Was Christmas Pagan? Sorting Fact From Fiction

Was Christmas originally pagan? The short answer is… No! Here’s the longer answer.

There is a fairly common claim that Christmas was originally a pagan celebration that Christians co-opted during the first four centuries to undermine and destroy pagan religion. This has been repeated in ‘books’ (I use the word book quite loosely here) such as The Da Vinci Code, on many so-called history shows, and in the popular media. Academics, historians, the Humanist Society, and popular atheist influencers have also started to commonly adopt this claim.

However, the evidence does not support this claim.

There is no evidence from ancient sources that Christians stole the Christmas celebrations from pagans. All the supposed evidence comes from 18th—and 19th-century writers who either relied on poor translations of medieval documents or, intentionally or otherwise, misled people to make a point. Unfortunately, the claims of those Enlightenment writers have become commonly and uncritically accepted as truth.

In this post, I will review the most commonly made claims and demonstrate that ancient sources do not support them. I will then give what I think is the best-evidenced explanation of why Christmas is celebrated on the 25th of December.

The Common Claims of Stolen Pagan Festivals

There is one fact we can begin with that is absolutely certain. There is no evidence in the Gospel accounts that Jesus was born on the 25th of December. The date is not mentioned, and the context given in Matthew and Luke does not allow us to date the birth of Jesus. Any claims about the date of Jesus’s birth are made from material outside the Bible.

We also know that the early Church really wasn’t that interested in Christmas for the first three centuries of Christianity. In the 4th century, the writer Philocalas published an almanac or calendar of all the events and festivals happening in the Roman year. This was published in AD 354 and included the first recorded instance of Christmas being on the 25th of December.

There are texts that talk about the birth of Christ, but no strong evidence for any kind of Christian festival before the fourth century. Obviously, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but since the early Christians wrote a lot about their worship and were disputing with each other what worship should look like, we can safely assume that if Christmas was important for the early Church, they would have argued about it more.

Some Standard Claims We Can Quickly Deal With

There are a few standard claims made about how Christianity stole Pagan festivals to make Christmas. The most common claims are that the pagan gods Mithras, Osiris, Adonis, and Dionysius were all born on the 25th of December, and that Baby Krishna was brought gold, frankincense and myrrh.

To start with, there is no ancient source or text or image that has Krishna receiving gold, frankincense and myrrh. It is not in any Hindu sacred text and is not part of Hindu traditions. This story first appeared during the 19th century as part of the move towards religious syncretism by members of the theosophical society and was, to be blunt, made up.

We can also say very clearly and confidently that there is no historical evidence from any ancient source that Mithras, Osiris, Adonis or Dionysius were born on the 25th of December.

These gods are generally chosen because they are all related in some way to death and rebirth, so they fit nicely with the idea that Jesus was not a real person but was a copy of other already existing deities which were grafted onto the stories of either a real but ordinary person or just completely made up.

However, Dionysius, who was a Greek god, has no evidence at all for being born on the 25th of December. Adonis, a kind of Syrian God, although incorporating elements of Greek myths as well, had a different birthdate altogether. These two are the least likely to be suggested, and we can dispense with them here.

Osiris is potentially a more complicated figure.

Osiris was an incredibly important Egyptian deity who was said to be the first pharaoh. He was killed by a revival god, and then his wife Isis mummified him to preserve his spirit and he was reborn to be pharaoh in the afterlife. The cults of Osiris and Isis were popular and enduring beyond Egypt. They were particularly influential for esoteric societies such as the Golden Dawn.

As a very important god, there actually is some good evidence for when he was born. Whilst the dating is a bit complicated because you have to translate from the Egyptian calendar to the Greek calendar to the Julian calendar and then to our Gregorian calendar, it is very likely that he was born in early September. So, not the 25th of December.

We discard the claims that Jesus was a copy of Osiris, Adonis, or Dionysius. None of them were recorded as dying on the 25th of December. This leaves Mithras, who needs a more detailed look.

Mithras

Mithras is one of those ancient deities that lots of people have heard about but not many people actually know about. They might have heard about underground temples and weird rituals involving bulls. But the reality is somewhat different. And by somewhat, I mean absolutely and radically different in every possible way.

The cult of Mithras is not an ancient religion. It emerged in the 1st century AD in Rome and then spread around the Empire. It was popular amongst aspiring military officers and civil servants, especially in centres of Roman power. It was a way for people wanting to climb the social and political ladder to get ahead of the game.

The cult of Mithras was in many ways like the Freemasons. An exclusively male group of people from middle management who met, did some rituals, wore some special clothes, and helped each other to get ahead in the world while eating nice food and drinking lots of wine.

Where did Mithras Come From?

As far as can be known for certain, there was no deity called Mithras before the 1st century AD. However, there was a Persian god called Mithra.

Mithra pre-dated the rise of Zoroastrianism in Persia, and so is a very ancient god. How Mithra became Mithras is partially because of Pompey Magnus, the successful general and politician who fought against Julius Caesar on behalf of the Senate. The Roman historian Plutarch writes that the Pirates who plagued the Mediterranean were followers of the secret rites of Mithras. Pompey Magnus defeated and slaughtered the pirates in a hugely publicised campaign that helped him maintain his political power.

The contact with Mithras through the defeat of the pirates provided a link to this ancient cult. However, the cult of Mithras did not perform the same rites and rituals as the old cult, followed by the pirates. The Roman cult of Mithras adopted the name and image of the god from the eastern cult, and more or less made up its own new rites to perform together in their temples/gentlemen’s dining clubs.

There is no link between the Roman Cult of Mithras and the ancient deity of Persia apart from a similar name. There is no evidence for the cult of Mithras before the 1st century AD, and there is no evidence that Mithras was born on the 25th of December.

But the plot thickens a little bit, because there are dedications to Mithras Sol Invictus – Mithras the Unconquered Sun.

Mithras Sol Invictus?

There were some cults of Mithras that mixed Mithras with the deity Sol Invictus, the unconquered sun. Sun deities were incredibly common and were often mixed with other deities. There are also claims that Sol Invictus was born on the 25th of December and that, as Mithras and Sol Invictus were the same deity, Mithras was born on the 25th of December as well.

However, there is more evidence for Mithras and Sol Invictus being separate gods than being the same god. They were rival cults at times, and there are surviving friezes in Mithraic temples that show Mithras and Sol Invictus as separate entities.

To summarise. There is no evidence that Mithras was born on the 25th of December, and there are also no ancient sources that Mithras was a resurrectionist god.

The Roman Cult of Mithras emerged around the same time Christianity emerged. The cult of Mithras was not really ‘religious’ as we might think of it, but was rather a gentlemen’s club or the Freemasons for aspiring Roman army officers and civil servants who engaged in a kind of orientalism which adopted strange gods and rituals from eastern religions to make their gatherings a bit spicy and a bit fun.

Christianity did not steal Christmas or anything else from Mithras, which leads us to this other god we have mentioned: Sol Invictus, who is also claimed to be the source of the Christian appropriation of Christmas festivals.

Sol Invictus – The Unconquered Sun

The claim was made by syncretists, theosophists, and gentlemen esotericists in the 19th century that the cult of Sol Invictus was brought to Rome in the 3rd Century AD from Syria by Emperor Elagabalus.

They argued that Christianity was influenced by this religion and appropriated the birthday of Sol Invictus for Jesus. However, there are no ancient sources that correspond with this claim. Instead, this claim is mostly down to the racism and orientalism of those 19th-century philosophs.

Orientalist Mistakes

The Emperor Elagabalus has, in recent times, been argued to be recognised as a trans-female. There are sources written a couple of centuries after Elagabalus died that claim they would wear women’s clothes. Elagabalus is an eastern name, the ‘El’ at the beginning, comes from Semitic languages to mean god, such as with Elohim, for example.

The people writing in the 19th century put together an Emperor with an Eastern name, who was accused of gender nonconformity and who seemed to have links to sun worship, and decided that this strange Eastern religion was obviously introduced by this strange Eastern person.

That is far from the truth. Worship of sun gods is about as old as humanity. The worship of the sun was prevalent in Roman society throughout its history, although it gained particular traction after the formation of the Empire. Nero’s colossus was a form of sun god, and there are ancient sources going back to the time of the Roman kings that talk about sun worship.

So, the worship of Sol Invictus, in this case, does predate Christianity. There is the scope that it could have influenced Christianity and might have offered a festival to be appropriated. More academic scholars of ancient religions have agreed that Christianity adopted the festival of Sol Invictus as Christmas. However, once again, the evidence just doesn’t support this.

Sol Invictus Did Not Influence Christianity

The main source of evidence that is cited as proof that Christians adopted the supposed birthday of Sol Invictus, the 25th of December, as Christmas day comes from a source written by a Christian writer called the Scriptor Cyrus, supposed to date to the late 4th century.

The Scriptor Cyrus is supposed to have written that the doctors of the church were so appalled that Christians participated in the festival celebrations of Sol Invictus on the 25th of December and so they argued that the Nativity should be celebrated on the 25th of December to replace that festival. This source is widely quoted by academics and experts in the period.

This is the only evidence to support this claim. However, this evidence is not as secure as might be thought.

The Evidence Doesn’t Hold Up To Scrutiny

Scriptor Cyrus simply translates as the Syrian Writer. It is not a name. It is a designation. The name is also not on the original text, it is created by the 19th century writers who first start using this text to support their claims.

This is particularly due to the work of James Frazer and The Golden Bough, where he tried to argue for a synthesis of all religions because, he thought, all religions shared a set of universal truths and practices which joined them together.

The text being quoted does not originate from the 4th century but from the 12th century. It was written in Syria in the late 12th century and was an annotation of a document written by a local bishop.

So far, the evidentiary power of this source is shredding away. But there is more.

When people quoted from that text, they left out two important things. A crucial sentence and the theological context of that historical period. The crucial sentence that was missed comes just before the writer makes the claim that Christians appropriated Sol Invictus’s birthday for their own festival.

The sentence says, “That the reason why the fathers of the church moved the 7th of January celebration to the 25th of December is…” The text does not say outright that the Christians just used the 25th of December but that they moved it from the 7th of January. This is really important if you know the theological context of the 12th century.

The Date for Christmas Depends on When Jesus Died

The Eastern Christians in Syria celebrated Christmas on the 7th of January. Then, during the Crusades, they had more contact with Western Christians who celebrated Christmas on the 25th of December.

Both Western and Eastern Christians wanted to prove that their dating was correct. The text attributed to Scriptor Cyrus was not about how Christians stole the festival of Sol Invictus but rather was a polemic against Western Christians. The writer was trying to argue that the true date of Christmas should be the 7th of December and that the Western Christians celebrating on the 25th were celebrating a pagan festival and thus were wrong. This source does not carry sufficient weight to be acceptable for arguing that Christianity appropriated the festival of Sol Invictus for Christmas Day.

However, the almanac written by Philocalus (mentioned in the introductory paragraphs) does say that there was a feast for Sol Invictus on the 25th of December. Or, it might do anyway.

On the 25th of December the Almanac indicates that 30 chariot races were organised to celebrate the nativity of the ‘Invictus.’ This has generally been assumed to mean Sol Invictus, but there were quite a few gods with the title ‘Invictus’ in their various guises, including a few divinised emperors. Also, elsewhere in the Almanac, Sol Invictus is written about simply as Sol. So, the Invictus of the 25th could refer to a different god entirely.

But even assuming the inscription meant Sol Invictus, which is not guaranteed, does this mean that Sol Invictus was born on the 25th of December?

There is evidence that the main feast day of Sol Invictus, dating back to the time of Emperor Augustus, was the 28th of August. This was supplemented in AD 274 by Emperor Aurelian by another festival on the 22nd of October.

In the almanac, 36 chariot races are organised for the 22nd of October. Six more than the 25th of December. This indicates that the 22nd of October was a more important celebration of Sol Invictus than the 25th of December, and we know from other sources that the main celebration of Sol Invictus was the 28th of August.

The 25th of December was a Sol Invictus festival but not the main one, and if Christianity had really wanted to appropriate a festival of Sol Invictus, they would have chosen one of the other dates – the 25th of December just wasn’t important enough.

We can safely discard any claims that Christianity took the birthday festival of Sol Invictus and made it into Christmas. But there is another, more important festival that happened in December, which has also been argued to be the root of Christmas. Saturnalia.

Saturnalia

The writers of The Big Bang Theory claimed that Christianity stole the festival of Saturnalia, making this quite a popular idea. However, it has been claimed by academics, popular atheists, and other writers for a couple of centuries. We will now see whether those claims hold together. (Spoiler alert, they do not)

Who was Saturn?

Saturnalia is the festival of the god Saturn. There are few ancient sources for the god Saturn. Even in the time of the Romans, the worship of Saturn was an ancient practice so its history extends beyond our ability to easily grasp. But we can learn from the name itself. There was a town in Latium called Saturnia, which could have lent its name to Saturn or been named after Saturn.

The Etruscans, the people who preceded the Romans, worshipped a god called Satre, which could have a link to a later God called Saturn.

The Roman historian Varrus, writing during the time of Julius Caesar, said that the name Saturn comes from the Latin word Satus and means planting or sowing. For Varrus, the Saturnalia was a festival originally undertaken to mark the end of the harvest period or the start of the sowing time.

This seems to be the likeliest explanation of the name. The origins and development of the myths associated with Saturn can be followed through two main periods, Pre-Roman Latium and Republican Rome.

Saturn was a pre-Roman king who ruled the area called Latium, which would eventually be the site where Rome was built. He was a wise and just king, and under his rulership, everyone had an abundance. There were no slaves, no masters, and no one owned anything of their own, but everything was shared and held in kind.

It was a society of equality and abundance, a golden era. His throne was situated on the hill known as the Mons Saturnus, which was renamed the Capitol. At the base of the Capitol the Romans would build their forum and house their Senate.

In Virgil’s Aeneid, the story of how Aeneous fled the fall of Troy, came to Latium, and founded the dynasty, which would eventually give birth to Romulus and Remus, is told It was said that the coming of Aeneous led to the eventual corruption and collapse of the golden age as it was replaced with an age of iron.

Then, during the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, Rome became increasingly linked to Greece and adopted elements of its culture, including finding links between their gods.

Just as Jupiter was associated with Zeus, Saturn was linked to Chronos. Previously, Saturn had been seen as a benevolent and generous king. Now, he was linked to a malicious and threatening tyrant who ate his own children until Zeus/Jupiter overcame him and banished him from Greece to Italy, where he founded a kingdom which eventually became Rome. He was feared and had to be placated to stop him from destroying everyone.

How did the Romans worship Saturn?

The temple of Saturn was claimed by the Romans to be the oldest temple in Rome, dating back to the 4th century BC, but worship of Saturn predates the building of that temple. The Romans said that the worship of Saturn was obviously ancient because sacrifices to Saturn were performed in ‘the Greek style’ rather than in the Roman style.

When Romans sacrificed to the gods, they pulled their toga up over their heads like a veil. Greeks sacrificed bareheaded. The Etruscans, who predated the Romans, were a Greek people. The age of the Temple, the style of sacrifices offered, and the enduring stories all point to Saturn as being one of the oldest gods worshipped by the Romans and probably one of the founding gods of the Roman pantheon.

Saturn represented a dichotomy – the golden king with the abundant harvest and the cruel tyrant who eats his children. The temple of Saturn was the repository for the Senate treasury and was filled with riches, but the ankles of Saturn’s statue in the temple had thick wool wrapped around its ankles to represent fetters to prevent Saturn from harming the people.

The Christians would eventually focus on this theme, writing that Saturn represented everything barbarous and savage and that when gladiator fights were organised during the Saturnalia, the deaths of the gladiators were a sacrifice to Saturn. There are no Roman sources to support this, but it is not beyond the realm of possibility.

When was Saturnalia?

Saturn is too old a god for the birthday to be known or reliable. But we do know that the feast of Saturnalia, one of the biggest celebrations of the entire year, was celebrated in December to worship the god Saturn. This is what the 18th and 19th-century writers claim Christianity took and turned into Christmas. It is also one of the most popularly known claims about the origins of Christmas.

The great feast day of Saturn, when the Saturnalia happened, was the 17th of December, not the 25th. So, immediately, the argument that Christians put Christmas on the 25th of December to replace Saturnalia has lost some ground. The Saturnalia became so popular that by the time of Augustus, it lasted for a whole week.

Augustus, being the kind of quite puritan-esque emperor that he was, said that Saturnalia should only be 3 days long. Then Caligula, who liked a laugh and a drink and some light murder occasionally, extended it to four days.

Seneca, Nero’s tutor, wearisomely wrote that “Saturnalia used to be for December and now seems to last the year.” It is in much the same tone as people who complain about Christmas trees in November.

On the 17th of December, on the first day of Saturnalia, the woollen fetters around the feet of Saturn were cut away, and then a huge feast was held where the statue of Saturn was taken and laid down on a couch to join in with the food. During the festival, men and women wore a special kind of costume called Synthesis, which was normally worn by women to a dinner party – so playing around with inverting gender and social expectations.

Freedmen were made to wear a special liberty cap of a kind normally given to slaves to indicate their manumission. Slaves were allowed to talk back to their masters, and the masters would serve their slaves dinner that evening. Gambling was made legal for the festival, and generally, a whole lot of drinking and debauchery went on. People also gave each other presents, normally candles and special statues of the god.

Christians did not start giving presents at Christmas until the 15th century.

Saturnalia was common throughout the Empire but not as widely or vigorously celebrated the further away you were from Rome.

Sources from the time are clear that Saturnalia and Christmas are celebrated at the same time, right into the 5th century. So during those centuries, Christmas did not replace Saturnalia, but instead, the celebrations happened during the same month, or sometimes during the same period.

It was noted by the early Church fathers that some Christians would celebrate Saturnalia and then also Christmas. Because Saturnalia was fun and much like Christmas today, by the 3rd century AD, it had mostly become about the revelry and the social inversion and less about Saturn.

So, we can pretty clearly and confidently say that Christmas was not a rip-off of Saturnalia and that Christmas on the 25th of December was not an attempt to stop people from going to Saturnalia festivities.

But why was Christmas celebrated on the 25th of December when there was no Biblical evidence for doing so?

Why the 25th?

Originally, Christians did not celebrate Christmas. The early theologian Origin wrote that nowhere in the Bible did any righteous person celebrate a birthday. (But Origin was the kind of man that castrated himself to prevent lust so make of that what you will) It was generally believed that the celebration of birthdays was a pagan fancy, not something that a Christian should be doing.

The first recorded instance of Christmas being on the 25th of December comes in AD 354. This is a significant date because it comes after the council of Nicaea, where the church was deciding whether Jesus was God or only a man.

The argument over the humanity and divinity of Jesus, how the incarnation worked and what it meant led to the start of Christmas being celebrated in the Church. The part of the Church that wanted to emphasise that Jesus had a birthday and was human as well as divine led the way in establishing the celebration of Christmas.

Christmas celebrations were part of a theological debate over who and what Jesus was.

That’s the most likely reason for Christmas starting to be celebrated after not really being that important for the first few Christian centuries. But why the 25th of December?

Understanding how dates work in the Bible

Jews and Christians both believed that important events in history happened in a symmetrical fashion. Jewish scholars believed that the creation of the world, the birth of Abraham, and the day the coming Messiah would be born were all the same day. There was a divine pattern to history.

Christians came to believe that Jesus died on the anniversary of his incarnation. He left the world on the same day he went into the world.

Through some complicated calculations based on when the Passover happened, early Christians came to the conclusion that Christ was conceived on the 25th of March.

This was also the day when, in The Lord of the Rings, the ring is thrown into Mount Doom. Tolkien used this date to make his point about what was happening.

9 Months after the 25th of March is the 25th of December, Christmas day. Christmas was celebrated on the 25th of December because the early Church believed that he was conceived on the 25th of March, and they celebrated that day because they were making a theological point about the incarnation.

Conclusion

Not only does the evidence not hold up to scrutiny, there is another point that is often forgotten.

Christmas and the incarnation was an incredibly holy event for Christians. The early Church would not have wanted to associate it with a pagan festival for any reason, not even to try and displace pagan worship. They would have seen that as a blasphemous action.

I think that it is clear that the evidence from ancient sources does not support the claims that Christianity stole Christmas from other gods. It was a claim created in the 18th and 19th century by religious syncretists who wanted to appropriate other people’s religions into a schema which unified all religious belief. But their evidence was faulty, their arguments weak, and their conclusions flawed.

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