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The Pagan Origin of Christmas According to ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s Tathbīt


The Tathbīt dalāʾil al-nubuwwa of the chief qāḍī of Rayy ʿAbd al-Jabbār al-Hamadhānī (d. 1024 or 1025) contains a lengthy digression asserting early Christianity’s gradual corruption by the pagan Romans. One of the Muʿtazilī theologian’s most striking claims regards the origin of Christmas, which he argues derives from a pagan holiday of the “Romans and Greeks” called the Nativity of Time. Previous scholarship has attempted to identify this holiday as a festival known from the ancient Graeco-Roman Mediterranean world. However, ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s construction of “Roman and Greek” paganism is highly indebted to Arabic reports on the Ṣābians of Ḥarrān, whom he mentions before and after his Christmas account. In turn, this article collects references in roughly contemporary Arabic sources to a pagan Aramaean holiday called variously the Festival of the Nativity or the Festival of the Nativity of Time. The article argues that ʿAbd al-Jabbār in fact refers to this holiday, having learned of it from a report on Ḥarrānian religion. To conclude, the article situates the Christmas account within ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s broader comparative religious project and briefly treats its influence upon Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328).