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Sat, 31 December 2005 20:14 |
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Christmas: A season for pagans?
By JOSEPH F. KELLY
A documentary on Christmas in Britain, broadcast on cable television some years ago, told of a young Scotsman who served in the British army in World War II. Brought up a Scots Presbyterian, he was astonished at how his English comrades celebrated Christmas with joy and warmth and presents. When he was home on leave, he asked his matriarchal grandmother why their family had never celebrated Christmas. Her reply? "Because we're not pagans, laddie!"
That remark sounds strange today, but actually the grandmother had the Bible on her side. The gospels tell of the Nativity but not of a Christmas feast, and many strict evangelical denominations have frowned on the practice. Indeed, some scholars claim that of all the "reforms" the Puritans introduced into England, the abolition of Christmas was the most resented, since it took away the prime holiday during long and, in rural areas, rigorous winters.
In fact, the Nativity of Jesus played no significant role in the earliest Christian communities. Only two of the gospels (Matthew and Luke) include it; no other New Testament book even mentions it. It became significant only because some "Christians" (SO CALLED) in the second century doubted Jesus had a body.
That last remark sounds stranger than the Scottish grandmother's, but it is true. As Christianity moved out of a Jewish framework and began to convert Greek pagans, some educated Greeks conceived of God as a pure spirit and could not accept the Christian belief that the Son of God had become a human being with a body.
These "Christians", called Gnostics, rejected the Jewish notion of a god who created a material world; instead, they claimed that a lesser and evil god had done so. The Gnostics considered the body something evil from which revealed knowledge (gnosis in Greek) would help the soul escape.
In response to this challenge, the Christians emphasized the full humanity of Jesus, concentrating on the two most human elements in his life, his birth, and death.
By the end of the second century Christmas was an essential element of "Christian" teaching. But there was still no feast.
A feast required a date, but the gospels gave not even a clue to the day of Jesus' birth. Oddly enough; the Gnostics initiated the process. "Christians" often tried to supplant pagan customs with their own, for example, substituting the veneration of the Palestinian "Christian" martyr George for that of the pagan hero Perseus (which is how George got his dragon). The Gnostics combated an Egyptian pagan feast celebrated on Jan. 6, but not with the birth of Christ (because they rejected the notion of his having a body) but rather with his manifestation on Earth. The Greek name for this feast was, the Epiphany. Other "Christians" now took up the hunt for a date. Since almost all Romans believed that the world re-created itself annually on the vernal equinox, a third-century "Christian" with the wonderful name Sextus Julius Africanus suggested that Christ was formed in his mother's womb on the anniversary of the creation of the world Since the vernal equinox fell on March 25 in those days, Sextus added nine months to it and came up with a birthdate of Dec. 25.
(Ironically; most "Christians" think the date of the Annunciation, March 25, was arrived at by going back nine months from Christmas; atually just the reverse is the case.)
But Dec. 25 did not catch on right away; Jan. 6 remained popular. The person who inadvertently finalized the date of Christmas and made it a feast was not a Christian but a pagan, the Roman Emperor Aurelian (270-275).
Aurelian feared that the Christians had become too powerfull, so he decided to combat them by re-invigorating paganism around the cult of the sun god, whom he called the Unconquered Sun. The great feast of the Unconquered Sun would be the winter solstice, which, as the shortest day of the year, figured as the sun's birthday. The winter solstice fell on Dec. 25.
The Christians responded to the emperor's challenge with propaganda of their own. They revived Sextus' argument for Jesus' birth. Furthermore, the Jewish prophet Malachi had spoken of the Sun of Righteousness, whom the Christians now identified with Christ, thus contrasting their sun with the pagans' sun and appropriating the Unconquered Sun's birthday.
When Aurelian was assassinated the cult of the sun-god largely faded, and the "Christians" emerged with a date for Christ's birth and a feast to go with it. In 326, for the first time a "Christian" calendar
identified the feast of Christmas with Dec. 25. But all was not settled. Jan. 6 remained a popular day, even though the Gnostics had largely disappeared by the fourth century. The "Christians" kept the feast of the Epiphany but changed its character. Instead of celebrating the manifestation of a spiritual being on Earth, it now celebrated the manifestation of Jesus to the whole human race, which was duly represented by the Magi, whose arrival in Bethlehem was fixed on Jan. 6. (When I was a boy, people still called little Epiphany "Little Christmas.") In spite of this, the feast of Christmas still had trouble catching on. Part of this was the legacy of struggle with the sun-god. In the fifth century Pope Leo I spoke Of "Christians" who came to church in the morning and, before entering the building, turned and bowed in the direction of the rising sun. But Christmas surged on. By the sixth century it had acquired . such stature that Advent, a period of preparation, had been attached to it, secure proof of its acceptance. The Unconquered Sun had finally set.
The afore written article is for your information and not necessarily considered totally accurate. Obviously, the author has no idea of what the word "Christian" means. I find the article interesting as it is obviously written by an unbeliever and was carried in the left biased Cleveland Plain Dealer. You probably noticed I had taken the liberty to make a few insertions into the article. CP
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