well-established,34 and the celebration of Sol on that day cannot be attested before AD 354/362 and had not yet entered the calendar in the late 320s, it is impossible to postulate that Christmas arose in reaction to some solar festival. There is quite simply not one iota of explicit evidence for a major festival of Sol on December 25th prior to the establishment of Christmas, nor is there any circumstantial evidence that there was likely to have been one.', Hijmans, 'Usener's Christmas: A Contribution to the Modern Construct of Late Antique Solar Syncretism', in 'Die Metamorphosen der Philologie. Hermann Usener und seine Folgen', (2011).
[33] Paul Ernest Jablonski, 'De origine festi nativitatis Christi', in te Water (ed.), 'Pavli Ernesti Iablonskii Opuscula', volume 3, p. 317 (1809), cited by Roll, 'Towards the Origins of Christmas', p. 130 (1995).
[34] 'Now Hardouin has very learnedly proved, that among the Romans the twenty fifth of December was always celebrated as the Nativity of their God of Day, or the Sun. On this Day an antient Roman Calendar has the Words - Natalis invicti- the Birth-Day of the invincible;- -a Name which Julian the Apostate likewise gives to the Persian God Mithra, or the Sun.', Clement, 'Sermons on several subject and occasions', volume 2, p. 65 (1774).
[35] Usener, 'Das Weihnachtsfest und Christlicher Festbrauch' (1889), cited by Roll, 'Towards the Origins of Christmas', p. 131 (1995).
[36] 'And indeed, ever since Usener’s studies of the feast of Christmas, the idea that December 25 was chosen as Christ’s birthday to counteract this important pagan festival has received wide acceptance.', Hijmans, 'Sol Invictus, the Winter Solstice, and the Origins of Christmas' (2011).
[37] 'That a specific cult or festival of Sol played the role in the establishment of Christmas on December 25 that Usener postulates for it is ultimately based on three pieces of evidence. The first is the date itself, December 25th and evidence that there was a pagan solar festival on that day. The second is a very late and polemically anti-catholic gloss on the 12th century Syriac scholar Bar Salibi.16 The third is an out-of-context passage from an anonymous homily of unknown date, but believed to be of the early or mid fourth century A.D. Usener and others also adduce many examples of solar imagery linked to Christ - as the true light, the sun come down to earth, the sun of justice, the true sun, etc. - but none of these offer any direct evidence of an important festival for Sol on December 25th giving rise to the establishment of Christmas.', Hijmans, 'Usener's Christmas: A Contribution to the Modern Construct of Late Antique Solar Syncretism', in 'Die Metamorphosen der Philologie. Hermann Usener und seine Folgen', (2011).
[38] 'Mithras' birth is generally supposed to have occurred, and been celebrated, on 25 December, but that rests solely on the assumption that it coincided with the Natalis Invicti, the birthday of the official Sun god. Ths assumption is reasonable but not self-evidently correct. A valiant attempt was made by I. Toh ('Das lokale System der mithraischen Personifikationen im Gebiet von Poetovio,' Artheoloki vestnik 28 (1977), 385-92) to correlate other events in the story of Mithras with the seasonal cycle and hence with a liturgical year, but it was not, in my opinion, persuasive (R. Beck, 'Mithraism since Franz Commont', ANRW II.17.4 (1984), 2002-115, at 2040-1). More cautiously and convincingly, R. Merkelbach (Mithras (1984), 141-5) suggested several dates as potentially significant, arguing principally from the zodiacs with which Mithraic icons are so liberally endowed.', Beck, 'Beck on Mithraism: collected works with new essays', p. 55 (2004).
[39] 'There is no evidence of any kind, not even a hint, from wihin the cult that this, or any other winter day, was important in the Mithraic calendar. Although three seasonal zodiacal signs are singled out in the iconography (Taurus, Leo and Scorpius), Aquarius, the sign that would correspond to notional mid-winter, being diametrically opposite to Leo, is never paid special attention.75 No Mithraic votive is dated 25th December (VIII A.D. KAL. IAN.). Nor is there any mention among the dipinti in the mithraeum of S. Prisca of Mithras' birthday, though the first line of a zodiacal poem was written up on the wall, starting, quite unconventionally, with Aries, the first sign of Spring.76.', Alvar, 'Romanising oriental Gods: myth, salvation, and ethics in the cults of Cybele, Isis and Mithras', in Gordon (ed. trans.), Religions in the Graeco-Roman World, p. 410 (2008).
[40] Of the mystery cult of Sol Invictus Mithras we know little with certainty, and even if we leave aside the problem of the relationship between the Mithraic mysteries and the public cult of Sol, the notion that Mithraists celebrated December 25th in some fashion is a modern invention for which there is simply no evidence.', Hijmans, 'Usener's Christmas: A Contribution to the Modern Construct of Late Antique Solar Syncretism', in 'Die Metamorphosen der Philologie. Hermann Usener und seine Folgen', (2011).
Christian writer Julius Africanus suggested December 25 as the birth of Christ long before it was connected with pagan festivities for Sol Invictus or Mithras.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
This date was not connected with the birth of Tammuz. Tammuz's death and descent into the underworld was commemorated during the summer solstice[6] [7] (nowhere near December 25), and there is scant evidence for any commemoration of the god's return;[8] whether or not there are any references to the 'resurrection' (not 'rebirth'), of Tammuz, is a matter of scholarly dispute.[9] [10]
The proposed birthdate of December 25 was the byproduct of the Christian chronologers, who needed to fit all the important dates of their history of the world into a schema.[11]
Africanus' calculation was not based on an equinox. It was driven, as I pointed out earlier, by the necessity of his chronology. Africanus followed the Jewish chronology which held that the world was already around 5,500 years old by the first century CE. He used the chrono-geneaologies of the Hebrew Bible as his reference for historical dates up to the Greek era, at which point he switched to the Olympiads.
In addition, he explicitly fixes the birth of Jesus on the basis of his interpretation of the prophecy of the '70 weeks' in Daniel 9, nothing to do with the equinox.[12] [13] Reinforcing this date was Africanus' belief that the earth itself had been created on March 25, which is a far more obvious influence on his decision to place the conception of Jesus on this date (since he mentions it),[14] than the spring equinox (to which he makes no reference at all).
So we have clear evidence from Africanus' own hand indicating the basis of his selection of March 25 as the date of Jesus' conception, and it has nothing to do with the spring equinox; bear in mind of course that an explanation with evidence is of course always more efficient than an explanation for which there is no evidence at all. Even more to the point, Africanus himself did not even make specific calculation for the birth of Jesus, nor did he make any speciifc reference to December 25 as the birth of Jesus, even though that is the date to which his conception date naturally leads.[15]
Instead the calculations of Africanus were aimed at establishing the date of Jesus' conception, and clearly not aimed at establishing the date of Jesus' birth, still less aimed at deliberately aligning it with December 25 and the winter solstice; as I mentioned previously, this was simply a byproduct of his cumbersome chronological engineering.
Immediately after Africanus, the anonymous Latin work De Pascha Computus gave the date of March 28th for the conception of Jesus, but like Africanus, it did not attempt to identify Jesus' birth specifically with December 25. In addition, the author of this writing didn't even pretend to be doing chronology on the basis of previous histories and records, they simply claimed that they knew from direct divine revelation that the earth had been created on March 28, and Jesus had been conceived on the same date.[16]
What is clear is that even thought the chronology of Africanus and his conception date became popular among some of the Greeks,[17] and even though the date of December 25th became popular in the 4th century as the date of the birth of Jesus,[18] the reasons for fixing on it varied widely.
Africanus didn't even mention it specifically, since his concern was the dates of the conception and crucifixion, not the birth (even though his chronology leads directly to December 25 as the birth date), De Pascha Computus likewise doesn't mention the date at all (again focusing on the date of the conception), Chrysostom dated the birth of Jesus to December 25 on the basis of a complicated calculation involving the service dates of the Jewish High Priest, assuming a specific date for the service of Zachariah (father of John the Baptist),[19] and by the time Augustine is writing on the subject he does not attempt any new calculation to establish a date which he notes is already a matter of tradition,[20] instead using the already established date as the basis of a weird anagogical numerology,[21] with no attempt to derive the date from the equinox, even though he noted (as had others), the appropriateness of the seasonal change to the symbolism of the birth of Jesus.
It is therefore hardly surprising that current scholarship typically dismisses the idea that identification of December 25 as the date of Jesus' birth was predicated on adoption, co-option, or replacement of pagan equinox festivities such as those for 'Sol Invictus',[22] [23] especially given the lack of evidence for such a pagan festival on this date prior to the Christian fixation on December 25 as the birth of Jesus.[24] [25] [26]
Compounding this is the fact that during the very time that December 25 was adopted widely by the Church as the date of Jesus' birth, the key dates for festive activities in celebration of Sol were in October and August, not December.[27] Intriguingly, Hijmans points out that in fact the possibility of the pagans adopting December 25 in response to the already established Christian festivity, cannot be ruled out.[28]
This date was not connected with Saturnalia. Saturnalia wasn't on December 25, it was typically celebrated on December 17, sometimes from December 14 to 17,[29] [30] and even when it was later extended to a week it still ended on December 23, not December 25.[31]
The second is that we don't have any historical evidence indicating that Saturnalia was influential on the choice of December 25 as the date of the birth of Jesus, still less the much later celebration of the feast of the nativity which came to be known as Christmas. This absence of evidence isn't positive evidence that Saturnalia was not influential in such a way (that would be an argument from silence), but it is negative evidence contra-indicating the theory that Saturnalia was influential in such a way.
The date was not connected with festivities for Sol Invictus.[32] Nor was it connected with the birth of Mithras.
The earliest reference I have found to Mithras being born on December 25, is in the anti-Catholic work of Paul Jablonski, an 18th century Protestant attempting to argue that the Catholic Church had become paganized, and that the date of Christmas was simply a heretical adoption of a pagan festivity, specifically the celebration of the birth of Mithras.[33] I am always skeptical of agenda driven claims, especially when they are accompanied by a complete lack of substantive evidence, as they were in Jablonski's case.
Ironically, later in the 18th century the same claim was made by the Catholic cleric Jean Hardouin, who asserted that the Catholic Church had rightly 'Christianized' the celebration of Mithras' birth.[34] Like Jablonski, his argument was without substantive evidence. This blunder was widely popularized in the 19th century literature by Hermann Usener,[35] and has remained influential ever since.[36]
However, Usener's lines of evidence were extremely tenuous,[37] [38] and modern scholarship specifically in the field of Roman religion and Mithraic studies, has debunked his theory comprehensively.[39] [40]
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[1] 'Sextus Julianus Africanus, before 221: 22 March = the (first) day of creation, 25 March = both the annunciation and the resurrection.', Roll, 'Toward the Origins of Christmas', p. 87 (1995).
[2] 'But a North African Christian named Sextus Julius Africanus had a different idea. He contended that the Son of God became incarnate not at his birth but at his conception, so if Mary conceived him on March 25, he would have been born nine months later on December 25.' , Kelly 'The Feast of Christmas', p. 16 (2010).
[3] 'while the winter solstice on or around December 25 was well established in the Roman imperial calendar, there is no evidence that a religious celebration of Sol on that day antedated the celebration of Christmas, and none that indicates that Aurelian had a hand in its institution.', Hijmans, 'Sol, the sun in the art and religions of Rome', pp. 587–588 (2009).
[4] 'It is not until the last decade of the twelfth century that we have documentary evidence of any attempt to derive the Christian from the pagan festival.', Baldovin & Johnson, 'Between memory and hope: readings on the liturgical year', p. 266 (2000).
[5] 'This is in an anonymous marginal gloss on a manuscript of a work of Dionysius Bar Salibi published by Assemani in Bibliotheca Orientalis II, Rome 1721, 164, cited by B. Botte, Les origines de la Noel et de l'Epiphanie, Louvain 1932, 66.', Baldovin & Johnson, 'Between memory and hope: readings on the liturgical year', p. 266 (2000).
[6] 'the rites of weeping for Tammuz, which took place around the summer solstice,', Prosic, 'The development and symbolism of Passover until 70 CE', p. 84 (2004).
[7] 'What is involved is a myth of a god descending to the underworld at the time of the summer solstice in Tammuz, and remaining in the underworld until the winter solstice six months later.', Livingstone, 'Mystical and mythological explanatory works of Assyrian and Babylonian scholars', p. 257 (1986).
[8] 'Wailing for Tammuz at the time of the autumnal festival would mark the end of the summer period. Unfortunately, it is virtually unknown whether such a ritual at that moment of the season existed. Only a few suggestions gleaned from foreign rituals and cultic calendars elsewhere may show that such laments also took place shortly before the expected return of the disappeared god.', Hemmes, Becking, & Dijkstra, 'On reading prophetic texts: gender-specific and related studies in memory of in Memory of Fokkelien Van Dijk-Hermmes', Biblical Interpretation Series , No .18, p. 101 (1996).
[9] Yamauchi, 'Tammuz & the Bible', Journal of Biblical Literature (81.283-90), 1965; Yamauchi, 'Additional Notres on Tammuz', Journal of Semitic Studies (11.10-15), 1966; Kramer, 'Mythology of Sumer and Akkad', Mythologies of the Ancient World', pp. 94-137 (1961).
[10] 'Tammuz was also originally worshipped only as a dying god, and whether the idea of his resurrection was added to his cult before our era is still disputed', in 'Did Jesus Exist?', p. 183 (1975); 'Tammuz was also originally worshipped only as a dying god, and whether the idea of his resurrection was added to his cult in pre-Christian times is still disputed.', Wells, 'J.M. Robertson (1856-1933): liberal, rationalist, and scholar : an assessment', p. 162 (1987).
[11] 'The whole question of the exact date of Christ’s birthday appears to have arisen only when Christian chronographers began writing their chronologies. Obviously, the birthday of Christ had to be established in such chronologies, and numerous dates were proposed.', Hijmans, 'Sol Invictus, the Winter Solstice, and the Origins of Christmas' (2009).
[12] 'Now it happens that from the 20th year of the reign of Artaxerxes (as it is given in Ezra among the Hebrews), which, according to the Greeks, was the 4th year of the 80th Olympiad, to the 16th year of Tiberius Caesar, which was the second year of the 102d Olympiad, there are in all the 475 years already noted, which in the Hebrew system make 490 years, as has been previously stated, that is, 70 weeks, by which period the time of Christ’s advent was measured in the announcement made to Daniel by Gabriel.', Africanus, 'The Extant Fragments of the Five Books of the Chronography of Julius Africanus', fragment XVIII (from Syncellus, 'Chronicles'), in Roberts,Donaldson & Coxe (eds.), 'The Ante-Nicene Fathers Vol. VI : Translations of the writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325', p. 138 (electronic ed. 1997).
[13] 'Similar to Hippolytus, Julius Africanus held that precisely five and a half millennia had separated the creation of Adam from the incarnation and birth of Jesus Christ, meaning that he dated these events to annus mundi or AM 5501. From the extant fragments, we can also conclude that Africanus believed the crucifixion to have taken place in the spring of the second year of the 202nd Olympiad (or Ol. 202.2), in what he designated as the 16th year of Tiberius. The Olympiad date strongly points to the spring of AD 31 (seeing how, according to the regular count, Ol. 202.2 began in the summer of AD 30), although this should already have been the 17th year of Tiberius's, if the latter's reign was counted, in regular fashion, from the autumn of AD 14. As Venance Grumel has observed, the year AD 31 has 25 March fall on a Sunday, which may well have been Africanus's intended date for the resurrection.', Nothaft, 'Dating the Passion: The Life of Jesus and the Emergence of Scientific Chronology', p. 57 (2011).
[14] 'From the extant remains of his Chronographie, one can also infer that Africanus treated the day of the resurrection of Christ as the beginning of a new year of the world, as he seems to have put the Passion in AM 5531, whereas the resurrection, two days later, is already dated AM 5532. This indicates that Africanus, just like Hippolytus and the computist of 243, considered the world to have been created on 25 March and he may well have associated the same date with Christ's incarnation.', Nothaft, 'Dating the Passion: The Life of Jesus and the Emergence of Scientific Chronology', p. 57 (2011).
[15] 'Cullmann (1956, 22 n.5), Kraabel (1982, 274, citing Cullmann), and the EEC s.v. Christmas (p. 206) all claim that as early as 221 Julius Africanus calculated the date as December 25th in his fragmentarily preserved Chronicle, but provide no reference.', Hijmans, 'Sol Invictus, the Winter Solstice, and the Origins of Christmas'; Hijmans cites Wallraff (2001), as arguing that Africanus did not in fact calculate such a date; 'he does not know of any such calculation by Africanus'.
[16] 'The De Pascha Computus, for instance, written in AD 243, argued that Creation began with the vernal equinox, i.e. March 25th, and that the Sun, created on the fourth day, was therefore created on March 28th. This obviously meant that Christ, the new “Sun of Righteousness” must have been born on March 28th. To support these dates the author proclaimed explicitly that he had been inspired ab ipso Deo. Cullmann 1956, 21-2.', Hijmans, op. cit.
[17] 'Other Greek-speakers, however, preferred the higher interval of Africanus, or one close to it, but adjusted so that the Creation should take place on a Sunday; the most favoured was the era of Annianus (early 5th century), in which the Creation took place on Sunday, 29 Phamenoth = 25 March 5492 BC, and the Incarnation, meaning the Conception of Jesus Christ, on Monday, 29 Phamenoth AM 5501 = 25 March AD 9.', Holford-Strevens, 'The History of Time: A very short introduction', p. 161 (2005).
[18] 'None of the dates were influential, or enjoyed any official recognition. Their basis varied from learned calculations to pure guess-work. It was only in the 330s, apparently, that December 25th was first promoted as a feast day celebrating the birthday of Christ. Initially, this happened only in Rome, but in the 380s it is attested as such in Asia Minor as well, and by the 430s in Egypt.10 Nonetheless, other churches, as we have seen, continued to maintain Epiphany – January 6th - as the birthday of Christ, and do so to this day.', Hijmans, op. cit.
[19] 'His third argument follows the approach of the De solstitiis in using the Lucan chronology and the assumption that Zacharia was High Priest during the feast of Tabernacles in the year John the Baptist was conceived. Chrysostom counts off the months of Elizabeth's pregnancy, and dates Mary's conception from the sixth month of Elizabeth's, Xanthikos on the Macedonian calendar, then counts off another nine months to arrive at the birthdate of Christ.', Roll, 'Toward the Origins of Christmas', pp. 100-101 (1995).
[20] 'But He was born, according to tradition, upon December the 25th.', Augustine, 'On the Trinity' (4.5), in Schaff (ed.), 'The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers Vol. III', p. 78 (electronic ed 1997).
[21] 'If, then you reckon from that day to this you find two hundred and seventy-six days which is forty-six times six. And in this number of years the temple was built, because in that number of sixes the body of the Lord was perfected; which being destroyed by the suffering of death, He raised again on the third day. For “He spake this of the temple of His body,”48 as is declared by the most clear and solid testimony of the Gospel; where He said, “For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly, so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth."', Augustine, 'On the Trinity' (4.5), in Schaff (ed.), 'The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers Vol. III', p. 78 (electronic ed 1997).
[22] 'The specific nature of the relation of Christmas to the then-contemporary feast of the birth of the sun, Natalis Solis Invicti, has up to now not been conclusively proven from extant texts, no matter how much some sort of causal relation might make perfect sense.', Roll, 'Toward the Origins of Christmas', p. 107 (1995).
[23] 'History of Religions proponents who try to demonstrate further that the young Christian church consciously chose to adopt festal dates and practices from heretofore abhorrent pre-Christian (and even heterodox Christian) sects run up against the sharp polemics of the top church administrators of the time. Moreover, some standard arguments found in the literature up to approximately the 1970's which drew analogies with putative pre-Christian solar antecedents for Epiphany in Egypt and elsewhere have run aground with the definitive refutation of these theories.', Roll, 'Toward the Origins of Christmas', p. 107 (1995).
[24] 'All this casts doubt on the contention that Christmas was instituted on December 25th to counteract a popular pagan religious festival, doubts that are reinforced when one looks at the underlying understanding of Sol and his cult. ', Hijmans, op. cit.
[25] 'The contention that December 25th was an especially popular festival for Sol in late antiquity is equally unfounded, as is as the notion that this festival was established by Aurelian when he supposedly instituted a new cult of the sun.', Hijmans, op. cit.
[26] 'In short, while the winter solstice on or around the 25th of December was well established in the Roman imperial calendar, there is no evidence that a religious celebration of Sol on that day antedated the celebration of Christmas, and none that indicates that Aurelian had a hand in its institution.20 One might think that celebrating the sun on the winter solstice is so self-evident that we need hardly doubt that such a festival had a long tradition, but what evidence we have actually belies that notion. The traditional feast days of Sol, as recorded in the early imperial fasti, were August 8 and/or August 9 , possibly August 28 , and December 11. These are all dates that are unrelated to any important celestial alignment of Sol, such as the solstices and equinoxes.', Hijmans, op. cit.
[27] 'This means that in the early fourth century, when Christmas was established by the church on December 25, anyone surveying the calendar of festivities in honour of Sol would identify the period from October 19 to October 22 as far more important than December 25, and the festival of August 28 as far older. If the aim was to “neutralize” the cult of Sol by “taking over” its major festival, December 25th seems the least likely choice.', Hijmans, op. cit.
[28] 'On the evidence currently available we cannot exclude the possibility that, for instance, the 30 chariot races held in honor of Sol on December 25 were instituted in reaction to the Christian claim of December 25 as the birthday of Christ. In general, the extent to which late pagan festivals copied, incorporated, or responded to Christian practices, elements, and dates deserves far more attention than it has received; cf. Bowersock 1990, 26-7, 44-53.', Hijmans, op. cit.
[29] 'But all our surviving calendars that preserve the month of December mark 17 December as the date for the Saturnalia. In his discussion of the origins of the Saturnalia, Macrobius explains that the Saturnalia was often celebrated over three days from 14 to 17 Decemver, since the former was the date given by the Numan calendar, the latter the date given by the Julian calendar after Caesar added two days to the month', Newlands, 'Statius' Silvae and the poetics of Empire', p. 236 (2006).
[30] 'The Saturnalia occupy a position exactly between the Consualia of the 15th and the Opalia of the 19th of December.', Versnel, 'Inconsistencies in Greek and Roman Religion: Transition and reversal in myth', p. 165 (1993).
[31] 'Eventually, the carnival expanded to a full seven days, December 17 to 23.', Littleton, 'Gods, goddesses, and mythology', volume 11, p. 1255 (2005).
[32] 'In short, we have no firm evidence for a festival for Sol on December 25th until Julian wrote his hymn to Helios in December of 362. The entry in the calendar of 354 is probably for Sol, although only the epithet invictus is used (above, n. 4), and probably dates to 354, although it was possibly added later. Circumstantial evidence suggests that a festival of Sol on the winter solstice was not yet included in such calendars in the late 320s. As the Christian celebration of Christmas on December 25th can be attested in Rome by AD 336, at which point it may already have been well-established,34 and the celebration of Sol on that day cannot be attested before AD 354/362 and had not yet entered the calendar in the late 320s, it is impossible to postulate that Christmas arose in reaction to some solar festival. There is quite simply not one iota of explicit evidence for a major festival of Sol on December 25th prior to the establishment of Christmas, nor is there any circumstantial evidence that there was likely to have been one.', Hijmans, 'Usener's Christmas: A Contribution to the Modern Construct of Late Antique Solar Syncretism', in 'Die Metamorphosen der Philologie. Hermann Usener und seine Folgen', (2011).
[33] Paul Ernest Jablonski, 'De origine festi nativitatis Christi', in te Water (ed.), 'Pavli Ernesti Iablonskii Opuscula', volume 3, p. 317 (1809), cited by Roll, 'Towards the Origins of Christmas', p. 130 (1995).
[34] 'Now Hardouin has very learnedly proved, that among the Romans the twenty fifth of December was always celebrated as the Nativity of their God of Day, or the Sun. On this Day an antient Roman Calendar has the Words - Natalis invicti- the Birth-Day of the invincible;- -a Name which Julian the Apostate likewise gives to the Persian God Mithra, or the Sun.', Clement, 'Sermons on several subject and occasions', volume 2, p. 65 (1774).
[35] Usener, 'Das Weihnachtsfest und Christlicher Festbrauch' (1889), cited by Roll, 'Towards the Origins of Christmas', p. 131 (1995).
[36] 'And indeed, ever since Usener’s studies of the feast of Christmas, the idea that December 25 was chosen as Christ’s birthday to counteract this important pagan festival has received wide acceptance.', Hijmans, 'Sol Invictus, the Winter Solstice, and the Origins of Christmas' (2011).
[37] 'That a specific cult or festival of Sol played the role in the establishment of Christmas on December 25 that Usener postulates for it is ultimately based on three pieces of evidence. The first is the date itself, December 25th and evidence that there was a pagan solar festival on that day. The second is a very late and polemically anti-catholic gloss on the 12th century Syriac scholar Bar Salibi.16 The third is an out-of-context passage from an anonymous homily of unknown date, but believed to be of the early or mid fourth century A.D. Usener and others also adduce many examples of solar imagery linked to Christ - as the true light, the sun come down to earth, the sun of justice, the true sun, etc. - but none of these offer any direct evidence of an important festival for Sol on December 25th giving rise to the establishment of Christmas.', Hijmans, 'Usener's Christmas: A Contribution to the Modern Construct of Late Antique Solar Syncretism', in 'Die Metamorphosen der Philologie. Hermann Usener und seine Folgen', (2011).
[38] 'Mithras' birth is generally supposed to have occurred, and been celebrated, on 25 December, but that rests solely on the assumption that it coincided with the Natalis Invicti, the birthday of the official Sun god. Ths assumption is reasonable but not self-evidently correct. A valiant attempt was made by I. Toh ('Das lokale System der mithraischen Personifikationen im Gebiet von Poetovio,' Artheoloki vestnik 28 (1977), 385-92) to correlate other events in the story of Mithras with the seasonal cycle and hence with a liturgical year, but it was not, in my opinion, persuasive (R. Beck, 'Mithraism since Franz Commont', ANRW II.17.4 (1984), 2002-115, at 2040-1). More cautiously and convincingly, R. Merkelbach (Mithras (1984), 141-5) suggested several dates as potentially significant, arguing principally from the zodiacs with which Mithraic icons are so liberally endowed.', Beck, 'Beck on Mithraism: collected works with new essays', p. 55 (2004).
[39] 'There is no evidence of any kind, not even a hint, from wihin the cult that this, or any other winter day, was important in the Mithraic calendar. Although three seasonal zodiacal signs are singled out in the iconography (Taurus, Leo and Scorpius), Aquarius, the sign that would correspond to notional mid-winter, being diametrically opposite to Leo, is never paid special attention.75 No Mithraic votive is dated 25th December (VIII A.D. KAL. IAN.). Nor is there any mention among the dipinti in the mithraeum of S. Prisca of Mithras' birthday, though the first line of a zodiacal poem was written up on the wall, starting, quite unconventionally, with Aries, the first sign of Spring.76.', Alvar, 'Romanising oriental Gods: myth, salvation, and ethics in the cults of Cybele, Isis and Mithras', in Gordon (ed. trans.), Religions in the Graeco-Roman World, p. 410 (2008).
[40] Of the mystery cult of Sol Invictus Mithras we know little with certainty, and even if we leave aside the problem of the relationship between the Mithraic mysteries and the public cult of Sol, the notion that Mithraists celebrated December 25th in some fashion is a modern invention for which there is simply no evidence.', Hijmans, 'Usener's Christmas: A Contribution to the Modern Construct of Late Antique Solar Syncretism', in 'Die Metamorphosen der Philologie. Hermann Usener und seine Folgen', (2011).
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