Christmas and Its Origins

This is an excerpt from the book Under the Influence: How Christianity Transformed Civilization, by Alvin J. Schmidt. I offer it as food for thought and consideration:

Frequently one hears that Christmas Day, like Sunday, is a holiday that evolved out of the religious cult of Mithraism--namely, that the date of December 25 comes from the Roman emperor Aurelian's edict in A.D. 274 that established the festival of Natale Solis Invicti (Birth of the Unconquerable Sun) as he dedicated a new temple to the sun as near the Mausoleum of Augustus. The widely held belief that Christmas Day came about as a result of Christians having Christianized sun-god worship fails to consider the argument that Christians in some geographic areas--in northern Africa (primarily in Egypt), for example--were already observing Christmas Day as early as December 25, in A.D. 243, thirty years before Aurelian's edict. They associated Christ's birth with the Old Testament prophecy in Malachi 4:2, which calls the predicted Messiah "the sun of righteousness" (Natalis Solis Iustitiae in Latin). If the argument is true, then the Christians did not choose December 25 to Christianize Aurelian's decision, but rather the emperor, by establishing the Birth of the Unconquerable Sun, may have tried to paganize the Christian observance of the birth of Christ, the "sun of righteousness." The latter gains added plausibility when one recalls that Emperor Diocletian in the Great Persecution of 293-305 reinforced Aurelian's edict in order to "expunge Christianity."Moreover, also in the mid-fourth century, Christians considered March 25 "to be the actual date of both Christ's Passion and Resurrection and his conception [sic] so that December 25--exactly nine months later--was originally chosen from a computation based on the assumed date of Jesus' death, resurrection, and conception." Hence the attempt to link Christmas Day with Mithraism's sun god festival does not have unequivocable historical support.