Father and daughter decorate the Christmas tree in anticipation of Christmas. But why is this day celebrated on December 25?
Nowadays, many (but not all) Christians celebrate Christmas on December 25. If the date of Jesus Christ's birth is not precisely known, why was this date chosen?
There are two main theories as to why Christmas is celebrated on December 25. One, known as the “religious history” hypothesis, suggests that Christmas replaced one or more pagan holidays. The other theory, called the “calculation” hypothesis, suggests that early Christians used certain calculations to establish December 25 as Jesus' birthday.
In fact, both theories could be true. “The two hypotheses are not mutually exclusive,” Philip Nothaft, a research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University, who studies the history of astronomy and chronology, told Live Science in an email. Nothaft has studied and written about the date of Christmas.
Two theories
It is unclear when or why some Christians began celebrating Jesus' birth on December 25.
Ancient sources indicate that a festival dedicated to Sol Invictus, the sun god, was celebrated in the Roman Empire on December 25, raising the possibility that it was replaced by Christmas. There was also a pagan festival called Saturnalia in mid-December that lasted several days.
There are some complications with this “religious history” hypothesis, however: Christians may have begun celebrating Jesus’s birthday on December 25 even before Sol Invictus was instituted, as Paul Bradshaw, professor emeritus of theology at the University of Notre Dame, points out in an article published in The Oxford Handbook of Christmas (Oxford University Press, 2020).
Nothaft agreed. “A lot depends on when December 25 became associated with the Roman festival dedicated to [Sol Invictus],” he wrote in an email. “Most scholars would probably agree that it was not before 274 CE, when [Emperor] Aurelian dedicated a new temple to Sol Invictus in Rome.
“We know too little about this holiday to draw firm conclusions,” Nothaft added. There is also the question of how significant the holiday was for early Christians to associate it with the birth of Jesus.
December 25 is also “the date when observers in the Northern Hemisphere can first detect the northward movement of the sun” after the winter solstice, David Allen, an astronomer at the Anglo-Australian Observatory, wrote in a 1992 paper published in the journal Archaeoastronomy. Seeing this movement may explain why the festival was celebrated on that date, Allen noted.
Another theory, the calculation hypothesis, is based on the assumption that early Christians calculated Jesus' birthday by adding nine months to the date they believed Jesus was conceived. One possibility is that some early Christians believed Jesus' crucifixion was March 25, and they added nine months to get December 25. This would imply that early Christians linked the date of Jesus' crucifixion to the date of conception, as Bradshaw noted.
One argument in favor of this hypothesis is an inscription on a statue dating to the third century, which contains calculations about when Easter should be celebrated, and also mentions that Jesus was crucified on March 25, 29, as Bradshaw noted in his article. (Scholars tend to believe that Jesus, who died at age 33, was born around 4 B.C.E.)
The problem with the calculation hypothesis is that it is unclear why early Christians associated March 25 with the date of Jesus' crucifixion and conception, Bradshaw writes.
“Both theories are surrounded by uncertainty, but I think the computational hypothesis has a slight edge,” he said.
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