In Case You're Asked: "Calculating Christmas"

Touchstone Magazine shared this post from its archives, an article by William J. Tighe, Professor of History at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, exploring the efforts of the Early Church to establish the date of the birth of Christ. He confronts the usual explanation that early Christians "baptized" the pagan celebration of the birth of Sol Invictus, noting that view has it backwards: the Emperor Aurelian established that feast to compete with the birth of Christ in 274 A.D.

Instead, Tighe examines the common belief that the great prophets of God were conceived or born and died on the same date. Thus the date of the Annunciation, March 25 in the West, April 6 in the East, became the determining factor:

It is to this day, commemorated almost universally among Christians as the Feast of the Annunciation, when the Archangel Gabriel brought the good tidings of a savior to the Virgin Mary, upon whose acquiescence the Eternal Word of God (“Light of Light, True God of True God, begotten of the Father before all ages”) forthwith became incarnate in her womb. What is the length of pregnancy? Nine months. Add nine months to March 25th and you get December 25th; add it to April 6th and you get January 6th. December 25th is Christmas, and January 6th is Epiphany.

Christmas (December 25th) is a feast of Western Christian origin. In Constantinople it appears to have been introduced in 379 or 380. From a sermon of St. John Chrysostom, at the time a renowned ascetic and preacher in his native Antioch, it appears that the feast was first celebrated there on 25 December 386. From these centers it spread throughout the Christian East, being adopted in Alexandria around 432 and in Jerusalem a century or more later. The Armenians, alone among ancient Christian churches, have never adopted it, and to this day celebrate Christ’s birth, manifestation to the magi, and baptism on January 6th.

Western churches, in turn, gradually adopted the January 6th Epiphany feast from the East, Rome doing so sometime between 366 and 394. But in the West, the feast was generally presented as the commemoration of the visit of the magi to the infant Christ, and as such, it was an important feast, but not one of the most important ones—a striking contrast to its position in the East, where it remains the second most important festival of the church year, second only to Pascha (Easter).

In the East, Epiphany far outstrips Christmas. The reason is that the feast celebrates Christ’s baptism in the Jordan and the occasion on which the Voice of the Father and the Descent of the Spirit both manifested for the first time to mortal men the divinity of the Incarnate Christ and the Trinity of the Persons in the One Godhead.

Please read the rest there.

Image credit: Diptych with Scenes of the Annunciation, Nativity, Crucifixion, and Resurrection, 1300–1325 (German) Public Domain from THE MET. The image at the top is the interior of the diptych; the bottom image is the exterior.