Pagan roots of Christmas and Easter(?)

It began with a simple Facebook post from a friend who, after taking down Christmas decorations on Dec. 27, asked when others dismantled their decorations. Some had already taken theirs down while others, wanting to preserve some Christmas cheer at the end of a dreary year, wanted to keep them up longer. A few mentioned the traditional season of Christmas which lasts for 12 days, ending on January 5. They would undecorate after Christmas was over on January 6.

In reply to my comment about these 12 days of Christmas, one friend-of-a-friend brought up the topic of whether I would agree that Christmas and Easter had their roots in historical pagan celebrations. My short answer was “No to Easter, maybe to Christmas.” The answer required a lot more space than FB etiquette called for, so here goes . . . 

Our celebration of Easter Sunday (or more properly Pasca or Resurrection Sunday) flowed out of the Jewish celebrations of Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, and Pentecost (a 50 day observation following the Feast) which in the first century had already been celebrated for about 1300 years. We must realize that at the time of the exodus almost the entire world, except for this group of Hebrew slaves, was pagan. There were hundreds of gods and thousands of shrines and temples to these gods. Paganism was the culture of the day . . . the water they swam in. This was also true in the time of Jesus. Remembering that the first Christians were Jews, we can understand that Passover, the Feast, and Pentecost were part of their upbringing, their major holidays, like Christmas and New Year are to most of us. But for these early believers Passover took on new meaning as they celebrated the resurrection of the Messiah Jesus. In fact for the first 300 years of church history Pasca was not a day, it was a period of 50 days. Celebrating something as monumental as a risen Savior required more than a day . . . it required 7 whole weeks!

While there were almost certainly pagan celebrations of springtime in those days, the true roots of our Pasca/Easter holidays flow out of the Jewish holidays which had already been practiced for over 1000 years.

Now Christmas, on the other hand, may have had its roots in the pagan festivals surrounding the winter solstice. There are 2 main theories of how December 25 came to be the Festival of the Nativity.

1. The Romans observed Saturnalia and the birthday of Mithra, the god of the sun, during this time of year. In the 4^th century Christian leaders, seeing hordes of pagans entering the church, began adopting the festival of Saturnalia, saying that its final day, December 25, was Jesus’ birthday. The hope was that a pagan holiday would be transformed into a Christian celebration. Unfortunately the result was that many of these “converts” continued in their pagan practices, and Christmas was a raucous season of revelry and debauchery.

The problems with this theory are twofold- no early Christian writers refer to changing the Christian calendar in this way, and it would be unlikely, during a period when Christians were martyred for standing against the pagan culture, that leaders would deliberately adopt a pagan holiday as Jesus’ birthday. 

2. The second theory of the roots of Christmas has to do with calculating the date of Jesus’ death. Early Christian Fathers believed that a perfect life would begin and end on the same day. In the year 200 Tertullian calculated that Jesus died on March 25 on the Roman (solar) calendar. Therefore the perfect Savior was also conceived on March 25. Jesus was born a perfect 9 months later on December 25. Jesus was conceived and crucified on the same day of the year. This theory was affirmed by Augustine around the year 400.

So now you see why I replied as I did to the query of the friend-of-a-friend. Our Easter/Pasca celebration had its roots in Jewish tradition, and Christmas perhaps had some tradition in pagan holidays. Either way, for followers of Jesus there is nothing pagan of these sacred days when we celebrate the two most significant days in human history.