The Chronograph of 354

The Chronograph is a collection of calendars and lists put together at Rome for the year 354: an illustrated civil calendar, lists of consuls, city prefects and bishops of Rome, and two lists of the burial days of Roman bishops and martyrs. The original is lost and the work is known from later copies. The standard edition of the unillustrated parts is Mommsen’s of 1892.

The list of martyrs (part 12) is arranged by the calendar and gives the day and the cemetery at which each was commemorated. Its first line, placed before the entries for January, reads VIII kal. Ian. natus Christus in Betleem Iudeae: “on the eighth day before the Kalends of January, Christ born in Bethlehem of Judea”. That is 25 December. The list shows that the Roman church kept the day by the middle of the fourth century. It is a liturgical record made more than three hundred years after the event, and it does not say on what the date rests.