Every child knows why Christmas is celebrated on December 25th.

In times of declining churchliness and mixed cultures, one might want to put this into perspective and say: Every child should actually know why December 24th is Christmas Eve and December 25th is Christmas.

In fact, neither the one nor the other sentence is correct.

Jurgen Kaube

Editor.

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After all, why should children know something about which almost all adults are also wrong?

We're not joking.

Almost nobody knows why we celebrate Christmas on December 25th.

Not even the Pope.

Only Hans Förster has a sensible suggestion.

But we'll come to Hans Förster later.

Let's start with what every child knows.

Christmas falls on December 25 because Jesus was born on the night of December 24-25.

But how do we know?

From the Gospel of Luke, which tells of the birth, we don't even know that it was cold.

There are indications of the year of birth, because "it came to pass that a command went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should submit to a number", namely "when Quirinus was governor of Syria" (Lk 2, 1 -6).

Pretty confused

But that's where the difficulties start, because Publius Sulpicius Quirinus was Roman governor in Syria from 6 to 7 AD.

It is clear that Christ himself could not have been born in the year 6 or 7.

New Testament philology has long since concluded that the supposed census served only to tell a reason why Christ should not be born in Nazareth, where his family lived, but in Bethlehem, the city of King David.

The evangelist gives a second date.

An angel appeared to Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, “at the time when Herod was king of Judea” to tell him that his wife Elizabeth was pregnant.

That makes things even more confusing.

For John was almost the same age as Jesus;

he jumps in his mother's womb when she meets the pregnant Maria.

But Herod died already 4 BC.

The oddly calculated feast

Even the calculation of the year in which Christ was born seems rather hopeless on the basis of such contradictions.

How much more then that of the month, even of the day.

And a good hundred years ago, a New Testament scholar stated with resignation that Jesus' death was not a single year during the ten-year term of office of Pontius Pilate that had not already been suggested as the year of Christ's death.

It must have been sometime between 29 and 33 AD, the most likely date is April 7, 30 according to the current state of research, which is a Friday according to our calendar.

But how does that help us for Christmas?

How did you come up with December 25th?

At first it didn't occur at all.

At first it was assumed in late antique texts that Christ was born in the spring, on March 28th.

Why?

Because Christ is the "Sun of Righteousness" and March 28 is the day of creation of the sun - according to "De Pascha Computus" from 243 AD.

The anonymous author came up with this because the God of Genesis distinguishes between day and night on the first day of creation.

So it must have been on a day when day and night were of equal length, hence on March 25th, the day of the vernal equinox.

And the sun was created three days later.

Hans Förster, Viennese church historian, reveals

It is clear that a number of other birthdays could also have been calculated using such allegorical-astronomical calculations.

But what about December 25th?

Which brings us to Hans Förster.

This Viennese church historian has presented two extremely learned studies on the beginning of Christmas, the second just now.

In addition to the information already given, we can also gather from them our astonishing ignorance about the Christmas date.

It's a detective story delivered by Förster, and anyone who claims that the humanities study of remote texts isn't useful should be slapped with both volumes.

So far, according to Förster, there have been two schools of thought on the date of Christmas - and both are wrong!

One, to which Joseph Ratzinger also refers in his book “The Spirit of the Liturgy”, assumes that, according to the ancient Jewish view, Jesus, like all perfect human beings, did not die at some point in the year, but on the day of his birth.

At some point, according to the thesis, one passed from birth to conception as the symbolic date.

Because Christ was crucified on the fourth day after the vernal equinox - March 25 according to the Julian calendar - this day was also considered to be the day of his conception.

And nine months later, voilà, December 25th is the day of his birth!

This theory is particularly popular in England.

There, the Puritans considered Christmas a dubious matter, only after Cromwell's religious dictatorship was it allowed to be celebrated again.

Since then, Anglo-Saxon theologians and church historians have loved a purely Christian justification for Christmas.

In other words: They draw the hair-raising acrobatics of that transition from "birth" to "conception" and the anachronistic idea that even in ancient times people knew how to date births exactly nine months after conception, to another, not purely Christian justification for the festival before.

A sun?

No, a star!

This "impure" justification is by far the most popular.

According to her, December 25 was chosen by the church as Christ's birthday because that was the day traditionally used for pagan solstice celebrations.

In the fourth century, when the festival of Christmas was established, Christianity was on its way to becoming the state religion.

That's why it tried to pick up the often only superficially Christianized masses, as we would say today, from where they were, for example from their cults.

Where the "Sol invictus" had been celebrated since 247 AD, the birth of an even greater light source should now be commemorated.

Understood in this way, Christmas would be a reinterpreted sun cult.

With this religious-historical thesis, Hans Förster drives his sleigh in his most recent book ("The Beginning of Christmas", Verlag Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2007; Förster's book "The Celebration of the Birth of Christ in the Old Church" was also published by the same publisher in 2000).

The supposedly popular pagan solstice festival is poorly documented.

On the contrary, there are authors like Maximus of Turin who, in the fourth century, on Christmas Day December 25th, expressly praise the fact that there are no pagan parallel festivals.

Furthermore, in the fierce controversy over the date of Christmas - many Christians long favored January 6th - the argument "pagan feast day" strangely never came up.

For Augustine, December 25th is the theme of Christ's revelation to the Jews, represented by the shepherds in Bethlehem, and January 6th his revelation to the Gentiles, represented by the Three Kings.

And he calls December 25th the shortest day of the year, from which the light begins to grow again.

It is the "birthday of the day".

Of the day, Förster emphasizes this beautiful word: not the sun.

The impractical spring

There are dozens of sermons and tracts from late antiquity that Hans Förster evaluated in order to finally come to the conclusion that there is little evidence that Christmas is the Christian version of an ancient solstice celebration.

This celebration is a "research myth" and the winter solstice is not a significant day in the pagan calendar of late antiquity.

But then what was the reason for December 25th?

Förster lets the festival arise from the spirit of tourism.

In the first half of the fourth century, the flow of pilgrims to Bethlehem increased significantly.

Gregory of Nyssa already warns that physical presence does not guarantee presence of mind.

And yet: "You know the place of your birth, you have a church there, don't you have to celebrate the feast of your birth?" .

Even without a pagan festival that would have had to be replaced, the date from which the days become longer and not shorter makes sense as a special one.

It certainly helps that the god isn't a hero right from the start, but a being who doesn't immediately shine with full power.

One records the winter solstice, but not to replace a giant Roman party.

Christmas is not the refinement of euphoria.

When asked about the festival being a form of sun worship, Gilbert K. Chesterton once replied: It feels different.

It is celebrated on December 25th, not because the end of winter is something triumphant and Christ is a god of light, but because it is cold outside and hope is something weak and small and Christ is a child.