from the December 21, 2015 eNews issue

A Norwegian Christmas (Photo: Royal Norwegian Embassy)

Each year at Christmas we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. After the New Year, we struggle to remember to add a year as we date our checks, which should remind us that the entire Western World reckons its calendar from the birth of the One who changed the world more than any other before or since.

Yet, it is disturbing to discover that much of what we have been taught about the Christmas season seems to be more tradition than truth.

When Was Jesus Born?

Most serious Bible students realize that Jesus was probably not born on Dec. 25. The shepherds had their flocks in open fields (Luke 2:8), which implies a date before October. Furthermore, no competent Roman administrator would require registration involving travel during the season when Judea was generally impassable (Matthew 24:20.)

If Jesus wasn’t born on December 25, just when was he born? Although the Bible doesn’t explicitly identify the birthday of our Lord, many scholars have developed diverse opinions as to the likely birthday of Jesus. (It reminds one of the rabbinical observation: with two Jews, you have three opinions!) See our briefing, The Christmas Story: What Really Happened for more information.

Then Why December 25?

The early Christian church did not celebrate Jesus’ birth, and therefore the exact date was not preserved in festivals. The first recorded mention of Dec. 25 is in the Calendar of Philocalus (A.D. 354), which assumed Jesus’ birth to be Friday, Dec. 25, A.D. 1. This was after Constantine’s Edict of Toleration in A.D. 313, which enabled the persecuted Christians to exchange the rags of hiding for the silks of the court. But the predictable expediency to adopt the inevitable cultural changes caused many of the former pagan rituals to be adapted to their new “Christian” trappings.

The date of December 25th, which was officially proclaimed by the church fathers in A.D. 440, was actually a vestige of the Roman holiday of Saturnalia, observed near the winter solstice, which itself was among the many pagan traditions inherited from the earlier Babylonian priesthood.

Babylonian Traditions

All forms of occultic practices have their origins in the original city of Babylon. Isaiah Chapter 47clearly brings this out. Most of what we associate with pagan Rome had its origins in ancient Babylon. Babylon is mentioned in over 300 references in the Bible; it is even alluded to three times in Christ’s own genealogy.

The Tammuz Legend

Tammuz, the son of Nimrod and his queen, Semiramis, was identified with the Babylonian Sun God and worshipped after the winter solstice. As the days became shorter and …

(more)

Categories: Teologice