I support this so much.

And you didn’t even come say hi? I see how it is 😂

Thank you so much Shaily!

When I checked in at registration I was asked “like Candida Moss the biblical scholar?” And I said “yes other people’s parents had dictionaries and did not make this mistake”

We also hope you'll join us on March 18 in person at Fordham University for a lecture with Candida Moss (@candidamoss.bsky.social) on "Who Wrote Your Bible? Enslaved Scribes and the Material History of Scripture"!

Thank you!

Possibly, but I think we'd need better evidence that Christians were celebrating the birth of Jesus on Dec. 25th in the early third century for that to make sense.

The calculation theory is probably right. But this was a fascinating example of how an academic hypothesis, when well received, crystallizes into something much more solid and comes to be received as a fact. 6/6

All of which is to say that the scholarly argument is less airtight than I had previously thought and Duchesne himself was pretty cautious. His theory (known popularly as the calculation theory) did not eliminate the birthday of Sol Invictus from the reasons for the date of Christmas. 5/6

After Duchesne's death a late antique homily was discovered that does explicitly articulate the conception/Easter argument, but it is a much later and its origins are a bit unclear. Maybe it reflects earlier thought and practice. Again H/T Talley's Origins of the Liturgical Year. 4/6

This argument (or, better, hypothesis) was first advanced by Louis Duchesne, but Duchesne knew there was a problem. No early Christian authors *say* that the date of Christmas is related to the date of Easter/the conception. So Duchesne summarizes in the following way (H/T Thomas Talley) 3/6

Most scholars will say that the date of Christmas was calculated from the presumed date of Jesus's conception, which in turn was calculated from the date of his death (for a great summary see @praxeas.bsky.social 's piece for BAR here): www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/people...) 2/6