Christmas in History

Every year the Christian world celebrates the birth of Christ the Lord in all parts of the globe. Parents hasten to buy gifts and dolls for their children and vie with one another in making the Christmas tree, and they begin preparing to celebrate it from the last days of the month of November. In every home a grotto is built, adorned with flowers, colored papers, lamps, and candles, containing little figures of the cattle and the sheep and a modeled image of a star, symbolizing the place where Christ the Lord was born in Bethlehem of Judea, and symbolizing also the guide that went before the shepherds from the open country to the manger where the child Jesus lay shortly after his birth.

Indeed, in these observances there are several precious benefits, some spiritual — and these are the more important — and some purely material. How noble it is that the little ones should be reminded every year of the birth of Christ the Lord, and that this good memory should be planted in their minds for the whole of life. And what a beautiful memory it is for grown people: the memory of the birth of the messenger of goodness and peace, the good Teacher, whose teachings have moved down the centuries and the generations as a shining, radiant guide, to straighten what has grown crooked in the morals of nations and individuals. Were I to attempt to enumerate the spiritual benefits reaped from this commemoration, I should certainly fall short, for that would require massive volumes and a theological education. As for the material benefits, the chief of them is the briskness of buying and selling in every market of the world for the sake of donning new holiday clothes, children and adults alike, and the enjoyment of gladness and joy for two days or a week, that people may forget the troubles and problems of life, if only for a time. Upon my life, there is in this an eloquent wisdom, pointing clearly to the nobility of purpose of those who devised the idea of the feast.

But wait. Someone may ask what I mean by saying "those who devised the idea of the feast." Is it not mentioned in the Gospel? Was it not enjoined by Holy Scripture? My answer is no: neither Scripture nor the apostles enjoined it; rather, it is the arrangement of certain eminent men of the Church, and the outcome of numerous developments that took place during the first five centuries after Christ. Christians did not celebrate it during those centuries. Nor was there agreement in that age upon a fixed day for the feast: some said it fell on the twenty-fifth of December, others said it fell on the sixth of January, and others celebrated it on the twenty-fifth of March.

The first to urge that it should be reckoned on the twenty-fifth of December was Theophilus of Antioch, in the year 180 A.D., in an epistle of his in Latin still preserved in the library of Magdeburg. Hippolytus referred to it in the year 202, in his commentary on verse 23 of the fourth chapter of the Book of Daniel, saying that the birth of Christ took place on Wednesday, the twenty-fifth of December, in the forty-second year of the reign of Augustus, Caesar of Rome. The first certain reference to this date occurs in the calendar of Philocalus of the year 354; here is its translation word for word: "In the first year of the Lord, the Lord Jesus Christ was born on Friday, falling on the twenty-fifth of December, the fifteenth day of the moon." And although the twenty-fifth of December of the first year A.D. was a Sunday and not a Friday, we find that it was not celebrated as a feast.

Clement of Alexandria, in the year 200, mentions several dates for the day of Christ's birth, but he describes them all by saying that they are sheer fables. He says that some historians claim the birth took place in the twenty-eighth year of the reign of Augustus, on the twenty-fifth of the month of Pachon (an Egyptian month), corresponding to the twentieth of May. Others allege it was on the 24th or 25th of the month of Pharmuthi, that is, the 19th or 20th of April. Clement himself fixes the date at November 17, in the third year before Christ. However, a writer whose name is unknown composed a pamphlet in Latin in which he determined — by revelation, as he put it — that the birth took place on Wednesday, the 28th of March, the day thought to be the feast of the birth of the sun, as a symbol of the Sun of Righteousness.

Polycarp concluded that the Nativity fell on a Sunday, that is, the day on which the creation of the world began, and that the baptism of Christ was on a Wednesday, that is, the day of the birth of the sun. It may be that certain Latin writers and historians in the year 354 shifted the feast from January 6 to December 25, which was the feast of the birth of the sun among the pagans.

The Syrian and Armenian Christians accused the Romans of being worshippers of the sun and of idols, saying that it was the followers of certain men of the Western Church who appointed the twenty-fifth day of December as the day of Christ's

birth, when in truth it was a pagan feast among the sun-worshippers. Chrysostom said, in a sermon he delivered at Antioch on the twentieth of December in the year 386 or 388, that the 25th of December had been a feast known in the West from ancient times, and that the Western peoples dwelling in the region lying between Thrace and Cadiz honored this feast and celebrated it as a pagan festival. Its origin, then, is in the West, and from there it spread rapidly into the Eastern lands. Our proof of this is that Honorius, Emperor of Rome in the West, wrote to his mother and to his brother Arcadius, Emperor of Byzantium, describing to her how the feast was celebrated in the West. The Christians of the Eastern Roman Empire soon adopted it. The three patriarchs of the East acknowledged it officially in the days of Pope Anastasius (398–401): the Patriarch Theophilus of Alexandria, the Patriarch John of Jerusalem, and the Patriarch Flavian of Antioch. And the Armenian Patriarch Isaac adopted it from Proclus, Patriarch of Constantinople, in the year 440. But the Armenian Christians who were subject to the Byzantine patriarchal see kept this feast for only thirty years.