How to Make the Most of Christmas for Christian Families
I. When was Jesus born?
A. Popular myth puts his nascence on Dec 25th in the yr ane C.E.
B. The New Attestation gives no date or year for Jesus� birth. The earliest gospel � St. Mark�due south, written about 65 CE � begins with the baptism of an developed Jesus. This suggests that the earliest Christians lacked interest in or knowledge of Jesus� birthdate.
C. The year of Jesus birth was adamant past Dionysius Exiguus, a Scythian monk, �abbot of a Roman monastery. His calculation went as follows:
a. In the Roman, pre-Christian era, years were counted from ab urbe condita (�the founding of the City� [Rome]). Thus 1 AUC signifies the twelvemonth Rome was founded, five AUC signifies the fiveth yr of Rome�s reign, etc.
b. Dionysius received a tradition that the Roman emperor Augustus reigned 43 years, and was followed by the emperor Tiberius.
c. Luke 3:ane,23 indicates that when Jesus turned thirty years old, it was the 15th year of Tiberius reign.
d. If Jesus was 30 years one-time in Tiberius� reign, then he lived 15 years nether Augustus (placing Jesus birth in Augustus� 28th year of reign).
e. Augustus took power in 727 AUC. Therefore, Dionysius put Jesus birth in 754 AUC.
f. However, Luke one:5 places Jesus� birth in the days of Herod, and Herod died in 750 AUC � 4 years before the yr in which Dionysius places Jesus nascence.
D. Joseph A. Fitzmyer � Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies at the Catholic Academy of America, member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, and sometime president of the Cosmic Biblical Association � writing in the Catholic Church�south official commentary on the New Testament [ane] , writes near the engagement of Jesus� birth, �Though the year [of Jesus birth is not reckoned with certainty, the birth did not occur in Advertisement 1. The Christian era, supposed to accept its starting indicate in the year of Jesus birth, is based on a miscalculation introduced ca. 533 by Dionysius Exiguus.�
E. The DePascha Computus, an anonymous document believed to take been written in North Africa around 243 CE, placed Jesus birth on March 28. Cloudless, a bishop of Alexandria (d. ca. 215 CE), idea Jesus was born on Nov 18. Based on historical records, Fitzmyer guesses that Jesus birth occurred on September 11, 3 BCE.
II. How Did Christmas Come to Exist Celebrated on December 25?
A. Roman pagans start introduced the vacation of Saturnalia, a week long period of lawlessness celebrated between December 17-25. During this menstruation, Roman courts were closed, and Roman law dictated that no ane could exist punished for dissentious property or injuring people during the weeklong celebration. The festival began when Roman government chose �an enemy of the Roman people� to represent the �Lord of Misrule.� Each Roman community selected a victim whom they forced to indulge in food and other physical pleasures throughout the week. At the festival�due south conclusion, Dec 25th, Roman regime believed they were destroying the forces of darkness by brutally murdering this innocent man or adult female.
B. The ancient Greek writer poet and historian Lucian (in his dialogue entitled Saturnalia) describes the festival�s observance in his fourth dimension. In addition to human sacrifice, he mentions these customs: widespread intoxication; going from house to business firm while singing naked; rape and other sexual license; and consuming homo-shaped biscuits (however produced in some English and most High german bakeries during the Christmas season).
C. In the fourth century CE, Christianity imported the Saturnalia festival hoping to have the infidel masses in with information technology. Christian leaders succeeded in converting to Christianity large numbers of pagans by promising them that they could go on to celebrate the Saturnalia as Christians. [2]
D. The trouble was that there was nix intrinsically Christian well-nigh Saturnalia. To remedy this, these Christian leaders named Saturnalia�s concluding day, Dec 25thursday, to be Jesus� birthday.
E. Christians had little success, however, refining the practices of Saturnalia. As Stephen Nissenbaum, professor history at the University of Massachussetts, Amherst, writes, �In render for ensuring massive observance of the anniversary of the Savior�south birth past assigning it to this resonant appointment, the Church for its part tacitly agreed to allow the holiday to be celebrated more than or less the mode it had always been.� The earliest Christmas holidays were celebrated by drinking, sexual indulgence, singing naked in the streets (a precursor of modern caroling), etc.
F. The Reverend Increase Mather of Boston observed in 1687 that �the early Christians who outset observed the Birth on Dec 25 did non do then thinking that Christ was born in that Month, but because the Heathens� Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those Heathen Holidays metamorphosed into Christian ones.� [iii] Because of its known pagan origin, Christmas was banned by the Puritans and its observance was illegal in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1681. [four] However, Christmas was and still is celebrated by most Christians.
1000. Some of the almost depraved community of the Saturnalia funfair were intentionally revived by the Catholic Church in 1466 when Pope Paul 2, for the amusement of his Roman citizens, forced Jews to race naked through the streets of the city. An bystander account reports, �Before they were to run, the Jews were richly fed, so as to make the race more difficult for them and at the same fourth dimension more agreeable for spectators. They ran� amid Rome�s taunting shrieks and peals of laughter, while the Holy Father stood upon a richly ornamented balcony and laughed heartily.� [5]
H. Every bit part of the Saturnalia funfair throughout the 18thursday and xixth centuries CE, rabbis of the ghetto in Rome were forced to habiliment clownish outfits and march through the city streets to the jeers of the crowd, pelted by a multifariousness of missiles. When the Jewish community of Rome sent a petition in1836 to Pope Gregory XVI begging him to terminate the annual Saturnalia abuse of the Jewish community, he responded, �Information technology is non opportune to brand whatever innovation.� [6] On December 25, 1881, Christian leaders whipped the Polish masses into Antisemitic frenzies that led to riots beyond the country. In Warsaw 12 Jews were brutally murdered, huge numbers maimed, and many Jewish women were raped. Two meg rubles worth of property was destroyed.
III. The Origins of Christmas Customs
A. The Origin of Christmas Tree
But equally early on Christians recruited Roman pagans by associating Christmas with the Saturnalia, then too worshippers of the Asheira cult and its offshoots were recruited by the Church sanctioning �Christmas Trees�. [vii] Pagans had long worshipped trees in the forest, or brought them into their homes and decorated them, and this observance was adopted and painted with a Christian veneer by the Church.
B. The Origin of Mistletoe
Norse mythology recounts how the god Balder was killed using a mistletoe pointer by his rival god Hoder while fighting for the female person Nanna. Druid rituals use mistletoe to poison their human sacrificial victim. [eight] The Christian custom of �kissing under the mistletoe� is a after synthesis of the sexual license of Saturnalia with the Druidic sacrificial cult. [nine]
C. The Origin of Christmas Presents
In pre-Christian Rome, the emperors compelled their most despised citizens to bring offerings and gifts during the Saturnalia (in Dec) and Kalends (in January). Later, this ritual expanded to include gift-giving amongst the general populace. The Catholic Church gave this custom a Christian flavor past re-rooting information technology in the supposed gift-giving of Saint Nicholas (meet below). [10]
D. The Origin of Santa Claus
a. Nicholas was born in Parara, Turkey in 270 CE and later became Bishop of Myra. He died in 345 CE on December vith. He was simply named a saint in the 19th century.
b. Nicholas was among the well-nigh senior bishops who convened the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE and created the New Attestation. The text they produced portrayed Jews as �the children of the devil� [11] who sentenced Jesus to death.
c. In 1087, a group of sailors who idolized Nicholas moved his bones from Turkey to a sanctuary in Bari, Italy. There Nicholas supplanted a female person boon-giving deity called The Grandmother, or Pasqua Epiphania, who used to fill the children's stockings with her gifts. The Grandmother was ousted from her shrine at Bari, which became the center of the Nicholas cult. Members of this group gave each other gifts during a pageant they conducted annually on the anniversary of Nicholas� death, December 6.
d. The Nicholas cult spread north until information technology was adopted by German and Celtic pagans. These groups worshipped a pantheon led by Woden �their chief god and the father of Thor, Balder, and Tiw. Woden had a long, white beard and rode a equus caballus through the heavens one evening each Fall. When Nicholas merged with Woden, he shed his Mediterranean appearance, grew a beard, mounted a flying horse, rescheduled his flight for December, and donned heavy winter clothing.
east. In a bid for heathen adherents in Northern Europe, the Cosmic Church building adopted the Nicholas cult and taught that he did (and they should) distribute gifts on December 25thursday instead of December 6th.
f. In 1809, the novelist Washington Irving (most famous his The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle) wrote a satire of Dutch culture entitled Knickerbocker History. The satire refers several times to the white disguised, flying-horse riding Saint Nicholas using his Dutch proper name, Santa Claus.
1000. Dr. Cloudless Moore, a professor at Union Seminary, read Knickerbocker History, and in 1822 he published a poem based on the grapheme Santa Claus: �Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the business firm, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, in the hope that Saint Nicholas shortly would be in that location�� Moore innovated past portraying a Santa with eight reindeer who descended through chimneys.
h. The Bavarian illustrator Thomas Nast almost completed the modern flick of Santa Claus. From 1862 through 1886, based on Moore�s verse form, Nast drew more than 2,200 cartoon images of Santa for Harper�s Weekly. Before Nast, Saint Nicholas had been pictured as everything from a stern looking bishop to a gnome-similar figure in a frock. Nast also gave Santa a home at the Northward Pole, his workshop filled with elves, and his listing of the good and bad children of the world. All Santa was missing was his cherry outfit.
i. In 1931, the Coca Cola Corporation contracted the Swedish commercial artist Haddon Sundblom to create a coke-drinking Santa. Sundblom modeled his Santa on his friend Lou Prentice, chosen for his cheerful, stubby face. The corporation insisted that Santa�s fur-trimmed arrange be bright, Coca Cola red. And Santa was born � a alloy of Christian crusader, pagan god, and commercial idol.
Iv. The Christmas Challenge
� Christmas has always been a holiday celebrated carelessly. For millennia, pagans, Christians, and fifty-fifty Jews accept been swept away in the flavor�s festivities, and very few people ever break to consider the celebration�s intrinsic pregnant, history, or origins.
� Christmas celebrates the birth of the Christian god who came to rescue flesh from the �expletive of the Torah.� It is a 24-hour declaration that Judaism is no longer valid.
� Christmas is a lie. There is no Christian church building with a tradition that Jesus was really born on December 25th.
� December 25 is a 24-hour interval on which Jews have been shamed, tortured, and murdered.
� Many of the almost popular Christmas customs � including Christmas trees, mistletoe, Christmas presents, and Santa Claus � are modern incarnations of the most depraved pagan rituals ever skilful on earth.
Many who are excitedly preparing for their Christmas celebrations would prefer not knowing about the holiday�s real significance. If they do know the history, they oft object that their celebration has nada to do with the vacation�due south monstrous history and meaning. �We are just having fun.�
Imagine that betwixt 1933-45, the Nazi government celebrated Adolf Hitler�southward birthday � Apr 20 � as a holiday. Imagine that they named the day, �Hitlerday,� and observed the day with feasting, drunkenness, gift-giving, and various pagan practices. Imagine that on that solar day, Jews were historically subject field to perverse tortures and corruption, and that this continued for centuries.
Now, imagine that your great-great-great-grandchildren were almost to celebrate Hitlerday. April 20th arrived. They had long forgotten almost Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen. They had never heard of gas chambers or expiry marches. They had purchased champagne and caviar, and were about to brainstorm the political party, when someone reminded them of the day�southward real history and their ancestors� agony. Imagine that they initially objected, �Nosotros aren�t celebrating the Holocaust; we�re just having a little Hitlerday party.� If you lot could travel forward in time and see them; if you could say a few words to them, what would y'all advise them to practise on Hitlerday?
On Dec 25, 1941, Julius Streicher, i of the most vicious of Hitler�due south assistants, celebrated Christmas by penning the following editorial in his rabidly Antisemitic newspaper, Der Stuermer:
If one really wants to put an terminate to the connected prospering of this expletive from heaven that is the Jewish claret, there is only one style to do it: to eradicate this people, this Satan�s son, root and branch.
It was an appropriate idea for the day. This Christmas, how volition we celebrate?
Author: LAWRENCE KELEMEN
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SOURCES
[1] Addison G. Wright, Roland E. Potato, Joseph A. Fitzmyer, �A History of Israel� in The Jerome Biblical Commentary, (Prentice Hall: Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1990), p. 1247. [2] The first mention of a Nativity banquet appears in the Philocalian calendar, a Roman document from 354 CE, which lists December 25th as the mean solar day of Jesus� birth. [three] Increment Mather, A Testimony against Several Prophane and Superstitious Community, At present Practiced past Some in New England (London, 1687), p. 35. Run across also Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas: A Cultural History of America�due south Most Cherished Holiday, New York: Vintage Books, 1997, p. 4. [4] Nissenbaum, p. 3. [5] David I. Kertzer, The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican�s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001, p. 74. [6] Kertzer, p. 33, 74-v. [7] Clement Miles, Christmas Customs and Traditions: Their History and Significance, New York: Dover Publications, 1976, pp. 178, 263-271. [8] Miles, p. 273. [9] Miles, p. 274-v. [10] Miles, pp. 276-279. [11] John eight:44
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