A History of Christmas ｜ Bishop Barron
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Summary
Is December 25th the day of the birth of our Savior? Is it a Christian holiday or a pagan holiday? What does the Bible say about the date of Jesus' birth, and how did it come about? Does it really matter when it happened? What is the point of celebrating Christmas if you don t know when Jesus was born?
Transcript
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I hope you're having a marvelous first day of Christmas.
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People, they want to take down the Christmas tree at 5 o'clock on Christmas Day itself.
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There is so much about the Christmas season, Advent, the 12 days of Christmas, the whole even
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why we celebrate Christmas on December 25th that is confusing to many modern people.
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I consider it all part of the war on Christmas.
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I like to consider myself a general in the war on Christmas.
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But I decided we need to bring in some outside support here because I don't know, what do
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So I figured I would bring in an expert on Christmas, and that would be His Excellency,
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Bishop Barron, thank you so much for coming on.
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I actually want to talk specifically about time and about history and about this claim
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that, one, Christians just invented Christmas and made it this time of year to steal a holiday
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Two, that there's no good reason that they picked December 25th other than there were pagan
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And three, that it doesn't really matter when we celebrate Christmas.
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Let's just enjoy the good feelings of the season or something like that.
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In no particular order, feel free to give me your thoughts.
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Well, as you suggest, the standard view, and I would have learned it certainly as a student,
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is that we don't really know for sure when Jesus was born exactly.
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And December 25th corresponds to the pagan feast day of the Sol Invictus, the all-conquering
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And there's a beautiful association there of Christ, the light of the world, et cetera.
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Another angle on it, though, is that some suggest, you know, the feast of the Annunciation,
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March 25th, so nine months prior to December 25th, is actually older than the feast assigned
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And so, is there some ground, if there was some reason to believe that was the case
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historically, then wouldn't it make sense that December 25th would be the day of Jesus'
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But I think the wider point you're making is the most important one, namely, that Christianity
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I love myths of all the different, you know, cultures, and they're fascinating, and they
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That's the great virtue of the myths about nature, about the cosmos, about human psychology,
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But a mark of the myth is always that little phrase, you know, once upon a time or in that
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time, they usually use the Latin, in illo tempore, or I've often said the contemporary version
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That's a way of signaling, I'm dealing with a myth here, because I'm not trying to situate
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No one wonders, you know, who was the king of, you know, Greece when Hercules was cleaning
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the Aegean stables, or it's just a category error, because a myth deals with kind of trans-historical
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Then there's Christianity, which is a stubbornly historical religion.
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It's not just making generic claims about our psychology or about the cosmos or the rhythms
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It's making very specific claims about something that happened.
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I think of it, Michael, every single Sunday when we recite the Creed, and we say that little
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But we're not talking about the cross as an archetypal symbol, we're not talking about
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No, no, we're talking about this particular first-century Jew who was crucified in the Roman
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manner under this governor, whose existence can be verified outside the Bible, named Pontius
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Pilatus Pilatus, that grounds Christianity in a way that mattered immensely from the beginning.
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The first Christians knew how vitally important it was that these things happened, you know?
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So there's a constant temptation to reduce Christianity to a mythic system, and it should be vigorously
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Right, because one often hears Christianity referred to as the true myth.
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You know, we're not denying that there is this mythic significance, that there's this incredible,
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you know, semiotic significance to the cross and to the mysteries of life and death.
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And even when we read in the Gospels, we read in illo tempere, but then what happens right
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And now we've lost the realm of mere poetry or high prose, and we're now into the realm
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of journalism, something that really happened with a real man among other men and women in
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a real place, in real time, and we can trace that historicity all the way back.
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I love that you mentioned the coincidence of the Annunciation, you know, nine months prior
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I think it was St. Hippolytus of Rome who pointed that out.
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And even Pope Benedict XVI observed that while one recognizes these beautiful parallels between
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the pagan feasts and Christmas, it's very difficult to argue now that the pagan feast, the Sol Invictus
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predated Christmas because the earliest evidence we have of both in a calendar is from the chronography
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And so it might just as well be the case that the Feast of Sol Invictus went the other way
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And what's so beautiful about it to me, I suppose, is that when you have the historicity, you
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And that I suppose in a broader view, the nativity and the crucifixion and the resurrection, it
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It's what gives meaning and redeems all of the history, secular and otherwise, that we
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And you were referring, at least implicitly there, to C.S. Lewis, who made that observation
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that those who say Christianity is just another myth haven't read many myths.
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And Lewis himself was a great expert in mythic literature.
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It's not just one more mythic telling among many.
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So you could say, remember, and this goes back a few years when I was just ordained, Joseph
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Campbell came on the scene and talked about the myths of the world.
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He felt that really all the cultures are telling one great story.
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And I mean, look, that might be true at some archetypal level, but you can't say Christianity
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is just one more iteration of the mono-myth because we're up against the stubborn historicity
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Elements of truth from the mono-myth that are also in the Gospels, sure.
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So Lewis talks about the good dreams of the human race, that the myths represent the human
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race dreaming about what will be accomplished in Christ.
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And that's why when Christ is announced, a lot of cultures said, oh, yeah, I recognize
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I understand that because their imagination had been evangelized through the myths.
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So I think that's a great way of combining the two ideas.
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We don't have to just reject the mythic tradition, but we see it as a true myth.
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Even I was just flying back from India where I flew out for a friend's wedding.
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And by the way, a big reminder to people, be very careful if you're going to become friends
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with Indians because one day they might expect you to fly to India for their wedding.
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And it was actually in the more Catholic state in Kerala where legend or maybe history,
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but at least legend says that St. Thomas landed.
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Well, that's, I hope, I hope it's credible because I like to think that I was there where
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I think it was Pope Benedict suggested he, he really only made it to Northwestern India,
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And that, but, but I'd prefer to say that I was walking the ground that St. Thomas did.
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And, but on my flight back, I was reading some church fathers and I was reading this great
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You know, I love Dante and I figured this will be some indulgent reading, especially in Advent
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And something that Dante does is he, he gets into not only religious history and not only
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myth also, but, but secular history, you know, you, you see these confounding figures, these
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old Romans, you know, Cato, for instance, in, in purgatory plays a really big role.
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And it, it's a reminder that, you know, the historical aspects of Christianity are not just confined
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to the faith or to some tiny little sliver of history, but to all of it.
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And then, then I was reminded of this bizarre fact of Christmas, which is that at the time
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of the nativity, at the time of the Christ's birth, you have sitting on the throne in Rome,
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the, the, the man referred to as the son of the divine, the Filius Divi, and then born
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in Bethlehem, you have the Filius Dei, the son of God, the, the ascension to the throne
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of Caesar Augustus, Filius Divi, was heralded by, by a star, by a, a comment.
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The, the nativity of our Lord, heralded by another star in Bethlehem.
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The, the Filius Divi on the throne in Rome heralds the Pax Romana, the Roman peace.
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The, the, the nativity of our Lord heralds the Pax Mundi, you know, the, the whole peace
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The, the, if a Hollywood screenwriter could put that story on paper, you wouldn't believe
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Yeah, and you mentioned Pope Benedict a couple times, and, you know, go back to that famously
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controversial Regensburg address he gave that was misconstrued in a thousand different ways.
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His main point there was, it's remarkably significant that Christianity says in Jesus,
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Because what that does, it permits a dialogue, literally dialogue, with the sciences, with
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history, with culture, with law, with all the deepest aspirations of the human heart.
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Because what we're longing for, whether we're in a cultural framework, a legal framework, a political
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framework, we're looking for logos in some way.
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And so, Christianity doesn't have to position itself as sequestered over on the side of things.
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Because if the logos that every scientist is seeking, every artist is seeking, every decent
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person is seeking, that's the logos that became flesh in Jesus.
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So, it enables this marvelous cultural conversation, which has marked Christianity at its best from
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The point he was making there at Regensburg is a really vital one in a time of religious
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And if religion is seen as dangerous, you know, to our political arrangements and all that,
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no, no, it belongs at the heart of all of it because of the unique claim being made by
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The beginning of John's gospel, that matters immensely for our conversation today.
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I love that you mentioned the Regensburg address because the part that got the late Pope in
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trouble was he pointed out that the Christian conception of God is the God who is the logos,
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Whereas the Muslim conception, and he cited Ibn Hazm, this medieval Islamic scholar, is that
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Allah is utterly transcendent such that if Allah were to order a follower to worship an idol,
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And that would be understandable within the Muslim conception of God.
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That would not be understandable within the Christian conception of God, which is a perfectly
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And I thought it was silly that he got in trouble for it.
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But it's extraordinarily significant because if our God is the God that is the logos, then
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that means it all has to make sense, you know, that the whole story has to make sense.
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And so you mentioned in the beginning of the gospel of John, you see Christ identified with
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In the beginning of the synoptic gospels, what do you get?
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You get history, you get a genealogy, you get, so how does one, how does one make sense
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Well, I mean, I read them together as the Bible compels us to.
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The genealogy accounts are meant to ground us in Israelite history.
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I think it's wonderful that the first page you see in the New Testament is this long, complex
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genealogy, three sets of 14 generations, 14 being the number that corresponds in Hebrew
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So Matthew is saying David, David, David has come.
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But you can't avoid Israel if you don't understand Jesus.
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He's the culmination of this long, roiled and complex and loamy history of Israel.
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But it's that same Jesus who is uber particular.
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He's an Israelite, came through this long, particular tradition, who's also the logos.
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The logos, the reason behind all things, is made plain to us in this baby who's the culmination
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God speaks his word in all things, which every scientist has to assume, right?
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But he spoke in varied and fragmentary ways to our ancestors.
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But now in the fullness of time, he's spoken by means of his son, by means of his word.
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And so it's the, what appears as the culmination of Israel is in fact the logos by which all
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I think that's the beautiful coming together, if you want, of a more Greek and a more Hebrew
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view that are right on display in the New Testament.
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I love that point you just made too, which is every scientist, whether he knows it or
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Otherwise, nothing we say would be understandable one to another.
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Intelligibility of the world, and that's Ratzinger too.
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One of the best arguments for God's existence is the radical and universal intelligibility
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How do you explain that without recourse to some sort of creative intelligence which has
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It's intelligibly there, which is why the inquiring mind goes out to meet it.
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But Aquinas says that, you know, that there's this wonderful congruence between the seeking
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Well, how do you explain that without some kind of recourse to logos?
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Now, the genius of Christianity, so any Greek philosopher might have said that, you know,
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But who would have guessed that that logos is most fully revealed in this baby in Bethlehem,
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wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger, that the logos by which the whole
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universe is governed is something like the self-emptying love of God.
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That's the genius and poetry of Christianity, that it brings those two things together.
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If you resolve it one-sidedly on the side of history or one-sidedly on the side of philosophy,
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It's the coming together of those two that's so powerful.
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And to think about the symmetry of that in history that one would read only in the very
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finest myth or see in only the most significant aspects of history.
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Namely, you have Adam, from Adam comes Eve, and then we have the fall of man because of
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And then in the new Adam, our Lord, and in the new Eve, our Lady, you have the new Adam
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And you have the, just as we have the fall of mankind because of their disobedience to
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God, of our first parents, so you have the redemption of mankind in our Lady acquiescing
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and saying, yes, I'm the Lord's handmaid, be it done according to his will.
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From our oldest first father, you have this little baby as the new Adam.
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And even that kind of perspective on it, I fear, is somewhat lacking in even the Christian
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consciousness today, to say nothing of non-Christians who've probably never heard of such a thing.
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Well, you've been reading St. Irenaeus, it sounds like, because that was Irenaeus.
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I mean, look, very early on, he's a second century figure.
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He's writing in the 160s, 170s, the time of Marcus Aurelius.
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And I think one of the real seminal geniuses of our tradition, you know, we say Augustine
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and Origen, of course, but I think Irenaeus is one of the top three figures among the church
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And he saw all those parallels that you were pointing out.
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And let me stay with Mary for a second, because you're right, the new Eve, he was very
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But look at Mary in Luke's gospel, is presented as the new Ark of the Covenant, because she bears
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within her the presence of God as the Ark bore the presence of the Ten Commandments.
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Most beautifully, I think, when she goes into the hill country of Judah, and we'd say, okay,
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It is, but it's also a reference to the Old Testament, because when the Ark was lost
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through a long series of events, it ends up in the home of this man in the hill country
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When David came to get the Ark, he brings it back to Jerusalem, and he does this festive
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Well, what happens when John the Baptist, in the womb of his mother, hears the greeting of
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Well, the father saw that as a recapitulation of David's dance.
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So it's a new David dancing in the presence of the Ark of the Covenant.
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I mean, they saw Israel coming to its fulfillment.
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And again, that's the point we have to make over and over again, Michael, I think, is without
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And when you try, and it happens all the time, you turn Jesus into a sage.
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But when you see him through the lens of Israel, and as Paul said, he's the yes to all the promises
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made to Israel, ah, now we get him, now we understand him, that Israelite side of Christmas,
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It seems to be a peculiar eccentricity of our age that there is a desire to dehistoricize everything.
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And I don't want to be too provocative, but go back to the early 20th century when a lot
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of the historical critical figures, so these are biblical commentators in a more liberal,
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But a lot of them were coming up out of a frankly anti-Semitic viewpoint.
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Some, I don't want to overgeneralize, but some were even sympathetic with the Nazis.
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And there was, even when I was learning the Bible as a young seminarian, there was a somewhat
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You see it in biblical scholarship to the present day.
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When you turn him into, he's a stoic philosopher, or he's a, you know, he's another mythic commentator.
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No, no, he's the yes to all the promises made to Israel.
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I never made a connection here with the sort of critical historicist school that basically
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Someone like Friedrich Schleiermacher, who's the founder of modern liberal Protestantism.
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From Schleiermacher all the way through Bultmann and those people, you do find a certain anti-Jewish
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And so, you know, Bultmann puts it very much in dialogue with the kind of the Greek, the
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One of the marks of the last maybe 30 years biblical scholarship is the re-Judaizing of
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And speaking of the Israel of the Old Testament, I've noticed one argument against modern Christians
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And it's, I guess, a kind of historical argument is, well, we eat shellfish.
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And furthermore, how dare you Christians insist upon any kind of moral law because, you know,
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you've violated some obscure passage of Leviticus.
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And it seems to me a beautiful thing, though somewhat unknown these days, that the divine
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And that, you know, the other day I mentioned something about the natural law.
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People looked at me as though I had three heads, you know, that they'd never heard that the moral
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law might be distinct from a ceremonial law or a judicial law.
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And you hear that argument in different forms all the time today.
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People need to read that wonderful section in the second part of the Summa of Aquinas when
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he makes that distinction between the moral, ceremonial, and what he calls juridical precepts
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They're kind of seen as symbolic anticipations of what will happen in Jesus, especially
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They're kind of raised up into a higher expression, whereas the moral law remains
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In fact, the Ten Commandments Aquinas construes as basic expressions of the natural law.
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Well, that remains the case all the way through.
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By the way, I just gave a sermon on this recently.
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A lot of the debate in the Reformation around Paul in regard to the law, I think, can be cleared
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I think Paul is referring to Aquinas' juridical and ceremonial precepts.
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Because read it in Paul to the Romans, where he's so strong on the, you know, it's not the
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But heck, by the end of Romans, he's happily welcoming all these expressions of the moral
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So they're not repugnant to the work of salvation at all.
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But that distinction is lost in a lot of people, unfortunately.
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Well, and even here we see a distinction between the natural law and other aspects of revelation.
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And it reminds me of a line from the First Vatican Council, which says that the existence of God
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can be known with certainty by the natural light of reason.
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And this today is shocking to so many people who throw their hands up.
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They say, you know, well, man, we can't really ever know if God exists, you know, pass the
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And it's this real subjectivist sort of hippy-dippy talk.
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We did believe that we can know the existence of God with certainty.
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But we can't necessarily know very much about God, or we can't know how to serve God in
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this world, or we can't know the specifics and the way in which God enters into history
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It's not revelation without reason, as many modern people would like to characterize religion.
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That's, you know, Thomas Aquinas and all the great figures in our tradition, faith and
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And you're right, Thomas would refer to arguments for God's existence and all that as part of
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But you might say the conditions for the possibility of taking revelation seriously.
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So if, you know, you have some sense from reason of God's existence, God's attributes and
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all that, well, then it makes perfect sense that God would speak, that God would reveal
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So I think, for example, you know, and you and I have met a few times, and I've come to
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And so my reason can say a number of things about you.
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And I could look you up on Google and Facebook, and my mind could construe something true about
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But I'm not going to know you, no way, unless you ultimately deign to speak to me from your
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Not that I'm expecting you to do that right now.
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But I mean, only if we became exceptionally good friends and that you decide, I'm going
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to tell this person something about myself that he would never know otherwise, right?
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That, to me, is the perfect analogy for the faith reason.
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We can know a lot of things about God, I think, through our reason.
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I mean, through the visible things of the world, the invisible things of God are known.
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And pagans can do that, and modern pagans can do that.
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But the claim of the church, still startling, is that this God whom we know through reason
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And he's revealed certain things about himself that we would never have known otherwise, that
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come from the heart of God and most fully in his son, right?
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But now, in the fullness of time, he's spoken through his son.
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And it's like that baby in Bethlehem, like that poor, destitute figure on the cross.
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But that's God speaking his deepest heart to us, you know?
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That's the, again, paradox in poetry of Christianity.
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And we listen attentively as God speaks his heart to us.
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You know, a very good friend of mine of many years, raised Jewish, read St. Augustine,
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But then I caught up with him maybe a year after he had this revelation.
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I am entirely intellectually persuaded, not just of Christianity broadly even, but specifically
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He said, I can't bring myself to pray to a man.
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And I said, but you're persuaded it's all true.
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I said, you're persuaded that you need baptism.
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I said, how do you even cross the street if you think all of that, but you haven't done it?
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And he said, very carefully, but he couldn't, he said, and then I was reminded that the
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God takes to himself a human nature to use for his iconic purposes, and that this incarnate
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This is folly to the Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews, which for him meant everyone's
00:29:47.500
But of course, that's part of the, weirdly, the convincing power of it, you know?
00:29:54.140
If it was just a conventional story that we could kind of figure out on our own, what's
00:30:01.700
But the supremely strange story, the supremely strange world of the Bible that opens up to
00:30:08.920
us, to me, that has its own sort of convincing power.
00:30:12.880
But, you know, at the end of the day, and this is every single one of our great figures
00:30:15.880
who say this, at the end of the day, it's the Holy Spirit that has to convict us.
00:30:21.240
We can't aggressively think our way through it.
00:30:26.240
We can think about it, and we should, but we can't compel this thing.
00:30:33.660
You know, I can't compel someone to be my friend.
00:30:39.420
I can even speak my heart, you know, to someone.
00:30:42.400
But if they don't want to be my friend, I can't compel it.
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God wants to be our friend, and so he can't coerce us in that relationship.
00:30:55.280
And even this point about how odd it all is, you know, a priest friend of mine in New York
00:31:00.660
once said, he said, people want really clear religion.
00:31:04.460
They want just five bullet points or something.
00:31:15.220
But the best analogy there is Chesterton's about the key, you know.
00:31:19.020
The reason a key works is it's like really complicated.
00:31:22.200
And if it were simpler, it wouldn't be effective because anyone could then, you know, pick the lock.
00:31:27.180
It's a very weirdly complex convoluted thing that will open this equally weird convoluted lock.
00:31:34.960
And so life is very strange and complex, and God gives us a very strange and complex key to open the door.
00:31:44.100
And the key is, I would say, Israel culminating in the Mashiach, in the Messiah of Israel.
00:31:52.120
That's the key that he handed to people like Peter and Paul, you know, and who hand that key on to us.
00:32:00.180
So then looking ahead to the rest of the story, we know how the story begins.
00:32:08.520
We know the big turn of the story, which we're celebrating now.
00:32:11.820
And then we know how the story ends, though there are some gaps to fill in, I suppose, in the middle.
00:32:19.180
We're now beginning the—even though people treat December 1st as, you know, the first day of Christmas and it goes on for 25 days.
00:32:24.800
We've once heard a modern religion—that's not my own line, but described as the old religion had first the fast and then the feast.
00:32:32.120
Now we have first the feast and then the hangover.
00:32:39.000
And even coming out of Advent, people are awaiting the birth of this little baby Jesus.
00:32:48.660
And we're still in a period of awaiting Jesus, but we're now awaiting the second coming.
00:32:53.680
And so traditionally during Advent, one considers the four final things—death, judgment, heaven, and hell, which is why it's a penitential period.
00:33:05.920
What do we do as we await now this second Advent, which is going to be more significant, perhaps, even than the first?
00:33:18.060
That's why a season like Advent names something permanent within Christianity.
00:33:28.680
So we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior.
00:33:32.060
Think of the last lines of the Bible, you know, Maranatha, come, Lord Jesus.
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We're in like this permanent stance of vigil keeping.
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And that's, I think, a lot of the spiritual life.
00:33:45.060
I used to teach it under that rubric, is we have to learn to be vigilant.
00:33:53.000
That means we're alert and awake even when we don't feel like it, even when we are growing tired, we're growing indifferent.
00:34:17.900
And wicked people prosper and good people suffer and all those things.
00:34:21.620
Wars and rumors of wars and all of it continue.
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And we keep the—you know, it's like the five wise virgins, right, that have oil in their lamps.
00:34:37.600
And so when the master comes, they're not able to greet him.
00:34:41.260
That name's a permanent quality of the Christian life, is vigilant waiting for the Lord.
00:34:47.120
And it's a great discipline, you know, Michael, because, again, we want to be in command of the spiritual life like we are anything else.
00:35:00.080
But it'll never work that way with religion, with the Christian religion.
00:35:07.480
There are those in anti-purgatory who waited too long in life.
00:35:13.980
And so before they even begin purgatory, they just have to wait.
00:35:23.980
And that also names something very important to spiritual life.
00:35:31.600
And in a way, that is the whole of your spiritual life, is come, Lord Jesus.
00:35:43.640
It's a challenge, but it's a very important aspect of the Christian life.
00:35:50.540
And now I'm reminded even of those early cantos of purgatory where people wait around a little bit too long.
00:35:59.980
And Dante falls into this a little bit too, where he says, you know, I've just been through this arduous journey.
00:36:05.240
I've gone through the very pit of hell, climbed up through Satan.
00:36:13.280
And he's reminded of one of his own lines of poetry, a very famous line.
00:36:18.800
Because Dante wrote all this famous love poetry, you know.
00:36:32.620
He's going to go all the way up Mount Purgatory as well.
00:36:39.480
That reminded me of the very beginning of the whole Commedia, when he's wandered off the straight path.
00:36:50.520
And then, of course, he's blocked by the three beasts that represent the three modalities of sin.
00:36:55.680
And that's the person that wants to rush his way through the spiritual life.
00:37:03.260
You need to do a lot of work before you're ready for this vision of God.
00:37:07.500
And that's the whole ascetic dimension of the Christian life that we don't like.
00:37:14.840
But much of life is this ascetic preparation and this willingness to accept the arduousness of the journey.
00:37:26.520
It's a long trek, as you say, all the way down through hell.
00:37:32.080
And you've got to see Satan at the very center of your own sinful life, generating all of the coldness and wickedness of sin.
00:37:42.560
And then you've got to patiently climb up Mount Purgatory.
00:37:49.480
But I think today we want to just rush through the spiritual life.
00:37:53.580
Oh, yeah, let me figure this out and just give me the book to follow.
00:37:57.580
You've got to wait and you've got to go through a journey.
00:38:00.260
It might be the consequence of people no longer reading Dante or reading The Church Fathers or reading The School Men, St. Thomas Aquinas, or reading the Bible, certainly.
00:38:11.160
And it's ironic because if all you ever read is self-help, you're never going to help yourself at all.
00:38:17.360
Well, just think of, you know, we're coming out of the Advent season and the great Advent hymn, O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel.
00:38:25.140
Well, that's someone who is held captive, taken captive and held for ransom.
00:38:30.520
Maybe in a distant country, maybe chained in place and completely incapable of saving himself.
00:38:36.020
And all he can do is hope, come, come, can someone come and ransom me?
00:38:42.320
We're not able to lift ourselves out of our situation.
00:38:45.920
That's why God had to come to us and come all the way down.
00:38:53.280
There's this, Paul says, Christ becoming sin on the cross.
00:38:57.320
If he's a sinner, then he needs to be saved too.
00:39:02.040
Goes all the way into our dysfunction and then lifts us up through his grace.
00:39:15.140
It was a very important battle because he realized Pelagius was a very charming figure and a very bright man and saw something true.
00:39:22.580
But if he was basically right, Christianity falls apart.
00:39:25.960
Because then we're just one more, you know, the classical philosophers had that.
00:39:30.740
Enough knowledge and enough habituation to virtue, you know, you'll be fine.
00:39:39.580
That we're not saved by any of that, but we're saved by the baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.
00:39:53.760
You know, that's a permanently countercultural message, especially now.
00:40:01.120
Bishop Barron, Your Excellency, Merry Christmas.