“Excuse me?” the girl in front said. “I go to church all the time, and I don’t see much sun worshiping going on!”

“Really? What do you celebrate on December twenty-fifth?”

“Christmas. The birth of Jesus Christ.”

“And yet according to the Bible, Christ was born in March, so what are we doing celebrating in late December?”

Silence.

Langdon smiled. “December twenty-fifth, my friends, is the ancient pagan holiday of sol invictus-Unconquered Sun-coinciding with the winter solstice. It’s that wonderful time of year when the sun returns, and the days start getting longer.”

[...]

Now the girl in front looked furious. “You’re implying Christianity is just some kind of . . . repackaged sun worship!”

“Not at all. Christianity did not borrow only from sun worship. The ritual of Christian canonization is taken from the ancient ‘god-making’ rite of Euhemerus. The practice of ‘god-eating’-that is, Holy Communion-was borrowed from the Aztecs. Even the concept of Christ dying for our sins is arguably not exclusively Christian; the self-sacrifice of a young man to absolve the sins of his people appears in the earliest tradition of the Quetzalcoatl.”