The Origins of Christmas

As the holidays approach, it might be useful to look at the historical background of Christmas. Christmas takes place during the winter solstice when the day is shortest and the night is longest. People celebrated the winter solstice long before the birth of Jesus. The concept of the birth, death, and rebirth of the sun became associated with the savior god of many cultures.

Thousands of years before Jesus, the Mesopotamians held a festival of renewal at the winter solstice designed to help the god Marduk tame the monsters of chaos for one more year. In ancient Greece, before the time of Christ, the winter solstice ritual celebrated the rebirth of the god Dionysus, who was deemed to have died and arisen from the dead. During the winter solstice, the ancient Romans celebrated the feast of Saturnalia in honor of the god Saturn. There were also ancient pre-Christian celebrations of the winter solstice by the Buddhists, Celts, Druids, Chinese, Tibetans, Indians, Koreans, Japanese, Native Americans, and others.

The reason so many cultures developed winter solstice celebrations was in order to cheer themselves up during the darkest period of the year. We often hear about people developing the blues during the Christmas season. This is because many people suffer from Seasonal Affect Disorder (SAD) and become depressed during the season when there is so much darkness. The gods celebrated in the winter solstice festivals were frequently gods of light or the sun.

Christians began celebrating the birth of Jesus on December 25th during the fourth century AD. The early fathers of the Christian Church did not know the date when Jesus had been born. December 25th was the birthdate of the Roman god Mithra. Mithraism developed in Asia Minor long before the birth of Christ. It may have come from ancient Persia. Mithra was the god of light, or the Sun, and was born of a virgin. His worshippers believed that Mithra promised resurrection from the dead and that he ascended into heaven. The worship of Mithra included forgiveness of sin by baptism of initiates and a communion of bread and wine to commemorate Mithra’s last meal on earth. The worship of Mithra presented a real problem for the Church fathers because of the similarities to the worship of Jesus. In around 353 AD, the Church fathers decided to combat Mithraism and other pagan holidays by celebrating the birth of Jesus on Mithra’s birthday, December 25. Merry Mithramas!

Scholars are in general agreement that the Bible story about Jesus being born in Bethlehem is probably fictitious. We know that Jesus came from Nazareth. The Bible says that Caesar ordered a census to levy taxes and that Joseph, as a descendent of David, had to travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem, the city of David, to register for the census (Luke 2:1-5). This was written to fulfill the prophecy that the “Messiah” would be “from the house of David.” However, the Romans kept careful records of their censuses, and scholars know that there was no worldwide census at the time of Jesus’ birth.

The late Raymond E. Brown, S.S., a Catholic priest and former Professor of Biblical Studies at Union Theological Seminary in New York, said in his magisterial The Birth of the Messiah, that “Luke’s reference to a general census of the Empire under Augustus which affected Palestine before the death of Herod the Great is almost certainly wrong….We have no evidence of one census under Augustus that covered the whole Empire, nor of a census requirement that people be registered in their ancestral cities.”

The Romans counted people at their place of domicile, not where their ancestors were born. They would not have required Joseph to travel to Bethlehem. They would have wanted him to stay in Nazareth and be counted where he lived. In addition, Caesar would not have taxed Judea while Herod was king. At the time of Jesus’ birth, Bethlehem would have been in an area that was exempt from Roman taxation.

The distinguished biblical scholar, E.P. Sanders of Oxford and Duke Universities, points out in his book, The Historical Figure of Jesus, that David lived 42 generations before Jesus. He asks, why would Joseph have to register for a tax in the town (Bethlehem) of an ancestor who lived 42 generations earlier? He describes Luke’s story of the Nativity as “Fantastic!” Another distinguished scholar, Bart D. Ehrman of the University of North Carolina, asks in his treatise, The New Testament: “Can it be possible that everyone in the empire was to return to the place their ancestors lived a thousand years earlier?”

John P. Meier of Notre Dame University, a Catholic priest who is considered by many to be the leading biblical scholar in the world, notes in his definitive work, A Marginal Jew, Rethinking the Historical Jesus, that, “Somewhere around 7-6 B.C. a Jew named Yeshua [Jesus], a shortened form of the Hebrew Yehoshua (Joshua), was born in the hillside town of Nazareth in lower Galilee. The Infancy Narritive traditions that locate his birth in Bethlehem of Judea (traditions isolated in chap. 2 of Matthew and Luke respectively) are probably later Christian theological dramatizations of the belief that Jesus was the royal Davidic Messiah.”