Mind of a Christian - Chapter 2

Christmas - It's not pagan, and don't let people stop you from celebrating it

With the nearing of Christmas, comes the seasonal surge of people arguing that Christmas is either a pagan holiday, derived from pagan holidays, or otherwise idolatrous. I have been told this, and I've seen other people being told this, and it gets tiring.

There was an Instagram post of a person saying:

The reason we celebrate Christmas is because Jesus Christ purchased salvation for both the Jew and the Gentile. Christmas would be meaningless if He did not purchase salvation for sinners. But He did. He came. He lived a perfect life. He died in our place. He rose from the dead!

And with great irony, the first comments I saw were like this:

As a Bible-believing Christian, Christmas is not biblical... (the post goes on)

Whoah! That's nonsense, OP. Where is Christmas talked about in the Bible? Cringe time of year. The idolatry is awful.

. . . are you serious?

Look. I know that there's many believers out there who take scripture seriously and care about following God in a pleasing way. I know that the modern, commercialized, western cultural celebration of Christmas is a hollow shell of what used to be God-glorifying. I get it, and I'm with you!

But, come on. Did you even read the post? It's almost as if someone wrote a bot that blindly searches for the keyword "Christmas" and auto-comments "Christmas is pagan / idolatrous / unbiblical".

What bothers me just as much are the replies that say "Amen" and "So true". I can practically see them smugly shaking their heads. And so, I'm throwing myself in the ring, so that believers and non-believers can see that this is not the only Christian stance of the holiday. I won't have the final say, but I at least want to show you that, indeed, I, as a Bible-believing Christian, can confidently say that Christmas is biblical.

Okay, let's break down the arguments.

1. Christmas was created to Christianize a pagan holiday

One common argument is that Christmas was created as a way to Christianize Saturnalia or Sol Invictus (two holidays that were celebrated around the same time of the year), so that pagans would have an easier time adopting Christianity. However, the early church made it a clear point to not assimilate into pagan traditions.

Pliny the Younger, a prominent Roman lawyer, wrote a letter to Emperor Trajan where he was bothered that Christians refused to worship the Roman gods, and saw that as a potential sign of sedition or rebellion against Roman rule. Tertullian, a prominent church leader, wrote a letter on idolatry, where he scolded Christians for having wreaths at their doors, which was a common pagan practice to honor gods of doors, gates, and other entranceways. These two figures - one anti-Christian and one pro-Christian - lived during the first and second centuries, and in their ways, expressed how Christianity made it a point to be wholly separate from paganism.

As for Saturnalia, it had become a large celebratory holiday by 217 BC, so it predates Christmas. However, because of the Christian insistence of not wanting to be identified with pagans, Saturnalia would not be a holiday that they would adopt with Christian motifs to create Christmas.

Sol Invictus gets brought up as a pagan holiday being Christianized because it was celebrated on the same day as Christmas - December 25. But, it doesn't even have the luxury of predating Christmas so that Christmas might be a derivative of it.

The Chronography of 354 is a collection of manuscripts that contains the oldest references for both Sol Invictus and Christmas being celebrated as yearly holidays. And prior to the year 354, Christian writers have been hypothesizing Jesus' birthday: Hippolytus marked it as December 25, although other people threw around other dates. In any case, with our current manuscript evidence, you cannot assert that as yearly festivals, Sol Invictus predates Christmas and that Christmas is an adoption of Sol Invictus.