Latest / Abide Meditation App / Why Is Christmas on December 25th_ _ Dr. Tom Schmidt

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Why Is Christmas on December 25th_ _ Dr. Tom Schmidt · Abide Meditation App

0:00
Speaker 1: Why is Christmas on December twenty fifth? The Bible never
0:03
Speaker 1: gives a date, and every year on social media you'll
0:05
Speaker 1: hear theories like it was the birthday of the Sun
0:07
Speaker 1: God's soul in Victis or Mythrus. But the real story
0:10
Speaker 1: is honestly more interesting. I'm joined by doctor Tom Schmidt,
0:13
Speaker 1: a Yelle trained scholar of early Christianity and the New
0:15
Speaker 1: Testament who's published research on the origins of Christmas. We're
0:19
Speaker 1: going to walk through all the evidence the Roman sun god,
0:21
Speaker 1: the winter solstice in a fascinating Greek inscription carved onto
0:24
Speaker 1: a statue of the bishop Appolytus that helps explain how
0:27
Speaker 1: December twenty fifth started to make sense. So with that,
0:30
Speaker 1: let's get into it, all right. I'm here with doctor
0:32
Speaker 1: Tom Schmidt. Welcome to the show, Andrew.
0:34
Speaker 2: It's great to be back.
0:35
Speaker 1: So tis the season to talk about the date of Christmas.
0:40
Speaker 1: And you have a relatively recent article. I say relatively recent.
0:44
Speaker 1: It was twenty fifteen, I believe, so in the Grand
0:46
Speaker 1: Scheme of Academia. That's recent article on the date of Christmas,
0:51
Speaker 1: December twenty fifth? Why is it on December twenty fifth?
0:54
Speaker 1: I have talked about this on the channel before about
0:56
Speaker 1: the history of religion thesis and the calculate thesis. And
1:02
Speaker 1: I want us to walk the audience through all the
1:06
Speaker 1: arguments for why we think early Christians largely settled on
1:12
Speaker 1: December twenty fifth, and we can get into why I
1:14
Speaker 1: use the word largely there too. So maybe start us
1:17
Speaker 1: off where you think makes the most sense.
1:20
Speaker 3: I think maybe what makes the most sense is starting
1:23
Speaker 3: with the more certain data that we have, because in
1:26
Speaker 3: so much historical investigation there's a lot that's squishy and unclear.
1:31
Speaker 3: So maybe we'll start with what is clear and what
1:33
Speaker 3: everybody agrees on, and then we'll go from there. What
1:38
Speaker 3: everyone agrees on is that in three hundred and eighty
1:41
Speaker 3: six AD, John Chrisystem. John chris System is a very
1:46
Speaker 3: famous Christian figure. He's the Bishop of Antioch in three
1:52
Speaker 3: eighty six, and he's preaching a Christmas sermon that we
1:56
Speaker 3: have and it's on December twenty fifth, and in it
2:00
Speaker 3: he says, you know, folks, this date is new for us.
2:05
Speaker 3: We just started celebrating this date less than ten years ago,
2:09
Speaker 3: he says. So that brings us back to three seventy six.
2:12
Speaker 3: And he says, and actually this date is spreading throughout
2:15
Speaker 3: the whole Roman world right now, the Roman Empire right now.
2:19
Speaker 3: And we know that he's right about that because we
2:21
Speaker 3: get all these other Christmas sermons that come about that
2:24
Speaker 3: we still have preserved from famous figures around roughly the
2:27
Speaker 3: same time. And then John says something really interesting. He says,
2:33
Speaker 3: but we learn this date from the church in Rome,
2:36
Speaker 3: and they've been celebrating it on this date for a
2:38
Speaker 3: long time, he says. He says that several times, so
2:42
Speaker 3: that we know that in the East, in Antioch, in
2:47
Speaker 3: the Roman East, that they were celebrating Christmas in the
2:49
Speaker 3: three seventies three eighties, and it was new then, and
2:51
Speaker 3: that the Roman they got it from the Romans, and
2:53
Speaker 3: the Romans were doing it even earlier. Curiously, around the
2:58
Speaker 3: same time, in the three sixties, the Emperor of Rome,
3:02
Speaker 3: Julian the Apostate. He was a Christian who then reverted
3:06
Speaker 3: to paganism Grek Roman paganism. That's why it's called Julian
3:08
Speaker 3: the Apostan. He writes a hymn to the Sun God,
3:12
Speaker 3: the god of the Sun, and he mentions that there
3:15
Speaker 3: is a huge important festival on December twenty fifth to
3:20
Speaker 3: the Sun God. So the question becomes, what is going
3:25
Speaker 3: on here? Was Christmas chosen because it corresponded with the
3:32
Speaker 3: feast of the Sun God and in some sources the
3:34
Speaker 3: birth of the Sun God? Or was it simply coincidental,
3:39
Speaker 3: you know, these dates just happened to coincide, or is
3:43
Speaker 3: the opposite true that actually Julian in trying to revive
3:46
Speaker 3: grek Roman paganism that had fallen on such hard times
3:49
Speaker 3: that some pagan priests decided to co opt Christmas celebrations.
3:55
Speaker 3: That's the big question.
3:57
Speaker 1: I actually did not know about that. John chris System
3:59
Speaker 1: quote A big fan of John Chrisystem I study early
4:02
Speaker 1: Christian magic in his homilies. He complains about magic a
4:06
Speaker 1: lot his people in his congregation, using amulets and stuff
4:09
Speaker 1: like that. But we're talking three seventies, three eighties, so
4:12
Speaker 1: quite late. We're you know, half a century after Constantine,
4:16
Speaker 1: three hundred and fifty years after Jesus, and John is like,
4:21
Speaker 1: oh wow, this is our new date, December twenty fifth,
4:24
Speaker 1: But which kind of tells us something about kind of
4:27
Speaker 1: the wild wild West of early Christianity, where it was
4:29
Speaker 1: something that we take for granted, Oh Christmas is December
4:32
Speaker 1: twenty fifth. Even a big name bishop in a major
4:35
Speaker 1: city like Antioch is the date wasn't settled yet precisely.
4:39
Speaker 3: Yeah, And we see that it's not just John that
4:41
Speaker 3: tells us this. We know from many sources that the
4:44
Speaker 3: date was not settled. It took a long time to
4:46
Speaker 3: get settled. We have some naysayers, you know, people who
4:49
Speaker 3: argue against it. And another big running date was January
4:53
Speaker 3: sixth and that's still held in the Armenian Church today.
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Speaker 2: And there were other dates too.
5:00
Speaker 3: When you go back and you start rooting through the records,
5:02
Speaker 3: you know, some people said November March twenty eighth was
5:06
Speaker 3: a date. Also, March twenty fifth seems to have been
5:09
Speaker 3: a date. December twenty fifth, of course, was a date.
5:13
Speaker 3: So there was a variety of possibilities and December twenty
5:16
Speaker 3: fifth was one of them, and that's the one that
5:18
Speaker 3: won out.
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Speaker 1: So let's start dialing back in time, trying to get earlier.
5:22
Speaker 1: So where did John get this idea? And maybe focus
5:26
Speaker 1: first on the Sun God, because you just brought up
5:29
Speaker 1: the Sun God. There was apparently we have this scrap
5:32
Speaker 1: of evidence that there was some sort of Sun God
5:34
Speaker 1: festival on December twenty fifth. This leads us to the
5:38
Speaker 1: so called history of religion thesis that there was there
5:44
Speaker 1: must have been some sort of major festival on December
5:47
Speaker 1: twenty fifth Christian authorities. I think there's like a lazy,
5:52
Speaker 1: you know, Twitter meme way that it goes, which is
5:55
Speaker 1: why they wanted to steal the holiday or to somehow
5:59
Speaker 1: christian is it. You can make a more academic argument
6:02
Speaker 1: and say there's some process of Christianization where people were
6:05
Speaker 1: already celebrating it, why not put a Christian label on it?
6:09
Speaker 1: And this theory, from my understanding, has fallen out of
6:12
Speaker 1: favor in recent years. Can you walk us through the
6:13
Speaker 1: history of religion thesis sol Invictus Son God and where
6:18
Speaker 1: that scholarship stands now you.
6:20
Speaker 2: Have correctly summarized it.
6:22
Speaker 3: The thesis is roughly that there was this Roman the
6:26
Speaker 3: city of Rome, had a celebration to the Sun God,
6:29
Speaker 3: the birth of the Sun God, on December twenty fifth,
6:31
Speaker 3: and had games associated with that chariot racist things like that,
6:35
Speaker 3: and that this was a big deal and that Christians
6:39
Speaker 3: liked it, and they thought, well, we'll celebrate the birth
6:42
Speaker 3: of our son of God, you know s O n
6:45
Speaker 3: as opposed to Sun, and we'll do that on December
6:48
Speaker 3: twenty fifth, and this actually was the majority position of
6:53
Speaker 3: scholars for quite some time, where it's going back to
6:57
Speaker 3: the nineteenth century, where that originally December twenty was this
7:01
Speaker 3: pagan holiday that the Church, in whatever process and for
7:04
Speaker 3: whatever reasons, co opted, and it was easy for them
7:07
Speaker 3: to do that because if you read the New Testament
7:10
Speaker 3: and the Old Testament, Jesus is associated with bringing light
7:15
Speaker 3: into the world, and in fact, there's even a prophecy
7:18
Speaker 3: in the prophet Malachi who talks about the Sun of
7:20
Speaker 3: righteousness sun the son of righteousness will arise that was
7:24
Speaker 3: vieused as a messianic prophecy of Jesus. So it was
7:27
Speaker 3: easy for them to make the argument that maybe our
7:32
Speaker 3: light of the world began to dawn on December twenty
7:34
Speaker 3: fifth and will just replace this other holiday. The problem
7:39
Speaker 3: with this is that we actually have very little evidence
7:44
Speaker 3: of a Roman festival on December twenty fifth to the
7:48
Speaker 3: Sun God. There's a reason why Julian the Apostate is
7:51
Speaker 3: our earliest piece of evidence from the three sixties, because
7:56
Speaker 3: we know lots and lots about Roman religion, many sources
8:00
Speaker 3: that talk about that. We actually have Roman religious calendars
8:04
Speaker 3: that are preserved, and none of them mention a date
8:09
Speaker 3: of the birth of the Sun God on December twenty fifth.
8:12
Speaker 3: The closest we can come before Julian is a manuscript
8:17
Speaker 3: called the Chronography of three fifty four AD, So this
8:20
Speaker 3: is not much before Julian, and Julian's in the three sixties.
8:23
Speaker 3: This is the three fifties.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, and only twenty or so years before John Chris
8:27
Speaker 1: System too, so this is also quite late after Constantine.
8:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it.
8:31
Speaker 3: Says the birth of Invictus was on December twenty fifth,
8:35
Speaker 3: but it doesn't say the Sun Now. Often the sun
8:38
Speaker 3: god was called soul invictus, the unconquered Sun Invictus means unconquered.
8:44
Speaker 3: Most scholars have read this passage as referring to the
8:46
Speaker 3: Sun God being born on December twenty fifth, But either way,
8:49
Speaker 3: I mean that only gets us back to the three fifties,
8:51
Speaker 3: three thirties, So most scholars think, what's going on here
8:55
Speaker 3: is that Emperor Aurelian in the two seventies he was
9:00
Speaker 3: worshipper of the Sun God. He founded a temple of
9:02
Speaker 3: the Sun in Rome in two seventy four a d.
9:05
Speaker 3: And there's some good it's circumstantial, but there is some
9:08
Speaker 3: good reasons to believe that he started a date of
9:14
Speaker 3: a feast to the Sun God, a celebration of the
9:17
Speaker 3: Sun God on December twenty fifth, in two seventy four
9:21
Speaker 3: a d. And now even with that date, though, you know,
9:26
Speaker 3: you can still make that History of religion's argument that
9:29
Speaker 3: this then became a very popular feast and the church,
9:32
Speaker 3: the Church in some sense used it or borrowed from it,
9:35
Speaker 3: or would have you. That though, gets us into the
9:41
Speaker 3: alternative theory, the calculation theory.
9:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, and before we dive into that, I do want
9:45
Speaker 1: to give the history of religion theory. It's it's fair shake.
9:49
Speaker 1: I think that was a little flippant, just because it's
9:51
Speaker 1: the the memes that pop up every single year. TikTok
9:55
Speaker 1: is just a wash with people saying Christianity is stealing
9:58
Speaker 1: pagan this than that. And you know, I study Syncretism,
10:02
Speaker 1: so like I do understand when christian Christianity, Judaism, all
10:06
Speaker 1: religions are building their religions out of the available culture.
10:10
Speaker 1: So and I think I think it's gregory. There's some
10:14
Speaker 1: Western bishop in like the six hundreds who does outright
10:17
Speaker 1: say like let's christianize temples, let's christianize holidays like we
10:20
Speaker 1: do have like actual bishops saying that. But when it
10:24
Speaker 1: comes to so it's gregory. Okay, Yeah, I did do
10:27
Speaker 1: a video on souln Victis, So I feel like I
10:29
Speaker 1: have a decent grasp on this scholarship. And from my understanding,
10:33
Speaker 1: Soul was a relatively minor god in the earlier centuries
10:36
Speaker 1: of the Roman Roman Republican, then the early Roman Empire,
10:39
Speaker 1: and then a really and really the Sun God has
10:42
Speaker 1: his moment from two seventy into the three hundreds. Constantine
10:46
Speaker 1: himself apparently was a Sun God fan. So the argument that,
10:51
Speaker 1: just to repeat what you were saying, the argument is
10:53
Speaker 1: that the a December twenty fifth Sun God festival doesn't
10:57
Speaker 1: seem to be particularly ancient, seems to be late third century,
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Speaker 1: and by no means was a major holiday, so major
11:06
Speaker 1: that Christians everywhere, Christian authorities everywhere, it would be like,
11:09
Speaker 1: oh my word, we need to we need to Christianize
11:11
Speaker 1: this asap otherwise, you know, to get these pagans in line.
11:16
Speaker 1: It could not have been viewed as a threat because
11:19
Speaker 1: it was just not It was recent and not particularly major.
11:22
Speaker 2: I agree.
11:23
Speaker 3: Another factor is is just the fact of us as
11:27
Speaker 3: humans we all live on this earth. We all look
11:29
Speaker 3: at the sun and the moon before the internet, before TV.
11:33
Speaker 3: We're doing that all the time constantly. We're very aware
11:36
Speaker 3: of the patterns and the phases of the moon and
11:39
Speaker 3: of the sun, and how the sun will lie in
11:41
Speaker 3: the northern hemisphere, will stay out longer and get higher
11:44
Speaker 3: in the sky in the summer, and the opposite in winter.
11:47
Speaker 3: And it's a natural human reaction to see to realize
11:53
Speaker 3: when the winter solstice occurs that the sun is now
11:55
Speaker 3: out longer. We see this across all cultures. We see
11:58
Speaker 3: it in a Jewish culture, we see it in Christian culture.
12:01
Speaker 3: We see it in basically every culture we have evidence of.
12:04
Speaker 3: So another factor, complicating factor in this is that it's
12:08
Speaker 3: just very possible that people are noticing the same thing
12:11
Speaker 3: and independently marking these dates in parallel, and we have
12:18
Speaker 3: to We know that, for instance, Jews did do this.
12:20
Speaker 3: The vernal equinox was important for Jews, it was important
12:23
Speaker 3: for Christians. And if the vernal equinox is important, the
12:27
Speaker 3: spring equinox, then the solstices and the autumnal equinox are
12:31
Speaker 3: also important.
12:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a really good point, and I think Lens
12:38
Speaker 1: explain someone why the history of religion theory was so popular,
12:41
Speaker 1: because the solstice and the vernal equinox do seem to
12:45
Speaker 1: be part of the story here, so we can't. So
12:49
Speaker 1: the argument to refute the history of religion thesis is
12:53
Speaker 1: somewhat nuanced. We have to say, yes, the solstice had
12:56
Speaker 1: something to do with it, No, sole invictis probably didn't
13:00
Speaker 1: anything to do with it, so it is nuanced. So
13:02
Speaker 1: with that, now that we're talking about solstices and vernal equinoxes,
13:06
Speaker 1: I think now is a good time to walk our
13:09
Speaker 1: way into the calculation theory, which I think will require
13:12
Speaker 1: some laying the foundations to wrap our heads around this argument.
13:17
Speaker 3: The calculation theory brings us to just another thought world.
13:21
Speaker 3: It's this world of ancient Christian chronographers. These are ancient
13:25
Speaker 3: Christians who are trying to figure out when biblical events occurred,
13:31
Speaker 3: like the crucifixion of Jesus, like the Resurrection of Jesus,
13:35
Speaker 3: like other points in the biblical past, and of course
13:38
Speaker 3: like the birth of Jesus. And we see this starting
13:42
Speaker 3: in the second and third centuries, where Christians are doing
13:45
Speaker 3: this and in order to figure out the most important
13:50
Speaker 3: dates in the Christian calendar, which is the Crucifixion and
13:53
Speaker 3: Resurrection of Jesus. You have to be able to figure
13:57
Speaker 3: out the Passover. The Passover is a Jewish holiday and
14:03
Speaker 3: it's a lunar holiday. It's calibrated to the phases of
14:06
Speaker 3: the moon, and you are according to biblical instructions and
14:10
Speaker 3: Jewish talmotic documents, you're supposed to celebrate the Passover on
14:15
Speaker 3: the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Now, this
14:21
Speaker 3: brings up two problems for chronographers. Number one is when
14:26
Speaker 3: is the vernal equinox. It's actually hard. I mean, we
14:29
Speaker 3: can make a random guess and say towards the end
14:32
Speaker 3: of March, but it's actually very difficult to figure out
14:35
Speaker 3: precisely when the vernal equinox is and then the Passover
14:41
Speaker 3: on a year to year basis. It's easy to go
14:43
Speaker 3: out and look up at this guy and see if
14:45
Speaker 3: the moon is full or not. But what's very difficult
14:49
Speaker 3: is to predict when a full moon would have occurred
14:52
Speaker 3: in the past. It's technically possible, but it's very hard
14:56
Speaker 3: to do because the moon moves around a little bit
15:00
Speaker 3: and it's inconsistent, and it runs throughout the solar calendar.
15:04
Speaker 3: So if you keep track of when Passover or Easter
15:07
Speaker 3: occur every year, you notice it moves. Those dates move
15:10
Speaker 3: in the calendar, and sometimes they are a month apart
15:14
Speaker 3: from one year to another. So that's important because in
15:20
Speaker 3: order to figure out the crucifixion of Jesus, you need
15:25
Speaker 3: to know all of all of this stuff going on,
15:28
Speaker 3: otherwise you're going to land on the wrong date. And
15:31
Speaker 3: to bring this full circle to the birth of Jesus,
15:36
Speaker 3: it turns out that early Christians thought, for a variety
15:41
Speaker 3: of reasons, they thought that Jesus was conceived on the Passover,
15:46
Speaker 3: so they thought he was arrested and crucified on the Passover.
15:49
Speaker 3: They also thought he was conceived on the Passover, And
15:54
Speaker 3: of course, if you're conceived at some point, if you
15:57
Speaker 3: know when someone is conceived, you can at least get
15:59
Speaker 3: a rough estimate of when they are born.
16:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, so let's dial back a little bit. So let's
16:04
Speaker 1: imagine it's the first few centuries of Christianity. You have
16:07
Speaker 1: these extremely erudite, extremely smart early Christian theologians who set
16:12
Speaker 1: out on a mission to try to calculate the major
16:15
Speaker 1: milestones of the life of Jesus. The Gospels give us
16:18
Speaker 1: a lot of data on a lot of things. They
16:20
Speaker 1: don't mention time times and dates. Very often, they don't
16:24
Speaker 1: mention when Jesus was born, but we do get some
16:27
Speaker 1: details about when he was crucified, so around the passover.
16:31
Speaker 1: So the passover changes year to year because of the
16:35
Speaker 1: phases of the moon, so it's shifting between April and March.
16:38
Speaker 1: So that presents a problem for these chronographers. Let's say
16:44
Speaker 1: two hundred something cee three hundred something, see either hundreds
16:47
Speaker 1: hundreds of years after the crucifixion of Jesus. Instead, they're
16:50
Speaker 1: trying to backdate. They're like calculating back literally centuries when
16:56
Speaker 1: was the full moon sometime around thirty CE when they
17:00
Speaker 1: think Jesus was crucified. So that's the problem they're trying
17:05
Speaker 1: to crack.
17:05
Speaker 3: Here, right, Yes, And the problem is actually compounded also
17:09
Speaker 3: because if you follow the gospel accounts, Jesus is crucified
17:13
Speaker 3: on a Friday, So this full moon also has to
17:18
Speaker 3: correspond with a day of the week, which just adds
17:21
Speaker 3: another layer of complications.
17:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, hats off to them for attempting it,
17:27
Speaker 1: but you can see the problem they have here. It's
17:29
Speaker 1: a chalindrical problem. It's an astronomical problem. They're trying to
17:32
Speaker 1: calculate moon phases with the dates. So this is the
17:36
Speaker 1: mission that's in front of them. And let's now get
17:39
Speaker 1: into you briefly gestured at this what this has to
17:43
Speaker 1: do with the birth of Jesus. We're talking a lot
17:45
Speaker 1: about the crucifixion of Jesus here. Why does the birth
17:48
Speaker 1: of Jesus have anything to do with this? And you
17:50
Speaker 1: mentioned that they believe the conception of Jesus happened around
17:56
Speaker 1: March or the same Passover era time that he was
18:00
Speaker 1: crucifie early Christians.
18:03
Speaker 2: Collectively.
18:03
Speaker 3: It's not totally universal, but it's a majority position, almost universal.
18:09
Speaker 3: They seem to have believed that Jesus was conceived either
18:13
Speaker 3: on the Passover or the vernal equinox, or both, because
18:16
Speaker 3: occasionally those dates match. And why they believe this is
18:21
Speaker 3: another question that they give various reasons for this that
18:25
Speaker 3: we could get into, but one of them is that
18:29
Speaker 3: they really liked the idea of sort of the life
18:33
Speaker 3: of Jesus being matched with when they thought God created
18:38
Speaker 3: the universe. There's another universal beliefs that they thought God
18:42
Speaker 3: created the universe on the vernal equinox. You know, if
18:44
Speaker 3: you think that, if you believe that God spoke into
18:48
Speaker 3: being everything at once, then you need to select a
18:52
Speaker 3: day that this happened. And not all Christians believed this
18:57
Speaker 3: is how God created the universe, but some of them,
19:00
Speaker 3: some ancient Christians did, And so if you're going to
19:03
Speaker 3: select a day, you have to select a phase of
19:05
Speaker 3: the moon. You have to select what what what day?
19:08
Speaker 3: And of course you know they're looking at options and
19:12
Speaker 3: they think the vernal equinox is the best one because
19:15
Speaker 3: that's a perfect balance of light and darkness everything.
19:18
Speaker 2: And then you know it matches it.
19:22
Speaker 1: Cosmic, cosmic perfection for the savior of the universe. So
19:27
Speaker 1: let's get some names to this. Let's get some hard data.
19:29
Speaker 1: We've mentioned early Christians say this and that. Do we
19:31
Speaker 1: have any specific quotes or Scholet or early Christian theologians
19:34
Speaker 1: who specifically say this about conception happening on the passover
19:39
Speaker 1: on the vernal equinox?
19:40
Speaker 2: Yes. Yeah.
19:41
Speaker 3: Our earliest source for this is an apocryphal text, you know,
19:45
Speaker 3: the Infancy Gospel of James and the proto of Evangelian
19:50
Speaker 3: of James. That that seems to suggest that the conception
19:57
Speaker 3: happened on the passover. It's not totally explicit, but this
20:01
Speaker 3: is a second century document.
20:03
Speaker 2: We have other.
20:05
Speaker 3: Statements by other Christians that are explicit, and in fact,
20:09
Speaker 3: one of them comes from two hundred and twenty two AD,
20:13
Speaker 3: and it comes from this wonderful, beautiful inscription Christian inscription
20:20
Speaker 3: on a statue of a seated figure that is now
20:23
Speaker 3: found at the entryway to the Apostolic Library in the Vatican.
20:27
Speaker 3: And for the benefit of your viewers as opposed to
20:30
Speaker 3: your listeners, I'll bring up a picture of this.
20:33
Speaker 1: Great so maybe for the listeners, describe what we're looking at.
20:36
Speaker 3: We are looking at a beautiful marble, life size seated
20:40
Speaker 3: figure on a chair on a throne really that has
20:44
Speaker 3: many lion heads on either side of the armrests, and
20:48
Speaker 3: on the side of the throne is inscribed a set
20:53
Speaker 3: of lengthy inscriptions, and the inscriptions are difficult to read
21:00
Speaker 3: you zoom in in person. I have seen this statue
21:03
Speaker 3: in person, and when you look at it, the inscriptions
21:06
Speaker 3: are fairly clear as far as inscriptions go. And it
21:11
Speaker 3: turns out that what this inscription is of is a
21:14
Speaker 3: passover calendar. It's a calendar designed to try and figure
21:19
Speaker 3: out when previous passovers occurred so that the author of
21:24
Speaker 3: the calendar could figure out when certain biblical events occurred.
21:28
Speaker 3: And the author of the calendar is a guy named
21:30
Speaker 3: Hippolytus Hipolytics of Rome, and the calendar dates to two
21:34
Speaker 3: hundred and twenty two AD.
21:37
Speaker 1: So I mentioned this in one of my videos. I
21:39
Speaker 1: use the analogy of an Excel spreadsheet. You can kind
21:42
Speaker 1: of imagine Hippolytus has I mean, you're more familiar with it.
21:47
Speaker 1: But he's basically trying to figure out lunar phases like
21:51
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty years before his time, right exactly.
21:53
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's trying to figure out when the passover happened
21:57
Speaker 3: almost two hundred years previously. And in fact, he goes
22:00
Speaker 3: even farther back. He's trying to figure out when passovers
22:02
Speaker 3: involving Moses happened. So he's going more than a thousand
22:04
Speaker 3: years backwards in time and explaining how this here, I'll
22:09
Speaker 3: bring up another image. This is a transcription, so it's
22:13
Speaker 3: much easier to read. It's a transcription of that side
22:16
Speaker 3: of the chair. It's all in Greek letters. The Greeks
22:20
Speaker 3: used alphabetic characters to indicate numbers, so this is a calendar.
22:25
Speaker 3: It's quite a complicated calendar. What's interesting for our purposes
22:28
Speaker 3: is it's trying to predict when various passovers are and
22:32
Speaker 3: when it comes across a passover that the author hippologist
22:36
Speaker 3: believes corresponds with a certain very important event in Judeo
22:40
Speaker 3: Christian history. He marks it with a note. And if
22:43
Speaker 3: we zoom in right here, there is a note right
22:48
Speaker 3: here that in Greek says the genesis or the genesis
22:53
Speaker 3: of Christ, and he uses an abbreviation for Christ. That's
22:59
Speaker 3: the berlinear stroke. The indicates that's an abbreviation the genesis
23:03
Speaker 3: of Christ. In other words, the beginning or the coming
23:05
Speaker 3: to be of Christ. And he thinks this occurred on
23:09
Speaker 3: the passover of two BC. In our calendar, we would
23:12
Speaker 3: say the passover of two BC April second. And that's
23:19
Speaker 3: interesting because whatever he means by genesis, he thinks that either,
23:26
Speaker 3: you know, the birth of Christ happened on the passover
23:28
Speaker 3: April second, or it can also be interpreted as the
23:32
Speaker 3: conception of Jesus happened on the passover. It all depends
23:35
Speaker 3: on how we interpret that Greek word. It's the same
23:39
Speaker 3: word for the book of Genesis. You know, the beginning
23:41
Speaker 3: or the coming to be. And in my article that
23:45
Speaker 3: I wrote, I show that in contemporary Greek medical literature
23:50
Speaker 3: that was written in the two hundreds, the word genesis
23:54
Speaker 3: of a person refers to their conception. And so it
23:58
Speaker 3: seems like this is what Hyppolotis is doing. He thinks
24:01
Speaker 3: Jesus was conceived on the passover of April second, and
24:07
Speaker 3: logically then he must have believed that Jesus was born
24:10
Speaker 3: sometime nine months later. And of course, sometime nine months
24:16
Speaker 3: later from April second is around December twenty fifth. If
24:21
Speaker 3: it's an exact nine months, it's January second.
24:23
Speaker 1: So let's circle back now to John Christistom, and we
24:27
Speaker 1: can take the calendar off the full screen. So let's
24:33
Speaker 1: circle back to the beginning of our discussion. You mentioned
24:35
Speaker 1: John Christistom writing in the three eighties. CE says, hey,
24:40
Speaker 1: we've just started practicing Christmas on December twenty fifth. We
24:44
Speaker 1: got this from those Christians way over in Rome. So
24:48
Speaker 1: we're in Antioch, that's modern day Turkey, quite far east.
24:52
Speaker 1: And then he mentions the Christians in Rome have been
24:54
Speaker 1: celebrating it on this date for a long time, and
24:58
Speaker 1: here we have data, presumably from Rome. So Hippolytus was
25:03
Speaker 1: based in Rome right from two twenty twos, so like
25:07
Speaker 1: this is quite early. This is like well before John
25:10
Speaker 1: Chris system.
25:10
Speaker 3: Yes, and the statue was found in Rome, and Hippolytus
25:15
Speaker 3: was from Rome as well, So this is Roman data
25:17
Speaker 3: from two hundred twenty two a D. Like you said
25:20
Speaker 3: of them apparently celebrating the conception of Jesus or marking,
25:24
Speaker 3: I should caution that there's no evidence there was actual
25:27
Speaker 3: ecclesiastical celebrations. This is purely a chronological exercise. But he
25:32
Speaker 3: thinks that Jesus was conceived on the passover of April
25:37
Speaker 3: second in Rome in two hundred twenty two a D.
25:40
Speaker 3: That's where his belief, That's where he documents his belief.
25:42
Speaker 1: Okay, so now let's start moving because we're still working
25:47
Speaker 1: around the vernal equinox. We're in March, where in April?
25:50
Speaker 1: Bring us now to December. What does hippolotists tell us
25:55
Speaker 1: about or what are your theories about? What Hypolytis then
25:59
Speaker 1: thought about birth of Jesus. If he thinks conception happened
26:03
Speaker 1: on April second, on some passover to BC, when did
26:08
Speaker 1: he think Jesus was born?
26:10
Speaker 3: Of course that's the natural question. He writes another work
26:14
Speaker 3: that we have, and it's a commentary on Daniel. It's
26:18
Speaker 3: actually the earliest complete Christian commentary on a book of
26:22
Speaker 3: scripture that exists. And if you read this, he says,
26:28
Speaker 3: Jesus is born on December twenty fifth. The problem with
26:32
Speaker 3: this is that that's only what some of the manuscripts
26:35
Speaker 3: that remain of this commentary say. There are other manuscript
26:39
Speaker 3: witnesses that don't have a date at all, or will
26:43
Speaker 3: say something else, like something involving April. It's a corrupted reading.
26:47
Speaker 3: It doesn't really make sense. You can't really read it.
26:50
Speaker 3: So scholars have always argued over this and what did
26:57
Speaker 3: he actually believe about the birth of Jesus. It's of
26:59
Speaker 3: course possible that he didn't say anything, or he said
27:01
Speaker 3: some date other than December twenty fifth, and some medieval
27:04
Speaker 3: scribe down the road changed things in the manuscript tradition,
27:08
Speaker 3: so scholars were at a standstill regarding what apologists believed.
27:12
Speaker 3: What I noticed and what I published in my article,
27:15
Speaker 3: was that he has yet another work where he is
27:19
Speaker 3: doing chronological calculations and he is talking about the creation
27:25
Speaker 3: of the world, and he thinks that this happened on
27:28
Speaker 3: March twenty fifth, and he's doing this lengthy chronology where
27:32
Speaker 3: he's dating biblical events from creation so from the March
27:38
Speaker 3: twenty fifth, and he has a passage in there where
27:40
Speaker 3: he appears to say that Jesus was born nine months
27:46
Speaker 3: after the anniversary of the creation of the world. And
27:51
Speaker 3: if he thinks, which he does, seem to think, that
27:54
Speaker 3: the world was created on March twenty fifth, the vernal
27:56
Speaker 3: equinox in the Roman calendar, then nine months precisely nine
27:59
Speaker 3: months later is December twenty fifth. So I argue that
28:04
Speaker 3: I think he chose December twenty fifth as the birthday
28:08
Speaker 3: of Jesus. But you know he did this because of
28:12
Speaker 3: juggling involving figuring out when the passover occurred and when
28:16
Speaker 3: the world was created on he thought it was the
28:18
Speaker 3: vernal equinox. Those are his assumptions going in. In other words,
28:22
Speaker 3: this doesn't seem to be ancient Christian tradition that has
28:27
Speaker 3: passed down the birthday of Jesus to him. It also
28:30
Speaker 3: doesn't seem to be based on the birthday of solen
28:33
Speaker 3: Victus or the Sun God or anything like that.
28:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's quickly go back to that. So, as we
28:37
Speaker 1: mentioned the solen Victus apparently had his moment around two
28:43
Speaker 1: seventy CE with Emperor Aurelium, and then we have this
28:47
Speaker 1: calendar from three fifty four that mentions some sort of
28:50
Speaker 1: festival on December twenty fifth for Invictus, who scholars think
28:54
Speaker 1: is a reference to solen Victus. So two seventy is
28:58
Speaker 1: the earliest that we could theorize. If indeed Emperor Relian
29:02
Speaker 1: instituted some sort of major holiday to celebrate Solenvictis on
29:06
Speaker 1: December twenty fifth, it would be around two seventy. Even then,
29:09
Speaker 1: that's speculative, though we don't have the data until three
29:13
Speaker 1: fifty four. We're talking to twenty two here, though, we're
29:16
Speaker 1: well before Aurelian, well before solen Victis having his moment.
29:21
Speaker 1: So it seems that at least one Christian, but maybe
29:24
Speaker 1: we can unpack this more who else was floating around
29:26
Speaker 1: this date? At least one Christian in the early two
29:29
Speaker 1: hundreds was starting to circle around December twenty fifth as
29:33
Speaker 1: the birthday of Jesus because of what we would consider
29:39
Speaker 1: contrived attempts to match the make cosmic perfection to the
29:45
Speaker 1: life of Jesus. You know, the universe created on the
29:48
Speaker 1: vernal equinox, Jesus conceived on you know, passover, then crucified
29:53
Speaker 1: on the passover, like it is kind of convenient, but
29:57
Speaker 1: this is we're trying to get into the mind of
29:59
Speaker 1: hippol here exactly.
30:01
Speaker 3: Hippolotis wasn't the only person doing this. We have other
30:05
Speaker 3: examples of this happening. There's an even earlier author called
30:09
Speaker 3: Clement of Alexandria. He's writing in Alexandria, Egypt in the
30:13
Speaker 3: one nineties, maybe maybe two hundred two five something like that,
30:18
Speaker 3: so he's predates Hippolytus. He also is doing chronological work,
30:22
Speaker 3: and he gives a chronology involving the life of Jesus
30:27
Speaker 3: where you see these similar assumptions baked in where he
30:32
Speaker 3: seems to think Jesus is conceived on the passover and
30:36
Speaker 3: born roughly nine months later. The difference is that he
30:39
Speaker 3: has different dates for the passover, so his corresponding dates
30:44
Speaker 3: for the birth of Jesus also seem to be different.
30:48
Speaker 3: There's another author called Julius Africanus. He actually is writing
30:54
Speaker 3: one year before Hippolotis and two twenty one, and he
30:57
Speaker 3: also could be in Rome. We know he lived in
31:00
Speaker 3: Rome for a while, but he also traveled all throughout
31:02
Speaker 3: the Mediterranean, so we don't know when he wrote his
31:06
Speaker 3: major chronographical work, if it was in Rome or not.
31:10
Speaker 3: But conceivably he's literally in Rome hanging out with apologists
31:14
Speaker 3: and they're talking about this stuff.
31:15
Speaker 2: We don't know.
31:17
Speaker 3: But he also seems to think the world was created
31:20
Speaker 3: on the vernil equna March twenty fifth, and he says
31:26
Speaker 3: it's this puzzling statement where he says the incarnation the
31:31
Speaker 3: Greek word is sarcosis, the infleshment of Jesus happened on
31:35
Speaker 3: March twenty fifth. And the question is what does he
31:39
Speaker 3: mean by this? Does he mean the birth of Jesus
31:40
Speaker 3: or the conceptionist? But you see, it's the same thought
31:43
Speaker 3: processes that are going on. All of these individuals might
31:47
Speaker 3: have arrived at slightly different dates, but the ingredients and
31:50
Speaker 3: the thought processes behind them all appear to be the same.
31:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good way to put it. That the
31:57
Speaker 1: ingredients are there. They're all circling the vernal equinox. There's
32:01
Speaker 1: a lot going on in March and April. Creation of
32:04
Speaker 1: the universe, possible conception of Jesus, possibly birth of Jesus, Africanus,
32:10
Speaker 1: if by enfleshment he means birth, or maybe he means conception.
32:15
Speaker 1: But the fact that so much speculation and calculations were
32:20
Speaker 1: happening around these dates, it seems to be too convenient
32:26
Speaker 1: not to be the explanation that if you calculate a
32:29
Speaker 1: perfect nine months forward, you're ending up in late December exactly.
32:33
Speaker 3: And I want to also point out that we are
32:38
Speaker 3: trying to zero in on a very narrow thing. We're
32:41
Speaker 3: just asking the question of when was December twenty fifth
32:44
Speaker 3: first chosen as the birth of Jesus. But there's a
32:46
Speaker 3: whole nother discussion about why did this date went out,
32:51
Speaker 3: how did it spread throughout the Roman Empire. I mean,
32:54
Speaker 3: these are all possible avenues of investigation, and this is
32:58
Speaker 3: just focusing in on when was this date first selected
33:02
Speaker 3: and why was it first selected? And I think the
33:04
Speaker 3: answer is it seems to have been selected in the
33:06
Speaker 3: early two hundreds, probably by Hippolytus, maybe by Julius Africanus,
33:12
Speaker 3: and that it was due to chronological assumptions about when
33:15
Speaker 3: God created the universe and about the passover in the
33:18
Speaker 3: vernal equinox, marking important points in Judeo Christian tradition, but
33:23
Speaker 3: especially in the Life and Death of Jesus.
33:26
Speaker 1: That's so fascinating and for me, I immediately, I mean, you
33:29
Speaker 1: mentioned possibly Hippolotis, But if we have some possible evidence
33:34
Speaker 1: that the Infancy Gospel of James is already floating the
33:38
Speaker 1: conception of Jesus on passover or the vernal equinox, it
33:43
Speaker 1: seems like that might the ingredients for that calculation might
33:45
Speaker 1: have already existed well before Hippolotis too.
33:48
Speaker 2: I think so.
33:49
Speaker 3: I think you can find evidence that Christians, for whatever reason,
33:53
Speaker 3: thought that Jesus was conceived on the passover or the
33:57
Speaker 3: vernal equinox, are both before apolitics. We have a lot
34:01
Speaker 3: of evidence of this, and I think that Hippolotis is
34:06
Speaker 3: inheriting this tradition and he's just using it to try
34:08
Speaker 3: and figure out when Jesus was born, and he's making
34:10
Speaker 3: these calculations to do so.
34:12
Speaker 1: So maybe let's transition then to if you have theories
34:15
Speaker 1: on how this then became the dominant date and how
34:18
Speaker 1: it's spread around the Mediterranean, because apparently it took it
34:21
Speaker 1: took decades. If the Roman Christians were already doing this
34:25
Speaker 1: in the early two hundreds and the Bishop of Antioch
34:28
Speaker 1: kind of use it as a novelty in the late
34:30
Speaker 1: three hundreds. That's you know, that's a century's worth of
34:33
Speaker 1: time for what Christians today take for granted as this.
34:37
Speaker 1: You know, of course it's December twenty fifth. You know,
34:40
Speaker 1: Christians living around Antioch in three seventy would have been like,
34:43
Speaker 1: what why December twenty fifth.
34:45
Speaker 3: It's vital to remember that when we're making these calculations.
34:48
Speaker 3: You know, not only are there a lot of assumptions
34:50
Speaker 3: baked in, but you're going to come up with different
34:52
Speaker 3: answers depending different answers of Jesus, for Jesus' birth, depending
34:56
Speaker 3: on when you think he was conceived, and if you
34:59
Speaker 3: think it was the past over March twenty fifth or
35:01
Speaker 3: April second or April sixth, you get different answers. And
35:04
Speaker 3: that's not even factoring into the uncertain gestational timeframe. I mean,
35:07
Speaker 3: we all know there's a lot a lot of hidden
35:09
Speaker 3: assumptions here. So how this gate goes from Hyppolitus and
35:15
Speaker 3: how it launches into the greater Church, that's a great question.
35:19
Speaker 2: It's a little bit murky.
35:21
Speaker 3: What we can say is that Hippolytis's calendar that's on
35:24
Speaker 3: the side of that statue that we talked about. It's
35:28
Speaker 3: a fascinating calendar. Unfortunately, from a chronological perspective, it's a
35:33
Speaker 3: very very bad calendar because he is totally wrong. He
35:38
Speaker 3: writes this calendar in two hundred twenty two a d.
35:40
Speaker 3: And when you look at when he thinks passover has
35:43
Speaker 3: happened in the past, and when he thinks passover has
35:45
Speaker 3: happened in the future, he's only right for two or
35:48
Speaker 3: three years before and after two hundred twenty two a d.
35:51
Speaker 3: The calendar is only correct for about seven years, and
35:54
Speaker 3: after that it just drifts. And it's very obvious. You
35:57
Speaker 3: don't need to be an astronomer. You just go out
35:59
Speaker 3: and you real that's not the full moon that I'm
36:01
Speaker 3: looking at right now.
36:03
Speaker 2: Anybody can do that.
36:04
Speaker 3: So it seems like Hippolytus' calculations were sidelined for rightly
36:10
Speaker 3: so because they were wrong. We have some attempts at
36:13
Speaker 3: correcting them. There's a Latin author in the two forties
36:17
Speaker 3: who tries to correct them. He does a better job,
36:20
Speaker 3: he's also wrong. And at some point we start seeing
36:26
Speaker 3: arguments in the three hundreds regarding when Jesus was born,
36:31
Speaker 3: and these arguments lean they do lean on this sort
36:35
Speaker 3: of calculation, hypothesis and pass over, but they also lean
36:40
Speaker 3: on this idea that I mentioned earlier, that they believe
36:44
Speaker 3: Jesus is the light of the world. Jesus said, I
36:46
Speaker 3: am the Light of the world. And they just loved
36:50
Speaker 3: that image of the light of the world becoming visible
36:54
Speaker 3: on the darkest day of the year, on the winter solstice.
36:58
Speaker 3: That image spoke to them very deeply, and we see
37:01
Speaker 3: this come up repeatedly in Christmas sermons, in other topics
37:06
Speaker 3: regarding Christmas, and I think that that was the factor
37:12
Speaker 3: that made December twenty fifth went out over other possible dates.
37:18
Speaker 3: There was this beautiful from their perspective, profound symmetry and
37:24
Speaker 3: imagery involving this date. There's some irony here. As some
37:30
Speaker 3: of your viewers know, December twenty fifth is not actually
37:33
Speaker 3: the winter solstice. The Romans thought it was the winter
37:37
Speaker 3: solstice that was the official marker of it, but of
37:40
Speaker 3: course the actual winter Solstice occurs a few days earlier
37:44
Speaker 3: than December twenty fifth.
37:48
Speaker 2: So I think what's.
37:49
Speaker 3: Going on is that the Roman Church ends up embracing
37:51
Speaker 3: this date, and they did. They do it because of
37:55
Speaker 3: a politics, but also because of this sort of season imagery,
38:00
Speaker 3: the solar symbolism that develops with the sun beginning to
38:04
Speaker 3: get stronger, corresponding with the light of the world, Jesus
38:07
Speaker 3: coming into creation or be visible in creation. And the
38:11
Speaker 3: Roman church loves this, and the other churches eventually join in,
38:19
Speaker 3: and it takes a while, but they eventually join in,
38:22
Speaker 3: and it wasn't They didn't have to adjust things too
38:25
Speaker 3: much because many of the other churches were celebrating on January.
38:29
Speaker 2: Sixth, the birth of Jesus, so you.
38:31
Speaker 3: Know, it was an adjustment, but it's the same season,
38:33
Speaker 3: you know, a couple of weeks early.
38:35
Speaker 1: Just to hammer this home, so you're totally right. In
38:39
Speaker 1: December twenty fifth was not the winter solstice, and the Romans,
38:43
Speaker 1: you know, they were good enough astronomers to know that
38:45
Speaker 1: it seems to have solidified almost as like the traditional date.
38:49
Speaker 1: I say this only so it's mentioned in two different
38:52
Speaker 1: Roman authors of Plenty of the Elder and Columella, who
38:56
Speaker 1: are too early even earlier than politists. Roman authors who
39:01
Speaker 1: explicitly mentioned December twenty fifth is the winter's solstice, and
39:06
Speaker 1: it's unclear whether they mean like the actual date, which
39:08
Speaker 1: it wasn't, or if they mean that's like when it
39:11
Speaker 1: was marked or recognized. So there does seem to be
39:17
Speaker 1: cosmic symbolism baked into the significance of the birth of Jesus.
39:23
Speaker 1: And I think this is partially why it's so difficult
39:26
Speaker 1: to address the history of religion theory, because the solstice
39:29
Speaker 1: does seem to be part of the story. It's just
39:33
Speaker 1: I think using terminology like oh, Christian's stole of major
39:36
Speaker 1: holiday is simplistic. I think everybody in the Roman Empire
39:41
Speaker 1: recognize this day as an important day, you know, the
39:43
Speaker 1: shortest day of the year. When this every day after this,
39:46
Speaker 1: it's starting to get longer and longer, the sun starts
39:48
Speaker 1: shining more and more. Everybody would have recognize that as
39:51
Speaker 1: a cosmically significant day, and why not attach your deity
39:55
Speaker 1: to that day?
39:56
Speaker 3: I agree, and I also want to zoom out even
39:59
Speaker 3: more war. You know, we've gone from talking about when
40:03
Speaker 3: December twenty fifth was actually first selected and why with
40:07
Speaker 3: Hippolitis maybe Julius Africanus, And then we've zoomed to talk
40:11
Speaker 3: about why did the church, you know, embrace this date,
40:15
Speaker 3: the wider church embrace this date over other possible dates.
40:20
Speaker 3: But there's another question too, which is just the on
40:23
Speaker 3: the ground question of what are random everyday Christians throughout
40:27
Speaker 3: the empire doing. What are they thinking when they're told
40:32
Speaker 3: or they're deciding when to celebrate the birth of Jesus.
40:36
Speaker 3: That's a much much harder question to answer. But clearly
40:41
Speaker 3: we do know in the fourth century there were some
40:44
Speaker 3: pagan celebrations to the Sun God on December twenty fifth,
40:49
Speaker 3: and so it's obviously very possible that there were some
40:52
Speaker 3: people in the Roman Empire who were not Christians who
40:56
Speaker 3: then converted to Christianity and were excited because they got
40:59
Speaker 3: to kind of just switch holidays around that they were
41:02
Speaker 3: marking the Sun God on December twenty fifth and now
41:05
Speaker 3: they have Christmas. But I don't think you know, if
41:10
Speaker 3: you look at the authors like John Chris A. Stum
41:13
Speaker 3: and some major major figures that are writing Christmas sermons
41:17
Speaker 3: on December twenty fifth, they don't seem to be like
41:22
Speaker 3: the kind of people who would want that to be
41:24
Speaker 3: a motive. You get that kind of attitude later on
41:28
Speaker 3: with like Pope Gregory in the six hundred AD or
41:31
Speaker 3: the five eighties or something, but back two hundred years earlier,
41:36
Speaker 3: I don't think that's a very likely motive, but again,
41:39
Speaker 3: it's very hard to read motives in person with people,
41:42
Speaker 3: you know, and we're trying to go back hundreds and
41:45
Speaker 3: hundreds of years to a culture not our own, where
41:47
Speaker 3: we have, you know, very fragmentary evidence. But it seems
41:51
Speaker 3: like the major factors were simply chronological factors, plus the
41:55
Speaker 3: cosmic solar symbolism of the ebb and flow of light
41:59
Speaker 3: in dark.
42:00
Speaker 2: In the world.
42:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, and this is more speculative on my part, but
42:04
Speaker 1: my hunch is that this would have been spread via liturgy,
42:08
Speaker 1: Like I just can't imagine your random illiterate Christian in
42:12
Speaker 1: the hinterlands of Syria would have cared much about the
42:15
Speaker 1: birth of Jesus unless they also go to a basilica
42:19
Speaker 1: and the bishop is like, oh, today we're going to
42:21
Speaker 1: celebrate the liturgy of the Birth of Jesus, and we're
42:23
Speaker 1: going to do it today on December twenty fifth, Like
42:24
Speaker 1: I could see that being a mechanism for I'm always
42:27
Speaker 1: trying to think of mechanisms of Christianization, like how did
42:30
Speaker 1: this particular holiday take off, How did this particular practice,
42:32
Speaker 1: particular practice takes off. It's purely speculative on my part,
42:35
Speaker 1: but I to have someone like John Chrisism talking about
42:39
Speaker 1: it in a homily too people in his church strikes
42:42
Speaker 1: me as that's probably ground zero for how this spread.
42:46
Speaker 2: I think you're right.
42:47
Speaker 3: I think I think there were probably letters exchanged between
42:51
Speaker 3: important bishops where they're trying to align. We know that
42:54
Speaker 3: these bishops felt this desire to try and get their
42:58
Speaker 3: celebrations to line up. We know that there was huge
43:01
Speaker 3: debates over when to celebrate Good Friday in Easter because
43:05
Speaker 3: it happens to do with the pass Over, and they
43:07
Speaker 3: exchanged lots of letters about that. We don't have these
43:10
Speaker 3: letters regarding Christmas, so this is speculative, but I think
43:13
Speaker 3: that's probably what was going on. And I think you're
43:17
Speaker 3: also on point regarding, you know, a peasant in the
43:19
Speaker 3: hinterlands of Syria that we have to remember that not
43:24
Speaker 3: only did they not have the Internet and encyclopedias and things,
43:27
Speaker 3: they didn't have calendars. I mean, they wouldn't have had
43:29
Speaker 3: a calendar on their wall, and you know, they would
43:32
Speaker 3: have been very aware of the seasons, but as far
43:35
Speaker 3: as like a specific date, many people may not have
43:38
Speaker 3: been all that aware. You know, people do can keep
43:41
Speaker 3: track of their birthdays back then frequently and so you know,
43:46
Speaker 3: this probably would have been ecclesiastical and they, you know,
43:49
Speaker 3: would have their bishop would have said, hey, we're going
43:51
Speaker 3: to celebrate the birth of Jesus in a couple of
43:53
Speaker 3: weeks and they say, okay, great, sounds good. There are
43:56
Speaker 3: I should say that these articles. I've written two articles
43:59
Speaker 3: on this, and freely available, so if people really want
44:01
Speaker 3: to dig in. One of them gets very technical, but
44:04
Speaker 3: it's freely available. It's on my website, it can be downloaded,
44:08
Speaker 3: and there's a link to the other more popular version
44:11
Speaker 3: on the website as well.
44:13
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I would like to invite the audience to
44:15
Speaker 1: definitely check out the academic one because you go really
44:19
Speaker 1: deep into this word genesis, genesis that we kind of
44:24
Speaker 1: glossed over briefly, but you have a pretty thorough going
44:27
Speaker 1: argument for why you think hypolitists meant conception and not birth,
44:33
Speaker 1: and you cross reference it with other early Christian writers
44:36
Speaker 1: who use that word to refer specifically to conception, and
44:40
Speaker 1: including non Christians too, right, like Galen the Physician.
44:44
Speaker 3: Correct, Yeah, correct, And that was something that I was
44:48
Speaker 3: able to do with the source Lingway Greykite database. It's
44:52
Speaker 3: this database of Greek words, so you can do extensive
44:55
Speaker 3: searches on it. And one thing I want to underscore
44:59
Speaker 3: is that even if I am incorrect and that Genesis
45:03
Speaker 3: refers to birth, the calculation theory in many senses still
45:09
Speaker 3: stands because it shows that Christians are eager to pinpoint
45:15
Speaker 3: the beginning of Jesus's life on the passover or vernal
45:19
Speaker 3: equinox are both, and that this sort of thought process,
45:23
Speaker 3: this was the engine to so to speak, begetting all
45:27
Speaker 3: these other dates. And some of them thought, well, it's
45:29
Speaker 3: the birth of Jesus on the passover. Some thought it's
45:32
Speaker 3: the conception of Jesus on the Passover. And you can
45:34
Speaker 3: see how the date of December twenty fifth could very
45:38
Speaker 3: easily flow from these assumptions.
45:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, and how often March twenty fifth comes up. It
45:44
Speaker 1: seems like March twenty fifth comes up several times, either
45:47
Speaker 1: for births or deaths or creations of the universes. And
45:51
Speaker 1: just the perfect calculation, the perfect nine months forward just
45:54
Speaker 1: implicates December exactly.
45:56
Speaker 3: If you look at you can do like a comprehensive
46:00
Speaker 3: census of when early Christians thought Jesus was crucified, and
46:05
Speaker 3: they almost always we have dozens of examples of this.
46:07
Speaker 3: They almost always say March twenty fifth, the vernil equinox
46:11
Speaker 3: is when he was crucified, or they will say no, no,
46:14
Speaker 3: March twenty fifth is when he was resurrected, And it's
46:18
Speaker 3: one of those two dates that they almost always choose.
46:23
Speaker 3: And you add in another assumption where they thought that
46:28
Speaker 3: Jesus was exactly you know, thirty or thirty one or
46:31
Speaker 3: thirty three years old, exactly to the day. In other words,
46:35
Speaker 3: he was kind of he was crucified on his birthday,
46:38
Speaker 3: or at least at least on the date of his conception.
46:41
Speaker 3: That's another assumption that's baked in and matches these other calculations.
46:45
Speaker 3: So it's other avenues that Christians took, but it's still
46:48
Speaker 3: the similar thought processes involving chronology.
46:51
Speaker 1: Yeah. Now, has there been significant pushback to this theory
46:57
Speaker 1: from your experience, I know there's been several major articles
47:00
Speaker 1: yourself included over the last ten or fifteen years. Really,
47:05
Speaker 1: I would say laying out this theory very clearly. I'm
47:09
Speaker 1: thoroughly convinced as a fellow scholar of early Christianity. But
47:12
Speaker 1: a few of these things do require assumptions, like the
47:16
Speaker 1: From my understanding, there's not an explicit I think Saint
47:19
Speaker 1: Augustine actually explicitly says there's a perfect life when he
47:23
Speaker 1: was born and crucified the same day, or conceived and
47:26
Speaker 1: crucified the same day. But there's a Talmudic reference to
47:29
Speaker 1: prophets like Moses being born and born and died the
47:34
Speaker 1: same day. And that's kind of a stretch to say
47:36
Speaker 1: that that Talmutic idea from let's say five hundred cees
47:41
Speaker 1: is somehow influencing hipoliticis at two hundred CE. So there
47:44
Speaker 1: are assumptions here and there, and I could see how
47:46
Speaker 1: someone might leverage that against the calculation theory.
47:49
Speaker 3: Yeah, there are a lot of assumptions. The problem is
47:52
Speaker 3: with either any theory. There's all these assumptions. With the
47:56
Speaker 3: history of religion theory that says that Christians sort of
47:59
Speaker 3: borrowed from Soul and Victus. There's also assumptions we don't
48:04
Speaker 3: really have evidence, you know, explicitly stating this. We have
48:07
Speaker 3: to sort of read in between the lines, so you
48:10
Speaker 3: get assumptions either way. What we do know for certain
48:13
Speaker 3: is that Hippologists did think the genesis of Christ was
48:16
Speaker 3: on the passover, whatever genesis means, and he thought Jesus
48:20
Speaker 3: was crucified on the passover, and that's inscribed in Stone
48:23
Speaker 3: and Rome in two hundred twenty two. A. D.
48:25
Speaker 2: Julius Africanus says the same thing.
48:27
Speaker 3: He has the resurrection on the twenty fifth of March
48:30
Speaker 3: and the sarcosis, the infleshment or the incarnation on the
48:34
Speaker 3: twenty fifth of March. So that's all. That's two twenty
48:37
Speaker 3: one AD. Hippolytus is two twenty two.
48:39
Speaker 2: So it's there.
48:41
Speaker 3: We know it's there. There are some other assumptions that
48:47
Speaker 3: are also baked in there. So this is simply just
48:50
Speaker 3: the most probable hypothesis that I think we can come
48:53
Speaker 3: up with, which I agree with. I'm certain of it.
48:59
Speaker 3: You mentioned other scholars and what other scholars have been saying.
49:05
Speaker 3: Another leading scholar is Philip Northhalft, and he's also published articles.
49:10
Speaker 3: He's an excellent, excellent scholar, and I hesitate to say
49:13
Speaker 3: he agrees with me. It might be more accurate to
49:15
Speaker 3: say I agree with him, because he published some things before.
49:19
Speaker 3: He has focused on similar ideas, and he appears convinced
49:24
Speaker 3: about why December twenty fifth was first chosen, as to
49:29
Speaker 3: why that date was then broadly accepted. He might lean
49:34
Speaker 3: a little more into the idea that Solen Victis celebrations
49:37
Speaker 3: had something to do with that, But in terms of
49:40
Speaker 3: why December twenty fifth was originally selected, he seems to
49:43
Speaker 3: be one hundred percent calculation theorist that these are from
49:47
Speaker 3: calculations to Politis and others are doing. And then another
49:51
Speaker 3: scholar that your viewers might want to reference is Steve
49:55
Speaker 3: Hyman's hij M A. N s. He's a scholar of
49:59
Speaker 3: Solo Victus of the Sun god worship in the ancient
50:02
Speaker 3: Roman Empire, and he was the one who sort of
50:06
Speaker 3: started this about I think twenty years ago where he
50:10
Speaker 3: did a dissertation and he realized that there actually is
50:15
Speaker 3: no evidence, explicit evidence before Julian the Apostate and maybe
50:19
Speaker 3: the chronography of three fifty four that there was a
50:22
Speaker 3: festival the Sun God on December twenty fifth, and he
50:25
Speaker 3: goes through coins. It's fascinating coin evidence, chemismatic evidence, inscriptions,
50:30
Speaker 3: and literary evidence. So those those two guys agree. I
50:37
Speaker 3: haven't seen much formal pushback to the idea. Whenever I
50:42
Speaker 3: hear about it, the criticisms are usually along the lines of,
50:50
Speaker 3: you know, this calculation theory is if I can be
50:53
Speaker 3: blunt it's just kind of absurd. You know, there's no
50:56
Speaker 3: way they selected the birth of Jesus based on this theory.
51:00
Speaker 3: My response to that is, well, it's not a question
51:03
Speaker 3: of whether it's absurd or not. It's a question of
51:05
Speaker 3: whether they believed it, and I think they did. They
51:09
Speaker 3: did believe these things, and I think there's ample evidence
51:12
Speaker 3: for that. So in a sense, you you can believe
51:16
Speaker 3: that it takes you know, one scholar said breathtaking mental acrobatics,
51:20
Speaker 3: and yeah, sure you could. You can take that point
51:23
Speaker 3: of view, but that doesn't mean it's not what they thought.
51:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think I think it's no theft. Maybe
51:28
Speaker 1: it was you, but someone said, like, let's call it
51:29
Speaker 1: the contrivances theory and not the calculation theory, because yeah,
51:33
Speaker 1: these I would, I would one hundred percent say guys
51:35
Speaker 1: like Apolitics were like trying to force the evidence to
51:38
Speaker 1: match these two cosmic signposts of the equinox and the solstice,
51:42
Speaker 1: Like if you want to say the universe was created
51:45
Speaker 1: on that day and Jesus was crucified on that day
51:47
Speaker 1: and conceived on that day, Like it's it's too convenient.
51:50
Speaker 1: They're they're forcing the evidence. So yeah, let's say contrivance's
51:53
Speaker 1: theory if we want to be a little mean about it.
51:55
Speaker 1: So I think that's someone someone calling it. You could
52:00
Speaker 1: just be like, yep, yep, I think it is a
52:02
Speaker 1: little bit absurd, but apparently they believed it.
52:04
Speaker 2: I agree, I agree, and.
52:06
Speaker 1: I just I do want to doctor Hymen's right. Who
52:10
Speaker 1: wrote the solen Victis book. That book was critical to
52:13
Speaker 1: my solen Victis video, and I just want to reiterate.
52:17
Speaker 1: He goes really deep in the history of the Sun
52:21
Speaker 1: God worship in the Roman Empire and really demonstrates the
52:26
Speaker 1: how minor the god is in the early Roman Empire,
52:31
Speaker 1: the various Sun God festivals that were celebrated, there were several.
52:35
Speaker 1: I believe there was one in August, there was one
52:38
Speaker 1: in October, and it seems like they were the more
52:40
Speaker 1: major ones for this minor god in the early centuries
52:45
Speaker 1: of the Roman Empire. And then suddenly this it seems
52:49
Speaker 1: to December twenty fifth, seems to have entered the scene,
52:52
Speaker 1: possibly in the late third century. And for me that
52:55
Speaker 1: was pretty convincing too that the Sun God might not
52:57
Speaker 1: have had much to do with this. Curious to see
53:00
Speaker 1: what no Theft says. I could see a theory where
53:04
Speaker 1: it might have helped amplify it throughout the three hundreds,
53:07
Speaker 1: if you have people celebrating this date, let's say in
53:11
Speaker 1: three p forty CE and the Eastern Mediterranean, and like, Okay,
53:14
Speaker 1: I guess I'll continue celebrating December twenty fifth. But it
53:17
Speaker 1: doesn't seem to have been a factor on settling on
53:20
Speaker 1: the date itself for Jesus, because that predates the big
53:25
Speaker 1: moment of the sun gum.
53:26
Speaker 3: Yeah, and Andrew, perhaps I could say a few words
53:29
Speaker 3: about other Roman holidays that sometimes are pegged with being
53:34
Speaker 3: the impetus for selecting the birth of Jesus on December
53:37
Speaker 3: twenty fifth, So holidays like Saturnalia or the Callen's Holiday
53:43
Speaker 3: or Brumalia.
53:44
Speaker 2: That's another one.
53:46
Speaker 3: Sole and Victis is of course the one we've been
53:48
Speaker 3: talking about, But usually you hear Saturnalia is the holiday
53:52
Speaker 3: that is that was drawn from and Saturnalia is this feast.
53:56
Speaker 2: It's this time of jollification and.
53:58
Speaker 3: Merriment and gift giving and things like that. It looks
54:02
Speaker 3: like a really great candidate for being the progenitor of
54:06
Speaker 3: the Christian holiday of Christmas. The problem with this is
54:10
Speaker 3: that it wasn't celebrated on December twenty fifth. It was
54:13
Speaker 3: celebrated on December seventeenth, and then there were times in
54:16
Speaker 3: Roman history where it went several days forward, and then
54:20
Speaker 3: sometimes where it went all the way to the twenty third,
54:23
Speaker 3: but it never seems to have actually hit December twenty fifth.
54:28
Speaker 3: And that's true for another holiday Singularia that I think
54:33
Speaker 3: was the final day of Saturnalia, So again the twenty
54:36
Speaker 3: third or twenty second, depending on which phase of Roman
54:40
Speaker 3: history you're talking about. So those dates, you know, in
54:43
Speaker 3: terms of actually matching the date, don't other possibilities. The
54:50
Speaker 3: Callens Callens is another holiday in the Roman Empire, but
54:56
Speaker 3: it's in January, it's early January, it's to mark, it's
54:59
Speaker 3: marked the new year, and it was originally a civic holiday.
55:03
Speaker 3: It wasn't really like a religious holiday, so to speak.
55:07
Speaker 3: But that date doesn't really match. One date that does
55:11
Speaker 3: match is Bruma or Brumalia, and that marked the Roman
55:15
Speaker 3: winterss Solstice, which was December twenty fifth, which was not
55:19
Speaker 3: actually the Winters's holstice astronomically speaking, but it was in
55:23
Speaker 3: their calendar. And this one does match in terms of dates,
55:27
Speaker 3: and we do know that it was a holiday, it
55:30
Speaker 3: was a religious holiday. The issue with that, though, is
55:34
Speaker 3: that originally it seems to have just been a astronomical marker.
55:41
Speaker 3: It takes a long time for it to become a
55:46
Speaker 3: religious holiday for Greco Roman followers of Greek Roman polytheism.
55:50
Speaker 3: And in fact, there's this chronographer, John the Lydian who's
55:54
Speaker 3: writing in the five hundreds and he's talking about Roman
55:58
Speaker 3: calondrical dates and holidays and things, and he talks about
56:01
Speaker 3: bromelia and he says, actually, it's only recently come in
56:04
Speaker 3: that people are celebrating this, and he's saying that in
56:07
Speaker 3: the five hundreds. So it seems like the best date
56:11
Speaker 3: is sole and Victus. That's the best possible date, like
56:14
Speaker 3: the History of Religion's theory says. But as we've talked
56:17
Speaker 3: about in our time together, that still doesn't it doesn't
56:20
Speaker 3: match up with what we're seeing with why December twenty
56:23
Speaker 3: fifth was chosen originally as the births of Jesus.
56:26
Speaker 1: Right, So Hippolytis still predates our data about brimalido.
56:30
Speaker 3: Yes, now he doesn't predate the term bromelia as referring
56:34
Speaker 3: to just an astronomical event of the solstice, but he
56:40
Speaker 3: does predate what seems to be the sort of religious
56:43
Speaker 3: festivities associated with that.
56:45
Speaker 1: Well, doctor Schmidt, this was an absolutely fascinating journey through
56:49
Speaker 1: the calculation theory. Thank you so much for joining us.
56:52
Speaker 2: Andrew. May I be so bold to say Merry Christmas.
56:56
Speaker 1: Merry Christmas to you too, take care. Thanks so much
56:58
Speaker 1: for watching, and a huge thing again to doctor Schmidt
57:01
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