Christmas Myths Exposed
Notes
Transcript
What social media gets wrong about Christmas.
What social media gets wrong about Christmas.
Was Christmas based on the Sol Invictus celebration?
What Christmas based on Saturnalia?
Was Christmas based on Mithras?
Was Christmas based on Yule?
Was Christmas based on the winter solstice?
Is Santa/Father Christmas based on Odin?
Does the Christmas season stress you out?
How does Christmas show up on your feed?
Is it hard to keep Christ in Christmas?
Is Christmas weird at your work?
Was Christmas based on the Sol Invictus celebration?
Ancient Romans has their own god for the sun, Sol. By the Republic period (509-27 BC), however, the Greek god of the sun, Apollo, had taken over. The Roman emperor Aurelian re-introduced Sol as a patriotic god in AD 274.
Not only that, there is no evidence of Romans celebrating Sol’s birthday on December 25th until AD 354.
The earliest Christian record of celebrating Christ’s birth on Dec. 25th is 211 or 222 on a statue of the priest, Hyppolytus of Rome.
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In Judaism, “perfect” people were born and died on the same day. Rabbinical teaching said that Moses was born and died on the same calendar day.
Early Christians could not calculate a birthday for Jesus using the Gospels of Luke and Matthew. Therefore, they calculated a date for the crucifixion of Jesus as March 25th, and made is birthday 9 months later.
Christians were celebrating Jesus’s birth on Dec. 25th at least 64 years before Romans celebrated Sol Invictus at all, much less on Dec. 25th.
Was Christmas based on Saturnalia?
The Roman god Saturn was an agricultural deity who was said to have reigned over the world in the Golden Age, when humans enjoyed the spontaneous bounty of the earth without labour in a state of innocence. The revelries of Saturnalia were supposed to reflect the conditions of the lost mythical age.
Saturnalia was celebrated Dec. 17th with drinking, feasting, gift-giving, and sometimes the role-reversal of slaves and masters.
The biggest evidence that Saturnalia did not become Christmas for the Christians is that Christians celebrated Saturnalia right alongside Christmas until the 5th century. By that time, Saturnalia had become just another harvest festival, like our Thanksgiving.
Gift-giving by Christians is based on the magi, and wasn’t widespread until the 16th century. Even then, it was mostly on Epiphany and not Christmas.
Pine wreathes and boughs were used to decorate for Saturnalia, but that wasn’t copied by Christians. The pine traditions didn’t start for Christians until the high middle ages in Germany, not Rome.
Was Christmas based on Mithras?
Mithraism was a popular cult in the western Roman world in the first few centuries AD.
Most of the comparisons between Mithras and Christmas comes from made up stuff in the 1990s, especially a 1999 book by Dorothy Murdock.
Agnostic New Testament scholar Bart D. Ehrman wrote in his Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth that "all of [Dorothy Murdock’s] major points are in fact wrong" and her book "is filled with so many factual errors and outlandish assertions that it is hard to believe the author is serious.... Mythicists of this ilk should not be surprised that their views are not taken seriously by real scholars, mentioned by experts in the field, or even read by them".
Was Christmas based on Yule?
The earliest source to mention Yule is a calendar of saints’ days dating to the 500s. It is used as a season without any celebrations mentioned.
Our next reference to Yule appears by Bede, written around 730 in northern England, two centuries later. He uses the term as a stand-in for November, and without any celebration.
Evidence about Yule customs appears from the late 800s onwards, in Old Norse texts. This is long after Christianity has spread through what is now England and Germany.
Yule customs include making vows, which hasn’t influenced Christmas but may have influenced our New Years celebration. Yule also featured a boar’s head, which may have influenced college fraternities celebrating a boar’s head, but not Christmas. Some claim that the Christmas ham tradition comes from this, but there is no evidence.
The pagan Yule log actually was taken from an earlier Christmas log beginning in the 1600s.
Was Christmas based on the winter solstice?
The date of Christmas is linked to the winter solstice, indirectly. Ancient Judaeo-Christian custom reckoned that prophets and saints died on the same date they were born or, in later times, the date they were conceived. Jesus supposedly died at the spring equinox, so by custom, that was also the date of his conception. That put his birth nine months later at the winter solstice. Evidence of Christian interest in the link between Jesus’ death and the equinox goes back to the 150s, so Christmas has its background in that period, even if we can’t be sure it was celebrated at that time.
Is Santa/Father Christmas based on Odin?
Odin was a Norse god who, according to mythology, had an 8-legged horse. Earlier historians were mistaken that it was able to fly. Even if it could, flying reindeer didn’t appear as part of the Santa mythology until the 1820s.
He was in the world, and the world was created through him, and yet the world did not recognize him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, he gave them the right to be children of God, to those who believe in his name, who were born, not of natural descent, or of the will of the flesh, or of the will of man, but of God.
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. We observed his glory, the glory as the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John testified concerning him and exclaimed, “This was the one of whom I said, ‘The one coming after me ranks ahead of me, because he existed before me.’ ”) Indeed, we have all received grace upon grace from his fullness, for the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. The one and only Son, who is himself God and is at the Father’s side—he has revealed him.
