Posted on 12/07/2005 2:36:38 PM PST by Charles Henrickson
According to conventional wisdom, Christmas had its origin in a pagan winter solstice festival, which the church co-opted to promote the new religion. In doing so, many of the old pagan customs crept into the Christian celebration. But this view is apparently a historical mythlike the stories of a church council debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, or that medieval folks believed the earth is flatoften repeated, even in classrooms, but not true.
William J. Tighe, a history professor at Muhlenberg College, gives a different account in his article "Calculating Christmas," published in the December 2003 Touchstone Magazine. He points out that the ancient Roman religions had no winter solstice festival.
True, the Emperor Aurelian, in the five short years of his reign, tried to start one, "The Birth of the Unconquered Sun," on Dec. 25, 274. This festival, marking the time of year when the length of daylight began to increase, was designed to breathe new life into a declining paganism. But Aurelian's new festival was instituted after Christians had already been associating that day with the birth of Christ. According to Mr. Tighe, the Birth of the Unconquered Sun "was almost certainly an attempt to create a pagan alternative to a date that was already of some significance to Roman Christians." Christians were not imitating the pagans. The pagans were imitating the Christians.
The early church tried to ascertain the actual time of Christ's birth. It was all tied up with the second-century controversies over setting the date of Easter, the commemoration of Christ's death and resurrection. That date should have been an easy one. Though Easter is also charged with having its origins in pagan equinox festivals, we know from Scripture that Christ's death was at the time of the Jewish Passover. That time of year is known with precision.
But differences in the Jewish, Greek, and Latin calendars and the inconsistency between lunar and solar date-keeping caused intense debate over when to observe Easter. Another question was whether to fix one date for the Feast of the Resurrection no matter what day it fell on or to ensure that it always fell on Sunday, "the first day of the week," as in the Gospels.
This discussion also had a bearing on fixing the day of Christ's birth. Mr. Tighe, drawing on the in-depth research of Thomas J. Talley's The Origins of the Liturgical Year, cites the ancient Jewish belief (not supported in Scripture) that God appointed for the great prophets an "integral age," meaning that they died on the same day as either their birth or their conception.
Jesus was certainly considered a great prophet, so those church fathers who wanted a Christmas holiday reasoned that He must have been either born or conceived on the same date as the first Easter. There are hints that some Christians originally celebrated the birth of Christ in March or April. But then a consensus arose to celebrate Christ's conception on March 25, as the Feast of the Annunciation, marking when the angel first appeared to Mary.
Note the pro-life point: According to both the ancient Jews and the early Christians, life begins at conception. So if Christ was conceived on March 25, nine months later, he would have been born on Dec. 25.
This celebrates Christ's birth in the darkest time of the year. The Celtic and Germanic tribes, who would be evangelized later, did mark this time in their "Yule" festivals, a frightening season when only the light from the Yule log kept the darkness at bay. Christianity swallowed up that season of depression with the opposite message of joy: "The light [Jesus] shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it" (John 1:5).
Regardless of whether this was Christ's actual birthday, the symbolism works. And Christ's birth is inextricably linked to His resurrection.
Cite for me the specific passage in Scripture that gives the whole Bible the authority you claim for it.
You continually seek to bind everything to Scripture. If it's in the Bible, that's law. If it's not, it's wrong.
Where, specifically, does the Bible give that authority to the Bible?
The fundamental difference between your view and mine is the particular, I believe excessive, authority you give to the Bible over and against all of the other traditions of which the Bible is but a part.
I would like to see the text that gives the authority to the written tradition of the Bible over everything else.
This is not a little thing. Really it is the whole thing.
There is no celestial component of the seven-day cycle.
Seven days is fixed by texts and traditions.
The year and the month do have a celestial component. The seven-day week is a purely abstract convention that does not repose on any celestial phenomenon.
I can find no fault with those statements, but the days of the week, and the tides, are of lunar significance, not solar.
A>They also "presumed" to compile the New Testament, since there is no record of Jesus commissioning the NT in the NT.
This comes close :
John 14:25 All this I have spoken while still with you.
John 14:26 But the Counsellor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will
send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind
you of everything I have said to you.
b'shem Y'shua
What significance do you think the days of the week have?
What seven-day cycle does there is exist in the celestial or terrestrial rhythms?
Based on the Holy Word of G-d, Y'shua was born on Sukkot ( in 2005: Oct 18)
see God Displays His Transcendence of Time, Again
or see AN END TO CHRISTMAS
b'shem Y'shua
If I knew the answer to that, I wouldn't need a savior. It is clear in the word that the day of rest is not a trivial matter, and that disregard of the rest brings on hardship and disease.
"It is clear in the word that the day of rest is not a trivial matter, and that disregard of the rest brings on hardship and disease."
I do not doubt that rest is necessary.
My point was only that the 7 day calendar is quite unlike the year and the month. Everyone in the world came up with a 12 month calendar, because there are 12 moons in a year. And the cycling of the seasons and change of position of the stars on a yearly basis was known to all civilizations the world over.
But the seven-day week is not a natural cycle at all. It is not something that arose naturally everywhere, but came out of the Middle East only. The Jews believe that it was divinely inspired and told to them by God, and that may very well be true. The Almighty has His own purposes.
My only point was that the 7 day cycle is neither lunar or celestial. Indeed, there is no natural seven day cycle, no "natural week". It's a man-made thing, the week. That man made it under the inspiration of God is the Jewish assertion, and I think that's probably truly how it came about.
The year and the month do have a celestial component. The seven-day week
is a purely abstract convention that does not repose on any celestial phenomenon.
You seem to discount G-d, the creator of the universe.
He told us that there are seven days to the week.
b'shem Y'shua
No, I don't discount the Genesis account and the religious traditions of Judaism, adopted by the rest of the world as the seven day week.
My point was that there is no NATURAL component of the week.
One need have no religion at all to come up with the month and the year: these are celestial phenomena. You figuring them out by watching the stars, the seasons and the moon. Winter and the moon cycles are hard to miss, and practically everyone, everywhere, figured them out.
That we HAVE a week, at all, is because of Jewish religion, at least as far as we know. There isn't any NATURAL, observable seven-day cycle in the Cosmos. This didn't come out of people all around the world staring at something obvious and counting the days, like the lunar and solar calendar did.
The week came PURELY out of a human tradition, without a natural component. Judaeo-Christians and Muslims believe that this tradition came from a divine revelation. The rest of the world thinks that it came out of the West and adopted it for convenience sake (just as it is 2005 in formally atheist China, because it's convenient to use the world calendar).
I'm not arguing that the week doesn't have a divine source.
I am merely stating that the source for the week is NOT something purely natural. It's either pure human tradition, or human tradition created in response to a divine revelation. The month and year are logical subdivisions of the calendar. The week is not logical, it is traditional. People differ in what they think about the source of the tradition.
When we look at the Noachide laws, which Genesis tells us God laid upon the whole world, we do not see a Sabbath Day. The Sabbath was laid by God upon the Jews, specifically, through the laws of Moses. It applied to Jews, not to everybody else.
That would be the Apostles. You know, those twelve men specifically chosen, annnointed and set apart by Christ to lead His church after His ascension.
The Sabbath was a symbolic reminder of the act of creation. There's nothing wrong, doctrinally, with changing the symbol to become a reminder of redemption, if done by the authorized representatives of the One who had actually done the creation in the first place and set up the original Sabbath.
Folks who obsess with the Sabbath being changed are straining at gnats and swallowing camels, IMO.
i submit to you by observation a month is ~28 days
and there are four phases to the moon.
b'shem Y'shua
Because, of course, the Roman Network News reported daily on all events of the time, and knowing how ephemeral written records can be, made sure to archive all their reports on acid-free paper with stable inks, then seal them in nitrogen-filled, hermetically sealed containers with a series of clues and instructions on how to retrieve them after the Germanic tribes came along and burned pretty much everything Roman to the ground.
Exactly. And passages such as Mark 16:16 as well ("baptizing them in my name and teaching them whatsoever things I command you"), II Tim 3:16+ "All scripture is inspired of God (literally, "God-breathed")...."
Those arent the only choices. What of embellishments of proto-orthodoxy?
No, there are multiple phases of the moon. We can reduce it to four, in the same sense that a clock sometimes only has 12, 3, 6 and 9 on it. But the 7 days don't follow the phases of the moon well, or the full moon would always fall on a Friday, month after month, year after year. Also, there's nothing particularly special about 4. Sure, one can divide 28 by 4. But one can divide it by two as well, and get a 14 day week...that still doesn't really follow the moon cycle very well.
Conversely, depending on where you begin to measure a day, sometimes a month is 29 days, which is prime.
What of it? If you think you have a case to make, go for it.
So did eternal life, would you wish to forgo it because it applied to jews?
e-s>So did eternal life, would you wish to forgo it because it applied to jews?
.
Excellent !
John 4:22 "You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship
what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews".
b'shem Y'shua
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