CHRISTMAS - History & Facts
I. When was Jesus born? FACTS
A. Popular
myth puts his birth on December 25th in the year 1 C.E.
B. The
New Testament gives no date or year for Jesus’ birth. The earliest gospel – St. Mark’s, written
about 65 CE – begins with the baptism of an adult Jesus. This suggests that the earliest Christians
lacked interest in or knowledge of Jesus’ birthdate.
C. The year of Jesus birth was determined by Dionysius Exiguus,
a Scythian monk, “abbot of a Roman monastery.
His calculation went as follows:
In
the Roman, pre-Christian era, years were counted from “aburbe condita” (the
founding of the City - Rome). Thus 1 AUC
signifies the year Rome was founded, 5 AUC signifies the 5th year of Rome’s
reign, etc.
Dionysius
received a tradition that the Roman emperor Augustus reigned 43 years, and was
followed by the emperor Tiberius. Luke 3:1, 23 indicates that when Jesus turned
30 years old, it was the 15th year of Tiberius reign. If Jesus was 30 years old
in Tiberius’ reign, then he lived 15 years under Augustus (placing Jesus birth
in Augustus’ 28th year of reign). Augustus took power in 727 AUC. Therefore, Dionysius put Jesus birth in 754
AUC. However, Luke 1:5 places Jesus’ birth in the days of Herod, and Herod died
in 750 AUC – four years before the year in which Dionysius places Jesus birth.
D. Joseph A. Fitzmyer –
Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies at the Catholic University of America,
member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, and former president of the
Catholic Biblical Association – writing in the Catholic Church’s official
commentary on the New Testament[1], writes about the date of Jesus’ birth, “Though the year [of Jesus birth is not
reckoned with certainty, the birth did not occur in AD 1”. The Christian era, supposed to have its
starting point 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 have been written in North Africa around 243 CE,
placed Jesus birth on March 28. Clement,
a bishop of Alexandria (d. ca. 215 CE), thought Jesus was born on November
18. Based on historical records,
Fitzmyer guesses that Jesus birth occurred on September 11, 3 BCE.
Conclusion:
The exact
date of Jesus’ birth is unknown. There is no official record of the birthday of
Jesus Christ.
II. How Did Christmas Come to Be Celebrated on December 25?
A. Roman pagans first introduced the holiday
of Saturnalia, (a week long period
of lawlessness celebrated between December 17 - 25). During this period, Roman courts were closed,
and Roman law dictated that no one could be punished for damaging property or
injuring people during the weeklong celebration. The festival began when Roman authorities
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’s conclusion,
December 25th, Roman authorities believed they were destroying the forces of
darkness by brutally murdering this innocent man or woman.
B. The ancient Greek writer poet
and historian Lucian (in his dialogue entitled Saturnalia) describes the
festival’s observance in his time. In
addition to human sacrifice, he mentions these customs: widespread
intoxication; going from house to house while singing naked; rape and other
sexual license; and consuming human-shaped biscuits (still produced in some
English and most German bakeries during the Christmas season).
C. In the 4th century CE, Christianity
imported the Saturnalia festival hoping to take the pagan masses in with
it. Christian leaders succeeded in
converting to Christianity large numbers of pagans by promising them that they
could continue to celebrate the Saturnalia as Christians.[2]
D.
The
problem was that there was nothing intrinsically Christian about Saturnalia. To
remedy this, these Christian leaders named Saturnalia’s concluding day,
December 25th, 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 return for ensuring massive observance of the anniversary
of the Savior’s birth by assigning it to this resonant date, the Church for its
part tacitly agreed to allow the holiday to be celebrated more or less the way
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 first observed the Nativity on December 25 did not do so 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 Pagan Holidays
metamorphosed into Christian ones.”[3]
Because of its known pagan origin, Christmas was banned by the Puritans
and its observance was illegal in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1681.[4] However, Christmas was and still is
celebrated by most Christians.
G. Some of the most depraved customs of the
Saturnalia carnival were intentionally revived by the Catholic Church in 1466
when Pope Paul II, for the amusement of his Roman citizens, forced Jews to race
naked through the streets of the city.
An eyewitness 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 time
more amusing 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. As part of the Saturnalia carnival
throughout the 18th and 19th centuries CE, rabbis of the ghetto in Rome were
forced to wear clownish outfits and march through the city streets to the jeers
of the crowd, pelted by a variety of missiles. When the Jewish community of
Rome sent a petition in1836 to Pope Gregory XVI begging him to stop the annual
Saturnalia abuse of the Jewish community, he responded; “It is not opportune to
make any innovation.”[6] On December 25,
1881, Christian leaders whipped the Polish masses into Antisemitic frenzies
that led to riots across the country. In
Warsaw 12 Jews were brutally murdered, huge numbers maimed, and many Jewish
women were raped. Two million rubles
worth of property was destroyed.
III. The Origins of Christmas Customs
A. The Origin of Christmas Tree
Just as early Christians recruited Roman pagans by
associating Christmas with the Saturnalia, so too worshippers of the Asheira
cult and its offshoots were recruited by the Church sanctioning “Christmas
Trees”.[7] 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 arrow by his rival god Hoder while
fighting for the female Nanna. Druid
rituals use mistletoe to poison their human sacrificial victim.[8] The Christian custom of “kissing under the
mistletoe” is a later synthesis of the sexual license of Saturnalia with the
Druidic sacrificial cult.[9]
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 December) and Kalends (in January). Later, this ritual expanded to include
gift-giving among the general populace.
The Catholic Church gave this custom a Christian flavor by re-rooting it
in the supposed gift-giving of Saint Nicholas (see 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 6th. He was
only named a saint in the 19th century.
b. Nicholas was among the most senior bishops
who convened the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE and created the New
Testament. 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
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 it
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 horse through the heavens one evening each
Autumn. 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.
e. In a bid for pagan adherents in Northern
Europe, the Catholic Church adopted the Nicholas cult and taught that he did
(and they should) distribute gifts on December 25th 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
bearded, flying-horse riding Saint Nicholas using his Dutch name, Santa Claus.
g. Dr. Clement Moore, a professor at Union
Seminary, read Knickerbocker History, and in 1822 he published a poem based on
the character Santa Claus: “Twas the night before Christmas, when all through
the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. The stockings were hung by the chimney with
care, in the hope that Saint Nicholas soon would be there…” Moore innovated by portraying a Santa with
eight reindeer who descended through chimneys.
h. The Bavarian illustrator Thomas Nast almost
completed the modern picture of Santa Claus.
From 1862 through 1886, based on Moore’s poem, 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-like figure in a frock. Nast also gave Santa a home at the North
Pole, his workshop filled with elves, and his list of the good and bad children
of the world. All Santa was missing was
his red 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, chubby face. The corporation insisted that Santa’s
fur-trimmed suit be bright, Coca Cola red.
And Santa was born – a blend of Christian crusader, pagan god, and
commercial idol.
IV. The Christmas Challenge
1. Christmas has always been a
holiday celebrated carelessly. For
millennia, pagans, Christians, and even Jews have been swept away in the
season’s festivities, and very few people ever pause to consider the
celebration’s intrinsic meaning, history, or origins.
2. Christmas celebrates the birth
of the Christian god who came to rescue mankind from the “curse of the
Torah.” It is a 24-hour declaration that
Judaism is no longer valid.
3. Christmas is a lie. There is no Christian church with a tradition
that Jesus was really born on December 25th.
4. December 25 is a day on which
Jews have been shamed, tortured, and murdered.
5. Many of the most popular
Christmas customs – including Christmas trees, mistletoe, Christmas presents,
and Santa Claus – are modern incarnations of the most depraved pagan rituals
ever practiced 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 often object that their celebration has nothing to do with the holiday’s
monstrous history and meaning. “We are
just having fun.”
Imagine that between 1933-45,
the Nazi regime celebrated Adolf Hitler’s birthday – April 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 day, Jews were historically subject to perverse tortures and
abuse, and that this continued for centuries.
Now, imagine that your
great-great-great-grandchildren were about to celebrate Hitlerday. April 20th arrived. They had long forgotten
about Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen. They
had never heard of gas chambers or death marches. They had purchased champagne and caviar, and
were about to begin the party, when someone reminded them of the day’s real
history and their ancestors’ agony.
Imagine that they initially objected, “We aren’t celebrating the
Holocaust; we’re just having a little Hitlerday party.” If you could travel forward in time and meet
them; if you could say a few words to them, what would you advise them to do on
Hitlerday?
On December 25, 1941, Julius
Streicher, one of the most vicious of Hitler’s assistants, celebrated Christmas
by penning the following editorial in his rabidly Antisemitic newspaper, Der
Stuermer:
If one really wants to put an
end to the continued prospering of this curse from heaven that is the Jewish
blood, there is only one way to do it: to eradicate this people, this Satan’s
son, root and branch.
AUTHOR: LAWRENCE KELEMEN
SOURCES
[1] Addison G. Wright, Roland
E. Murphy, 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 feast appears in the Philocalian calendar, a Roman document from 354
CE, which lists December 25th as the day of Jesus’ birth.
[3] Increase Mather, A
Testimony against Several Prophane and Superstitious Customs, Now Practiced by
Some in New England (London, 1687), p. 35.
See also Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas: A Cultural
History of America’s 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, 74-5.
[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. 274-5.
[10] Miles, pp. 276-279.
[11] John 8:44
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