Carl Philipp Emanuel Nothaft. Journal of the History of Ideas. Volume 72, Issue 4. October 2011.
Modern debates on the origins of Christmas have been characterized by the interplay of two conflicting points of view. Proponents of what may be called the ‘‘History of Religions Theory’’ interpret the feast as a Christianized version or substitute for pagan celebrations that took place on the same date in the Roman calendar, the most widely cited example being the birthday of Sol invictus on December 25. Their view is disputed by adherents to the ‘‘Calculation Theory,’’ who find evidence in Christian literature that the birthday of Christ was determined independently by recourse to certain types of chronological speculation. For all their divergences, both parties generally agree that December 25 does not represent the historical birthday of Jesus and that the nativity’s assignment to this particular day does not go back further than the third or fourth century. This critical attitude towards the foundations of what is still the most popular Christian holiday is not an entirely novel phenomenon, but can be traced back to the Reformation period. When the newly founded ‘‘Kirk’’ of Scotland published its First Book of Discipline in 1561, Christmas was listed among the many ‘‘holy dayis of certane Sanctis commandit by man, suche as be all those that the Papistis have invented’’ and which ‘‘becaus in Goddis Scripturis thai nather have commandiment nor assurance, we juge thame utterlie to be abolischet from this Realme.’’
Such concerns over the legitimacy of certain holidays continued to play an important role during the English Civil War, when the Puritan parliament made considerable efforts to excise the frolics of Yuletide from the festive calendar. Christopher Durston, David Cressy, and Ronald Hutton have written valuable accounts of this ill-fated Puritan ‘‘war’’ on Christmas, which led to public upheaval and a plethora of printed polemic. Informative and well-researched as these studies are, they give little attention to the intellectual background that nourished Protestant rejection of the Christian nativity festival. That obstinate, jejune Puritans would be scandalized by the ‘‘Drinking, Stage-plays, Enterludes, Masks, Mummeries, Dancing, and all licentious dissolutenesse’’ that unfolded each year during twelve-tide, may perhaps seem too obvious as to give the issue much further consideration. However, when Thomas Mocket, rector of Gilston in Hertfordshire, decried such vices in a pamphlet to justify the parliamentary ‘‘ban’’ of Christmas, effective since June 1647, even the title-leaf made plain that the opinions expressed therein rested on some eminently learned shoulders, including those of the Huguenot philologist Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540-1609).
That Scaliger’s expertise would be invoked in a controversy over the festive calendar is not surprising, considering his reputation as one of the founding fathers of historical chronology, a discipline that was at the height of its momentum during the first half of the seventeenth century. In an age when antiquarian research and religious controversy were closely connected, the chronologer seemed able to provide answers in a broad range of hotly contested areas, stretching from the succession of the Near Eastern kingdoms mentioned in the Old Testament to contemporary quarrels over calendar reform. And although most of its practitioners approached the discipline with wholly orthodox intentions, the results they arrived at were not always suited to bolstering biblical or ecclesiastical tradition. When, in 1569, the geographer Gerhard Mercator surmised that the early dynasties of pharaonic Egypt might pre-date Noah’s flood, this was only a prelude to the challenges posed by the seventeenth-century discovery of Chinese, Aztec, and ancient Near Eastern ‘‘deep time,’’ which repeatedly threatened to break the chronological boundaries set by the Old Testament and strongly resonated with religious dissenters such as Christopher Marlowe and Isaac la Peyrere.
But the distant, pre-Christian past was by no means the only area where received tradition and chronological scrutiny could prove to be an explosive combination. As we can learn from a remark in Scaliger’s posthumously edited table-talk, the Catholic liturgical year, with its numerous feast-days, was another potential target for acute criticism:
If I had said sixty years ago that Our Lord was not born on December 25, I would have been burnt. If a Papist said it nowadays, he would be hauled before the Inquisition. But it is allowed in our religion, since we are permitted to speak and profess the truth. In fact, the basis of their assumption is so absurd that it is astounding that all of Europe has agreed with it.
Once we overlook the obvious exaggeration and anti-Catholic bias, Scaliger’s words inform us that denial of the historicity of December 25 as Christ’s birthday was still a recent phenomenon in his own lifetime, one which had become fashionable chiefly among Calvinist scholars. The learned arguments that undergirded this development are now largely forgotten, even though they can properly be regarded as direct forerunners to our contemporary ‘‘origins’’ debates on Christmas. By reviving some of these arguments in the present article, I hope to provide a useful case study of early modern chronological scholarship and its relevance in broader social and religious contexts.
Before we turn to the sixteenth century, however, it will be useful to take a few looks upstream and see why, in Scaliger’s words, ‘‘all of Europe’’ had agreed to put Christ’s nativity on December 25 for many centuries. As so often, a formidable starting point is provided by the Venerable Bede and his De temporum ratione (725), which served as the most influential medieval textbook on computus (Easter reckoning) as well as the source for many then-current assumptions on chronology. In the thirtieth chapter of this work, Bede commented on an old Roman tradition, which assigned each of the four cardinal points of the year (the equinoxes and solstices) to the eighth day before the kalends (i.e. the first day) of a particular month:
This is what some of the pagans say; and very many of the Church’s teachers recount things which are not dissimilar to these about time, saying that our Lord was conceived and suffered on the 8th kalends of April [March 25], at the spring equinox, and that he was born at the winter solstice on the 8th kalends of January [December 25]. And again, that the Lord’s blessed precursor and Baptist was conceived at the autumn equinox on the 8th kalends of October [September 24] and born at the summer solstice on the 8th kalends of July [June 24]. To this they add the explanation that it was fitting that the Creator of eternal light should be conceived and born along with the increase of temporal light, and that the herald of penance, who must decrease, should be engendered and born at a time when the light is diminishing.
Among the sources that influenced Bede’s account was the Latin treatise On the solstices and equinoxes of the conception and birth of our Lord Jesus Christ and John the Baptist, which circulated under the name of John Chrysostom. As the title suggests, its author, who possibly wrote in North Africa in the fourth century, relied heavily upon the symbolism that involved the decrease and increase of sunlight associated with the equinoxes and solstices. According to him, this symbolism was already hinted at in the Gospel of John (3:30), where John the Baptist is quoted as saying ‘‘he [sc. Jesus] must increase, but I must decrease.’’ The Gospel text suggested that the birth of the Baptist had to be assigned to the day of the summer solstice, which marks the beginning of decreasing day-length, whereas Jesus—who was conceived six months later than John (Luke 1:24-38)— was born at the winter solstice, after which the days become longer again. In order to prove the validity of this interpretation, the author employed an exegetical argument to show that John was conceived at the time of the autumnal equinox, nine months before his birth. According to the Gospel of Luke (1:5-23), John’s father, the priest Zachary, entered the temple to burn incense on the very day he received the promise that his wife Elizabeth would bear a son. In order to make these events datable, PseudoChrysostom assumed—incorrectly as we shall see—that Zachary held the office of the High Priest, who only entered the Holy of Holies once a year, on the Day of Atonement (Leviticus 16:29-34). Since the latter falls on Tishri 10 in the Jewish calendar, Pseudo-Chrysostom dated the conception of John to the following day, the eleventh day of the lunar month, which in that year supposedly corresponded to September 24, the Roman date of the autumnal equinox.
Bede apparently accepted the opinion that the conception and birth of both Jesus and his forerunner coincided with the cardinal points of the solar year, but not without adding a slight caveat:
But because, as we have learned in connection with the calculation of Easter, the judgment of all men of the East (and especially of the Egyptians, who, it is agreed, were the most skilled in calculation) is in particular agreement that the spring equinox is on the 12th kalends of April [March 21], we think that the three other turning points of the seasons ought to be observed a little before [the date] given in the popular treatises.
From the perspective of a medieval computist, part of whose trade it was to assume March 21 as the true date of the vernal equinox, PseudoChrysostom’s astronomical line of reasoning could actually seem to work against the traditional date for Christmas. And although Bede never made this point fully explicit, attentive readers could take his words to imply that Jesus’s birth-day had to be shifted to December 21 or to any other day on which the winter solstice fell in the year of Christ’s birth.
On the whole, of course, Scaliger was right in claiming that the traditional date for Christmas on December 25 had hardly been called into question up to the middle of the sixteenth century. Among those who still clung to its reliability in his own day were the astrologers, some of whom were bold enough to draw up the horoscope of Jesus Christ. Girolamo Cardano (1501-76), who analyzed the planetary constellations at the moment of Christ’s birth in his commentary on Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos (1555), was not alone when he postulated that this moment must have taken place precisely at midnight between December 24 and 25 in the year 1 bce. Joseph Scaliger spoke for many when he later denounced Cardano’s ‘‘vanity joined with impiety,’’ complaining that the astrologer ‘‘subjects to the stars the Lord of the stars, and supposes Him to have been born at a time which is still in dispute.’’ As the second half of this remark shows, Scaliger saw reason to reject Cardano’s horoscope of Jesus not only from a theological, but also from a chronological vantage point. Indeed, the validity of his approach had to a certain degree already been undermined by the appearance of the Stromata of Clement of Alexandria, whose works were first published by Piero Vettori in Florence in 1550. Writing shortly after the assassination of emperor Commodus (December 31, 192 ce), Clement stated that between the latter event and the birth of Christ 194 years, one month and thirteen days had elapsed. Depending on whether these years were understood to be of the Julian (365.25d) or the Egyptian (365d) type, this figure leads to a birth-date on November 18, 3 bce or January 6, 2 bce, in both cases a far cry from Cardano’s date. To make matters worse, Clement cited further opinions, which placed the nativity in springtime, referring to dates in the Egyptian months of Pharmuthi (March/April) and Pachon (April/May). As Scaliger remarked in 1595, this variety of dates strongly indicated that even in Clement’s time ‘‘there was no real knowledge about this thing among Christians.’’
When Scaliger voiced such reservations, he tacitly entered territory which had already been mapped out two decades earlier by Matthaeus Beroaldus, a Calvinist preacher and professor of philosophy in Geneva, to whose bulky Chronicum (1575) he usually only turned to refute its contents. At first glance, Beroaldus would indeed seem an unlikely character to stage groundbreaking attacks on Christian tradition. In the preface of his work, he expressed the opinion that Scripture provided a sufficient and certain foundation for the reconstruction of ancient chronology. Non-biblical sources—to say nothing of pagan ones—were to be avoided or at least overwritten by Scripture if they gave conflicting testimony. Naturally, this approach could lead to highly questionable results, such as Beroaldus’s dating of the accession of Cyrus the Great a century later than usually supposed. In other instances, however, this austere biblicism made him rightfully suspicious of certain spurious traditions, which had a firm grip on sixteenth-century historical consciousnesses. These included the Corpus Hermeticum as well as the highly popular forged antiquities of Annius of Viterbo, both of which Beroaldus dismissed with unusual rigor. Another tradition that incurred his critique was the date of Christmas, to which he dedicated an entire chapter. Not only did Beroaldus sift through the sources to show that patristic opinion on the birthday of Christ was far from unanimous, but he also deftly debunked one of the main arguments cited in favor of the common opinion. The culprit was John Chrysostom, or rather the author of On the Solstices, whom Beroaldus wrongly identified with the golden-tongued preacher. Pseudo-Chrysostom, as we have seen, had based his dating of the conception of John the Baptist to the autumnal equinox on the assumption that Zachary was the High Priest. As Beroaldus pointed out, this clearly contradicted Luke’s own statement, according to which John’s father was a member of Abijah (1:5), the eighth of twenty-four priestly divisions (1 Chronicles 24:7-18), which simply happened to be on duty at the time (Luke 1:8). The idea that Jesus was born at the winter solstice had obviously been based on false chronological premises.
A new starting-point for determining the truth was needed and Beroaldus found it in the date of Epiphany (January 6), which ecclesiastical tradition associated with the day of Christ’s baptism and the Adoration of the Magi. Although he acknowledged that some ancient writers, such as Epiphanius of Salamis, had also considered January 6 as the date of the nativity, Beroaldus came to the conclusion that an even more reliable tradition linked the same date to Christ’s conception nine month earlier. His chief witness was the glossa ordinaria on the book of Esther (2:16), where the month in which Esther was brought to Artaxerxes’s court is elucidated with these words:
Tebeth among the Hebrews, Audynaios among the Greeks and among the Latins it is January, in which the Lord, having become flesh, was circumcised on the eighth day, adored by the Magi and honored with mystical gifts, and in which he is also said to have been baptized by John.
For reasons unexplained, Beroaldus omitted one crucial phrase, namely ‘‘circumcised on the eighth day’’ (octavo die circumcisus), when he cited this passage. The change of meaning thus caused was considerable. What the glossator, wholly orthodox in his intentions, had meant to say, was that the circumcision of the Lord was customarily assigned the first day of January, eight days after his birth on December 25. Beroaldus, on the other hand, now treated the glossa as testimony to a tradition that assigned the conception to January. If the latter theory was true, he argued, it necessarily meant that Jesus was born not in December, but in October.
A number of clues seemed to point exactly in this direction. First in line was the famous prophecy of the seventy weeks, found in the book of Daniel, where it is said of the Messiah that ‘‘he will put an end to sacrifice and offering’’ (9:27) in the middle of the last week. For Beroaldus it was very clear that these seventy ‘‘weeks’’ or 70 x 7 490 years had come to their promised end with Christ’s death and resurrection. The aforementioned middle of the last week occurred 3 1 /2 years earlier and could thus be located at the beginning of Christ’s public ministry, when Jesus received his baptism from John in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius (Luke 3:1). This naturally set the duration of the public ministry to 3 1 /2 years, thereby conforming to a well-established chronological estimate, which had first been made by Eusebius of Caesarea and later forcefully repeated by the Venerable Bede. Moreover, since the Passion of Christ took place on either Nisan 14 or 15 in the Jewish calendar (depending on whether one followed John or the Synoptic Gospels), a ministry of exactly 3 1 /2 years implied that the baptism took place not in January, but around Tishri 14, the seventh month of the Hebrew year (as enumerated in the Pentateuch), which roughly corresponds to September/October. At this point, the testimony of St. Luke (3:23) came into play, which stated that Jesus ‘‘began to be about thirty years of age’’ when he was baptized. According to Beroaldus’s very literal understanding of this passage, this event fell very close to his twentyninth birthday, when Jesus began the course of the thirtieth year of his life. The result was that Christ’s birth took place not in midwinter, but near the autumnal equinox, when the feast of Sukkot or ‘‘Tabernacles’’ (Tishri 15- 21) was celebrated.
Beroaldus was far from being the only sixteenth-century chronologer with a penchant for number symbolism and chronological symmetry. Seven years later, in 1582, an obscure Chronologie, written by a certain Jean de Fregeville, hit the Paris book market. When it came to discussing the birth date of Christ, its author’s approach was largely guided by typology: the figure of Isaac in the Old Testament mirrored Christ, his sacrifice (Gen 22:9) being a foreshadowing of the Passion. The same held true for the relationship between Isaac’s circumcision, on the eighth day of his life (Gen 21:4), and Christ’s circumcision (commemorated on January 1, the eighth day after Christmas). Fregeville’s readers were also supposed to bear in mind that Isaac’s circumcision was a sign of the covenant between God and Abraham, which was later renewed ‘‘by the blood of the Passover lamb’’ at the time of the Exodus. ‘‘For this reason, it is necessary that the Passover was celebrated at the same time as when Isaac’s circumcision took place.’’ In the course of his lengthy discussion, Fregeville came to the conclusion that Christ’s birth, baptism, and death all took place at the mystical time of the Passover, an assumption which was seemingly confirmed by the testimony of Clement of Alexandria, who wrote that some dated the nativity to the month of Pharmuthi, which roughly corresponded to April. Accordingly, it was the birth, rather than the conception, of John the Baptist which had taken place at the time of the autumnal equinox.
Arguments of a more practical nature against the plausibility of a birth in wintertime were submitted by the Reformed scholar Heinrich Wolf, who published his Chronologia in 1585. Could one seriously assume that such a wise administrator as Augustus would have ordered a census, which forced people to travel long distances, at such an inconvenient and rainy time of the year? And even more strikingly: the shepherds attending to their flocks in the outside was hardly a scene to be expected during winter, when sheep were supposed to stay inside their stables, as Columella (De re rustica 7.3) taught. Like Beroaldus, whose arguments he cited, Wolf favored a birth in autumn partly for typological reasons: the day of the birth of the Messiah was best viewed as a ‘‘semblance’’ (umbra) or replacement of one of the feasts of the old covenant—and since Passover and Shavuot were already mirrored by Easter and Pentecost, the important festivities of Tishri, such as Sukkot/Tabernacles, seemed promising candidates.
But neither Wolf nor his Calvinist predecessor Beroaldus intended to institute a new Christian holiday at the time of the autumnal equinox. When Beroaldus proposed his argument for fall in 1575, he did so only after denouncing feasts such as Christmas as shameful institutions, which promoted gluttony while being completely alien to the precepts of God and the spirit of the Gospels. Wolf also subscribed to this view, adding that it was desirable to have ‘‘the idolatry of all the feasts’’ analyzed one by one to reveal their true, unchristian origins and authorship. ‘‘This task, I hope, will be undertaken before long by my cousin Rudolph Hospinian, in his work De origine antichristianismi.’’
Just as Wolf promised, his relative, the Swiss theologian Rudolph Hospinian (1547-1626), published a work called Festa Christianorum in 1593, in which he unleashed a full-scale attack on the entire calendar of the Catholic Church, going through it one day at a time. Naturally, the nativity celebrations on December 25 were in for some particularly acute criticism. As others before him, Hospinian pointed out that there had never been a universal consensus among early Christians as to the date of Christ’s birth. In the early fifth century, John Cassian recorded that the Egyptians still commemorated the birth along with the baptism of Jesus on January 6 (Epiphany)—a tradition that has preserved itself in Armenia until present times. Neither the Armenians nor the papists, however, had set their sights on the right date, at least according to Hospinian, who summarized at length the chronological arguments proposed by Wolf and Beroaldus. Yet in keeping with the general spirit of his book, he went beyond the purely chronological line of argument of his predecessors and tried to uncover the pre-Christian roots of Christmas. In doing so, he could rely on the template provided by Polydore Vergil, whose investigations of the origins of church institutions in books IV-VIII of De inventoribus rerum had drawn attention to the manifold continuities and lines of influence that seemingly existed between ancient pagan and Christian rites and customs. One such parallel concerned the ‘‘Lord of Misrule,’’ a predominantly English custom, where master and servant would swap roles on Christmas day. As Vergil noted, this practice was reminiscent of the Roman Saturnalia, celebrated in the days after December 17.
Hospinian expanded this idea and went as far as claiming that ‘‘those who first instituted the feast in this month of December did not do it, because they believed that the Lord was then born, but in order to convert the Saturnalian feast, which was celebrated at Rome at that time, into this feast [sc. Christmas].’’ According to Hospinian, many cherished Christmas rites, such as gift-giving to children, but especially the licentious eating and drinking that unfolded each year during Yuletide, could be directly traced back to the exuberant excesses of pagan carnivals. In his view, holiday customs had reached such a lamentable state,
that it would seem they celebrate Bacchanalia or Lupercalia rather than the birthday of Christ; and because of the demeanor of these Epicureans it would seem well deserved if that night, celebrated in memory of Christ’s birth (which is why we call it Weihenacht, that is ‘‘holy night,’’ in our language) was rather called Weinnacht, that is ‘‘wine night.’’
As these examples clearly show, the debate over Jesus’s birth date was more than a sterile and technical question of historical chronology. It arose within the context of an ongoing Calvinist and Reformed concern about the very foundations of religious practice, in whose wake existing forms of worship were seriously scrutinized and sometimes outright rejected. Naturally, this Protestant obsession with orthopraxis went hand in hand with learned efforts to denounce the institutions of the Catholic liturgical year for their lack of scriptural foundation, their want of seriousness and their trappings of paganism. Any shred of antiquarian information that could lend support to this project was more than welcome and the years that followed Hospinian’s learned intervention would indeed spawn new discoveries, which further undermined the historical basis of Christmas. When Beroaldus produced his refutation of John Chrysostom’s dating of John the Baptist’s conception, he still relied on the same spurious treatise On the Solstices, which had already been used by Bede in the eighth century.
By 1593, however, the humanist David Hoeschel had found a Greek manuscript in Augsburg, from which he published an authentic sermon On the Birthday, delivered by Chrysostom on Christmas day 386 in Antioch. Not only did Chrysostom adduce an exegetical argument remarkably similar (in its mistaken assumption of Zachary’s High Priesthood) to that of On the Solstices to prove that Christ was born on December 25, but he also provided valuable background information on the status of this feast in his own congregation. As the preacher reminded his audience, the festival that they had all convened to celebrate had still been unknown to them a decade ago, before its recent import from the West. For Joseph Scaliger, who drew attention to this passage in the second edition of his De emendatione temporum (1598), there was no question who the ‘‘West’’ was to be identified with:
Chrysostom himself says in the same speech that the ritual of this day had been carried to Constantinople by the Romans only a decade earlier, i.e. the Romans had already been used to celebrate this day some years before the Constantinopolitans newly learned it from them. All this shows the novel and recent nature of the observance of this day.
Instead of falling for what he considered a fourth-century Roman invention, based on faulty chronological arguments, Scaliger went on to calculate the true date of the nativity by means of his own. For the year he chose 3 bce, an assumption which was inter alia backed by the testimony of Clement of Alexandria, who held that Jesus was born in the twenty-eighth year of the reign of Augustus over Egypt (counted from 1 Thoth August 29, 30 bce). As for the calendar date, Scaliger returned to the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke, which, as he recognized, could still be of chronological use, once the absurd notion of Zachary’s High Priesthood was out of the window. A first attempt in this direction had already been made by Matthaeus Beroaldus, who suggested that the twenty-four priestly divisions of the Old Testament were distributed over the Hebrew year such that each month saw two divisions on duty. Abijah, being the eighth division, was consequently assigned to the second half of the fourth month of the year, which Beroaldus crudely equated with June. This argument obviously served to support his conviction that John the Baptist was conceived at the time of the summer solstice, but it lacked soundness, chiefly because it ignored that, according to Josephus (Ant. 7.365-66), each division or ‘‘family’’ was on duty for precisely a week (‘‘from Sabbath to Sabbath’’), not two. As Scaliger realized, this implied that the cycle of the twenty-four priestly courses did not last an entire year, but would repeat after only 24 x 7 168 days. In search for a viable starting point for this cycle, Scaliger went back to the time of Judah Maccabee, who, according to his calculation, had begun rededicating the Temple on November 22, 165 bce. Assuming that this date also served as a new beginning for the cycle of the priestly courses, which were then re-established (1 Maccabees 4:42), he argued that the division of Abijah had its first turn 7 x 7 49 days later, on January 10, 164 bce. From that time until the middle of 4 bce, the year of John’s conception, 349 complete cycles of 168 days, which amounted to 160 years and 192 days, had elapsed. Accordingly, Abijah resumed duty on July 21, 4 bce and Zachary could return home to his wife after July 28. The conception of John must have taken place shortly afterwards and Jesus was in turn incarnated some five months later (Luke 1:24), in late December. Consequently, the nativity could be assigned with some confidence to late September or early October 3 bce.
Scaliger’s brilliant chronological ‘‘recovery’’ of the time of Christ’s birth was a welcome addition to the arsenal of Protestant readers in need of fresh ammunition against learned champions of Catholic tradition such as Cesare Baronio, who, in his Annales ecclesiastici, had only harsh words for those who questioned the consensus of the Latin and Greek fathers in favor of December 25. Baronio’s Annales were in turn the object of severe and penetrating criticism by Isaac Casaubon, who fully subscribed to Scaliger’s chronological hypotheses and their consequence that John the Baptist was conceived in summer.
As the example of Casaubon, who published his exercitationes against Baronio in London, indicates, the innovative antiquarian debunking of the traditional date for Christ’s nativity, which had been first formulated by Reformed and Calvinist scholars on the continent, had its most lasting and socially significant reverberations in England, where controversies over the legitimacy of Christmas reached fever pitch in the late 1640s and early 1650s. As early as the year 1588, readers of Hugh Broughton’s well-known work on biblical chronology, A Concent of Scripture, were confronted with a short note, presumably inspired by Beroaldus, according to which ‘‘our Lord his birth is mistaken,’’ owing to a wrong assignment of the time of Zachary’s ministry. Sixty years later, by October 1648, even such a nuanced defender of the Lawfulness of the Celebration of Christs Birth-day as the Canterbury cleric George Palmer had to admit that the true date of the nativity was less than certain ‘‘or at least, it is questioned by many Learned Christians.’’ This assessment was confirmed around the same time by a pamphlet entitled Christs Birth Misse-timed, in which the Anglican bishop Robert Skinner recycled the idea of calculating the ‘‘true’’ date via Jewish priestly shifts—albeit in the much cruder Beroaldian version—in order to prove that the time of the Lord’s nativity historically coincided with Sukkot. When it came to explaining the reason why the celebration had been erroneously deferred to December 25, Skinner’s strategy (like Scaliger’s) was akin to the modern-day ‘‘Calculation Theory,’’ as he pointed to Chrysostom’s confusion of Zachary with the High Priest and the calendrical speculations that resulted from it. Referring to a spurious claim allegedly made by Hugh Broughton, he swiftly tied this calculation to the Church of Rome, ‘‘where an Old Record in Greek was found [. . .] that mentioneth Zachary to have ministred in the seventh month,’’ showing that ‘‘all error cometh from Rome, that bitter Starre, Worme-wood, cast into the fountains of the Scriptures and Universities, to corrupt and bitter them.’’
Harsh as these words may have been, a far more damning verdict on Rome and the traditional Christmas was spoken by those scholars, who went beyond the purely chronological line of argument and joined Rudolph Hospinian in what may be called an early turn towards the ‘‘History of Religions Theory.’’ The basic idea was concisely put by Isaac Casaubon, who had previously used Scaliger’s argument to refute the historicity of December 25:
It would seem that the pious fathers were not so much concerned about the true birthdays [of John and Jesus], as much as they converted the feasts of the pagan rites into better use. For they hoped that the Christian religion would find easier acceptance if they simultaneously destroyed the impious feasts of the Gentiles and instituted new ones in their place, which pertain to the true cult of God.
In attempting to cast the inventiveness of the late antique Church in a positive, or even admirable, light, Casaubon underlined that he had no sympathies for those ‘‘who tear down aggressively the monuments of holy men and who use such human mistakes [as the mis-dating of Christmas] to exalt themselves, whilst they are debasing them.’’ At the same time, however, even he must have been aware that his explanation of the origin of certain Christian feasts was of no help when it came to defending Christmas against those eager to rid the calendar of all traces of post-apostolic misrule. It comes as no surprise, then, if English Puritans expressed the notion that Christmas was rooted in pagan revelries in far shriller tones. The attack was led by William Prynne (1600-1669), seventeenth-century England’s most prolific pamphleteer, whose infamous Historiomastix (1632)—a passionate diatribe against stage plays—contained a lengthy and learned denunciation of Christmas as a papist re-packaging of ancient Roman rites. ‘‘If any here,’’ wrote Prynne with characteristic zeal, ‘‘demaund, by whom these Saturnalia, these disorderly Christmasses & Stageplayes were first brought in among the Christians? I answer that the paganizing Priests and Monks of popish (the same with the heathen Rome) were the chiefe Agents of this worke.’’
From the point of view of those members of parliament who banned the feast in 1647, such insights were the final nail in the coffin of Christmas’s respectability as an example of good Christian worship. In the end, it was the lack of scriptural foundation and the perceived historical links to Roman idolatry, which led to Christmas’s temporary demise in mid-century Puritan England and the North American colonies. At the same time, however, the kind of criticism voiced in the works of Rudolph Hospinian, Thomas Mocket and others could not have been made as forcefully without the chronological evidence that had been previously assembled by continental scholars such as Beroaldus, Wolf, and Scaliger. Thanks to their profound antiquarian learning and occasional sparks of ingenuity, they had shown that the joyful celebration of Christ’s birthday during midwinter—a highly popular tradition that had gone virtually unchallenged for nearly a millennium—was historically baseless and even counter to the available sources. In doing so, they jointly attested to the fact that the early modern study of chronology encompassed something more than just a dry, but placid field of dates and facts. Despite the contempt in which the discipline would later be held by Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, chronology, at its height, was a buzzing interdisciplinary field of research, which provided numerous fruitful challenges, both to its practitioners and to the sacred and profane traditions it regularly confronted. In the case of the English Christmas, it could even mean that—as the Royalist ‘‘water-poet’’ John Taylor put it—it was suddenly ‘‘welcomed like Iacke Drum and thrust out of doores.’’