Christmas is always a big accusation that the Church accepted paganism into it. Fr Mitch Pacwa on EWTN said that, even though lots of people say that the Christians took the Sol Invictus feast and replaced it with the Feast of Christmas, Christmas came first and the Romans started the feast of Sol Invictus to replace the Feast of Christmas. I found this on the internet in support of Fr Mitch’s possition:
One ancient source mentioned Dies Natalis Solis Invicti in the Chronography of 354, and Sol scholar Steven Hijmans stated that there is no evidence that the celebration [Dies Natalis Solis Invicti] precedes that of Christmas: “[W]hile the winter solstice on or around December 25 was well established in the Roman imperial calendar, there is no evidence that a religious celebration of Sol on that day antedated the celebration of Christmas, and none that indicates that Aurelian had a hand in its institution.”
Source: Hijmans, S.E., Sol, the sun in the art and religions of Rome, 2009, p. 589. ISBN 978-90-367-3931-3
Also…
Since the Western Christmas (25 December) falls near the Winter Solstice (21 December), it occurs at the same time of the year as certain pagan solstice feasts. One such feast was the Roman celebration of Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (Nativity of the Invincible Sun), which commemorated the birth of the sun god Mithra. After Emperor Aurelian declared Mithra/Sol Invictus to be the patron of the Roman Empire in 274 AD, this feast in his honor became very popular.
Some say that the Christians invented Christmas, a feast in honor of Jesus’ birth, as an alternative to this popular feast of Mithra’s birth. Others claim that Christmas was never a separate feast, but is the feast of Sol Invictus itself, continued and adapted by pagan converts in the fourth century, after Constantine forced them to become Christians. Unwilling to abandon their beloved Mithraism, they changed Dies Natalis Solis Invicti into a feast of Christ’s Nativity (since no one knows for sure what day Jesus was born).
This common theory has a few problems. First, careful study shows that Western Christians were celebrating Christmas on 25 December in the late third century, before the Sol Invictus festival was widely celebrated in the Empire 1. So Christians did not create this feast to oppose a popular Roman one. As far as Christmas being a “continuation” of a pagan festival, this seems unlikely when one considers the abhorrence many Christians felt toward paganism. Believers of Jewish descent did not suddenly lose their deep aversion to idolatry after Baptism, and converts from paganism often despised the religions which they left behind. Thousands of Christians died during the Romans persecutions rather than engage in pagan rites. Why would they embrace the hated celebrations of their persecutors?
“As long ago as 1958, the Israeli scholar Shemaryahu Talmon published an in-depth study on the calendar of the Qumran sect, and he reconstructed without the shadow of doubt the order of the sacerdotal rota system for the temple of Jerusalem (1 Chronicles 24, 7-18) in New Testament times. Here the family of Abijah, of which Zechariah was a descendent, father of John the herald and forerunner (Luke 1,5) was required to officiate twice a year, on the days 8-14 of the third month, and on the days 24-30 of the eighth month. This latter period fell at about the end of September. It is not without reason that the Byzantine calendar celebrated ‘John’s conception’ on September 23 and his birth nine months later, on June 24. The ‘six months’ after the Annunciation established as a liturgical feast on March 25, comes three months before the forerunner’s birth, prelude to the nine months in December: December 25 is a date of history” 2.
[In addition to this, the ancient “integral age” tradition is that the Prophets died on the same day they were conceived. With Passover set at 25 March, the Annunciation would have taken place on that same date – and the Nativity would’ve taken place 9 months later, on 25 December.]
Even the common argument that shepherds would not have been in the fields in December is inaccurate. That is the time of the year when sheep naturally begin giving birth (“lambing”), and the shepherds would typically stay with the sheep at night to take care of the newborn lambs. In fact, the lambing season would have been the only time of the year in which the shepherds would have stayed with the flocks during the night (see Luke 2:8).This information seems to confirm that Jesus could well have been born on or near 25 December, perhaps even 6 January (considering the many possible normal fluctuations of gestational periods). So either of these traditional dates may be - or at least come very close to - Jesus’ real birthday! The fact that December 25 happens to fall four days after the Winter Solstice is a coincidence of history (and the Eastern Christmas is sixteen days removed from the solstice, so it’s harder to see a connection there).
- Greg Dues, Catholic Customs and Traditions, A Popular Guide, (Mystic, CN: Twenty-Third, 1989) 61.
- Tommaso Federici, Osservatore Romano 24 Dec 1998.
Source:
home.earthlink.net/~mysticalrose/pagan8.html
