The popular claim goes like this: early Christians wanted a birthday for Jesus, found a pagan holiday already sitting on December 25th, and took it over. Dr. Esau McCaulley tells a different story, and it starts at the cross instead of the manger. In his account, the early church first tried to fix the date of Jesus’ death near Passover, settled on March 25th, assumed the angel’s announcement to Mary fell on that same day, and counted nine months forward. The count lands on December 25th.
Those two stories lead to very different conclusions. In the first, Christmas is a borrowed holiday. In the second, it is the last step in a chain of reasoning. Some of that reasoning was mistaken, but all of it was about Jesus.
One limit belongs up front. McCaulley gives this account in a conversation, and he does not name the ancient writers or the specific early calendars behind each step. The sequence below is his reconstruction of how the dates were reached. It explains the dates well, but a reader who wants to verify it should look for those early calendars directly, especially evidence of how early the church kept the Annunciation on March 25th.
Starting from the one fixed date
Start with the texts themselves. Matthew and Luke tell the birth story in detail: the angel’s visit, the journey to Bethlehem, the shepherds, the travelers from the east. Neither Gospel gives a day or a month. The birth comes with a place and a family, and no date.
The death is different. The Gospels tie the crucifixion to Passover, one of the fixed feasts of the Jewish year. John, for instance, notes that Jesus was handed over on the day of the preparation of the Passover (John 19:14). A Christian trying to build a calendar around Jesus therefore had one firm anchor and one blank space.
That imbalance explains where McCaulley’s account begins. The first question the early church tried to answer, he says, was when Jesus died. The church’s calendar was built outward from the cross because the cross was the date they had.
Why would a death date tell you anything about a birth date?
This is the step modern readers miss, and the rest of the chain depends on it. McCaulley puts the ancient premise plainly: “In the ancient world, they had this idea, the significant events happen on the same day.” A great life was thought to have a kind of symmetry, with its beginning and its end falling on the same calendar date.
Nobody thinks this way now, and McCaulley says so. We know there is no built-in link between the day a person is born and the day that person dies. But he is careful to describe the idea as the participants held it: “the idea is you would associate someone’s birth with the death. It’s kind of an ancient concept.”
For a historian, this is the key point. The conclusion the early church reached depends on a premise they found natural and we do not. You cannot judge their reasoning by asking whether the premise is true. You have to ask whether, given what they believed, the conclusion followed. It did. If significant events cluster on one date, and you know the date of the death, you have a strong lead on the date the life began.
From Passover to March 25th
The next task was turning a Passover in the early 30s into a fixed calendar date. McCaulley places the death, as the early Christians understood it, during Passover somewhere around AD 30 to 33. The trouble was that Passover belonged to a Jewish lunar calendar, while the church increasingly kept time by the Roman one. A feast set by the moon does not sit at a fixed spot on a solar calendar, so converting from one system to the other was hard.
McCaulley is frank about the result. Because of the shift from the Jewish lunar calendar to the Roman calendar, “they got those dates a little bit off.” The date they settled on for the crucifixion was March 25th. Modern Christians already accept a version of this link, since Easter, which is tied to Passover, still moves around March and April. The only unfamiliar step is the ancient idea that a death date could fix a birth date.
The turning point at the Annunciation
Once the death was placed on March 25th, the same-day premise came into play. The early church did not move the birth to March 25th. It moved the beginning of Jesus’ human life there, and for them that beginning was the moment Gabriel came to Mary. Luke records the angel’s words: “And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS” (Luke 1:31).
That choice explains the whole calendar. If the life of the incarnate Son began at the Annunciation, then the Annunciation is the event that pairs with the death. In McCaulley’s account, they reasoned that since Jesus died on March 25th, Gabriel’s announcement to Mary must have happened on March 25th as well.
Then came simple arithmetic. Count nine months from March 25th and you reach December 25th, the Feast of the Nativity. In McCaulley’s summary, the line runs from Passover on the 25th, to the Annunciation on the 25th, to the birth on the 25th.
The order of the feasts matters too. McCaulley notes that in 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.” In his account, December 25th followed from the Annunciation feast, and the March feast came first.
Why do so few people know any of this? McCaulley’s answer is habit. Most Christians, especially in Protestant churches, do not live by the liturgical calendar. They never mark the March feast that comes nine months before Christmas, so they never notice the link between the two dates. His sharpest line on this turns the popular story upside down: “it’s actually Mary influencing when we celebrate Christmas more than it is a pagan holiday influencing when we celebrate Christmas.” Protestant traditions, he adds, rarely take Mary seriously enough to notice her influence.
So was Jesus actually born on December 25th?
Probably not, and McCaulley does not avoid the question. “We recognize that Jesus wasn’t probably born on December the 25th because the Annunciation probably didn’t necessarily happen on March the 25th.” The chain was only as strong as its first link, and that first link rested on a converted Passover date the church itself got slightly wrong and an ancient premise we no longer share.
That admission tells you what kind of claim December 25th is. The date expresses a conclusion about how the beginning and the end of Jesus’ life belong together, in the only form a calendar allows. The early church believed its date was correct, and on McCaulley’s account it probably was not. But what Christmas celebrates, that the Son of God was conceived and born, does not rest on the accuracy of the day.
Doesn’t the date still line up with a pagan festival?
This is the strongest objection, and it deserves a direct answer. Suppose a pagan celebration did fall on or near December 25th. Doesn’t that coincidence count as evidence of borrowing?
A shared date proves only that two events share a date. To show that one caused the other, you need evidence of motive or influence. McCaulley’s account supplies a cause from inside the Christian calendar, one that reaches December 25th without any reference to a rival festival. Once you can explain how the date was reached by counting from Passover, a coincidence alone no longer carries the argument.
McCaulley also questions the size of the rival the borrowing theory needs. For that theory to work, a pagan holiday would have to have been so dominant that the church had no choice but to compete with it. “The evidence of it being that universally popular, so popular that the Christians had to compete with it is historically not very well documented.” He adds that modern retellings tend to inflate that holiday precisely in order to play down Christmas.
It helps to be exact about what this part of the interview does and does not do. McCaulley does not name the festival, cite evidence about how it was observed, or quote Christians of the period describing why they kept December 25th. His case is that the borrowing story needs a dominant rival festival and a church motivated to compete with it, that the evidence for such a festival is thin, and that a Christian route to the date already exists. He also rejects the picture behind the theory, in which ancient people would switch religions because a celebration moved to a familiar day. That leaves room for a narrower question he does not take up: whether some Christians later noticed or commented on what others celebrated in late December. His claim is about where the date came from, and on that he is direct: “it was an attempt to link Jesus’ birth with his death, with his death as it’s understood in its relationship to Passover.”
What the date was for
The borrowing theory assumes the church set its feasts to appeal to outsiders. McCaulley reads the calendar the other way, as something the church built for itself. “The Christian calendar was a different way of ordering time,” he says, and under it “we’re ordering our days and weeks and months and years according to Jesus.” That is why he calls the search for pagan influences wrongheaded at its root. It treats a discipline meant to shape believers as a marketing tool aimed at everyone else.
The December 25th chain shows that discipline at work. The church did not start with the most popular days on someone else’s calendar. It started with the cross, the one date its Gospels gave it, and reasoned back to the cradle. In the church’s own reckoning, Christmas sits downstream of Good Friday. The feast many people treat as the opening of the Christian story was dated by the event Christians have always treated as its center.