Christmas

Origin of Christmas

Jeremiah 10:1 Hear ye the word which the Yahweh speaketh unto you, O house of Israel: 2 Thus saith Yahweh, Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them. 3 For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe. 4 They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not. 5 They are upright as the palm tree, but speak not: they must needs be borne, because they cannot do evil, neither also is it in them to do good.

Jeremiah, chapter 10, seems to be clearly referring to the ancient pagan Christmas tree, used during the pagan celebrations of the heathen sun-god at the winter solstice. This is shown in verse 2, where Yahweh connects this tree worship with the signs of the heavens. This is what Yahweh says: "Do not learn the ways of the nations or be terrified by signs in the sky (the winter solstice), though the nations are terrified by them..." -- that is, they carry important meaning to the pagans, telling them when to hold their festival, and representing the death and birth of the sun-god.

Very few realize that not very much has changed in the way Christmas is celebrated from the way pagans observed the day (under a different name) centuries before the birth of Yahshua The Messiah! Obviously they didn't call it "Christmas." They called this mid-winter festival by its original heathen or pagan name -- the Saturnalia [1] .

The Scriptures do not mention the celebration of The Messiah’s birth, and therefore it was not celebrated by early followers. So where did millions of modern-day "Christians" get the idea to celebrate it? In ancient times the winter solstice was celebrated in Babylon as the birth day of Tammuz (Dumuzi), the god of vegetation. This was the shortest day of the year, in the latter part of December (today it actually falls on December 21). According to the pagans, the god Nimrod would visit the evergreen tree and leave gifts upon it. This festival became known as the Saturnalia, and friends and family would exchange gifts.

Interestingly, the winter solstice was also celebrated by the followers of Mithra as the "nativity" or "birth" of the sun. Mithra [2] was the Persian sun-god, and his worship was widespread throughout the Roman Empire in the days of the early believers.

When the feast was celebrated in Rome, it was called the festival of Saturn [3] and lasted for five days. In both ancient Rome and more ancient Babylon, this festival was characterized by bouts of drunkenness, wild merrymaking, and lascivious orgies which would begin with an "innocent kiss" underneath the mistletoe and would then lead to justification of all sorts of sexual excesses, perversions and abominations.

Alexander Hislop writes in The Two Babylons: [4]

And first, as to the festival in honour of the birth of Christ, or Christmas. How comes it that that festival was connected with the 25th of December? There is not a word in the Scriptures about the precise day of His birth, or the time of the year when He was born. What is recorded there, implies that at what time soever His birth took place, it could not have been on the 25th of December. At the time that the angel announced His birth to the shepherds of Bethlehem, they were feeding their flocks by night in the open fields. Now, no doubt, the climate of Palestine is not so severe as the climate of this country; but even there, though the heat of the day be considerable, the cold of the night, from December to February, is very piercing, and it was not the custom for the shepherds of Judea to watch their flocks in the open fields later than about the end of October. It is in the last degree incredible, then, that the birth of Christ could have taken place at the end of December. There is great unanimity among commentators on this point (pp. 91-92).

Hislop continues:

Indeed, it is admitted by the most learned and candid writers of all parties that the day of our Lord's birth cannot be determined, and that within the Christian Church no such festival as Christmas was ever heard of until the third century, and that not till the fourth century was far advanced did it gain much observance (pp. 92-93).

Why did the Roman Church fix upon December 25 as the day to honor the Messiah's birthday? There are many opinions on this. One which seems to be valid is that the early Church, in moving all of its celebrations away from Judaism without denying its followers the holidays they had come to enjoy, took the date of Hanukkah, the Feast of Dedication, and "Romanized" it.

Hanukkah occurs on the 25th day of the Hebrew month of Kislev [[5]], which occurs approximately in December.

Hislop also has an opinion:

Long before the fourth century, and long before the Christian era itself, a festival was celebrated among the heathen, at that precise time of the year, in honor of the birth of the son of the Babylonian queen of heaven; and it may fairly be presumed that, in order to conciliate the heathen, and to swell the number of the nominal adherents of Christianity, the same festival was adopted by the Roman Church, giving it only the name of Christ. This tendency on the part of Christians to meet Paganism halfway was very early developed; and we find Tertullian, even in his day, about the year 230, bitterly lamenting the inconsistency of the disciples of Christ in this respect, and contrasting it with the strict fidelity of the Pagans to their own superstition (ibid., p. 93).

Frazier, in The Golden Bough [6] states without hesitation: "The largest pagan religious cult which fostered the celebration of December 25 as a holiday throughout the Roman and Greek worlds was the pagan sun worship -- Mithraism." He adds, "This winter festival was called 'the Nativity' -- the 'nativity of the sun' " (p. 471).

Mithra was not the only pagan deity said to be born at this time of year. Osiris, Horus, Hercules, Bacchus, Adonis, Jupiter, Tammuz and other sun-gods were supposedly born at the time of the winter solstice![7]

Alexander Hislop confirms this, adding: That Christmas was originally a Pagan festival, is beyond all doubt. The time of the year, and the ceremonies with which it is still celebrated, prove its origin. In Egypt, the son of Isis, the Egyptian title for the queen of heaven, was born at this very time, 'about the time of the winter solstice.' The very name by which Christmas is popularly known among ourselves -- Yule-day -- proves at once its pagan and Babylonian origin. 'Yule' is the Chaldee name for an 'infant' or 'little child'; and as the 25th of December was called by our Pagan Anglo-Saxon ancestors, 'Yule-day,' or the 'Child's-day,' and the night that preceded it, 'Mother-night,' long before they came in contact with Christianity, that sufficiently proves its real character. Far and wide, in the realms of Paganism, was this birthday observed ("The Two Babylons", PP. 93-94). The festival at Rome, called the feast of "Saturn," lasted five days, and loose reins were given to drunkenness and revelry. This was precisely the way in which the Babylonian midwinter, or December, festival was celebrated. Berosus tells us it also lasted "five days."

Declares Hislop:

The wassailing bowl of Christmas had its precise counterpart in the 'Drunken festival' of Babylon; and many of the other observances still kept up among ourselves at Christmas came from the very same quarter. The candles, in some parts of England, lighted on Christmas eve, and used so long as the festive season lasts, were equally lighted by the Pagans on the eve of the festival of the Babylonian god, to do honor to him: for it was one of the distinguishing peculiarities of his worship to have lighted wax-candles on his altars (pp. 96-97).

What about that old favorite, the Christmas tree? Surely it wasn't pagan, too, was it? The astonishing answer: "The Christmas tree, now so common among us, was equally common in Pagan Rome and Pagan Egypt. In Egypt that tree was the palm-tree; in Rome it was the fir; the palm tree denoting the Pagan messiah, as Baal-Tamar, the fir referring to him as Baal-Berith. The mother [8]of Adonis, the sun-god and great mediatorial divinity, was mystically said to have been changed into a tree, and when in that state to have brought forth her divine son. If the mother was a tree, the son must have been recognized as the 'Man the branch.' And this entirely accounts for the putting of the Yule Log into the fire on Christmas Eve, and the appearance of the Christmas tree the next morning" (Hislop, p. 97). The symbolism of the Christmas tree and the Yule log is made plain by Alexander Hislop. He writes:

Therefore, the 25th of December, the day that was observed at Rome as the day when the victorious god reappeared on earth, was held at the Natalis invicti solis, 'The birthday of the unconquered Sun.' Now the Yule Log is the dead stock of Nimrod, deified as the sun-god, but cut down by his enemies; the Christmas-tree is Nimrod redivivus -- the slain god come to life again (p. 98).

According to the Roman Catholic's [9] the well-known solar feast, however, of Natalis Invicti [10] ,celebrated on 25 December, has a strong claim on the responsibility for our December date. For the history of the solar cult, its position in the Roman Empire, and syncretism with Mithraism.

Additional References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturnalia http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/mom/mom09.htm http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/saturnalia http://www.biblebelievers.com/babylon/sect31.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_calendar http://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/frazer/gb03700.htm http://www.awitness.org/essays/bkup/16_crucified_saviors/chap8.html http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03724b.htm http://www.aloha.net/~mikesch/xmas.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_calendar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar http://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/frazer/