Merry Mithras! Or Why Is christmas on december 25th?

​Today’s question comes from Ben Basden, a friend of Chad’s from Texas, and the Minister of Music at CrossRoads Fellowship Church, a church that Chad helped start in 2003. Ben writes, “Does your book cover the topic of how there’s basically a 1/365 chance that Jesus was actually born on December 25 and that it was easier to just stick it on a pagan holiday?”
 
Looks like we should have just let Ben write the book! First, no, somehow none of that ended up in the book. We are probably going to realize later that the book has more holes in it than a QAnon conspiracy theory. Second, yes, every bit of what Ben wrote is accurate. Thanks, Ben, for the leading question, and thanks for ruining everyone’s Christmas. You have definitely captured the spirit of the book.
 
So let’s have some honest truth: we don’t have a darn clue when Jesus was born. Heck, it’s hard enough to narrow it down to the right YEAR, much less the date. It wasn’t in the year 1 A.D., though—can you imagine people sitting around at their Millennium Party, counting down from year 1 B.C. to year 1 A.D., saying, “We don’t know who this ‘Christ’ is, but boy is this the party of a lifetime! 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .”? We don’t have much to work with on the calendar, but mean ol’ Herod was dead by 4 B.C., so Jesus must have been born sometime before that. But again, we don’t know the year, much less the date. Apparently no one who mattered thought this kid was very important at the time, so they didn’t write it down.
 
*Note to parents: this right here is why you should keep a scrapbook; you never know when your child will grow up to be the founder of a major world religion.
 
So how did we end up on December 25th? Call me skeptical, but I have serious doubts that a full-term pregnant lady made a lengthy donkey-back road trip through mostly desert terrain in the dead of winter. I just don’t see it happening. So how did we end up there? Well, centuries later, when Christians decided they had to park the birth of Jesus somewhere, they did a little better than just throw a dart at the calendar. They decided this was also the perfect opportunity to stomp out a little paganism while they were at it. December 25 was the winter solstice (okay, it’s not, but they thought it was; they weren’t the Mayans when it came to calendar-making, okay?), and thus it was the perfect date to mark the birth of deities—the hope of new life, spring is coming, all that stuff. Lots—and I mean LOTS—of deities were said to be born on that date, including Sol Invictus, Horus, Osiris, Attis, Heracles, Dionysus, and a whole bunch of others in lots of different cultures, most of whom also had a worship cult associated with them. The most important of those is Mithras.
 
Mithras—and Mithraism, the religion named for him—is probably the most important religion you’ve never heard of (unless some college professor told you about it once and blew your mind), because not only was he born on Dec 25, there were tons of other similarities in the birth story, including a visitation by shepherds at birth. Most importantly, it was the official religion of the Roman Empire just before Constantine issued an official edict that read, in formal Latin, “New Rule: we are doing the Jesus thing now.”
 
Sadly, the holiday song “All Hail, King Mithras” just never took off. It did appear in the Methodist hymnal, though, as recently as 1950. *checks notes*—actually, that’s not true at all. We don’t want any hateful comments from our Wesleyan friends, please.
 
So what happened? As Christianity began to spread, it needed a date to commemorate the birth of its Messiah. No one knew when that was exactly, so they had to pick one. So if you park your holiday right on top of all those pagan birthdays, you not only get to celebrate YOUR deity, you also get to stomp out THEIR celebration, and gradually over time you get to say, “Not your god, but my God.” So we did that. That’s just true, even if most of us had no idea.
 
People still get bent out of shape about it, though, thinking that if Christianity is not 100% original storyline, then it must be made up or fake, so folks often dig in their heels and refuse to believe what is easily provable here. Don’t be like that. Normally, especially with religious movements, if everything is completely new storylines, that is the mark of a crazy cult group (looking at you, Scientology! Like, what even is that anyway?? Cognitive pop psychology with a heavy dose of aliens? Points for being original, but my goodness, y’all jumped the shark on that one!)
 
So yeah. We stole the birthday from the pagans. And we stomped out their paganism so hard, no one even remembers they were a thing. Take that, pagans!
 
And also, know that when Chad or Dave wish you “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”, there is at least a little part of us that is most definitely thinking about Mithras.