Tonight on December 21 we have a conflation of two celestial events: the winter solstice and the much-rarer conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn. Although the fact that these events are both happening at the same time is super awesome, they are not causally related. Hundreds of years ago in the fourth century during this time of year, the Ancient Roman Empire celebrated two sorts of holidays: the pagan feast day of Sol Invictus, and the Christian birth of Jesus. What scholars don’t agree upon, however, is the relationship among these festivals — did the Christians copy the pagans? Were these feasts unrelated? Or were the pagans imitating Christan practice?.
You see here a sculpture of Sol Invictus, with the words “SOLI SANCTISSIMO SACRUM” or “sacred to the most holy sun,” and it was carved in the second half of the first century CE. Notice the halo and the rays extending from the deity’s head. Romans had worshipped the sun very early in their history, but the association of the epithet “unconquered” or “invictus” became popular only in the second century.
It was not for another two hundred years, though, that recordings of having the feast of the birth of the sun on December 25 first appear. This day was actually the date of the winter solstice according to the Julian calendar (slightly off from our own). But do historians agree that this winter solstice had any sort of relationship with the sun’s birthday? No. No they do not.
Enter Christianity. For hundreds of years Christians made no mention of Jesus’ birthday, and early guesses were not in agreement. In 248 a Roman named Cyprian associated Christ’s nativity with the sun, stating that Jesus was born on the same day that the sun was — Cyprian had worked out the dates from his reading of the Bible, landing on March 28.
By 336 CE, records appear documenting that the Christian Church was celebrating Jesus’ birthday on December 25. But do historians agree that Christians selected that date to take advantage of pre-existing pagan tradition? Why no. No they do not. Regardless, the confluence of Sol Invictus and Christmas on December 25 was meaningful for both Romans and later historians.
Some historians argue that Christmas ended up on December 25 because some early Christians had tried to line it up with nine months after Jesus’ conception which they had calculated to be March 25.
Source(s): _Biblical Archaeology_, “How December 25 Became Christmas,” Andrew McGowan, December 2002. @penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopedia_romana/calendar/invictus.html, “Sol Invictus and Christmas.”
