Was Christmas moved to eclipse Rome's Saturnalia festival?
Ancient scribes often calculated Christ’s birth as falling in early spring.
Every December, billions celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ with rituals that feel timeless: candlelight, evergreen branches, and winter hymns. None of these seasonal details, however, come from the Bible—nor does the New Testament identify the date or time of year when Jesus was born. Luke’s Gospel does mention shepherds watching their flocks by night, a detail some have taken to imply a warmer season. Beyond this, the biblical writers provide no clues for the placement of Christmas.
This gap in the scriptural record left later generations of Christians with considerable interpretive freedom. As Christianity expanded across the Roman Empire and developed liturgical holidays to commemorate key events in Jesus’ life, the question of when to celebrate his birth became increasingly important. By the 4th century, December 25 had emerged as the dominant date in the Latin West. The choice reflected a mix of religious reasoning, symbolic association, and a Roman calendar crowded with midwinter festivals.
Among these was Saturnalia, a Roman wintertime celebration of feasting and gift-giving. In the 18th and 19th centuries, biblical scholars interested in parallels between ancient religious belief systems argued that because early Christians didn’t know the date of the Nativity, they moved it to compete with and appropriate the popularity of pagan winter festivals. But what does the historical evidence actually show?
(Is there historical evidence for the Star of Bethlehem?)
Saturnalia in the Roman world
Saturnalia was one of ancient Rome’s most beloved holidays. First mentioned in the 1st century BCE by the historian Livy, the festival celebrated the patriarch god Saturn and originally fell on December 17. Robyn Walsh, an associate professor of the New Testament and early Christianity at the University of Miami, explained that Saturnalia “gradually extended to a week-long celebration due to its growing popularity, particularly in the late republican and imperial periods.” Writing a century after Livy, Seneca the Younger described the festival’s raucous, joyful atmosphere: “The whole mob has let itself go in pleasures.”
The festival was marked, Walsh said, “by ritual sacrifices, social role reversals, feasting, gift-giving, and a suspension of normal social and legal norms. It symbolized a temporary return to a mythical age of equality and abundance, blending religious, social, and political meanings that resonated deeply in Roman culture.” Homes were decorated with greenery; people donned colorful garments instead of the somber toga; schools were closed; courts did not convene; and enslaved workers dined with their masters. “In later Roman history,” said Walsh, “Saturnalia inspired utopian imperial imagery and was evoked in political rhetoric to symbolize peace, justice, and the ideal reign of emperors like Augustus.”
As the basis for Christmas, Saturnalia is an imperfect candidate. Saturnalia did not fall on December 25; even in its longest form, it ended on December 23. The days that followed remained festive in Rome, but Saturnalia itself was not a solstice celebration and, thus, did not invoke imagery of light, as Christmas does. Its themes revolved around agricultural renewal and the mythical Golden Age of Saturn, not the rebirth of the sun.
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The birthday feast of the Sun God
A festival that did fall on December 25 emerged later: the Dies Natalis Solis Invicti—the “Birthday of the Unconquered Sun”—established by the emperor Aurelian in 274 CE. This imperial cult celebration honored Sol Invictus, the solar deity associated with military victory and cosmic order. The date’s connection to the winter solstice (December 20-22) made it a natural moment to praise the sun’s strengthening light.
Long before the institution of this festival, Christians had been describing Jesus as the light of the world. The idea is found in the Gospels where the association between Jesus and the sun was sometimes quite explicit. In one hymn drawing on the Gospel of John, Ambrose of Milan described Christ as the true light who rises over the world. The analogy was useful, but it was also potentially confusing as it pictured Jesus as the sun. In an effort to pull Christmas and the birthday of the Sol Invictus apart, Augustine of Hippo told his congregants, “let us hold this day as sacred not as unbelievers do because of the material sun, but because of Him who made the sun.” Solstice symbolism was clearly in the minds of Christians and pagans alike. A much later note in the margins of a 12th-century manuscript of the Syriac biblical commentator Dionysius bar-Salibi claims that Christmas was moved from January 6 to December 25 to correspond with the birthday of Sol Invictus.
Debates over the date of Christmas
Before the 3rd century, most Christians did not celebrate Jesus’ birthday at all. Origen of Alexandria explicitly mocked the celebration of birthdays, deriding them as a pagan practice. When Christians did begin to speculate about the date of Jesus’ birth, however, they relied not on scriptural detail but on religious deduction.
Clement of Alexandria, Origen’s teacher, was the first to mention efforts to identify the date of Jesus’s birth. Interestingly, Clement did not mention December 25 at all. Instead, he wrote that “those who have determined not only the year of our Lord’s birth, but also the day…say that it took place in the 25 day of Pachon [May 20] …others say that he was born on the 24 or 25 of Pharmuthi [April 20 or 21].”
One hypothesis, advanced by Louis Duchesne and Thomas Talley, is that the date of Jesus’s birth was calculated from the date of Easter. Duchesne used rabbinic texts to suggest that there was an ancient Jewish idea that prophets lived an exact number of years, dying on the same date they were conceived. Writing in 200 CE, the North African writer Tertullian identified March 25 as the date of Jesus’s crucifixion. If Jesus died on March 25 and was conceived on the same day, then a nine-month pregnancy produces a birthdate of December 25.
The earliest surviving reference to December 25 as Jesus’ birthday appears in the Chronography of 354 (sometimes known as the Philocalian Calendar), an illuminated Roman calendar compiled by the scribe Furius Dionysius Filocalus for a wealthy Christian named Valentinus. Under the entry for December 25, it notes: “Natus Christus in Betleem Iudeae” (“Christ was born in Bethlehem of Judea.”). By the 4th century, therefore, there is clear evidence that Christians in Rome were marking the feast on this day.
Other Christian communities may have used similar computational arguments to arrive at a different conclusion. The Chronicon Paschale, an early Byzantine chronicle, calculates April 6 as the date of the crucifixion, and therefore places Jesus’ birth on January 6. This date remains significant today in Orthodox churches, where January 6 is celebrated as Epiphany or Christmas depending on the tradition.
While Christian writers are not explicit about the methods they used to calculate the birth of Jesus, none of these writers relate Christmas to Saturnalia. In fact, as Andrew McGowan, Dean of Berkeley Divinity School, has written, “the first mention of a date for Christmas and the earliest celebrations that we know about come in a period when Christians were not borrowing heavily from pagan traditions.”
Strategy or symbolism?
So, was Christmas moved, or introduced, to eclipse Saturnalia or the birthday of the Sol Invictus? The ancient evidence suggests a subtler story. When early Christian writers discuss the meaning of December 25, they do not mention Saturnalia at all. Instead, they turn repeatedly to theological symbolism and cosmic timing: the solstice, the return of light, and, eventually, the linking of Jesus’ conception and death. This does not mean cultural exchange did not occur. As Christianity gradually became Rome’s dominant religion, winter customs were absorbed, adapted, or reinterpreted. Human beings, ancient and modern, have always sought ways to express hope and renewal in the darkest days of the year. As Walsh said, “it would be overly simplistic to say this was a direct borrowing from any single pagan festival. It is possible that the date was selected to coincide with or supplant long-standing celebrations such as the Saturnalia, the birthday of Mithras, or the feast of Sol Invictus, but the decision was complex and multifaceted.”
The dating of Christmas to December 25 represents a complex layering of theological imagination, solstice symbolism, and a Roman world rich with seasonal celebration. It is a story not of conquest but of convergence; an intertwining of a sacred time and celestial rhythm that still shapes how billions celebrate the season today.
