Was Jesus Really Born on December 25th?

A repackaged Pagan holiday, or yet another Pagan origin myth?

The internet is obsessed with claiming Pagan origins for every facet of Christian faith.

Zoroastrianism came first. (It didn’t.)

The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is modeled after the Egyptian god Osiris. (It’s not.)

Christmas is a repackaged a Pagan holiday. (Let’s get into it.)

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The Pagan origin claims didn’t originate with the internet.

There has always been acknowledgment from early church fathers that the date of Christ’s birth is not explicitly stated in the Bible and is based on tradition using other important biblical feast dates.

However — early Christian church fathers, with all of their cultural, historic, and religious knowledge, never stated that Christ’s claimed birthday of December 25th was Pagan in origin.

The accusation that Christmas is purely Pagan, including all its associated practices, emerged in the 16th century with the Protestant Reformation.

Protestant Reformers (especially Puritans) argued that Christmas had no biblical basis and was built on Catholic traditions that had absorbed Pagan customs. Puritans in England and New England called Christmas celebrations “Fool’s tide” and “popish” and sometimes banned them entirely.

Listen, I get it. It’s really enticing to believe that everything is a conspiracy. That much of our history is a fabrication. That everything we’ve been taught is a lie.

Because the truth is, we have been lied to, on a large scale, repeatedly throughout history.

But modern conspiracy theories are predicated on the belief that the population has always been as dumb, or dumber, than it is today.

And I just don’t believe that’s true.

I find it really, really hard to believe that previous cultures were dumber than we are today.

Birth of a Tradition

The earliest Christian church was not the formalized Catholic or Orthodox Churches as we know them today, and it did not stem solely from beliefs written down and canonized in the Bible.

The earliest Christian Church was people.

It was people who had heard the good news of Jesus Christ and collected and passed down the words and deeds of Jesus, His Apostles, and the early church as it formed — which officially started in 33 A.D., but it took a couple hundred years for formal, organized church traditions to be confirmed in writing, and then it continued to evolve from there over the last 2,000 years.

The date of Christmas was officially confirmed by the Roman Catholic Church in 336 A.D., but December 25th was recognized by numerous church fathers as the likeliest birth date of Jesus long before it was official.

Why is This Day Different From All Other Days?

Many of the earliest Christian scholars believed that Jesus was born on December 25th based on several factors — the first of which had to do with the date of his death.

A very ancient belief (found in Jewish and early Christian tradition) held that prophets died on the same calendar date they were conceived. Western Christians dated Jesus’ crucifixion to March 25, and Eastern Christians often used April 6 — the date of Passover, implied as the date of Jesus’ sacrifice in the New Testament and in apocryphal texts.

For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.

1 Corinthians 5:7

If conception occurred on March 25th, 9 months later would have been December 25th. If it was April 6th, then nine months later would be January 6.

This belief explains why early Christians arrived at December 25 long before any later institutional calendar decisions.

Hippolytus

Hippolytus of Rome (170-235 A.D.), writing in the early third century (around 200–204 AD), stands as one of the earliest Christian authors to clearly associate the birth of Jesus with December 25. In his Commentary on Daniel, Hippolytus writes directly that Christ was born “on the 25th day of December,” a statement that long predates the formal celebration of Christmas as a feast in the wider Church. This matters because it shows that the association of that specific calendar date with Jesus’ birth wasn’t invented centuries later out of convenience or borrowed from Pagan festivals — it was already part of Christian chronological thinking in the earliest generations of believers. Rather than a symbolic guess, Hippolytus’ testimony points to a preserved memory or tradition about Jesus’ birthdate that existed well before December 25 became the universally recognized date of Christmas.

Tertullian

Also around 200 A.D., Tertullian of Carthage (155-220 A.D.) reported the calculation that the 14th of Nisan (the day of the crucifixion according to the Gospel of John) in the year Jesus died was equivalent to March 25 in the Roman calendar. March 25 is, of course, nine months before December 25; it was later recognized as the Feast of the Annunciation — the commemoration of Jesus’ conception. Thus, Jesus was believed to have been conceived and crucified on the same day of the year. Exactly nine months later, Jesus was born, on December 25.

¹³ When Pilate heard this, he brought Jesus out and sat down on the judge’s seat at a place known as the Stone Pavement (which in Aramaic is Gabbatha). ¹⁴ It was the day of Preparation of the Passover; it was about noon.

John 19:14-15

³¹ Now it was the day of Preparation, and the next day was to be a special Sabbath. Because the Jewish leaders did not want the bodies left on the crosses during the Sabbath, they asked Pilate to have the legs broken and the bodies taken down.

John 19:31

Julius Africanus

Julius Africanus, a Christian historian writing in the late second and early third centuries (c. 160–240 AD), provides another early line of evidence supporting December 25 as the birthdate of Jesus — also through chronology. Africanus also calculated the Annunciation, the moment of Christ’s conception, as occurring on March 25, a date he associated with the beginning of redemption history. When the natural nine-month gestation period is applied, this places Jesus’ birth on December 25. While Africanus does not explicitly name Christmas or spell out the birthdate in those terms, his timeline clearly supports it. Like Hippolytus, his work shows that early Christians were already engaging in careful historical and theological calculations about the life of Christ, and that December 25 emerges organically from those early efforts — well before the date became formalized in the Roman Church calendar, and certainly not resulting from influence of earlier Pagan rituals.

This idea also appears in an anonymous Christian treatise titled On Solstices and Equinoxes, which appears to come from fourth-century North Africa. The treatise states: “Therefore our Lord was conceived on the eighth of the kalends of April in the month of March (March 25), which is the day of the passion of the Lord and of his conception. For on that day he was conceived on the same he suffered.” Based on this, the treatise dates Jesus’ birth to the winter solstice — again, independent of Pagan ritual.

St. Augustine

Augustine of Hippo (354–430 AD), writing in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, adds further weight to the case for December 25 by treating the date not as a Roman innovation, but as an inherited Christian tradition. In his writings, Augustine notes that even the Donatists — a North African Christian sect known for rejecting Roman ecclesiastical authority — celebrated the birth of Christ on December 25. This detail is significant, because it shows that the date was not imposed from Rome or standardized through imperial influence. Instead, December 25 must have been widely accepted earlier, before these divisions took shape within the Church. Augustine’s observation serves as strong evidence that the celebration of Christ’s birth on December 25 was already deeply rooted in Christian practice, shared across theological and political boundaries long before later claims of Roman or Pagan invention.

“For He [Jesus] is believed to have been conceived on the 25th of March, upon which day also he suffered; so the womb of the Virgin, in which he was conceived, where no one of mortals was begotten, corresponds to the new grave in which he was buried, wherein was never man laid, neither before him nor since. But he was born, according to tradition, upon December the 25th.”

Saint Augustine, in On the Trinity (c. 399-419)

The Sheep

But wait! There’s more!

There is a plethora of evidence in the Bible itself that supports the December 25th date.

Including the sheep in the fields near Bethlehem.

FUN FACT: Did you know that sheep were raised specifically in the fields around Bethlehem for sacrificial use in the Jerusalem Temple, particularly for Passover (!) which occurred in March/April (!!).

⁸ And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. ⁹ An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. ¹⁰ But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. ¹¹ Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. ¹² This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”

¹³ Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, ¹⁴ “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”

¹⁵ When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”

Luke 2:8-14

We’ve already established that the Bible indicates Jesus’ conception was timed for Passover, which prophetically foreshadowed Jesus Christ as the ultimate Passover Lamb. The sheep being raised for the Passover sacrifice would need to be between 8 days and 1 year old by March/April, according to Leviticus. The timing lines up and also fulfills ancient prophecy and foreshadowing Jesus as the Lamb of God.

⁴ Surely he took up our pain
and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
stricken by him, and afflicted.
⁵ But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
⁶ We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to our own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
⁷ He was oppressed and afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
and as a sheep before its shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
⁸ By oppression and judgment he was taken away.
Yet who of his generation protested?
For he was cut off from the land of the living;
for the transgression of my people he was punished.

Isaiah 53:4-8

There is a common claim that it was too cold in winter for sheep to be in the fields of Bethlehem. But the levant has mild winters. If you check a weather forecast right now, you will see it’s actually projected to be a high of 62° in Bethlehem on Christmas Day, with a low of 45°. The ideal temperature for sheep is 45-70°.

Refuting the Pagan Solstice/Sun Gods Argument

By this point, it should be clear that it was well-established by early church fathers that the tradition of Jesus Christ being born on December 25th was born of Christian tradition, not Pagan mythology.

The assertion that Christmas is a repurposing of ancient Pagan celebrations is repeated with confidence not because it is a strong argument. It’s not rooted in any historic evidence. It’s repeated because it is rhetorically convenient.

But what about Saturnalia? Sol Invictus? Mithra?

There is zero evidence that December 25th was a celebrated Pagan date prior to the birth of Jesus Christ.

Saturnalia was typically celebrated December 17th-23rd — a period not even including December 25th.

Sol Invictus — a late Roman Empire sun god celebrated on December 25th — was established in 274 AD, nearly 250 years after Jesus’ crucifixion.

And the claim that Mithra, a Persian sun god, had a birthday celebrated on December 25th originated in the 18th century — more than 1,750 years after Jesus’ crucifixion.

Christmas is not a copy of Pagan rituals.

It’s the other way around.

The Pagan rituals are a copy of Christmas.

They have attempted to steal the date and the traditions of Jesus’ birth to undermine and discredit the Messiah.

Furthermore, the winter solstice is not Pagan.

The solstice belongs to the Lord.

The Lord our God, who placed the sun in the sky, who designed every facet of earth.

The goal of the fallen angels — the goal of Paganism — is to get you to worship creation instead of the creator.

Taking God’s creation and inverting it for Pagan ritual is the M.O. of demons — it’s what they do.

But taking things back is God’s M.O..

God loves to take a desecrated thing and make it Holy.

God loves a metaphor.

Why wouldn’t God bring his son to Earth just after Saturnalia?

Oh you’re going to have a debaucherous, demonic, inverted solstice festival at the end of December?

Great, that’s the perfect lead-in for a sweet, innocent, tiny, baby, lamb of God.

There is truly no other time for the Savior’s birth that is more brilliantly metaphorical in all of God’s creation than December 25th.

The Christmas Tree

“But what about the Christmas Tree?” I hear you ask. “That’s Pagan, right?”

Ironically, it was Martin Luther — father of the Reformation himself — who is credited with popularizing lighting an indoor Christmas tree in 16th century Germany, though the tradition of the tree itself dates back to St. Boniface in the 8th century.

While evergreens were used in Pagan practices, they were also one of the few green plants available in the dead of winter — and to Christians they symbolize eternal life and immortality through Jesus Christ. But the tradition of the Christmas tree originates in 8th-century Germany, when St. Boniface, an English missionary converted a Pagan village.

St. Boniface encountered a group of Pagans preparing to sacrifice a child beneath their sacred “Thunder Oak,” dedicated to the god Thor. To stop the ritual, Boniface felled the massive oak with a single blow, and when the tree crashed to the ground, it miraculously spared a small fir sapling standing behind it. Pointing to the evergreen, Boniface proclaimed it a symbol of Christ — its triangular shape representing the Trinity and its year-round greenness representing eternal life. He urged the people to take such trees into their homes as reminders of God’s love, a tradition that later evolved into the modern Christmas tree.

Funny enough, legend has it that the tradition of putting lights on the Christmas tree started with Martin Luther, father of the Protestant Reformation. As the story goes, he was walking in the woods one evening and saw the stars twinkling between the branches of the trees. In order to replicate this scene for his children, he put candles on an evergreen tree in his house.

And thus a Christmas tradition was born — from the original Christian church fathers, modified by Catholics and Protestants along the way — not from Pagans.

In Summary

We can learn a lot from history if we actually study and understand it.

The claim that Christmas is Pagan proliferates because it feels intuitively clever, it flatters skepticism, and it requires no actual research.

But upon closer inspection, it completely disintegrates.

The argument didn’t even emerge until over a thousand years after Christ.

Someone else having your birthday does not mean that day is not your birthday.

Another religion using trees does not mean that trees are Pagan.

And finally, believing that Jesus’ actual birthday is a Pagan holiday is exactly what the demons would want.

So don’t get your information on Christianity from Pagans and non-believers.

They know not what they do.

Merry Christmas!