Joe Heschmeyer debunks the slew of popular myths about Christmas’s pagan origins.
Transcription:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and it’s that time of year again when people start claiming that Christmas is really pagan. Now, on the face of it, that’s not an entirely crazy theory. I mean, Christmas is celebrated on December 25th, a day not found in the Bible, and it’s on a day. That’s the winter solstice on the old Roman calendar. Plus you’ve got things like Christmas trees and even things called yuel logs that certainly seem pagan, right? Well add to that, that there’s this longstanding practice of certain Protestant groups telling their congregations that Christmases of pagan origins. This is one of the reasons that Puritans refuse to celebrate Christmas and actually outlawed it in the late 17th century in Massachusetts. And then you’ve got these days a growing chorus of modern non-religious people, non-Christians and neopagan who claim that Christmas is theirs, or at least not Christians.
And it’s not surprising given all of this, that people come to the conclusion that sure, maybe Christmas isn’t of Christian origin. Maybe it was just placed there on December 25th to counteract some pagan holiday, very common popular myth, but a myth, it is because the truth is the whole Christian Christmas is pagan thing really falls apart when you look at the historical evidence. Now this year I’m going to look at a brand new video called a Very Pagan Christmas, which claims to be a documentary despite not citing any documentation, but it has this going for you. It is pretty slick, it’s pretty well made. It uses AI pretty effectively in a way to draw you into the message being presented. And the core claim of the video is this
CLIP:
Hidden beneath this holiday’s, cheerful facade lies a story far older than the birth of Christ, one filled with powerful ancient rituals, strange symbols, and a mysterious darkness that still lingers in the air.
Joe:
So that’s kind of the thesis statement, if you will, of the video. It’s this idea that what we think of as Christmas traditions, everything from the date to elements like the Christmas tree and eLog, and we’re going to get into all of that stuff that it’s really rooted in not only paganism but pagan traditions that are actually much older than the birth of Christ. Now we’ll get into why none of that is true, but I want to start with the big issue. Why was December the 25th chosen? Well, according to the documentary, it was chosen because Theodosius had legalized, made Christianity the legal religion of the Roman Empire. Now, I do want to compliment them on this. People often think Constantine is the one who did that, and that is not correct. So they at least get the emperor and the year right. But everything else as we’re going to see goes disastrously wrong.
CLIP:
In 380 CE Emper, Theodosius went even further making Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire and banning all other forms of worship. Pagan temples were shuttered, rituals condemned, but the church faced a dilemma. Pagan beliefs and customs were deeply woven into the lives. The people to erase them would be nearly impossible. And so a new strategy was born, one that would take the familiar pagan rights and fold them into a Christian framework. The church began to absorb elements of paganism reinterpreting festivals and customs in ways that aligned with its doctrine. Ancient holidays celebrating the cycles of nature. The movement of the sun and the harvests were transformed into saints days and Christian festivals. The winter solstice, once a time of rebirth for the sun in pagan traditions was reimagined as the birth of Christ the Savior who would bring light into a darkened world.
Joe:
So if you’re paying careful attention, you’ll notice he’s really made two key claims and they’re important that we get the details of them right. Number one, soon after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in three 80, the decision was made to create Christmas on December 25th. And it matters there that it’s after Christianity becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire because the whole thesis is because of that, they’re looking for a way to appease these disgruntled traditionalist pagans who don’t want to give up their old practices. And so that leads to the second key claim that December 25th was chosen to rival ancient holidays on which Roman Pagan celebrated the cycles of nature like the solstice. So again, the timeline matters. The order of these things matters. If it turns out December 25th is much older, then Christianity becoming the state religion, then you’ll realize the whole thing falls apart, right?
Because here’s the good news, those two key claims are very demonstrably untrue. Let’s take them apart one by one, starting with the first one that December 25th was settled on shortly after the year three 80. None of that’s true. And to start, let’s turn to the work of Thomas Schmidt. Now, he was at the time at Yale, he is now I believe, teaching at Fairfield the university, not the hotel. And he has done some really good work as far as I know, kind of groundbreaking work on St. A, politics of Rome who was an influential early third century Christian theologian amongst other things who lived from about the year one 70 to about the year 2 35. Now, he was one of actually several early Christians who tried to put together a sort of timeline of the history of the world and of the Bible. Now, notice here in terms of just motives, they’re clearly not saying What are pagan feast days we can take over?
They’re just trying to say, okay, there’s all of these different books of the Bible and we’ve got ’em in different orders, and they describe all sorts of different events. How do all of these different things line up? And so he’s trying to do that to, we will say mixed success. The details don’t really matter. It doesn’t even matter if his calculations are right. We don’t even need to get into all the math. But the core of his theory is this, starting with the fact that he believes the world began on the first day of spring, which kind of makes sense. It makes more sense in the world, I guess beginning in the middle of fall or winter or something. And the first day of spring on the Roman calendar was March 25th, and he believed for a variety of reasons we don’t need to get into right now, that Jesus was born exactly 5,502 years and nine months later, which as Schmidt points out, would put his birthday on exactly December 25th.
Now, the point here is not that hypo politics is right, the point here is that hypo politics is not motivated by some pagan feast because notice a crucial detail how politics hypothesis lives and dies in the late one hundreds and early two hundreds. This is well before Christianity’s ever even legalized. He’s about a century before Constantine, and it’s much longer before Christianity becomes the official state religion of the Roman Empire. So the thesis that December 25th is being chosen because of Theodosius decision in three 80 makes no sense when you realize the politics is talking about it in the early two hundreds. As Schmidt points out, this also means that the December 25th date could not have in response to Saturnalia or the Feast of Soul Invictus because neither was celebrated on December 25th on that date in Roman history. As Schmidt points out, Saturnalia never was celebrated on December 25th, and the Feast of Soul was only celebrated on the feast of December 25th much later.
So apologies clearly, clearly could not have chosen that date to please pagan sentiments. In other words, he couldn’t be responding to two holidays that didn’t exist yet. The video talked about, oh, these longstanding pagan practices from well before the birth of Christ, and none of that is true. So that’s the first key claim. Soon after Christian, he became the official religion of the Roman Empire. The decision is made to create Christmas on December 25th. But you might say, well, hold on, that’s just one guy’s speculation and that’s fair. But we can point to what’s called the calendar of 3 54. And the calendar of 3 54 is basically an almanac, and in it, it’s looking at all sorts of different events. This is from that period in between when Constantine legalizes Christianity. So it’s kind of coexisting with Paganism and in three 80 when it becomes the official state religion.
So it’s still before the period that any of this is allegedly happening. So in the Almanac or in the calendar, it has both Christian events and Pagan one. And one of the things that it also includes is the first unambiguous evidence of Christmas being celebrated by Christians on December 25th. There’s just no getting around it. It is quite clearly just right there. So this obviously throws into not just doubt, but straight up disproves the idea that this somehow happened after three 80, and if it didn’t happen after three 80, that means it also didn’t happen because Christians had become the official state religion and were trying to appease pagans. So the whole thing falls like a chain of dominoes. And we’re just getting started because remember the second key claim, which is that, oh, well, they’re trying to either rival or maybe appease these ancient holidays on which Roman pagans celebrated the cycles of nature like the winter solstice. So here’s one of the moments in the documentary where it returns to this theme.
CLIP:
The winter solstice, once a time of rebirth for the sun in pagan traditions was reimagined as the birth of Christ the Savior who would bring light into a darkened world.
Joe:
And the video returns to this claim saying this,
CLIP:
For the early church, these deeply entrenched beliefs presented both a challenge and an opportunity. The Solstice traditions were an inseparable part of life, removing them entirely would likely fail.
Joe:
So allegedly these early Christians, sometime shortly after the year three 80 chose December 25th to respond to this deeply rooted pagan devotion to the winter solstice. The only problem with this is as Ronald Hutton, a scholar and pagan for that matter points out in his book the Stations of the Sun, Romans were actually unique in not having any kind of devotion to the solstice. He points out they didn’t even know exactly when the solstice was different. Roman authors give different dates for it. They didn’t seem to be particularly attuned to it. And what’s more the traditional pagan Roman calendar had left this period as a quiet and mysterious one. If you go back and look at a pagan liturgical calendar from ancient Rome, there are feast stays all over the place, and yet when you get to the winter solstice, there’s nothing there. So it would be very strange to take one of the dead spots on the calendar and say, this is the spot we’re going to claim to try to make sure Pagans get to celebrate that holiday.
They’re used to celebrating on December 25th, and they’re like, what holiday? The closest things we’ve got are Satalia, which starts back at December 17th and the calendar day from January 1st to third. So it’s actually kind of funny here because just given the sheer number of feasts of various gods in Roman paganism, imagine the Christians were trying to find one of those big feast days to co-opt it and turn it into a saint’s day or the birth of Jesus, and somehow they accidentally choose one of the days that has no particularly obvious important meaning to their pagan neighbors. So no, it is neither true that Christians came up with December 25th sometime after three 80, nor is it true that this is response to their solstice honoring pagan neighbors because neither of those things are true, and we can show those things are false, but you might object here, but weren’t there some pagans who celebrated the solstice?
And the answer is yes, as long as by some pagans you don’t mean the ones who are actually the neighbors of the Christians and the Roman empires, and you mean pagans a thousand miles away then That’s absolutely true. And if you pay close attention to the Christmases pagan crowd, it’s clear that they sometimes mean pagans from the Roman world and sometimes seem to mean something quite different. So this is one of those things you want to kind of pin people down on. When you say pagans, what do you mean? So listen to this clip for example.
CLIP:
Before Christmas became a Christian holiday, December’s coldest nights were marked by festivals honoring the sun’s return by celebrations where fire feasting and fervent prayer sought to ward off the long bitter nights. These early rights carried out by pagans in Europe and beyond were meant to channel forces they believed were essential for survival.
Joe:
So pagans from Europe and beyond are alleged to have celebrated the winter solstice. And as you can imagine, celebrating the fact that winter is halfway over was a big deal in various points in history and the coldest places in Europe, in places like Scandinavia. But for the first really 600 years of its existence, Christianity largely spread around the Mediterranean and around the Roman world and places that were comparatively temperate climates. To give you an example, in Rome, the average temperature in December or high of 56 and a low of 40, it snows so rarely that when it did back in 2018, it actually made the New York Times snow falls in Rome, and the eternal city takes a holiday with an article talking about how the army needed to come out to help clean up the snow. That’s how unprepared the city was for the reality that it could snow.
Contrast that with some of the AI generated images of pagans covered in snow, trying to celebrate their winter solstice from the documentary. And then for contrast, again, here’s a photo that I took during the time when I was living in Rome. This was December 6th, and as you can see, the blood orange trees are just ripe. They’re perfect. It’s not a time when people are hovering together, shivering, trying to survive the mid fifties. My whole point is this, this idea that Christians in the Roman Empire were trying to fight against a Scandinavian devotion to the winter solstice makes about as much sense as saying that the American Inauguration Day on January 20th exists because it’s trying to co-opt Cape Verde’s National Heroes Day. The theory in both cases, whether it’s the inauguration one or the Christmas one, is both historically and geographically illiterate. Now, to give you maybe, I don’t know, a helpful tool to use when you hear these kind of claims, oh, that thing you like, that’s really coming from Paganism.
I would say remember this, number one, paganism isn’t a thing. Rather what I mean by that, paganism is a catchall term that the early Christians used for non-Christians in much the same way that members of one country might refer to everybody else as foreigners. But if you imagine that paganism is a thing, that there is a pagan religion or pagan culture or a pagan calendar, simply it’s like imagining that there’s a monolithic group of people called foreigners that all eat enchiladas and pierogis and celebrate the Chinese New Year. The reality is obviously quite different. Roman paganism was incredibly diverse and so was Germanic and Norse paganism. So when you hear people claiming that X practice comes from paganism, I would give you these three questions. Number one, which pagans are you talking about? Number two, when did these pagan practices originate? I mean in this case allegedly centuries before the time of Christ, literally no evidence is going to be offered of this claim.
And when did Christians co-opt and what’s the timeline we’re dealing with here? And number three, what sources do you have confirming this? It can’t just be, oh, paganism is this many thousand year old sort of thing, because there’s this kind of myth that pagan cultures are always older than Christian ones, but pretty famously the Aztec Empire is younger than the University of Oxford. What I mean there is not just that Oxford existed at the same time the Aztecs did, but that when the University of Oxford was founded, the Aztecs weren’t even a people yet. They literally did not exist yet. So this myth that Pagan stuff is older and it’s kind of this monolithic thing, push back on that because when you hear those claims, they’re almost always untrue because people referring to this Pagan X, Y, Z tend to not know what they’re talking about.
But in fairness, let’s go back to the Roman Empire because while it doesn’t make sense to trace this story of Christmas to some hodgepodge of Greco-Roman and Norse paganism, there’s no Greco-Roman main devotion to the winter solstice and they weren’t close to the Norse and couldn’t have been influenced by them whether or not the North celebrated you at the time and there’s no evidence that they did. We do have one thing that at least is on its face, a plausible contender. There’s a Roman feast of Saturnalia because if Romans do in fact have a feast in Saturn in December called Saturnalia dedicated to the God Saturn. So what do we make of this? Here’s how the documentary presents the claim
CLIP:
In ancient Rome, the Festival of Saturnalia marked the heart of the winter season, a week-long event honoring Saturn, the God of agriculture and abundance. Beginning around December 17th, Saturn was a joyous and unruly time when societal norms were turned upside down, masters served, their servants, gambling was allowed and all were free to revel without restraint.
Joe:
What you just heard was really the high point of the documentary because those cleans were at least largely true. There really was a Roman fees called cilia. It was sometimes a pretty raucous affair with a lot of drinking and gambling and the like. And it did happen in mid-December, although not December 25th. In fact, it’s pretty different from Christianity’s Christmas or the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6th and different enough that historians like David Gwynn have pointed out that the majority of modern scholars would be reluctant to accept any close connection between the Saturn and the emergence of the Christian Christmas. In other words, the mere fact that two holidays both happen in December doesn’t automatically prove that one of them influenced the other one. It certainly doesn’t prove that Christians were trying to steal Saturnalia by having a holiday on the same date and then ended up on the wrong date. I’ll get to that in a second. Microbes, a Roman historian from the fourth century actually wrote an entire book on Saturnalia, and in it he traces probably in more detail than you care about how it went from being a one day festival on December the 17th to a three day festival In practice, it ended up being Romans taking the entire week off because December the 23rd was also a holiday on their calendar called Cilia in which adults would give little clay toys to small children.
He actually jokes about this fact in the book is written as like a dialogue, and so he jokes in it about the idea that Cigarillo would be treated as a solemn religious holiday. It’s just a adults giving these little clay figurines to kids. But it also is clear by the way from the text that this wasn’t actually just seven straight days of celebration. He points out that it’s not all feast days, there’s some days of rest. In other words, you’ve got one to three days of feasting where you’ve got the drinking and the gambling and all the craziness, and then you’ve got another holiday a week after the first day of the first one. And so you may or may not have to work on the days in between. For instance, there’s some legal work you might have to do because I guess the equivalent of the courts are open.
So depending on your job, you may or may not get the day off. Slaves at least got one day off in context. There is actually something of a similarity to Christmas. Here you have one holiday Saturn, and then what appears to have been originally a different holiday. So really that’s six days after day one of Saturnalia and the Italians actually have a term for this, Faray Ponte to build the bridge. When you have two holidays close together and you just take off the days from work in between, you’ve built a bridge between the two holidays so you don’t have to work either of them rather than taking off coming back to work for a couple of days and taking off again. What if you just didn’t work that whole week? And again, there is kind of a similarity between how we do Christmas and New Year’s on kind of the secular calendar that if you’ve got December 25th off and maybe you’ve got New Year’s Eve off, then you might be tempted to say, well, okay, essentially if there’s a weekend in there, you’re like, I’ll just take the whole week off.
I’ll take a couple days off work. That’s what we’re talking about with Saturday night, not like seven unbroken days of just wild partying festivities, but just two close together December holidays and then people just taking that whole week off work in as much as they were allowed to do that. So yes, there is a superficial similarity. There are two periods of time where people have weeks off of work. In fact, in the Christian Case, you actually have 12 days of Christmas because remember, the Christmas season isn’t historically from Christmas to new. It’s from Christmas to the Feast of the Epiphany on January the sixth, and all of those were at least lighter days. There’s some interesting stuff from Christian history where monks were allowed an extra meal lunch, not really second breakfast, although the word could be translated to second breakfast. But here’s the thing, these are pretty superficial similarities.
I mean, it’s actually to me kind of striking that you get seven days off for Satalia and you get 12 days of Christmas and somehow there are no overlapping days here. The last day of the Saturnalia cycle is still two days before Christmas. If Christians are trying to create a Christian version of Sael, why in the world did they miss it? How did they not put this, at least during Saturnalia, if you wanted to say, okay, we’re going to start midway through Saturnalia, so people have to choose or I don’t know. I mean if the whole idea is we want to give people the version of the holiday they’re used to, how did they fail to do that So spectacularly, additionally, Saturnalia is not a winter solstice holiday. It was not celebrated on the winter solstice, on the Roman calendar. It was not the celebration of the birth of a God or anything like that.
Rather, it’s the story of the God Saturn breaking out of his jail in the temple for a few days and overthrowing his more powerful son Jupiter and just kind of upping the world in a raucous anarchy for a little while. And this is marked by feasting and gambling and drinking. That’s pretty different from how the early Christians celebrated Christmas. So I think a fair read would have to say, yeah, there are two holidays in the winter, but that’s about where the comparisons stop. There are different days, different dates, different customs. You’re not doing the same thing on the two holidays except at the most vague level and therefore different pur... Read more on Catholic.com