Did Christians Steal Christmas from Saturnalia and the Sun God?

In the first post of this series, we briefly touched on the two Roman festivals that get blamed for Christmas: Saturnalia and the birthday of the "Unconquered Sun."

They come up in almost every "Christmas is pagan" argument, so they deserve a closer look. What were they, really? And did Christians actually borrow from them?

Let's take them one at a time.

What was Saturnalia?

Saturnalia was a Roman festival honoring Saturn, an old god of farming and the harvest. It started on December 17 and eventually grew to last up to a week, ending around December 23.

And it was a party. Businesses and courts closed. People feasted, drank, and gambled in public. Social rules flipped upside down: masters sometimes served their slaves dinner, and everyone wore a felt cap normally reserved for freed slaves. People exchanged small gifts like wax candles and little clay figurines.

The poet Catullus called it "the best of days." Not everyone agreed. The writer Pliny the Younger wrote about hiding out in a quiet wing of his country house during Saturnalia, where the noise of the party couldn't reach him.

So yes, there was feasting and gift-giving in late December. That's where the comparison comes from.

Why Saturnalia isn't Christmas

The resemblance falls apart once you look closely.

• The dates don't match. Saturnalia ended by December 23. Christmas is December 25. If Christians wanted to take over Saturnalia, they picked the wrong day.
• The point doesn't match. Saturnalia was about Saturn, the harvest, and a week of turning society upside down. Christmas is about God becoming a man. One is a party; the other is worship.
• Christians weren't fans. Around AD 200, Tertullian scolded believers for joining in Saturnalia and other pagan holidays. He pointed out that pagans would never join Christian feasts, so why were Christians joining theirs? That doesn't sound like a church looking to borrow the party.
• There's no paper trail. No early church leader ever said, "Let's put Christmas near Saturnalia to win pagans over." As we saw earlier in this series, the reasoning Christians actually left behind is about calculating from the date of the cross.

Feasting and gifts in winter aren't unique to any one culture. They're what people do when it's cold and dark and they want to be together.

The sun god theory

This is the stronger argument, and it's the one you'll hear from people who've done a little reading. It goes like this:

In AD 274, Emperor Aurelian made the sun god, Sol Invictus (the "Unconquered Sun"), a major god of the Roman Empire. He built a big new temple to him in Rome and set up games in his honor. The sun god's birthday was celebrated on December 25, right around the winter solstice, when the days start getting longer. Later, Christians took over the date and turned the sun's birthday into the Son's birthday.

It's a tidy story. Here's what the evidence actually shows:

• Aurelian really did build the temple and start the games in 274. That part is true.
• But his games weren't on December 25. The Roman calendar from AD 354 lists the games for the sun on October 19–22. Most historians think those were Aurelian's games.
• The first record of anything on December 25 comes from that same calendar of 354. It lists the "birthday of the Unconquered One" on December 25. Interestingly, it doesn't actually say the sun, though most scholars assume that's who it means.
• The first clear mention of a sun festival in late December is from AD 362, in a hymn by Julian, the last pagan emperor.

So the idea that a big sun festival on December 25 had been going strong since 274 is an assumption. There's no record of it.

So which came first?

Here's the timeline, side by side:

• Early 200s: Christians were already dating Jesus' death, and his conception, to March 25. Nine months later is December 25.
• Around AD 235: A Roman Christian writer named Hippolytus may have named December 25 as Jesus' birthday. (Scholars still debate this one.)
• AD 274: Aurelian builds his sun temple and starts games in October.
• AD 336: Christians in Rome list Christ's birth on December 25.
• AD 354: A Roman calendar lists both Christ's birth and the "birthday of the Unconquered One" on December 25.
• AD 362: Julian's hymn gives the first clear mention of a sun festival in late December.

Look at that list. The Christian reasoning for December 25 shows up earlier than any clear evidence of a sun festival on that date.

That doesn't prove Christians came first. The honest answer is that historians still debate it. Some think the sun festival was older and just didn't leave records. Others have even suggested the pagan festival on December 25 might have been a response to the Christian one.

But it does mean the confident claim that "Christians stole the sun god's birthday" goes way beyond the evidence.

Christians and the sun

To be fair, early Christians did talk about Jesus and the sun. But not the way the skeptics mean.

The Bible already calls the coming Messiah "the sun of righteousness" who rises "with healing in its wings" (Malachi 4:2, ESV). Jesus called himself the Light of the World (John 8:12). So when Christmas landed in the darkest part of the year, right as the days started getting longer, Christians loved the symbolism.

Once a pagan festival did exist on the same day, some preachers leaned into the contrast. An anonymous Christian sermon from the 300s or 400s notes that pagans called the day the birthday of the "Unconquered One," and then asks, in effect: who is truly unconquered, if not our Lord, who conquered death?

That's not borrowing. That's taking the culture's language and pointing it at Jesus, the same thing Paul did in Athens when he quoted their own poets to preach Christ (Acts 17:28).

And when some Christians did get too close to actual sun worship, church leaders shut it down. In the 400s, Pope Leo the Great rebuked believers who bowed toward the rising sun on the steps of St. Peter's before going in to worship. The church wasn't adopting sun worship. It was fighting it.

The bottom line

Saturnalia was a different holiday, on different days, for a different god, and early Christians told believers to stay away from it.

The sun god theory is more interesting, but the evidence for a December 25 sun festival shows up later than the Christian reasoning for that date, not earlier. At most, Christians saw the sun rising in the dark of winter and said, "That reminds us of Jesus."

That's not stealing a holiday. That's what Christians have always done: look at the world God made and see it pointing back to him.

The Son was always the point. The sun just helped make it.