Calculating Christmas

The article below is from the December issue of "Touchstone" magazine, and has generated interesting and informative follow-up on the magazine's weblog site (you will have to scroll down to read them). Also, follow this weblink

http://www.btinternet.com/~prgreetham/Wisemen/home.html

to a British site devoted to the question of the origins and dating of Christmas. --P.T.

Calculating Christmas
William J. Tighe on the Story Behind December 25

Many Christians think that Christians celebrate Christ’s birth on December 25th
because the church fathers appropriated the date of a pagan festival. Almost no one minds, except for a few groups on the fringes of American Evangelicalism, who seem to think that this makes Christmas itself a pagan festival. But it is perhaps interesting to know that the choice of December 25th is the result of attempts among the earliest Christians to figure out the date of Jesus’ birth based on calendrical calculations that had nothing to do with pagan festivals.

Rather, the pagan festival of the “Birth of the Unconquered Son” instituted by the Roman Emperor Aurelian on 25 December 274, was almost certainly an attempt to create a pagan alternative to a date that was already of some significance to Roman Christians. Thus the “pagan origins of Christmas” is a myth without historical substance.

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