Every year someone “discovers” that Christmas is “really” an ancient pagan festival. Candidates include Saturnalia, which ran for a week from December 17, and the Birthday of the Sun, the Julian winter solstice (December 25). Saturnalia sounds familiar: festive spirit, much drink and food, present-giving, party games and puzzles. Even the reactions to the festival were similar. The true ancestors of Ebenezer Scrooge are Seneca, looking down his nose at the boozy mob wearing funny hats, and the younger Pliny, who stayed in his study away from the family frolics.

The earliest Christians did not make much fuss of Jesus’s birth. Epiphany, and Jesus’s baptism, were more important; Easter was in a different league entirely. Guesses and calculations produced no agreement among these Christians on the day, month, season or year of Jesus’s birth. Only gradually did the Western Church settle, during the fourth century, on December 25. By doing so it may have been highlighting Jesus as the “Sun of righteousness” prophesied in Malachi iv, 2. It may also have been trying to align Jesus with the Roman sun god, perhaps as part of the Christianising of the empire and/or the imperialising of Christianity. The real reason remains a matter of speculation.

Nonetheless, the early Christians would have been surprised at the conclusion regularly drawn from the parallels between Christmas and pagan festivals. To see Christmas “only” as the new Saturnalia, Christmas trees as “really” fertility symbols, or the incarnate divine son as “merely” part of the Constantinian settlement, is to miss or deny the point of Christianity.

Those who try to reduce Christmas to yet another pagan festival stand within a tradition of Enlightenment rhetoric. Christianity to them is “merely” a pagan-style religion invented by the followers of Jesus after the failure of his kingdom-project; or it is “really” a wish-fulfilment; or it is “only” a way of propping up the Establishment, whether the Emperor Constantine’s or some modern variety. Such charges, regularly repeated despite regular refutation, invite the counter-question: why is it so important to insist that Christianity is simply ancient paganism with a self-righteous smile?

The answer lies in the challenge that Judaism and Christianity still pose to alternative world views and the systems they support. The Jews claimed that their God had made the world, rather than being part of it; they therefore refused to worship other gods, not least those of the main pagan empires. Likewise, Christians believed that Jesus was in the world; the world was made through him; the world did not recognise him; but he reclaimed it as his own.

The pagan festivals belonged in a cycle of time, with seasons, years and ages endlessly repeated. Jewish festivals, by contrast, belonged within a linear view of time: they looked back to God’s past acts of deliverance, and on to the ultimate redemption that would fill the earth with God’s glory once and for all. Likewise, Christianity sees Jesus and his achievement as the goal towards which the entire cosmos had been straining. Judaism posed a challenge to the world view on which paganism rests, a challenge reinforced in Christianity. Either history is going somewhere or it is not; sooner or later, you have to make up your mind. Paganism has always reacted by trying to cut Judaism and Christianity down to its own size.

But it will not work. When the early Christians celebrated Easter, they did not imagine that Jesus would die and rise again every year, despite the partial parallels with dying and rising gods who did just that. When they celebrated Christmas, they did not suppose that Jesus had to be born again and again in an endless round of myth and ritual. They claimed that God had become human just this once, coming as the rightful king to claim the long-vacant throne from regents and usurpers. There is the rub: if the Jewish story has come true in Jesus, then paganism in general, and its empires in particular, are called to account. Jesus has upstaged them, and they do not like it.

Judaism’s theology always had a political edge, which remained constant in early Christianity — something we forget at our peril. Modern Europe, however, has invented a new category, religion, which by definition, unlike ancient religion, has nothing to do with ordinary life, certainly not with politics.

The Christmas stories themselves insist that we should reject the sceptic’s analysis and criticism. Matthew speaks of the birth of the true king of the Jews under the nose of the present king, Herod. Luke sets his story explicitly within the world of Caesar’s empire, with Jesus as the world’s proper ruler. Screen out these political implications and Christmas, wobbling between sentimental irrelevance and commercial exploitation, is vulnerable to fashionable deconstruction. But, as usual, deconstruction leaves empire and earthly powers unscathed (all those years of Derrida, and we still get George Bush). Christmas is the start of a subversive story that ends, at Easter, with the conquest of the tyrant’s last weapon, death itself.

If we could question the early Christians about parallels between Christmas and pagan festivals, they would offer a reply based on classical Jewish concepts (word, wisdom, glory and the like) now seen as fulfilled in Jesus — giving the lie to the old theory, still revived from time to time, that incarnation is a non-Jewish idea foreign to the first Christians. Jesus is the original, they would say; the pagan gods are lifeless copies. Paganism endlessly rehearses the orchestral parts of the concerto. Jesus, the composer’s own son, has come to play the solo part, thereby making sense of the whole thing, and turning rehearsal into performance.

The author is the Bishop of Durham

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