December 25 and the Sun God: Why the 'Pagan Borrowing' Theory Is Only Half the Story

“Christmas is just a rebranded pagan holiday — the church stole the date from the Roman sun god.” This claim surfaces reliably in December, usually as a conversation stopper. It has the feel of suppressed historical knowledge, something the church doesn’t want you to know. And it gets enough things right to be misleading: December 25 was indeed associated with solar festivals in late Roman religion, and the church did sometimes adapt cultural forms to Christian purposes. But the specific claim that the date of Christmas was borrowed from a pagan festival turns out to be built on shakier ground than most people realize — and the chronology runs in the wrong direction.

Where the Theory Came From

The “replacement hypothesis” is not an ancient Roman secret. It was proposed in 1889 by the German philologist Hermann Usener, in a work on the Roman calendar. Usener argued that the Roman emperor Aurelian established the festival of Sol Invictus (“Unconquered Sun”) on December 25 in 274 CE, and that the Christian church subsequently adopted this date for Christmas to ease the transition of pagan converts.

This hypothesis was widely accepted in the twentieth century and became something like standard textbook explanation. The problem, which scholars began pressing more seriously in recent decades, is the chronology.

The Dates Don’t Line Up as Expected

The key evidence against the simple replacement story is that Christian records place December 25 as the date of Jesus’s birth before Aurelian established his sun god festival there.

Hippolytus of Rome (c. 170–235 CE), in his Commentary on Daniel — written around 204 CE — already mentions December 25 as the date of Jesus’s nativity. Tertullian, writing in the same period, preserved calculations that pointed toward the same date. These records predate Aurelian’s Sol Invictus festival of December 25 by approximately seventy years.

This chronological gap matters enormously. If Christians were already observing or calculating December 25 as Jesus’s birth date in the early third century, then the simple claim that Christianity borrowed the date from Aurelian is not coherent. The borrowing, if any occurred, may have run the other direction: Aurelian may have placed his solar festival on a date that the growing Christian movement had already claimed.

The Calculation Hypothesis

What would explain the early Christian association of December 25 with Jesus’s birth, if not pagan borrowing? The leading alternative scholarly explanation is what liturgical historians call the Calculation Hypothesis.

In some streams of early Christian theological thinking, there was a conviction that the great events of a prophet’s life — specifically his death and his conception — would fall on the same calendar date. Applied to Jesus: his death (at Passover, rendered in the Julian calendar as approximately March 25) and his conception would both have fallen on March 25. Nine months from March 25 yields December 25.

Thomas J. Talley, in The Origins of the Liturgical Year — the most thorough English-language scholarly treatment of how the Christian calendar developed — argues that this kind of theological calendrical reckoning, rooted in Jewish interpretive traditions rather than in pagan practice, is a more historically plausible account of the December 25 date than the replacement hypothesis. Susan K. Roll’s Toward the Origins of Christmas offers a careful comparison of both theories.

Neither Talley nor Roll claims the Calculation Hypothesis is certainly correct. The honest scholarly position, as New Testament historian Andrew B. McGowan notes in his survey article in Biblical Archaeology Review, is that the origin of December 25 remains genuinely debated. The question has not been settled.

Gerard van Honthorst · Adoration of the Shepherds, 1622 · Public Domain. An artist’s imaginative depiction of the nativity; not a documentary record. Honthorst (1592–1656) was known for his candlelit nocturnal scenes.

What the Bible Actually Says

It is worth noting what the Bible itself does not say: it does not specify a date for Jesus’s birth. The Gospel of Luke provides some circumstantial details — shepherds keeping watch at night, which might favor a different season — but offers no calendar date. Matthew’s infancy narrative is similarly silent on the question of the date. The early church was aware of this and, as the historical record shows, did not agree on December 25 as universally decisive until considerably later.

This is not a scandal but a historical fact: the church determined which texts were authoritative Scripture, and which dates marked significant commemorations, through processes that unfolded over centuries. The date of Christmas is part of that process — and as with many such questions, the simple popular story turns out, on examination, to be a simplification.

What to Do With This

Knowing that the “pagan borrowing” theory is a nineteenth-century hypothesis that the evidence complicates — rather than an obvious historical fact — does not tell us exactly when Jesus was born, because no historical source does. What it does is remove a piece of confident skepticism that often functions as more certain than it has any right to be.

The substance of Christmas — that the God of Israel became a human being in first-century Judea — stands or falls on different grounds entirely, none of which involve the Roman calendar. The date question is genuinely interesting and genuinely unresolved. But it has less bearing on what Christmas means than people on either side of the argument tend to assume.

References

• Thomas J. Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year, 2nd emended ed. (Liturgical Press, 1991)
• Susan K. Roll, Toward the Origins of Christmas (Liturgia Condenda 5; Kok Pharos, 1995)
• Andrew B. McGowan, “How December 25 Became Christmas,” Biblical Archaeology Review 28/6 (November/December 2002): 46–48, 51

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