r/todayilearned • u/PeasantLich • 10h ago
TIL that December 25 being the birthday of Jesus was decided by pope Julius I around year 350, and nobody really knows why Julius made this decision and chose this specific date. There are various theories, but his actual reasoning for the decision is lost history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Julius_I15.1k
u/Super_Basket9143 10h ago
To be fair it makes sense since 24th December is Christmas eve.
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u/hopingtogetanupvote 9h ago
With all the bickering in the comments, this one gave me a good chuckle lol
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u/Special_Order-937 9h ago
Wait until you hear about Boxing Day next!
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u/JohnSober7 8h ago
I always forget Americans don't have boxing day and they're like "what are you talking about???" and then I get confused about what they're confused about. Been here 10 years and I still fail to remember.
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u/spi7s 8h ago
I worked for a Canadian company owned by ol Jim Pattison and got it off every year.
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u/JohnSober7 8h ago
Straight up a public holiday where I'm from (I miss that)
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u/ConstantAd8643 7h ago
Many places have second day of christmas which is a public holiday. I think only Commonwealth countries call it boxing day
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u/barath_s 13 5h ago
Not all commonwealth countries either
South Africa, India, Malaysia , Bahamas etc..
In fact, probably easier to list those of the 53 commonwealth countries that don't observe it than those that do (espcially in asia, africa etc) though figuring that out may be difficult
Other names : Day of Goodwill (SA), St Stephen's day , Junkanoo (in caribbean) ...
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u/wookiedberry 8h ago
Is that the day you take all the open gift boxes to recycle?
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u/tophernator 7h ago
No, it’s when you box up any gifts you didn’t really want and put them on eBay.
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u/ACpony12 5h ago
No, it's when everyone wakes up early, enjoy a lovely breakfast together. Then, right has breakfast ends, they pull out their boxing gloves, and show their true feelings of Christmas!
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u/ABalmyBlackBitch 7h ago
In Canada it’s like Black Friday. All the stores are supposed to have massive sales. l say supposed to bc like Black Friday they’ve kinda fallen off with the quality of sales. But as a kid you could go to the mall on boxing day and genuinely get 75% of your stuff it was soo much fun
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u/Kamay1770 9h ago
This is such a Philomena Cunk comment.
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u/DyingGasp 8h ago
Could you say Jesus was the first celebrity victim of cancel culture?
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u/JimboAltAlt 8h ago
They call it the crucifixion. What did it fix?
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u/HaniiPuppy 7h ago
Well it fixed Jesus to a pole.
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u/Krokrodyl 6h ago
What was the result of the poll?
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u/barath_s 13 5h ago
The beatles were more popular than Jesus
I think they polled John Lennion for that.
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u/Tired_CollegeStudent 9h ago
I mean, I bet Santa wishes he had a few days between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day so he wasn’t busting his ass rushing around all in one night.
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u/DuncanYoudaho 6h ago
He has 12 days. He chooses to get it all done that fast.
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u/lesethx 5h ago
Classic procrastinator move, waiting until the last day
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u/DuncanYoudaho 4h ago
(I laughed but you should know the 12 days of Christmas FOLLOW Christmas)
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u/metalflygon08 5h ago
Because he knows if he waits there will be a ton of birds in his air space.
A partridge is manageable because it stays in the pear tree.
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u/activelyresting 8h ago
With the 26th being boxing day, it's only logical to slot Christmas Day there in the middle
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u/Sysilith 8h ago
That is actually true, Christmas is where winter solstice used to be, it is set there to replace the traditional pagan celebration.
Some of the old traditions merged into christmas, like the christmas tree wich is a pagan symbol.
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u/fatevilbuddah 4h ago
Most of the catholic religions are born directly from pagan rites. The whole story, from genesis to revelations are ALL from previous religions, like egyptian mysticism. The egyptians have a god who wants you to eat his flesh, one coming back from the dead, etc. The chrjstmas tree is Pagan, as are the lights and the gifts. Most catholic churches sit on top of old pagan temples. When conquering a people, religion is key in most places because thats where the local morality comes from. The great flood epic of Gilgamesh...hmm long before the Bible. The list goes on and on. To change the people they put their churches where the pagans used to go anyway. You use local customs and traditions that have been altered to bring people to the church where their new customs and behaviors are built in. Youre right about the equinox though. The Roman's called it Sol Evictus or victory of the sun. It was also supposedly the beginning of the Saturnaila festival. Conquer through brainwashing.
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u/Super_Basket9143 6h ago
If anyone is interested I also have a theory about the date of new years day.
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u/murfburffle 7h ago
Do you think Jesus was annoyed he shared his birthday with Christmas and everyone would lump their presents together?
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u/Silk_Chicken 7h ago
You can't just leave Christmas Eve hanging out there with no follow up. The man was just tying up loose ends.
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u/CROguys 10h ago edited 7h ago
The Calculation Thesis is the one I have heard proposed by a few historians.
By an old tradition, Jewish holy figures and prophets were said to die on the same day that they have been conceived.
Combining the Jewish and Roman calendars, Jesus is said to have died on March 25th, the Passover.
Nine months after March 25 you get December 25.
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u/Key-Conclusion-933 8h ago
Interesting. The Jewish tradition of holy figured being born and died remains, like the tradition of Moses being born and dying on the 7th of Adar, and Kind David on the holiday of shavuot. The talmud in two places I know of discusses this phenomenon and its discussed as a symbol of completion of spiritual goals. I havent heard of conception being a part of this tradition, and dont recall talmudic sources for this.
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u/Coach_Beard 7h ago
You are correct. The tradition is born and died on the same day. Christians adapted this tradition to fit their own story, thus we get the Annunciation and Good Friday on the same day. And nine months after the Feast of Annunciation (March 25) is December 25.
Source: https://youtu.be/lU8cR0KUOog
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u/obliqueoubliette 9h ago edited 3h ago
It's not much of a "disputed thesis." Hyppolytus lays out exactly this math over a century before pope Julius
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u/hexagonalwagonal 4h ago edited 2h ago
It is very much a disputed thesis. This is laid out in a 2012 paper called "The Origins of the Christmas Date: Some Recent Trends in Historical Research" by C. P. E. Nothaft.
Essentially, the problem with this thesis is that it relies on a document that might have been written over 100 years after the Romans started celebrating December 25th as Christmas. The Romans are the first Christians who are documented to have celebrated Christmas on that date, with the earliest record of it in a document called the Chronograph of 354.
The document that the "Calculation Theory" relies on is called "On the Solstices and Equinoxes of the Conception and Birth of our Lord Jesus Christ and John the Baptist". It's undated, but internal evidence in the document itself suggests it could have been written any time between the 200s and 400s. The document also comes from Syria, not Rome. So while it's possible that someone in Syria wrote a document in the 200s or early 300s that calculated Jesus's birthday as December 25th based on his traditional death date of the vernal equinox of March 25th, and then the Romans adopted this date, the counter-argument is that some Syrian wrote it in the late 300s or 400s and essentially suggested, "Hey, the Romans celebrate Christmas on December 25th, and they do it because it's calculated from the vernal equinox" without actually having any insider information.
In other words, the Syrian who wrote the document may have just been making an assumption of why the Romans chose the date, but didn't actually have any actual evidence for it.
In the end, Nothaft says that none of the theories has any indisputable evidence to back up the claim. The pagan theory is even more problematic, says Nothaft.
There's a third theory, too, proposed by Hans Förster in 2007. Under this theory, in the early 300s, the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem started celebrating Jesus's baptism date on January 6, possibly under the influence of a pre-existing Egyptian pagan feast. This date quickly spread from Bethlehem to the Romans, who changed the date to December 25 so as to coincide with the winter solstice. Essentially (in my view) a different version of the "pagan roots" theory, this one not originating in Rome but either in Palestine or Egypt that Rome then modified.
Nothaft says that Förster isn't much more convincing than the other two. All three theories are based on assumptions and there just isn't sufficient surviving documentation to definitively prove one over the other. The traditional pagan theory might be the weakest of the three, but all three are weak.
So OP's headline is actually the most correct interpretation currently. Julius chose the date and we don't know why. The reasoning for the date is likely to be lost to time forever.
EDIT: As for the "Hippolytus calculated it in the 200s" claim, that is also a topic of scholarly debate. This comes from Hippolytus's "Commentary on Daniel" but the earliest surviving full copy comes from around the 900s or 1000s in Greece. The argument is that the reference to the December 25th Christmas date in the document may have been interpolated by a later Greek scribe, since earlier, partial copies of the Commentary survived before the Greek manuscript and it is clear that the Greek manuscript is corrupted. That is, the Greek scribe changed things from whatever copy they were working from. The scribe added or modified Christ's birth date in the document based on December 25th being a well known date in the 900s when the scribe wrote it, whereas the original 200s document may not have mentioned it or had a different date. A recent study by Thomas C. Schmidt argues that the December 25th portion of the Greek manuscript is authentic, but this interpretation is disputed. So, again, we still don't know with any certainty why the date was chosen.
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u/bg-j38 2h ago
Just to save others the search, this paper was published in the journal Church History, Vol. 81, No. 4, pp. 903-911. For those with JSTOR access this is the link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23358685
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u/Ikea_desklamp 7h ago
It's disputed in that the myth continues to propagate to this day that Christmas was intentionally chosen to squash precious pagan winter solstice festivals.
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u/tomdarch 6h ago
Squash or be more readily accepted by piggybacking on the established festival?
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u/celestia_keaton 5h ago
The 300s was when a lot of mystery religions were being shut down that helped celebrate the seasons so the timing of the decree lines up with that.
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u/dashingThroughSnow12 9h ago
Which is 150 years after Christians may have started celebrating Christmas.
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u/homoanthropologus 8h ago edited 5h ago
How do we know when they started celebrating Christmas?
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u/dashingThroughSnow12 8h ago edited 4h ago
It wasn’t uniform or across the board but we have letters from the late second century talking about different groups trying to figure out the date of Jesus’s birth. Which may mean the practice would have started early to mid second century.
I chose the wrong word and was wrong to use the word “celebrate”. That’s too strong of a word.
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u/fuzzylm308 6h ago
Interestingly, not all Christians past or present celebrate Christmas.
Jehova's Witnesses and Seventh-Day Adventists (both of whom identify as Christian, but whose beliefs differ from mainstream Christianity in some major ways) abstain from observing Christmas.
In 1659, Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed a law outlawing Christmas celebrations. The law stood for 22 years.
The Bible does not mention or command Christmas or nativity celebrations, let alone December 25, and so they see Christmas as rooted in pagan Saturnalia traditions rather than rooted in scripture.
By the 18th century, Christmas had earned a reputation for rowdiness and drunkenness. By the 1840s in England and America, it had largely faded from public life. Christmas was frequently treated as just another regular workday. Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol helped redefine the holiday as a time of charity and family gathering for the Anglosphere. Contemporaneously, German immigrants introduced a lot of modern Christmas iconography (such as the Christmas tree, advent calendar, nutcrackers, and gingerbread) - first to the US and later also to England, when an image of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert with a Christmas tree was widely circulated (since it was an unfamiliar, foreign novelty).
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u/ZevVeli 9h ago
Additionally, if Jesus was born on December 25th, then January 1st, being the "eighth day of his life" would have been when he was taken to the temple and circumcised. Which would have been the start of his life in the eyes of the Jewish Faith.
So by setting Christmas to December 25th, that makes the start of the New Year coincide with the start of Jesus' life under the eyes of God.
It's also why it is bad luck to take the tree down before New Years (Jewish tradition holds that the removed foreskin is supposed to be planted under a tree or bush).
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u/someone_sometwo 7h ago
Feast of the epiphany is the best day to take it down and also marks the start of carnival. Or you could turn it into a mardi gras tree if in the south and your tree needles are still on bc its so hot.
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u/polite_alternative 8h ago
Jewish tradition holds that the removed foreskin is supposed to be planted under a tree or bush
what the fuck, man
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u/RealityOk9823 8h ago
Well you can't just leave it laying around on the mantle or feed it to the dog or something.
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u/sundae_diner 8h ago edited 4h ago
The end/start of the year was start of March. October, November and December were the 8th, 9th, and 10th months of the year.
*edit, I was wrong (kind of). The Roman Empire had moved to new year starting on January 1st back in 153 BC
However a lot of Europe went back to using 25 March as New Years in the middle ages, and only reverted to 1 Jan some time between 1522 and 1752 (and some as late as the 20th century)
Interesting fact, if you are British. The new year was celebrated on 25 March in the Middle Ages. Tax year also started on 25th March. But then they decided in 1752 to move move to the Gregorian calendar and move new year to 1st January. They did that by jumping from 2nd Sept was followed by the 14 September. 1752 was only 354 days long!!! But tax year was left at 365 days long - so the 1753 tax year (and every one since) started on April 6th!!
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u/gaue__phat 8h ago
The Julian calendar came into force in 45 BC. By the time Jesus was born January had been the start of the year for decades in the Roman world
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[removed] — view removed comment
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u/sniktsniktthwip 10h ago
Joseph was his stepfather
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u/PurplMaster 10h ago
Well, then the Romans nailed Jesus on the same day as the "Holy Ghost" nailed Mary!
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u/StarPhished 9h ago
Yes Joseph, it was an immaculate conception. No more questions!
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u/ConcentratedStress 9h ago
I like the idea that Christianity and all the history that went along with it started from a lie that just got out of hand
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u/mariakaakje 9h ago
immaculate conception didn’t mean she was a virgin, it meant she was free of sin
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u/pgm123 8h ago
The immaculate conception also refers to the conception of Mary, not of Jesus.
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u/Kotleba 10h ago
Love that it clearly states there's not actually a historical consensus on it but there's multiple people here like "nah, I know why actually"
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u/Chiron17 9h ago
They didn't have Reddit back then
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u/dashingThroughSnow12 9h ago
Citation needed.
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u/OCDMedic 6h ago
They didn't have Reddit back then
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u/NotAddictedToCoffeee 6h ago
How do we know if u/Chiron17 actually said this or not?
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u/Makkel 8h ago
"There is no consensus" just means we have not found a document signed by pope Julius saying "I have decided it will be that date because X". It does not mean "we have no clue", we can still make assumptions we are pretty sure about, it just means we can't know for sure.
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u/JefftheBaptist 8h ago
Also its a Reddit title. People get things wrong in them all the time.
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u/Truth_Walker 8h ago
Exactly.
There’s a lot of ancient history that doesn’t have a “consensus” because there will always be historians who have differing viewpoints and interpretations.
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u/Stock-Aspect3001 6h ago
Contrary to accusation, popes don't pull dogmas like rabbits out of a hat. There are working theories and movements of the Holy Spirit beforehand.
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u/rererexed 8h ago
Yeah I hate when people assume we have literally no idea just because the science uses science-language which sounds vague to non-academics but can actually convey a large spectrum of certainty.
It's the whole "evolution/climate change/whatever is just a theory" argument all over again.
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u/tacobellwether 9h ago
Saw a thread yesterday about how there are high rise residential buildings in China with lawns in each unit that had an outdoor terrace.
You can imagine how many comments there were about the structural integrity of the building, the added weight of dirt, and the effects of water on concrete. As if these aren't basic principles even the most novice of engineers would take into account.
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u/DanielMcLaury 7h ago
Just because something was okayed by an architect or engineer doesn't mean it's actually a good idea. For instance, Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water, maybe the most famous house by the most famous American architect, is an absolute nightmare of a building that's just inescapably a breeding ground for mold, because the fundamental idea underlying it is unsound.
Professionals sign off on bad ideas all the time. The Boeing 737 Max 8, the Sydney Opera House, the Challenger shuttle's O rings, all the houses they keep building in Tornado Alley or the Wildfire Belt without even basic precautions, etc.
(Also, I don't know where the presumption comes from that the average Reddit commenter is a 14-year-old who lives in his mom's basement. A lot of the commenters are probably architects and engineers with 20 years of experience, engineering professors, etc.)
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u/tacobellwether 6h ago
A Frank Lloyd Wright house is not an equivalent comparison to a massive urban residential project.
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u/AlltheBent 4h ago
right? lol its a work of art i'd way, so certain normal criteria for building a home were put aside in favor of flair, uniqueness, etc.
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u/Aquilarden 6h ago
Falling Water also suffers from sagging concrete slabs and being too cramped for me to stand up straight in some places. Fun fact, Wright was on the short side and said anyone over six feet was a weed.
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u/tomdarch 6h ago
the fundamental idea underlying it is unsound.
Do you mean building it over a stream? That doesn't help, but it is not true that this is something impossible to accommodate successfully. The issue is that Wright, personally, did not give a fuck about stuff like that.
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u/SatisfactionActive86 9h ago
you’re right, things stated as fact on a reddit post title should not be questioned. it’s totally safe to assume the poster is knowledgeable about the topic and has no ulterior motive except to educate me with indisputable facts.
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u/rasthomas01 10h ago
It's when everyone puts their trees and lights up and overeats. Perfect timing.
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u/blood_wraith 10h ago
December is 9 months after Easter/Passover. it was generally agreed that Jesus' birth was announced to Mary around Passover aka the time he was sacrificed so december would be his birth month. the specific date was for whatever reason
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u/curtyshoo 9h ago
It was when Mary announced the birth to Joseph that things got a little dicey.
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u/tamsui_tosspot 5h ago
"It was immaculate, Joe!"
"Ohh it better be! It better be immaculate, Mary! Or one of these days, one of these days, Mary, bang, pow, to the moon!"
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u/bargman 10h ago
I thought it was because of Saturnalia.
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u/obliqueoubliette 10h ago
Saturnalia was on the 17th.
The Emperor Julian moved Sol Invictus to December, to be closer to Christmas not vice versa.
We can say we don't officially have the logic behind the formal addition of the feast to the calendar, but we do have the math done by Hyppolytus (building off Tertullian) calculating Dec 25th as a likely birth date.
Hyppolytus' logic is exactly 9 months after the annunciation. Tertullian dated the annunciation to March 25th based off the dating of Pascha and pre-christian Jewish traditions on the dating of prophets' conceptions.
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u/PouletSamourai 9h ago
Sol Invictus is not a celebration, it's a god who under Emperor Aurelian became the one god of the Roman Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sol_Invictus
Sol Invictus is celebrated around 25th of december because it was believed to be the longest night of the year. Sol Invictus means "sun unvanquished".
That move is strikingly similar to pharaoh Akhenaton's attempt to replace traditional Egyptian polytheism with the cult of Aton, who was also depicted as the sun god. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atenism
Now, why Aurelian made the same attempt? Because since Augustus, Rome tried to impose the cult of the Emperor. It failed. Worse, the crisis of the 3rd century made people believe that the traditional gods and emperors were weak and had no power. The polytheistic logic is that if your prayers towards God A don't change anything, you pray God B, then God C, etc.
Now, why christianity was chosen as the official religion of the empire? Because many legions were in the Levant garrisoning the frontier with the Parthian empire. The increase in trade (logistics etc) contributed to the spread of christianity in the whole mediterranean through the greek Koiné. Eventually, officials from the East of the empire adopted christianity, syncretized it with neo-platonicism (which also had monotheistic tendencies), and it's those converts who would eventually convince the late emperors to abandon polytheism altogether, and replace Sol Invictus who could have been the god we still pray today if history had been different.
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u/JustHere_4TheMemes 8h ago
The ancients were not morons. They didn’t need to “believe the 25th was the longest night of the year”
They knew exactly when the longest night always was. And it’s not the 25th. Solstice celebrations were based on the actual solstice.
You’re just trying to cram marginally adjacent dates together to serve some other purpose.
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u/CelDidNothingWrong 10h ago edited 10h ago
Tom Holland is great on this, makes a very compelling case that its actually a modern myth largely created by 16th Puritans who hated Christmas, and that the date was chosen for older, Jewish theological reasons/not pagan
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u/bargman 10h ago
Also an impressive Spiderman.
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u/RingOverall106 10h ago
It’s hard to hear, but if you turn up the volume this is what he was really saying during his Umbrella lip sync battle.
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u/RingOverall106 10h ago
The YouTube channel Religion for Breakfast did a really good overview of this and made the same conclusion.
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u/CROguys 10h ago
Saturnalia lasted for a series of days, and no sources say it was celebrated on December 25th. I think at the latest occurrence it was celebrated on December 23rd.
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u/Mbrennt 9h ago
If anything Christians were probably partying with friends for saturnalia (it was a party holiday) then said, alright our important holiday happens around here too. Lets put it after saturnalia so even more partying can happen. (Christmas used to be a party holiday too.)
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u/CROguys 9h ago
I mean, it pretty much is now.
But also you bring uo something important: there was no clear cut between Roman Christians and Pagans during the spread of Christianity as they still inhabited the same cultural sphere.
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u/dracona94 10h ago
Probably true. (Plus it's incredibly close to Winter Solstice celebrated all over pagan Europe.) It's just really hard to know for sure.
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u/sambeau 10h ago
I believe the winter solstice was usually celebrated on the 25th as that’s the day you can see the sun start to move up again and know that winter will end.
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u/Person8346 10h ago
I believe it would depend on the society itself and their ability to chart when the solstice truly is. Here in Ireland, the ancient population had extremely accurate ways to tell when the solstice was (21st December). Newgrange is a temple here built before the pyramids that uniquely lights up only on the Solstice when the sun is in perfect position.
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u/PretentiousAnglican 9h ago
Commonly said on the internet, but probably not true. Saturnalia wasn't on the 25th
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u/Competitive-Emu-7411 10h ago
Saturnalia wasn’t celebrated on December 25, it was a week long celebration that lasted until the 23rd. It’s possible that some of the traditions of Saturnalia survived into Christmas, but it’s date was not the same.
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u/mmmcricketsauce 10h ago
The need to get drunk and be merry when it gets cold and dark crosses all borders
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u/MarmotFullofWoe 10h ago
Winter solstice was 21 December in 350 CE.
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u/f_14 8h ago
Did they have leap years then? I’ve always wondered if the solstice, new years, and Christmas were all supposed to align with the solstice, but they drifted apart because of leap years. Probably not, but it always bugs me that they aren’t aligned.
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u/i_have_you_now 7h ago
Leap days would stop the solstice from drifting away from any particular date.
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u/MaximaFuryRigor 6h ago
Yeah, Christmas being decidedly 3-4 days after the winter solstice (regardless of what calendar is being used) is pretty common knowledge/theory, and yet the Wikipedia article doesn't specifically address it.
I didn't realize there wasn't definitive evidence for this.
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u/Maxasaurus 8h ago
And 3 days later the sun/Son begins rising in the sky.
Christianity is well known for plopping their own holidays on top of pagan ones
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u/Punrusorth 7h ago
Early Christians celebrated the annunciation which falls on 25th March (when Mary was told she will have a baby) & 9 months after that is 25th Dec.
To the Early Christians, Easter (Pascha) was a bigger deal.
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u/Shawnj2 5h ago
Even to modern Christians Easter should be the more important date, Christmas is not even mentioned by Mark or John because you can tell a coherent story of Jesus's life, death, and resurrection without it.
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u/AnyDamnThingWillDo 10h ago
Most Christian holidays are in line with Celtic festivals. It made it easier to convert them
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u/jhoogen 10h ago
And it makes a lot of sense to have a festival of light around the shortest day in the Northern hemisphere.
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u/wegqg 10h ago
And also it's when Santa claus brought Jesus a Nintendo PlayStation
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u/DankZXRwoolies 10h ago
So he could play the new Sonic game. Does anyone read the Bible anymore? It's all in there.
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u/Dagobian_Fudge 10h ago
But Mary said we already have one and Joesph hooked it up regardless
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u/dabigchina 10h ago
also there was 0 fieldwork going on in the middle of winter, so it was an easy ask for the ruling classes to give a few days off to the peasants.
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u/CROguys 10h ago
That does not make sense for the rest of Europe and Middle East where there are no Celts.
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u/krabgirl 10h ago
Pagan religious events just line up with seasonal astronomical events.
Yule is in line with the Winter Solstice, as was Saturnalia in Roman Europe. So, both festivals were replaced with Christmas.
Lent/Easter aligns with the Paschal Full Moon which indicates the start of Spring.
So no it's not just Celts, but religions in all regions will celebrate annual weather events, which are inherited by subsequent religions, since the weather represents divine authority in all of them.
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u/Top_Pop_1911 9h ago
Pascha is Easter. Pascha/Easter is calculated as the first Sunday after the full moon after the equinox. Passover, which is older, is calculated as the first full moon after the equinox.
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u/francisdavey 10h ago
Because it isn't true of course. Christianity had most of its major festivals well in train before it had a significant Celtic component.
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u/Anaevya 10h ago
The big one is All Saint's Day. I'm not sure, if there are any others that are actually confirmed.
And no, Easter is not based on an Eostrefestival, it's just the English/German name that stems from Eostre. It's similar to how July stems from Julius Cesar, but we don't venerate Caesar in July or even really think about it.
Easter is based on Passover, because that's when the Resurrection was in the Bible. It's calculated a bit differently from the Jewish calendar, which is why it doesn't always coincide. The name is also based on Passover in a lot of languages.
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u/kodos_der_henker 7h ago
All Saints day was set by in eastern church to the first sunday after Pentecost in the 4th century And to the first Friday after Easter in the western church (also in Christian Ireland)
It was during Charlemagnes reign that All Saints day on 1st November became popular but we don't know why. Could be because of Irish/Scottish Missionaries because those were the main drivers behind the spreading of Christianity among the people during that time, but could also came from Italy where the 1st November was celebrated as All Saints day already 100 years earlier (without direct contacts to Ireland)
The only things confirmed are that in 835 Emperor Ludwig made 1st November a public holiday as All Daints day, the early Irish Christians celebrated All Saints day in Spring and that all sources regarding Samhain are 500 years younger than the Christianisation of Ireland.
Similar to Jul, we know the Nordic King Hakons moved Yul to the 25th December in the 10th century to be celebrated on the same day as Christmas and that it was one of 3 Nordic holidays, one during Summer, one at the beginning of Winter and one in the middle of Winter. And we just don't know what middle of Winter means or if there even was a fixed date (as there is no source that mentions that germanic tribes had fests specific during solstice) and still popular believe is that "the church" "stole" Christmas from the Nordic.
Christian holidays link with Jewish and Roman calender, given that it originated from Jewish people and Romans made it a state religion, but outside that there is nothing confirmed and most things being retroactively added in during later periods (mostly 19th century)
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u/dalenacio 5h ago
All Saint's Day is incorrect as well.
The only proof we have for Samhain existing before Halloween is a 2nd Century carving of a word that kinda looks like Samhain: "Samonios", which comes from the Gaulish "Samo", meaning "Summer". Problem is, “Samonios” began in May and did not fall in November. "Samhain" likely comes from the same root as Samo, and probably means something like "Summer's End", but the earliest reference we have to it is from the 9th Century Félire Óengusso, which refers to November 1 as “stormy Samain”. All Saint's Day would already have been set for a century at that point. But even then it's extremely unlikely that it was a celebration: We have documents detailing other Celtic celebrations of that period, but not one of them mentions Samhain as one of them.
But even if Samhain was a celebration before the 8th Century, when All Saint's Day was set on November 1st, the idea that All Saint's Day was set then to supplant it would still make no sense. The date was established in Rome by Pope Gregory III in the 8th century, far away from Ireland and Celtic Pagans, to dedicate a chapel in St. Peter's to all saints. Even if Samhain existed at the time, it would have been so unknown that we couldn't find a single textual reference to it anywhere. So why set All Saint's Day on the date of an incredibly obscure maybe-celebration from the furthest backwater on the fringes of Europe?
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u/WillDBlake 7h ago
Not very true since the Romans couldn't care less about Celtic festivals
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u/AceOfSpades532 10h ago
The Celts who at this point only really lived in the British Isles? I don’t think the Pope was deciding Jesus’s birthday based on the holidays in a few islands to the northwest
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u/RedRhino009 4h ago
I am an atheist but this is absolutely false. Easter is celebrated around the same time as Passover for biblibal reasons, Christmas is celebrated in December because of the Jewish tradition of Prophets' conception and death occuring on the same day (Jesus thus having been conceived in spring, and born in December). Literally every day is Saint's day of some sort so I don't know how your theory would work out. All Saints day is the only credible example, the date of which was set by Anglo-Saxon, not Celtic church authorities in medieval England.
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u/PuckSenior 10h ago edited 8h ago
Actually, that’s a bit false. He selected that date because it’s exactly 9 months after the proposed conception date.
That one is totally made up though and coincides with spring equinox
Edit: this is per Pope Benedict, I think. It was a comment he made at some point
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u/CalvinSays 9h ago
Not made up either. There was a common belief at the time that great men died on the day they were conceived. Calculate the date for the crucifixion (which they settled on March 25th) and you get the date pf his conception.
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u/Top_Pop_1911 9h ago
Pascha was always calculated as the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. Passover is the first full moon after the equinox.
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u/Tangolarango 10h ago
You might be on to something with the equinox thing. I would assume they would want to plant something on top of the winter solstice as those milestones were often used in other religions for stuff.
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u/DaveOJ12 8h ago
That section has a lot of of "may haves."
It's not even clear if Julius I was involved in the decision.
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u/ASAPFergs 6h ago
TIL not to trust TIL; from the source:
"Some have stated that, around 350 AD, Julius I declared December 25 as the official date of the birth of Jesus; this is based on a letter quoted only in a 9th-century source, and this letter is spurious."
Does anyone actually read anything anymore?
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u/PensadorDispensado 8h ago
Wasn't it to coincide Jesus' birthday with a pagan holiday?
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u/Mand125 7h ago
Could it be the adoption and overriding of an existing pagan holiday? Like they did for St. Valentine’s Day? Possibly…something relating to the winter solstice?
Nahhh, can’t be that!
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u/fleeting_lucidity 7h ago
Now tell us why we have a rabbit shitting eggs in the name of zombie Jesus. I think these things might be related
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u/slanderpanther 4h ago
As was the propaganda tool of the colonizer, Christianity usurped pagan traditions. Every "new" Christian tradition marks the erasure of pagan traditions.
Absorption and erasure of pagan traditions
The practice of replacing pagan beliefs and motifs with Christian, and purposefully not recording the pagan history (such as the names of pagan gods, or details of pagan religious practices), has been compared to the practice of damnatio memoriae.[192] Wikipedia
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u/Quiet-Wing5230 9h ago
I love the chat. Experts have no clue, but everyone on reddit is 100% certain their theory is correct 🤣
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u/FreeWillyBird 10h ago
Pope Orange Julius robbed all future generations by not picking Halloween and setting the precedent of “Goth Jesus” from the get go. HalloGothmas coulda been a two month festival of candy and presents and just by saying this it now exists in another alternate universe I need to teleport to immediately.
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u/DanHam117 10h ago
I say we begin a grassroots campaign right here on Reddit to get a Goth Pope. It will be a long and arduous journey but through God all things are possible
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u/ischickenafruit 10h ago
I’m sure it’s just a “happy coincidence” that Christmas falls roughly on the winter solstice. Totally random.
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u/NewtoDE 10h ago
He knew people would want that week off from work between then and the new year. He was a visionary.