The typical myth that circulates about Christmas is that it was once the birth date of Sol or Mithras, however there is no evidence of this pre-dating Christian sources citing December 25th as Jesus birth date: The specific nature of the relation of Christmas to the then-contemporary feast of the birth of the sun, Natalis Solis Invicti, has up to now NOT BEEN conclusively proven from extant texts, no matter how much some sort of causal relation might make perfect sense., Roll, Toward the Origins of Christmas, p. 107 (1995). The claim used to be made that December 25 developed in opposition to the Mithras myth, or as a Christian response to the cult of the unconquered sun promoted by Roman emperors in the third century in their efforts to establish a new imperial religion. However, these old theories can no longer be sustained. The decisive factor was the connection of creation and Cross, of creation and Christ’s conception -Joseph Ratzinger; The Spirit of the Liturgy, p. 107 Those who make these claims can not even prove them: that an important mithras feast also fell on December 25th can hardly be doubted, although there is NO DIRECT EVIDENCE of the fact - Edmund Kerchever Chambers It is not a fact if it can not be proven with evidence. There is no evidence of ANY KIND, not EVEN A HINT, from within the cult that this, or any other winter day, was important in the Mithraic calendar. - Dr. Alvar, 410 The idea, particularly popular in the 18th and 19th centuries, that the date of 25 December for Christmas was selected in order to correspond with the Roman festival of Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, or Birthday of the Unconquered Sun, is CHALLENGED TODAY. -Wikipedia article on Sol It is challenged because there is no ancient evidence. Although this view is still very common, it has been seriously challenged - Church of England Liturgical Commission, The Promise of His Glory: Services and Prayers for the Season from All Saints to Candlemas Jesus birth date was calculated to December 25th by the early Church in the late 2 and early 3rd centuries based on the Jewish belief that all great prophets died on the date they were conceived: It was a traditional Jewish belief that great men lived a whole number of years, without fractions, so that Jesus was considered to have been CONCIEVED on 25 March, as he died on 25 March, which was calculated to have coincided with 14 Nisan. -William J. Colinge, Historical Dictionary of Catholicism Again those who contend that Dec 25th comes from paganism can not prove it and admit it: Both the sun and Christ were said to be born anew on December 25. But while the solar associations with the birth of Christ created powerful metaphors, the surviving evidence DOES NOT SUPPORT SUCH DIRECT ASSOCIATION WITH THE ROMAN SOLAR FESTIVALS. The earliest documentary evidence for the feast of Christmas MAKES NO MENTION of the coincidence with the winter solstice. Thomas Talley has shown that, although the Emperor Aurelians dedication of a temple to the sun god in the Campus Martius probably took place on the Birthday of the Invincible Sun on December 25, the cult of the sun in pagan Rome ironically DID NOT CELEBRATE THE WINTER SOLSTICE nor any of the other quarter-tense days, as one might expect. The origins of Christmas, then, may NOT BE Expressly rooted in the Roman festival.- Michael Alan Anderson, Symbols of Saints , pp. 45-46 The latter celebration attributed to Sol in the calendar of 354 could well mean Jesus as His birth is listed and the Bible along with the early Church did in fact consider Christ to be the Sun: By the sun of righteousness in Malachi 4:2 the fathers, from Justin downward, and nearly all the earlier commentators understand Christ, who is supposed to be described as the rising sun.[65] -Carl Friedrich Keil, Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament (Eerdmans 1969), vol. 25, p. 468; The New Testament itself contains a hymn fragment: Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.[66] -Ephesians 5:14 Clement of Alexandria wrote of the Sun of the Resurrection, he who was born before the dawn, whose beams give light.[67]-Clement of Alexandria, Protreptius 9:84, quoted in David R. Cartlidge, James Keith Elliott, The Art of Christian Legend (Routledge 2001 ISBN 978-0-41523392-7), p. 64 -Wikipedia article on Sol Encyclopedia Britannica: This view presumes—as does the view associating the origin of Christmas on December 25 with pagan celebrations of the winter equinox—that Christians appropriated pagan names and holidays for their highest festivals. Given the determination with which Christians combated all forms of paganism, this appears a rather dubious presumption. -Encyclopedia Britannica article on the myth that Easter is the name for a goddess. And Bible Archeology has an excellent article on the history of Christmas: It’s not until the 12th century that we find the first suggestion that Jesus’ birth celebration was deliberately set at the time of pagan feasts. A marginal note on a manuscript of the writings of the Syriac biblical commentator Dionysius bar-Salibi states that in ancient times the Christmas holiday was actually shifted from January 6 to December 25 so that it fell on the same date as the pagan Sol Invictus holiday.5 In the 18th and 19th centuries, Bible scholars spurred on by the new study of comparative religions latched on to this idea.6 They claimed that because the early Christians didn’t know when Jesus was born, they simply assimilated the pagan solstice festival for their own purposes, claiming it as the time of the Messiah’s birth and celebrating it accordingly.More RECENT STUDIES HAVE SHOWN THAT MANY OF THE HOLIDAYS MODERN TRAPPINGS DO REFLECT PAGAN CUSTOMS BORROWED MUCH LATER....This HAS ONLY ENCOURAGED MODERN AUDIENCES TO ASSUME THAT THE DATE TOO MUST BE PAGAN. There are problems with this popular theory, however, as many scholars recognize. Most significantly, the FIRST MENTION OF A DATE FOR CHRISTMAS (C.200) and the EARLIEST CELEBRATIONS THAT WE KNOW ABOUT (C.. 250–300) come in a period when Christians WERE NOT BORROWING heavily from pagan traditions of such an obvious character. - Biblical Archeology BOTTOM LINE...CHRISTMAS IS NOT PAGAN!
Posted on: Sun, 23 Nov 2014 04:05:54 +0000
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