"Sol Invictus, the Winter Solstice, and the Origins of Christmas", Mouseion, Number 47/3 (2003), 377-398

This article explores the nature of the cult of Sol Invictus within its third century context. My work I upports the views of scholars who have argued that it was Aurelian who made 25 December the Natalis Invicti in honour of Sol Invictus and in celebration of the dedication of his new temple in Rome. However, I argue that by choosing this date for the temple’s dedication, Aurelian was not influenced by earlier Roman Solar cult but by contemporary, third-century ideas about the sun and its reappearance after the winter solstice found in the east and west, as well as in Egyptian calendars. We also find some of these notions articulated by Neoplatonic philosophers and courtiers of the late third century,

Questions Liturgiques, 2018

This article examines several occurrences of the Christmas date in early patristic writers, including Evodius, Hippolytus, and heretofore lost or unrecognized excerpts of Julius Africanus. For the last two centuries, the earliest instances of the Christmas date have been rejected pro forma as spurious or of doubtful authenticity. Although no evidence of forgery, falsification, mis-attribution, or mis-dating is cited, academic convention tends to be skeptical and dismissive of any witness earlier than Aurelian and the festival Sol Invictus, from which the Christmas date was allegedly appropriated. However, significant evidence points to the authenticity and early dating of the present sources: A published article shows that Hippolytus endorsed the December 25th birth of Christ in the early third century. Moreover, scholars have long predicted that Africanus, an older contemporary of Hippolytus, held to the December 25th nativity⸺ a prediction vindicated by direct evidence herein. Finally, the like document or tradition relied upon by Africanus is cited in a writing attributed to Evodius that appears to date prior to the mid-second century, more than 120 before Aurelian. The article thus concludes that the Christmas date occurs both earlier and of separate provenance than either of the two leading theories can adequately account.

Although December 25th is the date on which most Christians celebrate Jesus' birth, no one knows either the day or the year in which Jesus was born. The December 25th date was established during the late 4th century, nearly 400 years after Jesus died, and continues to be rejected by some 200-300 million Eastern Orthodox Christians who celebrate the event on January 6th. Establishing the date of Jesus' birth was a work in progress for nearly four centuries, during which various dates were proposed. It appears most likely that the December 25th date resulted from the borrowing of a then-popular pagan mid-winter celebration.

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 2015

The origins of Christmas and the date of Christ’s birth are separate but related questions. However, Christmas is usually assumed to have no connection with the actual date of Christ’s birth. Discussions regarding the origins of Christmas typically omit reference to the birth of Christ, unless it is to affirm it is unlikely he was born December 25th. This is unfortunate because it has skewed discussion and taken it in directions which tend to impugn the legitimacy of Christmas itself. However, chronological evidence strongly favors December 25th being the actual date of the nativity, such that the assumption Christmas is unconnected with the date of Christ’s birth is no longer academically defensible or sound.

Argues that the establishment of the Christmas-Epiphany liturgical cycle was the result of a developing Christology which came to recognize the need to acknowledge Christ's Messianic status at his birth rather than merely at his Baptism, and how it was a compromise between the Eastern and Western feasts of the Nativity.

The sacrifice of the sacred bull/calf deep in the underground cave, underlines the dualistic nature of the Mitraic Cult. The sacred bull was in its true nature a fetishist manifestation - phallus, of a multitude-form creator solar deity, a symbol of the sky and heavens, which through this ritual sacrifice ejaculates its seeds (blood) of life. While the underground cave , where Mitra was born from a stone, symbolized the interior (uterus) of the mother earth, which is about to be fertilized by the blood/seed of the celestial bull deep inside her. The death was the symbolic rebirth in the same time, as the sexual culmination is often compared with the “small death.” This symbolic sexual “penetration” of the celestial bull/phallus deep into the underground womb of the mother earth, can be deduced also from the unmistakably Phallus-like shape of the Mitraeums, the cave-like shrines of Mitra, where at the end of each the altar represented the ‘glans’ of these penis-shaped structures, and where the “celestial sperm” was spilled in the form of the bull’s blood. Moreover, in the famous Ostia’ Mitraeum in Italy, where was performed the symbolic “ejaculation” of the sacrificial seed (i.e. bull’s blood and most probably the real ejaculation of the adepts and Paters, which was mixed with the “celestial seed” of the slain bull), there’s a very intuitive and proper inscription in Latin: “FELICISSIMUS EXVOTO” - ‘a maximum felicity from a vow’, with an urn-vessel (a mosaic image on the floor) for the ejection of the spilled blood/semen. Mitraism was actually the most Chauvinistic and primitive predecessor of the 10th century dualistic movements, Bogomilism/Catharism and later Protestantism...

While the view that the celebration of Christmas on 25 December came about as the product of pagan influence continues to enjoy unbounded popularity, the rivaling “calculation theory” seems to have lost ground, owing in part to the recent criticism leveled against it by Hans Förster. The present article adduces Christian chronological sources from the third century in a fresh defense of the view that the choice of 25 December as the birthday of Christ was originally the result of chronological speculation. As will be demonstrated, Christian scholars from this period had the kind of arguments at their disposal that would have supported such a conclusion independently of inter-religious influence. Moreover, there is evidence to suggest that Julius Africanus already reckoned with this date at the beginning of the third century. As a result, the “calculation theory” is still deserving of serious consideration from scholars investigating the origins of Christmas.