(Cont. from Part 2) McGowan briefly describes the chain of historical evidence for the setting of Christmas on December 25 to coincide with the Sol Invictus festival:
It’s not until the 12th century that we find the first suggestion that Jesus’ birth celebration was deliberately set at the time of pagan feasts. A marginal note on a manuscript of the writings of the Syriac biblical commentator Dionysius bar-Salibi states that in ancient times the Christmas holiday was actually shifted from January 6 to December so that it fell on the same date as the pagan Sol Invictus holiday. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Bible scholars spurred on by the new study of comparative religions latched on to this idea. They claimed that because the early Christians didn’t know when Jesus was born, they simply assimilated the pagan solstice festival for their own purposes, claiming it as the time of the Messiah’s birth and celebrating it accordingly.
As McGowan describes, there are various problems with this theory, not least of which is that up until at least the year 312, "the persecuted Christian minority [in the Roman Empire] was greatly concerned with distancing itself from the larger, public pagan religious observances, such as sacrifices, games and holidays." His article mentions some of the evidence suggesting that December 25 was adopted for Christmas before that time.
His conclusion is while some elements of the Christian festival itself may derive from pagan practices, "the actual date might really derive more from Judaism - from Jesus' death at Passover, and from the rabbinic notion that great things might be expected, again and again, at the same time of the year - than from paganism." But he also suggests that this very "notion of cycles and the return of God's redemption" was also something that the pagans of ancient Rome would have understood.
Note on Bible Review: I would describe it as the Scientific American of Biblical scholarship. (Or at least the Popular Science!) In other words, it's a "popular" journal, not a scholarly one. But they don't publish schlock, either.
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