SOC 2805 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Unconquered, Liturgical Year, Tropical Year
Document Summary
The difficulty with the (now) common story about christianity borrowing a pagan holiday is that the objective data simply does not support the idea of borrowing from the roman festival, which was created too late. For the standard scholarly work on this, see thomas. Another problem for the borrowing from roman practice theory is that the dates are wrong. The dates for the roman festival were never the same as for the christian one. The date was originally january sixth, which converted to december 25th when the calendar changed from the. Julian to the gregorian calendar many centuries later. And the date for the roman festival was dated december 11th anyway. There is some further background for this, connected to several factors, including the concentration of the celebration of several events on one date, which was later expanded into separate festivals, and the changes in the calendars.
