With the nearing of Christmas, comes the seasonal surge of people arguing that Christmas is either a pagan holiday, derived from pagan holidays, or otherwise idolatrous. I have been told this, and I've seen other people being told this, and it gets tiring.

There was an Instagram post of a person saying:

The reason we celebrate Christmas is because Jesus Christ purchased salvation for both the Jew and the Gentile. Christmas would be meaningless if He did not purchase salvation for sinners. But He did. He came. He lived a perfect life. He died in our place. He rose from the dead!

And with great irony, the first comments I saw were like this:

As a Bible-believing Christian, Christmas is not biblical... (the post goes on)

Whoah! That's nonsense, OP. Where is Christmas talked about in the Bible? Cringe time of year. The idolatry is awful.

. . . are you serious?

Look. I know that there's many believers out there who take scripture seriously and care about following God in a pleasing way. I know that the modern, commercialized, western cultural celebration of Christmas is a hollow shell of what used to be God-glorifying. I get it, and I'm with you!

But, come on. Did you even read the post? It's almost as if someone wrote a bot that blindly searches for the keyword "Christmas" and auto-comments "Christmas is pagan / idolatrous / unbiblical".

What bothers me just as much are the replies that say "Amen" and "So true". I can practically see them smugly shaking their heads. And so, I'm throwing myself in the ring, so that believers and non-believers can see that this is not the only Christian stance of the holiday. I won't have the final say, but I at least want to show you that, indeed, I, as a Bible-believing Christian, can confidently say that Christmas is biblical.

Okay, let's break down the arguments.

1. Christmas was created to Christianize a pagan holiday

One common argument is that Christmas was created as a way to Christianize Saturnalia or Sol Invictus (two holidays that were celebrated around the same time of the year), so that pagans would have an easier time adopting Christianity. However, the early church made it a clear point to not assimilate into pagan traditions.

Pliny the Younger, a prominent Roman lawyer, wrote a letter to Emperor Trajan where he was bothered that Christians refused to worship the Roman gods, and saw that as a potential sign of sedition or rebellion against Roman rule. Tertullian, a prominent church leader, wrote a letter on idolatry, where he scolded Christians for having wreaths at their doors, which was a common pagan practice to honor gods of doors, gates, and other entranceways. These two figures - one anti-Christian and one pro-Christian - lived during the first and second centuries, and in their ways, expressed how Christianity made it a point to be wholly separate from paganism.

As for Saturnalia, it had become a large celebratory holiday by 217 BC, so it predates Christmas. However, because of the Christian insistence of not wanting to be identified with pagans, Saturnalia would not be a holiday that they would adopt with Christian motifs to create Christmas.

Sol Invictus gets brought up as a pagan holiday being Christianized because it was celebrated on the same day as Christmas - December 25. But, it doesn't even have the luxury of predating Christmas so that Christmas might be a derivative of it.

The Chronography of 354 is a collection of manuscripts that contains the oldest references for both Sol Invictus and Christmas being celebrated as yearly holidays. And prior to the year 354, Christian writers have been hypothesizing Jesus' birthday: Hippolytus marked it as December 25, although other people threw around other dates. In any case, with our current manuscript evidence, you cannot assert that as yearly festivals, Sol Invictus predates Christmas and that Christmas is an adoption of Sol Invictus.

Even if you could assert that Sol Invictus predates Christmas, the other point still stands: Christians did not want their faith to be associated with paganism, and Sol Invictus would likewise not be a good candidate to be appropriated into a Christian holiday.

2. Just because Christmas is not mentioned in the Bible, doesn't make it unbiblical

This is the appeal that the second comment had. I can commend the root motivation of honoring the Bible, but I have to say that the resulting thought process is ironically out of sync with biblical principles.

You don't approach scripture as if it is the exclusive source of all things good, and that things not mentioned in the Bible are automatically bad. Often times, pertinent questions and life experiences are excluded from the Bible. In those cases, we're supposed to meditate on the wisdom that exists in the biblical laws and commands, so that the underlying principles guide us to make informed decisions. This isn't a bug in the Bible, this is a feature.

We see this a bunch in the Bible itself:

In Numbers 27, the daughters of Zelophehad told Moses that their family's lineage or land allotment would be endangered of being wiped out because so far in the narrative, land inheritance was passed down to the men in the family, and Zelophehad did not have sons. And so in the face of this new situation, Moses went to God to seek wisdom, and God told him to grant the daughters their father's inheritance, drawing on the wisdom back in Genesis 1 that man and woman are to be co-rulers in ruling the earth on His behalf.

In Matthew 5, during the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus takes the existing law "You shall not murder" (Exodus 20:13), and expounds upon it to new scenarios where you might think poorly of someone, or might neglect to reconcile with someone after a fight. He takes the wisdom behind the law to show how it's about honoring your fellow human as a precious image of God, and how that looks in things beyond the law of don't murder them.

In Acts 15, the early church came across the miracle of many non-Jews becoming followers of Jesus, and so a new dilemma arose: should the Gentile believers be circumcised and be subject to following the Torah commandments? And so, the leaders worked it out: they applied what they've witnessed (the Holy Spirit falling on the non-Jews who believed in Jesus), and also the scriptures from Amos on how even non-Jews will be called by God's name. They used these to come to the conclusion that the Gentiles do not need to undergo circumcision to be a part of God's people, because salvation to both the Jews and the Nations is the same salvation through grace.

And so what does this have to do with Christmas?

Christmas is not mentioned in the Bible as a holiday to be celebrated. But let's put it to the test. Why are you celebrating Christmas? And in the context that spurred this whole chapter, why is the OP of the Instagram post celebrating Christmas? I'll bump what he said down here again:

The reason we celebrate Christmas is because Jesus Christ purchased salvation for both the Jew and the Gentile. Christmas would be meaningless if He did not purchase salvation for sinners. But He did. He came. He lived a perfect life. He died in our place. He rose from the dead!

This is straight up Philippians 2! If this is the driving force behind your celebration of Christmas, then it's the farthest it can get from idolatry. It's glorifying God as He decisively acted to rescue humanity in our brokenness. With Jesus' birth, there's no going back in God's redemption and restoration of all things.

Look, we all know that the modern western culture has commercialized and secularized Christmas, and how it affects both non-believers and believers. I fully understand how fake it can feel. I understand the need to redeem the spirit of Christmas to point back to Jesus. But does that mean that Christmas itself is idolatry? Absolutely not.

And, it also means that we shouldn't be so quick on the trigger to label pro-Christmas Christians as being idolaters. I'm consistently taken aback at how tactless people are when they say these things! Who are you trying to win over? You're making non-believers recoil at your aggression, and making believers disheartened and loose-footed in their faith.

True celebration of Christmas is a wonderful, God-glorifying thing. If this is how you approach Christmas, then don't let anyone stop you from celebrating it.

And, when Easter / Resurrection Sunday comes around not long after, the same people will come out with their same faulty arguments. Don't let them stop you from celebrating that, either.

Footnotes:

[1] Why is Christmas on December 25?: https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/why-december-25

[2] Tertullians' letter on Idolatry which mentions wreath-hanging: http://www.logoslibrary.org/tertullian/idolatry/15.html

[3] Chronography of 354 translated: https://www.tertullian.org/fathers/index.htm#Chronography_of_354
Part 6 and Part 12 are the oldest references to Sol Invictus and Christmas as yearly holidays.

[3a] Wikipedia article of Chronography of 354: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronograph_of_354
This helped me identify the places where Sol Invictus and Christmas were mentioned.

[4] Hippolytus' commentary on Daniel: https://www.pergrazia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/0205_hippolytus_commentary-on-daniel_2010.pdf
This mentions Hyppolytus' hypothesis of Jesus' birthday being on December 25.