Is Christmas pagan? Is Easter?

Every December the messages arrive. On WhatsApp, on Facebook, sometimes from the pulpit: Christmas is a pagan festival. The date was stolen from sun-worshippers. Easter is named after a goddess. Real Christians should have nothing to do with either.

Some of these claims are false. Some are half-true. One or two are genuinely debated by historians. This article sorts them out, so that you can celebrate — or decide not to — with a clear conscience and an honest answer for anyone who asks.

Start with the difference between a feast and a custom

It helps to separate two things that are usually lumped together.

The feasts themselves are Christian remembrances of real events: the birth of Jesus and his resurrection from the dead.

The customs that have grown up around them — Christmas trees, decorated eggs, rabbits, Father Christmas, new clothes, a goat or chicken for the family meal — came later, vary from country to country, and have very mixed histories.

A claim about a custom is not a claim about the feast. Even if a particular custom did have pagan roots, that would not make the remembrance of Christ's resurrection pagan. Keep the two apart and much of the confusion disappears.

Easter: the Christian Passover

Easter is the easier of the two, so begin there.

Jesus was crucified at Passover, the great Jewish feast remembering Israel's rescue from Egypt. He ate the Passover meal with his disciples the night before he died, and he reinterpreted its bread and cup around himself (Luke 22:15-20). Paul draws the line directly: "Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival" (1 Corinthians 5:7-8).

So the earliest Christians remembered the resurrection at Passover time. The Greek and Latin name for the feast is Pascha, from the Hebrew pesach, "Passover". Most of the world's languages still use a word descended from it: Pâques in French, Pascua in Spanish, Pasqua in Italian.

We know the feast was well established by the middle of the second century. Around AD 155, Polycarp of Smyrna — a man who had known the apostle John, according to Irenaeus — visited Rome and disagreed with its bishop, Anicetus, about the right date to keep Pascha. They could not agree, and they parted in peace. A few years later Melito, bishop of Sardis, preached a long Easter sermon, On Pascha, that still survives, linking the Passover lamb to Christ.

In AD 325 the Council of Nicaea sought a common date so that the whole church could celebrate together. That is why Easter moves every year: it is tied to the spring full moon, as Passover is.

Nothing in this history involves a pagan goddess.

Then where does the word "Easter" come from?

Only English and German — "Easter" and Ostern — use a different word. In 725 the English monk Bede wrote, in a book called The Reckoning of Time, that the Anglo-Saxon month around April was named Eosturmonath after a goddess called Eostre, whose feasts had once been held in that month. When the English became Christians, the name of the month stuck to the feast that fell in it.

Bede may be right. But be clear about how thin the evidence is. He is our only source for this goddess. No temple, statue, inscription or story about her survives. Some scholars accept Bede's report; others suspect he was guessing at the origin of an old month name. In the nineteenth century, writers built a whole fertility goddess called "Ostara" with hares and eggs out of very little — most of that picture is modern invention.

And even if Bede was right, all it tells us is where the English name of a month came from. It tells us nothing about the origin of the feast, which was being kept across Africa, Asia and Europe centuries before anyone in England had heard of Christ. Calling the days of the week Wednesday and Thursday — named after the Norse gods Woden and Thor — does not make Christians who meet on those days worshippers of Woden and Thor.

What about eggs?

Customs around eggs have more than one root. In many Christian traditions eggs were not eaten during Lent, the season of fasting before Easter, so they were a natural thing to celebrate with when the fast ended. Orthodox Christians have long dyed eggs red, and many have used the egg — something that looks dead but holds new life — as a simple picture of the empty tomb. The Easter rabbit came much later, from German folk custom. A Christian can enjoy the eggs or ignore them. They are not the point.

Christmas: why 25 December?

Here the question is genuinely harder, and you should be honest that historians disagree.

Start with what is certain. The Bible does not tell us the date of Jesus' birth. The earliest Christians do not appear to have celebrated it at all; their great annual feast was Pascha. Around AD 200, Clement of Alexandria reports that different Christians had calculated different dates for the birth — which shows people were interested, and that there was no agreed tradition.

The first certain evidence that Christ's birth was celebrated on 25 December comes from a Roman calendar known as the Chronograph of 354, which reflects practice in Rome from about 336. Most Eastern churches at first kept 6 January instead. Today many Orthodox churches celebrate on 7 January, which is simply 25 December in the older Julian calendar. The Ethiopian church's feast of Genna falls on the same day.

So why 25 December? There are two main theories.

Theory one: answering the sun festival

In AD 274 the emperor Aurelian built a great temple in Rome to Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun. The Chronograph of 354 lists the birthday of the Unconquered Sun on 25 December — the same day as Christ's birth. Near the winter solstice the days begin to lengthen, and the sun appears to be "reborn".

On this theory, the church in Rome chose 25 December to offer a Christian alternative to a popular pagan feast — to say that Christ, not the sun, is the true light. Christians did make that connection later: Christ was called "the sun of righteousness" from Malachi 4:2. And in the fifth century Pope Leo the Great rebuked Christians who bowed to the rising sun before entering St Peter's, which shows the two were sometimes tangled together in ordinary people's minds.

The weaknesses: the evidence for a big 25 December sun festival before the Christian feast is thinner than popular accounts suggest, and no early Christian writer says the date was chosen for this reason. The explicit claim that Christians moved the date to rival the sun appears much later, in a note by a Syrian writer centuries afterwards.

You will also hear that Christmas is the Roman feast of Saturnalia. Saturnalia was a real December festival of feasting and gift-giving, but it was held from 17 December for several days, not on the 25th.

Theory two: counting from the cross

The second theory was proposed by the French scholar Louis Duchesne in the nineteenth century and developed in detail by the American liturgical historian Thomas Talley in the 1980s.

It starts from a fact that is well documented: early Christians tried to calculate the exact date of Jesus' death. Around AD 200, Tertullian in North Africa placed the crucifixion on 25 March. Others in the East arrived at a date in April.

Many Christians also believed that Jesus was conceived on the same day of the year on which he died — a sense that God's great works begin and end in harmony. A fourth-century North African treatise, On Solstices and Equinoxes, says exactly this. And Augustine, writing around AD 400, records it plainly in On the Trinity: Christ is believed to have been conceived on 25 March, the day on which he also suffered, and to have been born on 25 December.

Count nine months from 25 March and you reach 25 December. Count nine months from 6 April and you reach 6 January — the date the Eastern churches kept. That the two calendars line up so neatly is a strong point in this theory's favour.

The weaknesses: we cannot be sure this calculation came before the date was chosen rather than being used to explain it afterwards, and the idea of conception and death falling on the same day is unusual to modern ears.

So should Christians celebrate them?

This is where the history hands over to Scripture.

Some Christians have answered no. The English Puritans abolished Christmas as a holy day in the 1640s, and for a time Massachusetts fined people for keeping it. Many Scottish Presbyterians followed a principle that worship should include only what Scripture commands. Jehovah's Witnesses do not celebrate Christmas or Easter, citing pagan origins and the absence of any command. Some churches in Nigeria and elsewhere hold similar convictions. These are people who want to obey God carefully, and they should be treated as such.

Other Christians — the great majority, from Catholic and Orthodox to Anglican, Methodist, Baptist and Pentecostal — keep both feasts gladly as times to remember the incarnation and the resurrection.

Paul speaks directly to this kind of disagreement:

One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. The one who observes the day, observes it in honour of the Lord.— Romans 14:5-6

And again: "Let no one pass judgement on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath" (Colossians 2:16).

The principle is liberty, governed by love. The one who celebrates must not look down on the one who does not. The one who abstains must not condemn the one who celebrates. Paul's warning in Galatians 4:9-11 about "observing days and months" is aimed at people who were treating the Jewish calendar as necessary for being right with God — not at Christians gladly remembering Christ.

Why this matters

When someone says "Christmas is pagan", they are usually saying one of three things: that the date is borrowed, that the customs are borrowed, or that Christianity itself is borrowed from older myths. The first is debated, the second is sometimes true and rarely important, and the third is a much bigger claim — taken up in Was Jesus copied from pagan gods?

You do not need to win every argument about trees and eggs. You need to know that the feasts point to two real events — a birth in Bethlehem and an empty tomb in Jerusalem — and that remembering them, or choosing not to keep special days at all, can both be done "in honour of the Lord".