Early Christian Chronology and the Origins of the Christmas Date: In Defense of the "Calculation Theory"

QL 94 (2013) 247-265

doi: 10.2143/QL.94.3.3007366 © 2013, all rights reserved

EARLY CHRISTIAN CHRONOLOGY AND THE ORIGINS OF THE CHRISTMAS DATE In Defense of the “Calculation Theory”

1. The Recent Onslaught against the “Calculation Theory” Christmas, the feast commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ, is celebrated in both the Western and Eastern churches (excepting Armenia) on 25 December. The same date once used to be the seat of the winter solstice in the Julian calendar and, as some would have it, the day on which the birth festival of the Roman sun god Sol Invictus was celebrated after its institution in 274 CE by the Emperor Aurelian. In the eyes of many observers, such coincidence dictates that Christmas is best seen as an example for the “inculturation” of pagan rituals into the developing liturgical year of the Church.1 This, in a nutshell, is the basic idea behind the most

1. The amount of literature on the origins of Christmas is vast. For useful introductions, see Hermann Usener, Das Weihnachtsfest (Bonn: Bouvier, 31969 [11889]); Heinrich Kellner, Heortologie (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 31911) 96-118; Bernard Botte, Les origines de la Noël et de l’Épiphanie: Étude historique (Louvain: Abbaye du Mont César, 1932); Anselm Strittmatter, “Christmas and the Epiphany: Origins and Antecedents,” Thought 17 (1942) 600-626; Hieronymus Frank, “Frühgeschichte und Ursprung des römischen Weihnachtsfestes im Lichte neuerer Forschung,” Archiv für Liturgiewissenschaft 2 (1952) 1-24; Leonard Fendt, “Der heutige Stand der Forschung über das Geburtsfest Jesu am 25. XII und über Epiphanias,” Theologische Literaturzeitung 78 (1953) 1-10; Susan K. Roll, Toward the Origins of Christmas, Liturgia Condenda, 5 (Leuven: Peeters, 1995); Ead., “The Debate on the Origins of Christmas,” Archiv für Liturgiewissenschaft 40 (1998) 1-16; Hans Förster, Die Feier der Geburt Christi in der Alten Kirche: Beiträge zur Erforschung der Anfänge des Epiphanie- und Weihnachtsfestes (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000); Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) 1-8; Martin Wallraff, Christus Verus Sol: Sonnenverehrung und Christentum in der Spätantike (Münster: Aschendorff, 2001) 174-195. The following abbreviations are used throughout: CCSL = Corpus Christianorum. Series Latina; CSCO = Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium; CSEL = Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum; GCS = Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten drei Jahrhunderte; GCS-NF = Die griechischen … Jahrhunderte, Neue Folge; PG = Patrologiae cursus completus. Series Graeca; PL = Patrologiae… Series Latina; SC = Sources Chrétiennes. Research for this article was made possible by

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C. Philipp E. Nothaft

influential and widely held explanation of the origins of Christmas, which, for lack of a better word, may be referred to as the “History of Religions Theory” (henceforth: HRT).2 Although HRT is nowadays used as the default explanation for the choice of 25 December as Christ’s birthday, few advocates of this theory seem to be aware of how paltry the available evidence actually is. Our earliest source to mention the Natalis Invicti in conjunction with 25 December comes eight decades after Aurelian with the famous Roman calendar that has been preserved as part of the so-called Chronograph of 354. The same Chronograph also contains a register of Christian martyrs, ordered according to their date of burial, which is headed by the birth of Christ in Bethlehem on 25 December. Since this so-called depositio martirum is attached to a similar list of Roman bishops (depositio episcoporum), whose original version dates from 336, this year is often cited as the terminus ad quem for the institution of Christmas.3 While this constellation of facts might lend credence to the notion that the birthday of Sol Invictus on 25 December preceded the dating of Jesus’s birth to that day, it remains thoroughly unclear why the fourth-century church would have adopted such a relatively new pagan festival in spite of the frequently expressed patristic disdain for paganism and its incursions into Christian practice. It is thus not surprising if a relative minority of scholars continues to wonder whether a different, and possibly more convincing, explanation for the liturgical dating of Christ’s birth may be forthcoming. As early as 1856, the German church historian Ferdinand Piper made the suggestion that 25 December was a mere corollary of 25 March, the Leverhulme Trust funded research project “Medieval Christian and Jewish Calendar Texts,” hosted by University College London under the supervision of Prof. Sacha Stern. 2. The word “theory” would seem to capture this view’s explanatory function somewhat better than the often used “history of religions hypothesis” (likewise “calculation hypothesis”), which over-emphasizes the uncertainty that is inherent to nearly all historical judgment. 3. For editions of the relevant passages, see Theodor Mommsen (ed.), Chronica minora saec. IV. V. VI. VII, vol. 1 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1892) 71-72, and id. (ed.), Inscriptiones Latinae Antiquissimae, vol. 1 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 21893) 278. The authenticity of the chronograph’s entries for “Christmas” has been disputed. See most recently Hans Förster, “Die beiden angeblich ‘ältesten Zeugen’ des Weihnachtsfestes,” Archiv für Liturgiewissenschaft 42 (2000) 29-40; Förster, Die Feier, 95-103; Wolfgang Wischmeyer, “Die christlichen Texte im sogenannten Filocalus-Kalender,” Textsorten und Textkritik, ed. Adolf Primmer, Kurt Smolak, and Dorothea Weber (Vienna: Österr. Akad. d. Wiss., 2002) 45-57; Claudio Gianotto, “L’origine de la fête de Noël au IVe siècle,” La Nativité et le temps de Noël: Antiquité et Moyen Âge, ed. Jean-Paul Boyer and Gilles Dorival (Aixen-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 2003) 65-79, pp. 67-68. Arguments in defense of authenticity are made by Józef Naumowicz, “La Calendrier de 354 et la fête de Noël,” Palamedes 2 (2007) 173-188; Alexander Zerfass, Mysterium mirabile: Poesie, Theologie und Liturgie in den Hymnen des Ambrosius von Mailand zu den Christusfesten des Kirchenjahres (Tübingen: Franke, 2008) 62-63, n. 286. On the context, see now Richard W. Burgess, “The Chronograph of 354: Its Manuscripts, Contents, and History,” Journal of Late Antiquity 5 (2012) 345-396.

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the date of the vernal equinox, to which the crucifixion had been assigned early on. Assuming that his earthly existence, reckoned from the conception in the womb to his death, comprised a perfect number of years, early Christians fixed the incarnation of Christ on 25 March and, counting forward nine months, arrived at 25 December as the date of his birth. This is the basic idea behind the – sit venia verbo – “Calculation Theory” (CT) for Christmas, which, although it may have never been a majority view, has played a significant role in discussions of the subject.4 The problems that plague both HRT and CT were recently highlighted by the Austrian papyrologist Hans Förster, who published a well-received monograph on the origins of Christmas and Epiphany in 2007. In his book, Förster rightly emphasizes the lack of compelling evidence for HRT, which raises the question whether the Natalis Invicti celebrations on 25 December were really so ancient, widespread, and momentous as to exert a strong influence on Christian communities, in Rome and elsewhere.5 At the same time, however, he is highly critical of CT, which in his opinion is plagued with logical inconsistencies and with the fact that it imputes an undue amount of speculative ingenuity to the early Church fathers.6 This dismissal of the Berechnungshypothese certainly struck a chord with some of his reviewers, one of them noting that his arguments

4. Ferdinand Piper, “Der Ursprung des Weihnachtsfestes und das Datum der Geburt Christi,” Evangelischer Kalender: Siebenter Jahrgang (Berlin: Wiegandt und Grieben, 1856) 41-56. Piper’s contribution is for some reason never cited in the literature, where the invention of CT is usually credited to Louis Duchesne, Origines du culte chrétien: Étude sur la liturgie latine avant Charlemagne (Paris: Thorin, 1889) 247-254. See further Hieronymus Engberding, “Der 25. Dezember als Tag der Feier der Geburt des Herrn,” Archiv für Liturgiewissenschaft 2 (1952) 25-43; Wilhelm Hartke, Über Jahrespunkte und Feste, insbesondere das Weihnachtsfest (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1956); August Strobel, “Jahrpunkt-Spekulation und frühchristliches Festjahr: Ein kritischer Bericht zur Frage des Ursprungs des Weihnachtsfestes,” Theologische Literaturzeitung 87 (1962) 183-194; James F. Coakley, “Typology and the Birthday of Christ on 6 January,” V Symposium Syriacum, ed. René Lavenant (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1990) 247-256; Paul F. Bradshaw, The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship: Sources and Methods for the Study of Early Liturgy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2 2002) 187-189; Joseph F. Kelly, The Origins of Christmas (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2004) 58-63; Frank C. Senn, The People’s Work: A Social History of the Liturgy (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2006) 71-73. 5. Hans Förster, Die Anfänge von Weihnachten und Epiphanias: Eine Anfrage an die Entstehungshypothesen (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007). The contention that Natalis Invicti on 25 December was the feast day originally instituted by Aurelian in 274 is successfully demolished by Steven Ernst Hijmans, “Sol Invictus, the Winter Solstice, and the Origins of Christmas,” Mouseion, 3rd ser., 3 (2003) 377-398. See now also id., Sol: The Sun in the Art and Religions of Rome (PhD diss., University of Groningen, 2009) 583595, http://dissertations.ub.rug.nl/faculties/arts/2009/s.e.hijmans. For a summary of his arguments, see C. P. E. Nothaft, “The Origins of the Christmas Date: Some Recent Trends in Historical Research,” Church History 81 (2012) 903-911. 6. Förster, Die Anfänge, 4-7, 25-39. See previously already Förster, Die Feier, 4-88.

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refuted CT “conclusively for it makes no mathematical sense.”7 As a substitute for the discarded HRT and CT, Förster provides us with a new explanation, which essentially holds that Christmas emerged as the result of fourth-century Holy Land tourism. As pilgrims flocked to Bethlehem to visit the original site of the nativity, they began to celebrate a corresponding annual festival in midwinter, which they eventually exported back to their home communities. While this celebration seems to have originally taken place on 6 January (Epiphany), the Roman church later settled for the solstice on 25 December, a date chosen for its affinity with popular Christian solar symbolism.8 Förster’s theory (FT) provides a well-rounded and prima facie convincing scenario of how Christmas came to be, although it resembles its contenders HRT and CT in being built on a remarkably thin layer of corroborating source material. The present essay, however, is not intended as a critique of FT, but rather as a defense of CT, whose merits are in my opinion greater than Förster and other critics of this theory are prepared to admit and which is therefore deserving of a fresh hearing. One problem with Förster’s forceful rejection of CT is that he does not confront this theory in its strongest form, in which it has been laid out by Thomas J. Talley since the 1980s.9 Instead of bringing his readers up-to-date with the available arguments, he prefers to engage somewhat polemically with Josef Ratzinger, whose brief remarks in Der Geist der Liturgie can hardly qualify as the testing stone for or against CT (see below). This polemical slant is also detectable in his explanation why scholars in the Englishspeaking world allegedly continue to have such a weak spot for this seemingly absurd theory. He locates the roots of Anglo-Saxon enthusiasm for CT in early modern English history, more specifically in the Puritan “war” on Christmas, which resulted in an official ban in 1647.10 According to Förster, English and American scholars in favor of this theory are really trying to rehabilitate Christmas from the charge of pa7. Lionel Wickham, review of Förster, Die Anfänge, in Journal of Ecclesiastical History 60 (2009) 754-755, p. 754. Further noteworthy reviews include Jürgen Kaube, in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 24.12.2007, p. 33; Alexander Demandt, in Süddeutsche Zeitung – Literatur, 24.12.2007, p. 14; Wolfram Kinzig, in Theologische Literaturzeitung 134 (2009) 708-711; Katharina Heyden, in Zeitschrift für antikes Christentum 13 (2009) 159-163; Martin Wallraff, in Gnomon 82 (2010) 339-344. 8. Förster, Die Anfänge, 306-309. 9. Thomas J. Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 21991) 79-155; id., “Further Light on the Quartodeciman Pascha and the Date of the Annunciation,” Studia Liturgica 33 (2003) 151-158. Förster is also strikingly silent on the work of Roger Beckwith, “St. Luke, the Date of Christmas and the Priestly Courses at Qumran,” Revue de Qumran 9 (1977) 73-94; id., Calendar and Chronology, Jewish and Christian (Leiden: Brill, 1996) 71-92. 10. Christopher Durston, “Lords of Misrule: The Puritan War on Christmas 1642-60,” History Today 35, no. 12 (1985) 7-14; Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) 206-217; Hutton, The Stations, 25-33.


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ganism, which had made the feast unacceptable in the eyes of early modern religious reformers, with whose goal of purging Christian liturgy of pagano-papist intruders they supposedly still sympathize.11 Yet this theory is historically inadequate, in so far as it implies that the Puritans would have been more favorably disposed towards Christmas, had they only discovered that its date was fixed in the way suggested by CT. Contrary to what Förster insinuates, the possibility that 25 December was originally chosen on the basis of dubious chronological speculations (rather than apostolic tradition) was one of the main arguments that Protestant scholars in the 16th and 17th century could harness against Christmas as an institution.12 In what follows, I am not going to repeat all the individual arguments that have been made by Talley and others in favor CT, but will rather focus on some select points that I consider most relevant in defending an up-to-date version of this theory. As I intend to show, CT is not only internally compelling, but can be backed up by a good number of sources, several of which go back to the early third century. In my version of the argument, CT is not construed as a sharp alternative to all other theories that ask questions about the origins of Christmas as liturgical practice, but rather as a supplementary explanation, which is supposed to help us understand better why late antique Christians were at all willing to consider the day of the winter solstice as a possible date on which to celebrate the Savior’s birth. Since, as I will attempt to show, the origins of 25 December as the date of the nativity probably predate the presumed institution of Christmas in the fourth century, it seems reasonable to try and make CT coexist with HRT and/or FT as part of a fuller, and possibly more accurate, theory of how the most popular of Christian feasts came into being. 2. Calculating the Birth of Jesus: Christian Chronology in the Third Century Scholars hostile to CT often find it hard to imagine that early Christians should have engaged in chronological “calculations” that they themselves find abstruse or even complicated. Förster is no exception when he disapprovingly refers to the “breathtaking mental acrobatics” (atemberaubende Geistesakrobatik) CT supposedly imputes to the Christian mind.13 Given these doubts, it is best to begin by asking: is there any evidence at all that – before Christmas began to be celebrated in the fourth century – 11. Förster, Die Anfänge, 6. 12. See C. P. E. Nothaft, “From Sukkot to Saturnalia: The Attack on Christmas in Sixteenth-Century Chronological Scholarship,” Journal of the History of Ideas 72 (2011) 503-522. 13. Förster, Die Anfänge, 6.

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Christians tried to determine the birthday of the Savior by chronological means? The answer is unequivocally “yes.” Thanks to the meticulous research of Venance Grumel, August Strobel and others, it has become increasingly clear that chronological and computistical speculation (computistical as in computus, the medieval science of Easter reckoning) played a central role in Christian thought from an early stage onwards. The third to seventh centuries were a high time for such attempts, with chronographers and computists repeatedly attempting to construct overarching chronological systems that agreed with the data provided by luni-solar calendar cycles (used to calculate the date of Easter), while suiting their own assumptions about the temporal dimensions of the history of salvation. The latter, of course, was pivoted on the advent of Jesus Christ, whose incarnation, birth, death, and resurrection gained particular importance in the eyes of those who speculated about these questions.14 Nothing should preclude us from taking this way of thinking seriously by applying it to the historical questions we face, including the date of Christmas. Two well-known early sources can serve to underscore this point: one is the epigraphically preserved Greek “paschal table of Hippolytus,” constructed at some point around 222, the other is the Latin treatise De pascha computus, written in 243 by an anonymous North African author. Both works made use of (different versions of) an archaic 112-year Easter cycle, on whose basis they calculated the Julian calendar dates of historical Passovers recorded in the Bible, beginning with the Exodus and ending with the Passion of Christ. In order to make their Passion dates agree with the account of the four Gospels, they were careful to assign the crucifixion to a year that was (a) not much later than the 15th year of Tiberius mentioned by Luke (3:1) and (b) had the Passover full moon (or 14 Nisan in the Jewish calendar) fall on a Friday.15 For the author of the Hippolytan paschal table, these criteria dictated that the Passion fell on 25 March 29 CE, a date which, by the end of late

14. Venance Grumel, La chronologie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1958); August Strobel, Ursprung und Geschichte des frühchristlichen Osterkalenders (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1977); id., Texte zur Geschichte des frühchristlichen Osterkalenders (Münster: Aschendorff, 1984). See also Philipp Harnoncourt, “Osterkomputation – Geschichtstheologie – Theologiegeschichte: Kalendarische Fragen und ihre theologische Bedeutung nach den Studien von August Strobel,” Archiv für Liturgiewissenschaft 27 (1985) 263-272. An important recent update on these subjects is Alden A. Mosshammer, The Easter Computus and the Origins of the Christian Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 15. For a chronological discussion of these sources, see now C. P. E. Nothaft, Dating the Passion: The Life of Jesus and the Emergence of Scientific Chronology (200-1600) (Leiden: Brill, 2012) 35-56. See also Marcel Richard, “Comput et chronographie chez saint Hippolyte,” pts. 1 and 2, Mélanges de science religieuse 7 (1950) 237-268; 8 (1951) 19-50; George Ogg, The Pseudo-Cyprianic De Pascha Computus (London: SPCK, 1955).


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antiquity, would reach nearly canonical status in the Latin West.16 The author of De pascha computus, due to the differing lunar data provided by his Easter cycle, could not maintain this date and moved the Passion to 9 April, 28 CE. That both authors nevertheless thought along similar lines, can be seen from the way they used their calculated crucifixion dates to derive the birth date of Jesus. The Hippolytan table records the genesis of Christ to have occurred exactly 30 years before the crucifixion, on the Passover full moon of 2 BCE, corresponding to Wednesday, 2 April.17 While the 30 years were obviously derived from Luke 3:23, the assignment of both the birth and death of Jesus to Passover was probably rooted in Jewish tradition. Passover, a season of heightened Messianic expectation, was commonly regarded as the time of birth of Isaac, the son of Abraham, who was a typological forerunner to Jesus. Moreover, the patriarchs were frequently assumed to have lived a “perfect” number of years, meaning that they were born and died on the same dates.18 In the De pascha computus, the situation differs only slightly, in so far as its author went back (from 28 CE) not 30, but 31 years, to mark the year 4 BCE as the year of the nativitas. The rationale behind this move is not hard to find: in 4 BCE, the Passover full moon, according to his table, fell on Wednesday, 28 March, which was identical to the previously established date of the fourth day of creation, on which the sun was created according to Genesis 1:14. The typological congruence between the fourth hexaëmeral day and the day on which Jesus, as the “sun of righteousness” (Mal 4:2), “shone forth,” i.e. was born, was too good to be left aside.19 By the year 243, we thus already find at least two compelling examples of Christian scholars trying to calculate the life-dates of Jesus Christ by chronological means. Their testimony provides excellent starting ground for any version of CT holding 25 December was derived in a similar fashion to 2 April and 28 March. The latter view is given a favor16. See Vincenzo Loi, “Il 25 Marzo data pasquale e la cronologia giovannea della passione in età patristica,” Ephemerides Liturgicae 85 (1971) 48-69. 17. It has sometimes been assumed that genesis was here meant to refer to the conception. See, e.g., Eduard Bratke, “Die Lebenszeit Christi im Daniel-Commentar des Hippolytus,” Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Theologie 35 (1892) 129-176, pp. 146-148; George Salmon, “The Commentary of Hippolytus on Daniel,” Hermathena 8 (1893) 161190, p. 176; Jean Michel Hanssens, La liturgie d’Hippolyte (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1959) 270-279; Hartke, Über Jahrespunkte, 63-64. While this cannot be excluded completely (and would lend further support to CT), “birth” would seem the more natural rendering, especially given that De pascha computus, a source that is clearly related to the Hippolytan table, speaks of nativitas. For further discussion, see Förster, Die Feier, 25-30, 52. 18. Strobel, Ursprung, 128-133; Talley, The Origins, 81-83. The notion that Jesus lived for exactly 30 years is also found in Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 1.145.3-4 (GCS 52, p. 90). On the background, see George Ogg, The Chronology of the Public Ministry of Jesus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940) 61-149. 19. De pascha computus 19 (CSEL 3.3, p. 266).

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able treatment by Josef Ratzinger, who suspects that, already in the third century, the approach of the De pascha computus was modified so as to make the conception (instead of the birth) of Jesus the calendrical equivalent of His Passion on 25 March.20 Förster takes issue with Ratzinger’s claims, wondering why the “quartodecimans” were condemned at the first ecumenical council (of Nicaea, 325 CE), given that the convergence of conception and crucifixion on the same calendar date would have made the “quartodeciman” Easter into the ideal commemorative day. He goes on to point out that we know of no third-century celebrations of the conception or Annunciation on 25 March, which in his view makes it unlikely that this day had already attained any such significance.21 This may seem like a serious objection, but both of Förster’s attacks are in fact directed against straw men. We know of no specific celebration or commemoration of Christ’s birth on either 2 April or 28 March and it is nonetheless clear that the nativity was assigned to both these dates in the third century by Christian scholars for purely chronological reasons. One of the special traits of CT is that it is not so much concerned with the origins of a feast, but with the fixing of a historical date. In the context of the third century, these chronological speculations could lead to various conclusions concerning the day on which Jesus was conceived, born, crucified etc., but these conclusions do not in turn presuppose the existence of any specific community celebrations on the dates in question. This seems very clear in the case of 2 April and 28 March and there is no reason to suppose that 25 March was any different at the time it first entered the discussion as the likely date of Jesus’s conception, possibly as early as 221 CE (see below). As a matter of fact, it is far from obvious how any of these dates could have even generated a genuine nativity feast as early as the third century, given that they were all meant to be Passover dates. The remembrance of the death and resurrection at this time of the year would have completely overshadowed that of the birth or conception. If this is kept in mind, the eventual dating of the birth to winter can in fact be appreciated as a necessary precondition for the nativity to become the focus of a specific celebration in the course of the fourth century.22

20. Josef Ratzinger, Der Geist der Liturgie: Eine Einführung (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 32000) 92-95. 21. Förster, Die Anfänge, 26, n. 2, wondering “warum die Quartodezimaner, wenn die Verbindung von Empfängnis und Kreuzigung in terminlicher Hinsicht so wichtig war, auf dem ersten ökumenischen Konzil verurteilt wurden. Es wäre doch folgerichtig, daß dann, wenn die von Ratzinger vertretene Hypothese stimmen sollte, die Quartodezimaner den idealen Ostertermin gefunden hätten. Auch ein besonderes Gedenken der Verkündigung am 25. März lässt sich in keiner Weise für das 3. Jahrhundert belegen. Auch dies wäre zu erwarten, falls der Empfängnistermin wichtig geworden wäre.” 22. On this, in my opinion crucial, point, see also Strobel, “Jahrpunkt-Spekulation,” 192-193.


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As mentioned, Förster’s critique appeals to the so-called “quartodecimans,” a name for those early Christian communities who celebrated Easter on the Passover date of 14 Nisan, regardless of the weekday, for which reason they became the subject of controversy in the second century. Unfortunately, Förster seems to conflate these “lunar” quartodecimans, who followed the Jewish calendar, with a different group of “solar” quartodecimans from Cappadocia, who according to Epiphanius of Salamis observed a fixed Easter/Passover on 25 March, which was the date of the crucifixion according to Hippolytus. This tradition is fully explicable on the grounds that the group in question abandoned the Jewish lunar calendar and instead used the local solar calendar, whose first spring month (Teireix) began on 12 March, making the 14th day, i.e. the “solar” 14 Nisan, correspond to 25 March.23 Yet regardless of whether certain Christians celebrated Easter on 25 March or 14 Nisan, it remains far from obvious how the assignment of the conception to the same day could have made this date “ideal” from any orthodox viewpoint, especially given that these customs all ignored the crucial role of the weekday (Sunday) in fixing Easter. Förster provides no elucidation of the matter, but commits another slight mistake by linking the condemnation of quartodecimanism to the decrees of the council of Nicaea. From Constantine’s letter to the churches of his empire, cited by Eusebius, it merely emerges that the bishops at Nicaea spoke out against certain Eastern churches who still used the Jewish calendar as the basis for calculating the Easter full moon. As Louis Duchesne already showed in 1880, this dispute was entirely separate from the quartodeciman controversies that had raged in the second century.24 Another argument that should not deter us from taking CT seriously is Förster’s caveat concerning the diverging views on the human gestation period that were current in antiquity. One reason he finds it unlikely that the date of the birth of Jesus could have been inferred from that of his conception is that Christian scholars were unable to “predict a date of conception even only approximately.”25 As should be clear, however, an advanced knowledge of embryology is completely irrelevant to the kind of chronological speculation at hand, 23. Epiphanius, Panarion 50.1.6-8 (GCS 31, pp. 245-46); Talley, “Further Light”; Strobel, Ursprung, 370-372; Jill Burnett Comings, Aspects of the Liturgical Year in Cappadocia (325-430) (New York: Lang, 2005) 22-25. 24. Louis Duchesne, “La question de la Pâque au Concile de Nicée,” Revue des questions historiques 28 (1880) 5-42; Avril Cameron and Stuart G. Hall (trans.), Eusebius: Life of Constantine (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999) 259-261. See also Venance Grumel, “Le problème de la date pascale aux IIIe et IVe siècles,” Revue des Études Byzantines 18 (1960) 163-178; Karl Gerlach, The Antenicene Pascha: A Rhetorical History (Louvain: Peeters, 1998). 25. Förster, Die Anfänge, 7: “Gerade die unterschiedlichen Ansichten über die Länge einer Schwangerschaft und die in der Antike fehlende Möglichkeit, einen Empfängnistermin auch nur näherungsweise zu bestimmen, lassen wohl doch begründete Zweifel an … einer altkirchlichen Berechnung aufkommen.”

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whose proponents would have simply assumed a perfect (and hence divine) and schematic duration of nine months for Mary’s pregnancy, i.e. the nine months stretching from 25 March (vernal equinox) to 25 December (winter solstice).26 3. From Spring to Winter In the end, the only objection against CT that carries some considerable weight concerns the calendrical shift from the birth to the conception that is presupposed by the argument. As mentioned earlier, a chronological parallelism between the dates of Christ’s Passion and birth could be justified by recourse to Jewish haggadic tradition, where important biblical figures were considered to have been born and died on the same date, in particular at the time of Passover. CT has to assume that third-century Christians developed a modified version of this view, where the time of birth was replaced with the time of conception in the womb. Förster is highly critical of this supposition and argues that early sources instead attest to a trend of assigning the birth – and not the conception – of Jesus to springtime. In his view, it is unlikely that this trend would have been suddenly reversed on purely chronological grounds.27 Once again, however, this objection is far from decisive: why should chronological assumptions about the life of Christ have remained static throughout the second and third century? Who can rule out that such a change of mind did occur? But one has to concede that the argument raises serious doubts for CT, if no further evidence can be adduced. As the conditional clause indicates, this is where Förster happens to ignore some crucial data. The picture begins to change once we consider existing early traditions that assign to Jesus a birth in midwinter. Examples for such a tradition, even predating the paschal table of Hippolytus, can be adduced: Clement of Alexandria (died ca. 215), in his Stromata, writes that 194 years, one month and thirteen days had elapsed between the assassination of the Emperor Commodus (31 December, 192 CE) and the

26. In the words of Duchesne, Origines, 252: “[L]es fractions sont des imperfections qui ne cadrent pas avec le symbolisme des nombres; one est toujours porté à les éliminer le plus possible.” 27. See Förster, Die Anfänge, 5, for his complaint “daß angeblich ohne erkennbaren Grund ab dem vierten Jahrhundert nur für diese eine Person [i.e. Jesus] die volle Zahl von Jahren nicht mehr von seinem Geburtstag – wie noch im zweiten und dritten Jahrhundert –, sondern von seiner Empfängnis an gerechnet worden sei.” Talley, The Origins, 130, concedes that it is “difficult to know what prompted the understanding of the incarnation as the conception, rather than the birth, and the projection of the nativity to a point nine months later.” The chronological parallelism between the conception and the Passion (both in Nisan) is already presupposed in the hymns of Ephrem (ca. 306-373). See Coakley, “Typology,” 247-249.


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birth of Christ.28 Depending on whether the years in question were meant to be of the Julian (365.25d) or Egyptian (365d) variant, this respectively leads to birth dates on 18 November 3 BCE or on 6 January 2 BCE, while the corresponding incarnation dates would have fallen on or close to 18 February and 6 April. The latter date is cited by Sozomen as the “solar quartodeciman” Easter observed each year by the Montanists. If this was an early tradition, it may have preceded the assignment of the birth to 6 January and even given rise to the latter, as has been suggested by Duchesne and Talley.29 That the date of 6 January, later known as Epiphany, reaches back deep into the second century receives some confirmation from Clement’s remarks in the same passage about the followers of Basilides, who celebrated the baptism of Jesus on 15 or 11 Tybi, which, if taken as dates in the Alexandrian calendar, would correspond to 10 or 6 January.30 By the time of John Cassian (d. 435), the Egyptians used the Epiphany date on 6 January to commemorate the birth along with the baptism, which makes it worth speculating if it already possessed this double significance in the second century, although this is far from certain.31 That both events would end up on the same date is not surprising, however, given that Luke (3:23) states that Jesus was baptized when he was “about 30 years old.” Early Christians would have been tempted to ignore the word “about” (ὡσεί) and assume a perfect number of years – a perfection that would have made Christ’s birthday and baptism coincide.32 Another fascinating calendrical coincidence can be obtained if the Basilidean dates are instead interpreted as days in the Egyptian calendar, in which each year was uniformly 365 days in length. In this case, 11 Tybi would have corresponded to 24/25 December for the years 29/30 CE, i.e. the period in which the Passion is often thought to have oc-

28. Clement, Stromata 1.145.5 (GCS 15, p. 90). For discussions of Clement’s chronological statements, see Roland Bainton, “Basilidian Chronology and New Testament Interpretation,” Journal of Biblical Literature 42 (1923) 81-134; George Ogg, “A Note on Stromateis 1.144.1-146.4,” Journal of Theological Studies 46 (1945) 59-63; Strobel, Ursprung, 148-59; Beckwith, “St. Luke,” 91-94; Beckwith, Calendar, 73-74; Förster, Die Feier, 11-32. 29. Sozomen, Historia ecclesiastica 7.18.12-14 (GCS 50, p. 329); Duchesne, Origines, 253; Talley, The Origins, 97-99, 117-121, 129. The Montanists are said by Sozomen to have celebrated Easter on 6 April or the Sunday thereafter. 30. Clement, Stromata 1.146.2 (GCS 15, p. 90). 31. John Cassian, Conlatio 10.2 (CSEL 13, p. 286). See also Cosmas Indicopleustes, Topographia christiana, PG 88, p. 197. 32. Beckwith, Calendar, 74. The link between the Basilidean celebration of the baptism and Epiphany is disputed by Hans Förster, “The Celebration of the Baptism of Christ by the Basilideans and the Origin of Epiphany: Is the Seemingly Obvious Correct?” Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism 5 (2008) 110-24; Förster, Die Feier, 32-38.

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curred.33 As Roger Beckwith has further pointed out, a birth or baptism in midwinter may also be present in Tertullian’s tracts Against the Jews and Against Marcion. The former text mentions a calendrical interval of 6 months between Christ’s birth and the destruction of Jerusalem. Since the latter is traditionally assigned to the 9th day of the Jewish summer month of Av (July/August), this points to a birth in January. In Against Marcion, the calendrical interval between the “coming” of Christ (here understood as the time of his baptism) and the coming of Marcion is mentioned as 6 ½ month. Beckwith points out that Tertullian linked the coming of Marcion to the rising of the Dog Star (i.e. the heliacal rising of Sirius on 19/20 July), which would in turn mean that the Marcionites set the coming of Jesus to the first week of January.34 From the foregoing, it should have become clear that a winter tradition for the birth of Jesus probably did circulate by the third century, as witnessed by Clement and Tertullian, and possibly also by Julius Africanus (see below). A Christian chronologist who followed this tradition and still wanted to maintain the aforementioned calendrical parallelism with Christ’s Passion would have been naturally inclined to reinterpret what was once the birth in springtime as the date of the incarnation, nine month earlier. That such a tradition should have arisen early on is all the more likely given the fact that it could even be derived by exegetical means. I am here referring to the well-known argument based on Luke’s account of the annunciation of the birth of John the Baptist to the priest Zechariah (1:5-25), which is inter alia found in John Chrysostom’s homily On the birthday, held in Antioch in 386 CE. In order to prove to his audience that 25 December was the historical birthday of Jesus, Chrysostom wrongly assumes that Zechariah was the High Priest and that, by consequence, the annunciation scene depicted in Luke took place in the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur (cf. Leviticus 16:29-33; Hebrews 9:7). The latter is on 10 Tishri in the Jewish calendar, which would put the conception of John in autumn, near the time of the equinox. Since

33. See Erwin Preuschen, “Todesjahr und Todestag Jesu,” Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 5 (1904) 1-17, pp. 13-14. 34. Tertullian, Adversus Iudaeos 8 (CCSL 2, pp. 1356-1364); Adversus Marcionem 1.19 (CCSL 1, pp. 459-460); Beckwith, Calendar, 75-76; Roland Bainton, “‘The Origins of Epiphany’, in id., Early and Medieval Christianity (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1962) 22-38, pp. 34-36; Bainton, “Basilidian Chronology,” 101. On the rising of Sirius/Sothis and the Sothic period, see Friedrich Karl Ginzel, Handbuch der mathematischen und technischen Chronologie, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1906) 181-195. See further Talley, The Origins, 117-21; Jack Finegan, Handbook of Biblical Chronology, rev. ed. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1998) 320-328, who likewise concludes that “the oldest sources … put the conception of Jesus in the spring, and his birth in midwinter” (p. 328).


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Jesus was conceived roughly six month later (Luke 1:24, 26), a birth in midwinter follows logically from the data.35 In Förster’s view, the sole purpose of this argument was to justify ex post the introduction in Antioch of the relatively new Christmas feast against its critics.36 That versions of this argument may have already been floating around before 386 and independently of the actual celebration of Christmas, is not a thought he deems worthy of serious consideration. Accordingly, he also denies that the Latin treatise On the solstices and equinoxes of the conception and birth of our Lord Jesus Christ and John the Baptist, which used to circulate under Chrysostom’s name, can have been written earlier than the fifth century.37 The author of this text, a certain Pontius Maximus according to one twelfth-century manuscript, does not mention any nativity celebration on 25 December, but he nevertheless places the historical birthday of Jesus on this date, relying on solar symbolism. He begins his chronological demonstration by citing Zechariah 8:19, where the fasts of the fourth, seventh, and tenth months (and also of the fifth month, which our author chooses to ignore) are designated as occasions of great joy for the house of Judah. In the On the solstices, these are identified as months in the Jewish calendar, counted from Nisan (cf. Exodus 12:2), but at the same time they are equated with months in the Julian solar calendar, starting with March. The fourth month thus becomes June, while the seventh and tenth month are identified with September and December. As our author notes, these are the months of the year to which the beginnings of the seasons (summer, autumn, winter) are traditionally assigned.38 In order to show that the birth and conception of Jesus and his precursor John the Baptist occurred in these months and at the respective turns of the seasons, the author employs the same exegetical gambit as Chrys35. John Chrysostom, In diem natalem D. N. Jesu Christi, PG 49, cols. 351-362. On the chronological indications in Luke ch. 1, see also J. van Goudoever, Biblical Calendars (Leiden: Brill, 21961) 272-275. 36. Förster, Die Feier, 59-77; Förster, Die Anfänge, 164-166. See also Gianotto, “L’origine,” 72-79. 37. Förster, Die Feier, 78-87. Other commentators have assumed a fourth- or even third-century origin, located in either North Africa or Syria. See, e.g., André Wilmart, “La collection des 38 homélies latines de Saint Jean Chrysostome,” Journal of Theological Studies 19 (1918) 305-327, pp. 316-317; Botte, Les origines, 88-92; Engberding, “Der 25. Dezember,” 33-36; Hartke, Über Jahrespunkte, 75-76; Strobel, “Jahrpunkt-Spekulation,” 193; Talley, The Origins, 92-97. The text of De solstitiis et aequinoctiis was edited by Botte, Les origines, 93-105, and again in Patrologiae Latinae Supplementum, ed. Adalbert-Gauthier Hamman, vol. 1 (Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1958) 557-567. On its transmission, see Wolfgang Wenk, Zur Sammlung der 38 Homilien des Chrysostomus Latinus (Vienna: Österr. Akad. d. Wiss., 1988); Rosalind Love, “Bede and John Chrysostom,” Journal of Medieval Latin 17 (2007) 72-86; Thomas N. Hall and Michael Norris, “The Chrysostom Text in Bodley 516,” Journal of Theological Studies NS 62 (2011) 161-175. 38. De solstitiis et aequinoctiis, ed. Botte, Les origines, 95-96.

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ostom did in 386, assuming that John was conceived shortly after Yom Kippur (which both here and in Chrysostom’s sermon is conflated with Sukkot), on which his father Zechariah had entered the temple to burn incense. In his version of the argument, the conception of John took place on 11th day of the lunar month (Tishri), i.e. one day after Yom Kippur, which in turn allegedly corresponded to 24 September, the Roman date of the autumnal equinox. John’s birth as well as the conception and birth of Jesus are consequently assigned to the other cardinal points of the solar year, namely the summer solstice (24 June), the vernal equinox (25 March), and the winter solstice (25 December).39 He further vindicates this correlation by citing the Gospel of John (3:30), where the Baptist is quoted as saying “he [sc. Jesus] must increase, but I must decrease.” The Gospel text is here taken to imply that the birth of John the Baptist had to be assigned to the day of the summer solstice, which marks the beginning of decreasing day-length, whereas Jesus was born at the winter solstice, after which the days become longer again.40 Förster is strongly dismissive of this argument and even insinuates that John Chrysostom treated his Antiochene audience to a lengthy chronological exposition of Luke 1 despite knowing that its central premise – Zechariah’s status as High Priest – was false.41 In doing so, he overlooks that this notion not only recurs in On the solstices and several later texts employing versions of the same argument,42 but also in the Gospel commentary of St Ambrose,43 in the works of Ephrem and his disciple Aba,44 in a commentary on Luke ascribed to Epiphanius,45 and – most 39. Ibid., 96-100. 40. Ibid., 97-98. The same argument is made repeatedly in the works of St. Augustine. See De diversis quaestionibus 58.1 (CCSL 44A, p. 104); Enarrationes in Psalmos 132.11 (CCSL 40, p. 1934); In Iohannis Evangelium 14.5 (CCSL 36, p. 144); Sermones 192.3; 194.2; 287.3 (PL 38, pp. 1013, 1016, 1302); Germain Morin (ed.), Sancti Augustini Sermones post Maurinos reperti (Rome: Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1930) 226, 229, 515. 41. Förster, Die Anfänge, 165, 166, n. 487. 42. Cosmas Indicopleustes, Topographia christiana, PG 88, pp. 196-197; Anastasius of Antioch, Sermo in Annuntiationem intermeratissimae Deique Genitricis Mariae, PG 89, pp. 1377-1380; Chronicon Paschale, PG 92, p. 484; John of Nicaea, De nativitate Domini ad Zachariam Catholicum Majoris Armeniae, PG 96, pp. 1441-1448; Frederick C. Conybeare, “Ananias of Shirak upon Christmas,” The Expositor, 5th ser., 4 (1896) 321-337; Michel van Esbroeck, “La lettre de l’empereur Justinien sur l’Annonciation et la Noël en 561,” Analecta Bolandiana 86 (1968) 351-371; Joseph Reuss (ed.), LukasKommentare aus der griechischen Kirche (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1984) 23-24. See further Coakley, “Typology,” 250-252; Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra, The Impact of Yom Kippur on Early Christianity: The Day of Atonement from Second Temple Judaism to the Fifth Century (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003) 322-338. 43. Ambrose, Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam 1.22 (CCSL 14, p. 17). 44. Ephrem, Commentary on Exodus 12:2-3 (CSCO 152, p. 141); Ephrem, Commentary on the Diatessaron, Luke 1:29 (SC 121, pp. 61-62); F. Nau, “Fragments de Mar Aba, disciple de Saint Ephrem,” Revue de l’orient chrétien 17 (1912) 69-73, pp. 69-70. The latter text is translated in Coakley, “Typology,” 251, n. 14. See further ibid., 254, and André de Halleux, “Le comput éphremien du cycle de la nativité,” The Four Gospels


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importantly – in the Protoevangelium of James. In this mid-second century infancy Gospel, Zechariah appears as the High Priest, who enters the Holy of Holies in order to ask God for counsel after the Virgin Mary, who had been entrusted to the temple by her parents, had reached maturity.46 That Chrysostom’s chronological embellishment of Luke’s story thus has roots that precede the fourth century is confirmed by Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra, who notes that this reading of the Gospel account would have been a natural outgrowth of the ancient Jewish and early Christian imaginaire surrounding Yom Kippur as a day of special theological and eschatological significance.47 Another possible hint for its early origin comes from manuscript S of the Old Syriac, which explicitly has Zechariah “bring in” (Luke 1:9) the incense, thereby implying a movement, possibly into the Holy of Holies (cf. Leviticus 16:12).48 That this understanding of the annunciation story has Levantine (and probably JewishChristian) roots is further indicated by the provenance of some of the fourth-century authors who refer to it (Ephrem and Chrysostom) as well as by the treatise On the solstices, whose Latin shows occasional traces of a Syriac substrate.49 The evidence thus suggests that, far from being an invention on Chrysostom’s part, the basic conceptual tools to deduce a birth of Jesus in midwinter from the data found in the Gospel of Luke were already in existence two centuries before the sermon of 386. Instead of accusing Chrysostom of dishonesty, as Förster does, it seems more reasonable to suppose that he simply rehearsed an argument that was already well-established by the time the new nativity feast on 25 December reached his congregation in Antioch. That said, the assignment of the conception of John the Baptist to (shortly after) Yom Kippur only points to the approximate time of the year, i.e. late September/early October, and further background assumptions are needed to fix the nativity of Jesus precisely on 25 December. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to overlook the congenial role offered by 25 March, the day of the vernal equinox, as a means of chronological calibration. Thanks to the paschal table of Hippolytus, we can be sure that 25 March played an important role in Christian chronology as the date of the crucifixion since at least the early third century, thus laying the ground for an influential calendrical tradition in the Western 1992: Festschrift Frans Neirynck, ed. F. Van Segbroeck, et al., vol. 3 (Louvain: Leuven University Press, 1992) 2369-2382. 45. Frederick C. Conybeare, “The Gospel Commentary of Epiphanius,” Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 7 (1906) 318-332, p. 325. 46. Protoevangelium of James (8.3), in J. K. Elliott (trans.), The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993) 60; Harm Reinder Smid, Protevangelium Jacobi: A Commentary (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1965) 68. 47. Stökl Ben Ezra, The Impact, 250-255. 48. Coakley, “Typology,” 251, n. 13-14; Stökl Ben Ezra, The Impact, 252. 49. Engberding, “Der 25. Dezember,” 36; Talley, The Origins, 92-93.

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church.50 Since it was established early on that Jesus died on 25 March, and since it was also assumed, based on Luke’s annunciation narrative, that he was born in winter, early Christians would have been tempted to re-interpret 25 March as the day of conception, whereby they could then arrive at 25 December as the date of the nativity. The attractiveness of 25 March and 25 December – the vernal equinox and the winter solstice – as cardinal points in the life of the Savior was naturally further underscored by a widespread solar symbolism, which viewed Christ as the “sun of righteousness” and is clearly present in chronological texts such as De pascha computus and the aforementioned On the solstices. At the winter solstice, the sun reverses its trend of shining for fewer and fewer minutes each day and the duration of daylight begins to increase again. At the vernal equinox, the duration of day and night reach equilibrium and shortly thereafter the light of day surpasses the dark of night for the first time. Thus, both dates are a fitting expression of the victory of light over darkness.51 4. Julius Africanus and 25 March While Western church tradition associated 25 March with the crucifixion of Jesus, Eastern sources more commonly viewed it as the date of the resurrection in conjunction with the year 31 CE.52 The earliest known witness for this contention, as forcefully proposed by Venance Grumel and recently vindicated by Alden Mosshammer, were the influential, but sadly lost, Chronographiae of Julius Africanus (ca. 221), a work which goes unmentioned in Förster’s studies.53 Scholars have worked hard to reconstruct the Chronographiae’s contents from the remaining fragments, many of which are preserved in the works of Eusebius of Caesarea and in the ninth-century Byzantine chronicle of Georgius Syncellus.54 50. Aside from Hippolytus, a contemporary reference to 25 March as the Passion date is found in Tertullian, Adversus Iudaeos 8.18 (CCSL 2, p. 1363). The possibility must be considered, however, that this part of the work was not written by Tertullian or that the exact crucifixion date may be a later interpolation. See Nothaft, Dating, 50-51. 51. On the subject of Christian solar symbolism, see Franz Dölger, Sol Salutis: Gebet und Gesang im christlichen Altertum, 3rd ed. (Münster: Aschendorff, 1972), and Wallraff, Christus Verus Sol. 52. Grumel, La chronologie, 28, 30, 91, 112, 121-124; Loi, “Il 25 Marzo,” 60-62. 53. Grumel, La chronologie, 22-24. See now the excellent analysis in Mosshammer, The Easter Computus, 328-329, 385-421. 54. See the new edition of Martin Wallraff (ed.), Iulius Africanus Chronographiae: The Extant Fragments (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007) = GCS-NF 15. See further Heinrich Gelzer, Sextus Julius Africanus und die byzantinische Chronographie, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1880) 19-52; William Adler, Time Immemorial: Archaic History and Its Sources in Christian Chronography from Julius Africanus to George Syncellus (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1989); Martin Wallraff (ed.), Julius Africanus und die christliche Weltchronistik (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006).


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From these fragments, we know that Africanus counted five and a half millennia between creation of Adam and the incarnation of Jesus Christ, meaning that he dated the latter events to annus mundi or AM 5501.55 Moreover, the date of Christ’s resurrection coincided with the beginning of a new year of the world, as can be seen from the fact that Africanus put the crucifixion in AM 5531, whereas the resurrection, two days later, already belongs to AM 5532. At the same time, he dated both these events to the second year of the 202nd Olympiad, which corresponds to the spring of 31 CE. In this year, 25 March fell on a Sunday, the weekday of the resurrection.56 Mosshammer made the important observation that Africanus’s chronicle was structured by intervals of multiples of 19, which lends support to Grumel’s hypothesis that he used a 19-year lunisolar calendar cycle to calculate the age of the moon on certain dates. In 31 CE, 25 March would have been close to a full moon, in accordance with the chronology of the Passion.57 The fact that Africanus began a new cosmic year from the resurrection therefore indicates that he counted the years of the world from 25 March, which was a Wednesday in 5501 BCE, Africanus’s year of creation. It would hence seem that he structured his chronicle around the date of 25 March, because he was pleased with the correspondence of the resurrection with the fourth day of creation, on which the sun and the moon began their course (making this day the beginning of calendrical time).58 If he counted exactly 5500 years between the creation and the divine incarnation, this would mean that 25 March was also the exact date of the latter event, referred to as sarkosis in the text, by which he likely meant the conception in the womb. If this is the case, then Africanus at least implicitly dated the birth of Jesus to the following winter, perhaps even to 25 December.59 While the specifics of Africanus’s chronology remain a matter of speculation, we can tread on firmer ground when it comes to the reception and modification of his work at the hands of later Eastern writers. The resurrection date on 25 March continued to play a crucial role in the chronological system underlying the lost chronicle of the Alexandrian 55. Julius Africanus, Chronographiae T 92; 93c (GCS-NF 15, pp. 274, 288); Mosshammer, The Easter Computus, 387-389. 56. Julius Africanus, Chronographiae F 93, T 93a-d (GCS-NF 15, pp. 276-288); Mosshammer, The Easter Computus, 389-406. 57. Mosshammer, The Easter Computus, 418-420. For Africanus’s knowledge of the 19-year cycle, see Chronographiae F 93 (GCS-NF 15, p. 282). 58. Mosshammer, The Easter Computus, 406-407, 420. 59. That Africanus accepted a nativity on 25 December was first claimed by Paul de Lagarde, Altes und Neues über das Weihnachtsfest (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1891) 317, basing himself on a tentative proposal in Gelzer, Sextus, 1:50. See most recently Michael Whitby, “Imperial Christian Historiography,” The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Beginnings to AD 600, ed. Andrew Feldherr and Grant Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) 346-370, p. 348.

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monk Annianus (fl. 400), which later provided the template for the work of Georgius Syncellus, who wrote his chronicle in ca. 810. According to Annianus/Syncellus, the world was created on Sunday, 25 March, while Jesus was incarnated in the womb 5500 years later, on Monday, 25 March, AM 5501, and rose from the dead on Sunday, 25 March AM 5534. Just as has been assumed for the chronicle of Africanus, Annianus’s system thus used 25 March as an epoch for counting the years of the world.60 He naturally also assigned the nativity to 25 December.61 A further notable point of correspondence between both chronographic sources consists in the fact that they date the incarnation and birth of Christ to AM 5501. Yet while Africanus had assigned to Jesus a lifespan of only 31 years, Annianus added two more years, dating the crucifixion to AM 5533 and the resurrection to the beginning of AM 5534. Syncellus, probably paraphrasing Annianus, expressly faults Africanus for his “error” of two years,62 but he never mentions any divergence between himself and his predecessor when it comes to the calendar dates of Christ’s conception and resurrection. That Africanus was the source for a nativity on 25 December cannot be demonstrated with certainty, but the evidence is such that this possibility should be taken very seriously. In this case, the Christmas date would ultimately trace back to the same roots that also spawned the various crucifixion dates that were common in late antiquity: scholarly conjectures, informed by calendrical calculations and chronological reasoning. 5. Conclusion As the foregoing deliberations have shown, there is a substantial amount of chronological evidence that must be taken into consideration when investigating the origins of the Christmas date, but which is too often ignored or dismissed by proponents of alternative theories. It is undeniable that there existed within third-century Christianity a vivid tradition of chronological scholarship and speculation, which contained all the tools from which – in principle – a commemoration of Christ’s birth on 25 December could have been constructed. As should have become clear, this kind of reasoning was no instance of “breathtaking mental acrobatics,” but a simple mixture of typological and chronological reasoning, which is characteristic of early Christian literature. Pace Förster, nothing 60. The Chronography of George Synkellos, trans. William Adler and Paul Tuffin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) xxix-lxxv. The best accounts of Annianus’s system are Grumel, La chronologie, 83-97; Mosshammer, The Easter Computus, 198203, 357-384. 61. For the latter date, see Syncellus, The Chronography, trans. Adler and Tuffin, 455. 62. Julius Africanus, Chronographiae T 93b-c (GCS-NF 15, pp. 286, 288).


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prevents us from taking into consideration that Christian scholars may have applied this kind of reasoning to put Christ’s birth on 25 December, a date attractive due to its solar symbolism, long before Christmas was actually instituted as a feast in the fourth century. Whether this is how it happened or whether, conversely, the pagan influence played more than just a secondary role is impossible to tell with hindsight, unless more evidence comes to light. This conclusion comes as distressing news in light of the great confidence with which certain simplified versions of HRT are nowadays passed around as common knowledge, both at universities and as part of public discourse.63 One of the greatest virtues of historical scholarship is its ability to challenge our certainties, which are too often based on mere folklore. If this essay was able to undermine such certainties for the debate on the origins of Christmas, then its task has been fulfilled.

The Warburg Institute Woburn Square London WC1H 0AB [email protected]

C. Philipp E. NOTHAFT

63. Cf. Roll, “The Debate,” 15, n. 37, who back in 1998 already rightly observed that “a certain lassitude, even popular sloppiness has eroded the conscientious scholarly nuancing” with which HRT had once been introduced. One might add that this attitude is still prevalent.

Early Christian Chronology and the Origins of the Christmas Date: In Defense of the "Calculation Theory"

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