Pseudo-Knowledge and \u201cPagan Christmas\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n
Time was when I, like most people, took it for granted the winter solstice and, in particular, the Roman Feast of the Birth of the Unconquered Sun were simply pagan celebrations that hung around into Christian times. In fact, when I set out to write this book I still thought this. But I discovered the reality is far more complicated and interesting. Indeed, it turns out this widely assumed \u201cfact\u201d that \u201ceverybody knows\u201d is probably another sample of pseudo-knowledge. For according to William Tighe, a church history specialist at Pennsylvania\u2019s Muhlenberg College, \u201cthe pagan festival of the \u2018Birth of the Unconquered Sun\u2019 instituted by the Roman Emperor Aurelian on 25 December 274, was almost certainly an attempt to create a pagan alternative to a date that was already of some significance to Roman Christians. Thus the \u2018pagan origins of Christmas\u2019 is a myth without historical substance.\u201d<\/p>\n
For the fact is, our records of a tradition associating Jesus\u2019 birth with December 25 are decades older than any records concerning a pagan feast on that day.<\/p>\n
[T]he definitive \u201cHandbook of Biblical Chronology\u201d by professor Jack Finegan (Hendrickson, 1998 revised edition) cites an important reference in the \u201cChronicle\u201d written by Hippolytus of Rome three decades before Aurelian launched his festival. Hippolytus said Jesus\u2019 birth \u201ctook place eight days before the kalends of January,\u201d that is, Dec. 25.<\/p>\n
Tighe said there\u2019s evidence that as early as the second and third centuries, Christians sought to fix the birth date to help determine the time of Jesus\u2019 death and resurrection for the liturgical calendar\u2014long before Christmas also became a festival.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
To make a long and complicated story short, there was agitation in the early Church concerning, not Jesus\u2019 birthday, but the day upon which the historical Good Friday and Easter fell. It finally ended up that, in the Eastern Church, the tradition focused on April 6 as the date for the original Good Friday, while in the Western Church it was widely held that the date was March 25. Why does this matter? Tighe continues:<\/p>\n
At this point, we have to introduce a belief that seems to have been widespread in Judaism at the time of Christ, but which, as it is nowhere taught in the Bible, has completely fallen from the awareness of Christians. The idea is that of the \u201cintegral age\u201d of the great Jewish prophets: the idea that the prophets of Israel died on the same dates as their birth or conception.<\/p>\n
This notion is a key factor in understanding how some early Christians came to believe that December 25th is the date of Christ\u2019s birth. The early Christians applied this idea to Jesus, so that March 25th and April 6th were not only the supposed dates of Christ\u2019s death, but of his conception or birth as well. There is some fleeting evidence that at least some first- and second-century Christians thought of March 25th or April 6th as the date of Christ\u2019s birth, but rather quickly the assignment of March 25th as the date of Christ\u2019s conception prevailed.<\/p>\n
It is to this day commemorated almost universally among Christians as the Feast of the Annunciation, when the Archangel Gabriel brought the good tidings of a savior to the Virgin Mary, upon whose acquiescence the Eternal Word of God (\u201cLight of Light, True God of True God, begotten of the Father before all ages\u201d) forthwith became incarnate in her womb. What is the length of pregnancy? Nine months. Add nine months to March 25th and you get December 25th; add it to April 6th and you get January 6th. December 25th is Christmas, and January 6th is Epiphany.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And because these traditional, albeit competing, birth dates were already being revered in the rapidly growing Church, the emperor of a failing pagan empire instituted the Feast of the Unconquered Sun not only as an \u201ceffort to use the winter solstice to make a political statement, but also almost certainly [as] an attempt to give a pagan significance to a date already of importance to Roman Christians.\u201d<\/p>\n
In addition to this there\u2019s another small, but telling, point. We also find St. John Chrysostom (a patriarch of Constantinople who died in 407 A.D.) noted that Christians had celebrated December 25 from the Church\u2019s early days. Chrysostom reinforced his point with an argument that used Scripture, not pagan mythology, for corroboration:<\/p>\n
Luke 1 says Zechariah was performing priestly duty in the Temple when an angel told his wife Elizabeth she would bear John the Baptist. During the sixth month of Elizabeth\u2019s pregnancy, Mary learned about her conception of Jesus and visited Elizabeth \u201cwith haste.\u201d<\/p>\n
The 24 classes of Jewish priests served one week in the Temple, and Zechariah was in the eighth class. Rabbinical tradition fixed the class on duty when the Temple was destroyed in A.D. 70 and, calculating backward from that, Zechariah\u2019s class would have been serving Oct. 2-9 in 5 B.C. So Mary\u2019s conception visit six months later might have occurred the following March and Jesus\u2019 birth nine months afterward.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
So how did it become \u201ccommon knowledge\u201d that Christmas is really just a warmed-over pagan festival? It happened through a series of ironies capped by yet another example of pseudo-knowledge.<\/p>\n
The first irony is the reaction of the Christians of the late Roman Empire to Aurelian\u2019s attempt to co-opt Christmas and make it a pagan day of celebration. Instead of fighting with Sun-worshipers who were trying to rip off their feast, early Christians simply \u201cre-appropriate[d] the pagan \u2018Birth of the Unconquered Sun\u2019 to refer, on the occasion of the birth of Christ, to the rising of the \u2018Sun of Salvation\u2019 or the \u2018Sun of Justice.'\u201d Mark that, because we shall return to it.<\/p>\n
The next irony happens in the 17th and 18th centuries, when the myth of \u201cpagan Christmas\u201d really took hold.<\/p>\n
Paul Ernst Jablonski, a German Protestant, wished to show that the celebration of Christ\u2019s birth on December 25th was one of the many \u201cpaganizations\u201d of Christianity that the Church of the fourth century embraced, as one of many \u201cdegenerations\u201d that transformed pure apostolic Christianity into Catholicism. Dom Jean Hardouin, a Benedictine monk, tried to show that the Catholic Church adopted pagan festivals for Christian purposes without paganizing the Gospel.<\/p>\n
In the Julian calendar, created in 45 B.C. under Julius Caesar, the winter solstice fell on December 25th, and it therefore seemed obvious to Jablonski and Hardouin that the day must have had a pagan significance before it had a Christian one.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Note that: Jablonski began, not with evidence, but with an assumption that the winter solstice must have had a pagan significance before it had a Christian one. In other words, Jablonski simply noticed a correspondence between the Julian calendar\u2019s solstice and Christmas and assumed the pagan feast must have been the prior one even though he had no proof for his theory. Meanwhile, Hardouin, rather than challenge that assumption, simply went along with it. And it\u2019s upon these two authors that the entire myth about Christmas being a warmed-over pagan Sun-worshiping feast is based.<\/p>\n
But in fact, the date [December 25] had no religious significance in the Roman pagan festal calendar before Aurelian\u2019s time, nor did the cult of the sun play a prominent role in Rome before him.<\/p>\n
There were two temples of the sun in Rome, one of which (maintained by the clan into which Aurelian was born or adopted) celebrated its dedication festival on August 9th, the other of which celebrated its dedication festival on August 28th. But both of these cults fell into neglect in the second century, when eastern cults of the sun, such as Mithraism, began to win a following in Rome. And in any case, none of these cults, old or new, had festivals associated with solstices or equinoxes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
What Can We Learn From This?<\/strong><\/p>\n
It is vital we not get bogged down in minutiae and miss the blazingly obvious. So, for instance, we must not get distracted by the irrelevant question of whether Roman Christians were right to place Jesus\u2019 birthday on December 25. Nor should we waste time saying, \u201cAh ha! Some early Christians relied on the unbiblical Jewish tradition of \u2018integral age\u2019 or Chrysostom\u2019s \u2018rabbinic tradition\u2019!\u201d Again, granted: the date of Christmas isn\u2019t found in Scripture. But that isn\u2019t what matters.<\/p>\n
The crucial thing is not, \u201cDid the early Christians get the date of Christmas right?\u201d It is, rather, \u201cWhat mattered to them as they determined the date of Christmas?\u201d And when you look at that, you again immediately realize that what dominates their minds is not Diana, Isis, sun worship, or anything else in the pagan religious world. What interests them is, from our modern multicultural perspective, stunningly insular. Their debates are consumed, not by longing for goddess worship, or pagan mythology, or a desire to import Isis and Diana into the Faith, but the exact details of the New Testament record of Jesus\u2019 death, alloyed with a Jewish\u2014-not pagan\u2014-theory about when Jewish\u2014-not pagan\u2014-prophets die. They don\u2019t care a bit how pagan priests ordered their worship in the Temple of Diana at Ephesus. They care intensely about how Levitical priests ordered their worship in the Temple of Solomon at Jerusalem. These Christians are completely riveted on Scripture and details of Jewish and Christian history and tradition. They don\u2019t give a hoot what sun worshipers, Osiris devotees, or Isis fans might think.<\/p>\n
A Common Objection<\/strong><\/p>\n
At this point some people object, \u201cBut you yourself acknowledge the early Christians \u2018re-appropriated the pagan \u201cBirth of the Unconquered Sun\u201d\u2018 to refer to the birth of Christ\u201d. True. That is, I\u2019m willing to grant that when Aurelian tried to co-opt a Christian holy day by designating it as the date for a pagan festival, Christians checkmated Aurelius by refusing to allow him to claim a sort of copyright on the Sun for paganism. Instead, they insisted on returning the Sun to the service of God its Creator\u2014Whom Scripture calls the True Light of the World and a Sun and a Shield\u2014and did not make the blunder of worshiping the creature. They behaved rather like modern Christians who offer punning riffs on current cultural phenomena (\u201cJesus: He\u2019s the Real Thing\u201d \u201cChrist: Don\u2019t Leave Earth Without Him,\u201d etc.). Exactly what they did not do is take passages of Scripture which referred to Jesus and apply them to Apollo or some other pagan deity. Nor did they look to Apollo or some other pagan deity to tell them about Jesus; they knew perfectly well Jesus could be represented as the Sun of Justice and Light of the World long before Aurelius invented his pagan festival. That\u2019s because early Christians were behaving in a way perfectly consistent with Scripture, becoming \u201call things to all men\u201d (1 Corinthians 9:22), not \u201cholding the form of religion while denying the power of it\u201d (2 Timothy 3:5).<\/p>\n
This matters immensely because it bears directly on the first moment when the early Catholic Church really did borrow something from pagans. And not just any pagans, mind you, but actual adherents of Babylonian Mystery Religion. And most amazingly, the early Catholics\u2019 decision to do so receives the complete approval of, and even hearty defense by\u2026 Evangelicals.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Why do these Evangelicals enthusiastically endorse the testimony of Babylonian Mystery religionists? I can\u2019t give away everything!\u00a0You can order the book either in Dead Tree Version here <\/a>(signed by me and everything) or you can get it for your Kindle here<\/a>.<\/p>\n
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