Two claims come back every December. The first says the church took December 25th from a pagan festival. The second says writing “Xmas” cuts Christ out of Christmas. Here is the answer this guide will test. On the evidence in this study, neither claim holds up as usually told. December 25th has an internal Christian explanation that does not depend on any pagan holiday. The X in Xmas is a Greek letter standing for Christ. Some questions remain open, and this guide names them plainly.
Several claims in this guide come from one witness: Dr. Esau McCaulley, who teaches New Testament at Wheaton College, speaking with Lisa Fields on a Christmas episode of the Jude 3 Project podcast. The aim is to sort out what Scripture says, what McCaulley asserts, and what would still need checking. You can work through it alone in one sitting or with a group over one longer session. Bring a Bible and something to write on. The central exercise, an evidence ledger, works best on paper.
The two claims, stated fairly
An investigation starts by stating the claim in its strongest form. Lisa Fields frames the first one the way most people hear it: “why do we celebrate Christmas on December 25th? ’cause Jesus wasn’t born on December 25th.” Behind that question sits a fuller theory. Early Christians had no birth date for Jesus. A popular pagan celebration already fell in late December. The church moved its feast there to compete, or to make conversion easier.
The second claim is simpler. Fields names it as it circulates: “there’s this whole conspiracy theory around Xmas without people understanding where that came from.” The theory says that writing the letter X in place of the name of Christ is a modern, secular move to erase Jesus from the holiday.
Notice that the two claims are different kinds of claims. The first is about cause: one festival produced another. The second is about meaning: a written abbreviation either refers to Christ or removes him. Each needs its own kind of evidence.
What would count as evidence?
Before reading any answer, decide what you would expect to find if each claim were true. This step keeps you honest, because it fixes the test before you know the result.
If the church borrowed December 25th to compete with a pagan feast, you would expect at least some of these:
- evidence that the pagan celebration was widely popular at the time the Christian date appeared;
- Christian writers saying, or clearly implying, that the date was chosen because of that festival;
- no other explanation for the date that works on its own terms.
If Xmas was designed to erase Christ, you would expect the abbreviation to appear first among people hostile to Christianity, or to have no link to the name of Christ at all.
Keep one more distinction in view. A shared date shows only that two things fall on the same day. It does not show that one caused the other. Agreement in timing is the beginning of an inquiry, not its conclusion.
Start with the texts
The oldest documents about Jesus’ birth are Matthew and Luke. Read Luke 1:26-38 and Luke 2:1-20 slowly, and Matthew 1:18-2:12 if time allows. As you read, mark every phrase that tells you when something happened.
You will find time markers, but look at what they measure. Luke 1:26 begins, “And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth.” Read on to Luke 1:36, where Gabriel tells Mary, “And, behold, thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age: and this is the sixth month with her, who was called barren.” The sixth month refers to Elizabeth’s pregnancy, not to a month of the year. Luke gives a sequence, not a calendar date.
Luke 2:8 adds a detail: “And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.” Ask what this verse tells you about the season. Readers sometimes draw firm conclusions from it in one direction or another. The verse itself names no month.
Now compare the death of Jesus. John 19:14 reads, “And it was the preparation of the passover, and about the sixth hour: and he saith unto the Jews, Behold your King!” Here the Gospel ties an event to a fixed feast of the Jewish year.
Write down what you found. The birth narratives give places, people and a sequence, but no date. The crucifixion is anchored to Passover. Any early Christian trying to build a calendar had one firm point and one blank. That observation comes from the text itself, before any scholar speaks.
Test one: where did December 25th come from?
McCaulley offers an account that begins with that firm point. His premise is an ancient idea about time: “In the ancient world, they had this idea, the significant events happen on the same day.” On his telling, the early church first tried to date the death of Jesus. They placed it at Passover, around AD 30 to 33. Converting from a Jewish lunar calendar to the Roman calendar was difficult, and McCaulley says plainly that “they got those dates a little bit off.” They settled on March 25th for the crucifixion.
From there, he says, they assumed the Annunciation, Gabriel’s announcement to Mary, fell on the same day. Nine months after March 25th is December 25th. He also points to an ordering in the record: “And if you actually go back and look at the early church calendars, the Feast of the Annunciation, that’s the announcement of Jesus’ birth was celebrated way much earlier in the church calendar.”
Weigh this against the expectations you set. The account supplies an explanation for the date that works without any pagan festival. That matters, because the borrowing theory gains much of its force from seeming to be the only explanation. McCaulley also addresses the size of the supposed rival: “The evidence of it being that universally popular, so popular that the Christians had to compete with it is historically not very well documented.”
Now weigh its limits, which are just as important. This is one scholar speaking in a conversation, not a documented study. He does not name the ancient writers or the specific calendars behind each step. When he says the early calendars show the Annunciation feast earlier, that is his report of the evidence, not the evidence itself. A transcript proves that McCaulley said these things. It does not, on its own, prove how the ancient church reasoned. An honest investigator holds his account as a strong, coherent explanation from a qualified witness, and marks the specific documents as the next thing to check.
Notice also what McCaulley himself concedes: “We recognize that Jesus wasn’t probably born on December the 25th because the Annunciation probably didn’t necessarily happen on March the 25th.” He is not defending the date as a birth record. That concession strengthens his credibility. A witness who admits the weak link in his own story is easier to trust than one who claims more than he can show.
Test two: does the X remove Christ?
The second claim is easier to check, because part of it is a fact about language. The Greek word for Christ is Christos, and its first letter is chi, which is written in a shape like the Latin letter X. McCaulley explains it this way, and his conclusion is direct: “And so the X isn’t removing Jesus from Christmas.”
Test this against your expectation. If the X were a device to erase Christ, it would have no link to his name. In fact, the X is the first letter of his title in the language of the New Testament. The erasure claim fails on the meaning of the symbol itself.
Here again, watch the limit. McCaulley says the abbreviation was common in the ancient world, then immediately qualifies it: “I don’t know exactly when.” That is a precise admission. He knows what the X means. He does not claim to know when Christians first wrote Christmas that way. So the meaning question is settled by the Greek alphabet, while the dating question remains open in this source. Be wary of any retelling that fills that gap with a confident number of centuries.
One more distinction applies here. What the X means and why a particular person uses it are separate questions. A store sign might use “Xmas” to save space, out of habit, or for reasons the owner never thought about. The abbreviation does not erase Christ. That does not tell you anything about the heart of whoever painted the sign.
The practice: build an evidence ledger
This exercise turns the reading into a skill you can use on the next claim you hear. Draw four columns on a page and label them: The text says, McCaulley asserts, Still needs checking, and Interpretation or meaning.
- Place each statement below in the column where it belongs. Some may fit two columns. If so, write why.
- The Gospels do not give a date for Jesus’ birth.
- The crucifixion is tied to Passover.
- Ancient people believed significant events fell on the same day.
- The early church placed the death of Jesus on March 25th.
- The Feast of the Annunciation appeared earlier in the church calendar than the Nativity feast.
- A pagan festival in late December was popular enough to force Christian competition.
- The X in Xmas stands for the Greek letter chi.
- Christians in the ancient world wrote Christmas with an X.
- The Christian calendar orders time around the life of Jesus.
- For each item in the Still needs checking column, write the kind of document that would settle it: an ancient calendar, a named early writer, or an inscription.
- Go back to your expectations from earlier. Which of them did the evidence meet, which did it fail, and which remain untested?
If you are leading a group, have people fill in the ledger on their own first, then compare. Disagreements about where an item belongs are the most useful part of the session. Ask people to explain their placement rather than voting. Resist the urge to hand out an answer key. The goal is for each person to see the difference between a claim that is established and a claim that is merely confident.
Questions for discussion
- Before this study, where did you first hear that Christmas was pagan, or that Xmas removes Christ? What made the claim believable at the time?
- Luke gives a sequence of months but no calendar date. Why might the Gospel writers have cared more about sequence and place than about the day?
- McCaulley’s account depends on an ancient belief we no longer share. Does a mistaken premise make the church’s reasoning dishonest, or only mistaken? What is the difference?
- Which item in your Still needs checking column would most change your view if the evidence turned out differently?
- McCaulley admits the date is probably wrong and that he does not know when the X abbreviation began. How do those admissions affect your trust in the rest of what he says?
- If a pagan festival did fall near December 25th, what further evidence would you need before concluding the church borrowed from it?
- Romans 14:5 says, “One man esteemeth one day above another: another esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind.” How should that verse shape conversations with Christians who choose not to celebrate Christmas at all?
What you can responsibly say
The last step of any investigation is to say only what the evidence supports. Write a short answer, three or four sentences, that you could give to a friend who says Christmas is just a pagan holiday with a Christian label. Use only claims from the first two columns of your ledger, and mark anything from the third column as something you are still checking.
A responsible answer might say that the Gospels give no birth date, that at least one New Testament scholar traces December 25th to a count from the date the early church assigned to the crucifixion, and that the claim of a dominant rival festival is, in his words, not well documented. It might add that the X is the first letter of Christ’s title in Greek. It would not claim the birth date is accurate, and it would not claim more about ancient sources than you have seen.
Then compare your answer with someone else’s, or with the version you would have given before this study. The difference between the two is the work this guide set out to do.