How did early Christians go about celebrating Christmas? Was it anything like the way we do it? In fact, can we learn anything from what they considered important and what they did or what they emphasized to enhance our worship of the Great-God-Among-Us: Jesus Christ?
Saint
Nicolas wasn’t going to be born to become Bishop of Myra until the fourth
century, when he would give away bags of gold to dowry-less girls and do all
those other sweet things that would get him enshrined as the legendary quintessential
Gift Giver, so there was no St. Nick, Father Christmas, or Santa Claus yet or
Saint Co-Laus (corruption of the Dutch for Nicolas).[1]
So,
with no Santa Claus in the picture, the first thing the early Christians did
was get Jesus’s identity straight.
As
early as around the year AD 90, a man named John, one of Jesus’s own chosen
messengers, was pastoring in and around the city of Ephesus, a huge and
thriving seaport of some 200,000 people on the Aegean Sea—in what is the
coastal region of the country of Turkey today. Christian churches were in homes
in those days, sort of like underground Chinese house churches today, since, as
in mainland China, Christianity was not strictly legal, and was subjected to
sporadic persecution. Tradition tells us John built a small hut on a hill near
the Temple of Artemis. It was an austere place with no fresh water. Here he
wrote his memoirs of Jesus and lived on, some say, until the age of 120. He was
continually in communion with the Holy Spirit, who guided his writing.[2]
What he wrote about Jesus inspired the way the churches under his care
approached the advent of Jesus.
In
the gospel of John 1:1, right there in the beginning of his account of Jesus’s
life, he starts with the words: “in the beginning.” Now this is a
reference to Genesis 1:1 in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. He’s
intentionally echoing the start of Genesis to tell us directly that the story
of Jesus begins before the world began. So, when we read this, we should
understand it to say, “in the beginning of creation” or “when God began to
create”—what? That active Word that went forth from God was already existing.
So, the word wasn’t created. The force of the verb John uses means that The
Word went back indefinitely forever in time. So, this Word always existed (eimi).
Then
John tells us: “and the Word was face to face with God.” This shows a
distinctness—this Word was communing face to face with God the Father (pros)
in a position of equality with God and in sweet communion. How can this be?
John explains it clearly for us, when he finishes the sentence with these
words: “and the Word was God.” That is the mystery we call the Trinity. How the
one God can have three faces or is comprised of three co-equal, co-eternal Persons:
God the Father, God the Word, God the Holy Spirit.[3]
But, one not three gods. God is not like us!
For
the next several verses, John tells us about the Word’s role in creating human
beings, giving us light and life, and then John sums it all up for us in verse
14: “and the Word became flesh.” That’s what Christmas, or what we call Advent,
is all about, that, at one point in time, God’s powerful creating Word, active
in creation and sustaining creation, became clothed in human flesh by being
born among the humanity he created, literally, “pitched his tent among humans.”
That’s what John says in the Greek word he chose (skēnoō).
The
tent imagery is a reference to the great moveable tent that led the children of
Israel in the wilderness after the exodus, what they called “the tabernacle.”
That special tent or tabernacle is where God met the people. They would pitch
this tent in the midst of their camp. Then suddenly a cloud would overshadow
it, fire would come forth, and God would meet with people in this tent of
meeting. So, this is the language John uses to describe Jesus. He pitches
the tent of his human body in the midst of people, and, in meeting Jesus, they
meet God.
As
an eyewitness, John himself reports that he and the other fishermen and
homemakers and small farmers and tax agents and everybody else scrutinized
Jesus empirically with their five senses (hearing his words, seeing his
miracles, touching him) and what they saw in Jesus was the same glory that Old
Testament Israel saw when God was present at the tabernacle: the shekinah glory
of God. That glory, John explains, was unique. It was like the only child of
the heavenly Father, filled to the brim with the two characteristics that Moses
beheld, when God passed before him on Mount Sinai and wrote once again for
Israel the Ten Commandments of God’s law (Exodus 34:6) and those are: grace and
truth (John 1:14). And those two categorical characteristics were the same ones
the people who examined Jesus saw in Jesus Christ—grace—that is, God’s
persevering love for humanity, and truth—the righteousness and justice of a
holy and sovereign God.
In
this book that we call the gospel—or good news—of John, John shared that
experience and discovery some sixty or so years later with the people under his
pastoral care: it was an indelible experience for him, still fresh and new and
as exciting as back in the days when it occurred. We can see the ineluctable
impression that it left on him—he had met the great God walking about among us
mere humans.
The
second thing the early Christians did was to try to set a date to celebrate the
Nativity.
Aida
was complaining the other day about the post office’s Christmas stamps: how
come the only time we see Jesus on a United States stamp is with Mary when he
was a babe in arms? What about a resurrection stamp? Or a crucifixion stamp? Or
even the feeding of the 5000 stamp? After all, as a baby, basically Jesus was
born, but he couldn’t do a whole lot yet. Well, apparently, the early
Christians felt exactly like she does. For them, the interesting part about
Jesus’s life began with his baptism that launched his ministry—that’s when
things really got going.[4]
Therefore, it should come as no surprise to discover that the very earliest
Christians didn’t celebrate Jesus’s birth—only his ministry, death, and
resurrection—because those were the important points for them. In fact, when
they did think about Jesus’s birth, they decided to group it onto January 6,
the day Jesus was baptized. That day they held a feast—called the Epiphany or
appearance, because that’s the day Jesus’s public ministry got underway.[5]
So, on the evening of January 5, they would have a feast to celebrate Jesus’s
birth and the next day they would celebrate his baptism. It was a good,
efficient way to do it.
In
AD 200, Clement of Alexandria refers to just such a celebration of the feast of
Jesus’s birth in Egypt on January 5, but apparently not everybody picked that
date. Some Christian communities had their own dates.[6]
After all, nobody could remember for certain exactly when Jesus was born. It
was sometime probably between March and mid-November. How do we know? Because,
that’s when the shepherds were in the fields. You remember that stirring
account in Luke 2:8-14 that appears in so many Christmas specials and pageants
and on so many Christmas cards: “And shepherds were in the countryside, the
same living out of doors and taking turns keeping night watching of their sheep.
And, an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around
them, and they were filled with a great fear. And the angel said to them, ‘Do
not continue being afraid, for, behold, I bring you good news of great joy,
which will be for all the people, since a Savior was born today, who is Christ
the Lord in the city of David and this will be a sign to you, you will find a
baby wrapped up and lying in a manger.’ And suddenly came with the angel a crowd
of heavenly hosts praising God and saying, ‘Glory in the highest to God and
upon earth peace among humans of good will.’” That event took place sometime in
the spring, summer, or fall. How do we know the approximate time of the year
this must have taken place? After mid-November the rains began and the cold was
piercing in Israel so the sheep were kept indoors. They were not brought out to
the fields again until mid-March at the earliest, so the range must be from mid-March
to mid-November.[7] But,
where, in this eight month range of possible dates, the exact month of Jesus’s
birth actually was, we simply do not know for sure, since the disciples and
their disciples apparently did not emphasize the date or, perhaps, even bother
to pass it on. Some Bible students do estimate it was September because of the
New Testament information on Elizabeth and Zechariah.[8]
Meanwhile,
on January 6, the pagan world was having its own feast dedicated to Dionysus,
the fertility god of wine and debauchery, to acknowledge the fact that the days
were getting longer. So, it appears that, just as today where we have our own
Christian music and our own Christian activities and celebrations, the early
church set up an alternative feast to compete with the pagan one.
After Emperor Constantine came into sole power (AD 312) and became a Christian, he later moved the celebration of Jesus’s birth a week or so earlier to
December 25 to combat a pagan feast to the Sun. Sun worship was a particularly
popular celebration among the army and its former general and now emperor.[9]
Constantine wanted his soldiers to convert to his new faith, so he snapped an
order and changed the content of their holiday. They went from worshiping the sun
god to worshiping God’s Son.
The
soldiers reportedly had been butchering bulls and standing under their dripping
blood to honor the Zoroastrian Persian (that is, Iranian) god Mithras, who as
the Mighty Sun’s ally was a champion of light against darkness, having himself
slain the mythic bull of darkness, evil, and death.[10]
Since Jesus’s blood was already shed to bring life and light to people (as John
points out in 1:4), Constantine decreed that nothing else needed to be
sacrificed, so he had his soldiers ease off on the Tauros population.
Moving the date from
January 5 to December 25 also pointed people away from celebrating the pagan
winter solstice festival. Now they could replace that nature worship with
celebrating nature’s Creator, Jesus, instead. Some Christians, however,
grumbled, so John Chrysostom and Gregory Nazianzen, two very popular preachers
(“Chrysostom” means the golden-mouthed orator) promoted the new date all over
the capital city of Constantinople. Still, those in the outlying districts
weren’t happy with the change. Egyptian Christians didn’t convert over to the
new date for a hundred years until 431 and the church of Armenia still has not
accepted it some 1500 or so years later.
Now,
how did the celebration of Jesus’s birth get to be called “Christmas” or
Christ’s mass or service? That didn’t come until the eleventh century, around
the year 1000, when the celebration was called “Cristes maesse” in Olde
English. During the Reformation, the new protest-ants went back to the
earliest church’s practice and didn’t bother to celebrate Christmas at all. In
fact, in England between 1642-52, they prohibited Christmas church services and
festivities by law. So, when the Puritans arrived here in America, they didn’t
bring Christmas with them! That came in the 1800s with the Irish and German
immigrants having such a joyful time that soon everybody joined in and even
those who weren’t Christians began celebrating Christmas—the day of Jesus Christ’s
birth—right on into today.[11]
In fact, our neighbors across the street, who were stringing Christmas lights
across their house, fence, bushes on Thanksgiving are directly descended from
Irish immigrants. And, by the way, they were Irish cops, too, before their
retirement. They’ve brought both joy and safety to our neighborhood—being the
best neighbors anyone could hope for! We thank God for the privilege to live
across from them.
So,
in summary, how did the early church celebrate Christmas? When they got
around to it, they held a big meal and thanked the Godhead for sending Jesus
Christ, the Second Person of the Triune God, to earth. And they thanked Jesus
for emptying himself of all his heavenly glory and humbly becoming like each of
us—but without sin—so he could do for us what we could not do for ourselves:
die on the cross for our sins in order to reunite us to fellowship with God.
So, if you want to celebrate Christ’s coming to earth in the grand old manner,
do what the early Christians did.
First,
relax. Don’t let Christmas become so big and pressured that you find the main
thing you’re thankful about is that it’s over.
Instead,
dwell on the simple things—after all, it’s all about a baby! Have a celebratory
feast. And, include in your gifts, gifts that promote Jesus’s ministries today.
Dwell
on who Jesus really is, by rereading the beautiful true reports in the
gospels. Make sure you worship God’s Son, not God’s creations.
Then,
you’ll be worshiping as the early Christians did, rediscovering the true,
affirming joy of Christmas. Each Christmas season should remind us once again
that the Greatest Gift God has given us is Godself in Jesus Christ:
God-Among-Us. And, for that we should all be eternally thankful.
Amen.
Bill
[1] “Nicholas, St.,” Collier’s
Encyclopedia 17 (1986): 527. See also the children’s book, The True
Story of Saint Nicholas, by Rebecca Benson Haskell, illustrated by
Elizabeth Durham Goodhue (Chambersburg, PA: Alan C. Hood, 1997) and “What Does
Santa Claus Think about Jesus?” by Aída
Besançon Spencer (Dec. 11, 2015) https://aandwspencer.blogspot.com/2015/12/what-does-santa-claus-think-about-jesus.html.
Although
iconic today as the symbol of Christmas, even the earliest estimate of the use
of Christmas trees is well over 1000 years after the early church (first 300s
vs. 1300s and after).
[2] See Fatih Cimok, A Guide to
the Seven Churches (Istanbul, Turkey: A Turizm Yayinlari, 1998), 47; Eusebius,
Church History 3.31; F. W. Farrar, The Early Days of Christianity (New
York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1883), 393-404; Kim Ju-Chan, Biblical Routes
of Turkey (Seoul, Korea: Chung Dam, 1998).
[3] See also Matt. 28:19. All New
Testament translations are by the author. See further my book, Three in One:
Analogies for the Trinity (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2022).
[4] Notice that Mark, who followed
Peter’s preaching in Rome, began his gospel at Jesus’s baptism (where Peter
began his ministry too).
[5] Epiphany has also referred to
when the incarnate Jesus was revealed to various groups of people at his birth,
the coming of the magi, his baptism, and the wedding of Cana (first miracle),
as well as when he will be revealed at his second coming. “Epiphany,” Evangelical
Dictionary of Theology, 2d ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001), 381.
[6] Some dates suggested were
January 6, April 18 or 19, May 20, and December 25. “Christmas,” Evangelical
Dictionary of Theology, 238-39.
[7] Henri Daniel-Rops, Daily Life
in the Time of Jesus (Ann Arbor, MI: Servant, 1961), 229-31.
[9] See for example, 2 Kings 23:11.
[10] J. N. D. Kelly, Early
Christian Doctrines, 2d ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), 6-7;
“Christmas,” F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, eds. The Oxford
Dictionary of the Christian Church, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1983), 280.
[11] “Christmas,” Collier’s
Encyclopedia vol. 6: 403-4.
