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The Origins of Xmas
Joy
to the World?
Alan
Mansager
The stealthy Xmas
season begins early with a few retail displays appearing in September, and then
roars to a manic climax the third week of December.
The holiday consumes
Western society like a mountain forest fire. Even atheists are pulled
enthusiastically into the gift-exchanging vortex.
If Xmas is the
celebration of the Savior’s birth, what is Santa Claus doing as master of
ceremonies?
What of the strange
mix of the profane and the religious all gift-wrapped in one package?
Was St. Nick present
at the manger, along with Rudolf and Blitzen, holly and mistletoe?
Did the Apostles
prepare for each December 25 by buying gifts for one another?
Did those who
followed Yahshua pass greeting cards to one another on December 25 and sing
carols to Him amid falling snowflakes?
Did first-century
parents tell their children not to be naughty but nice for Santa’s sake, who could
satisfy their coveting?
For all of these
traditions and customs to have such allure they must be rooted somewhere in
Scripture, right? Not so fast.
Many would be
surprised to discover that the word “Christmas” is missing from Scripture. Not
a single passage tells us to observe the birthday of the Savior, either.
It is time to take an
honest look at this celebration and ask the hard questions.
In
Jeremiah 10:2 we are admonished, “Learn not the way of the heathen.”
Then in verses 3-5
the Father in heaven rebukes those who take trees from the forest and set them
up as objects of veneration.
Your salvation hinges
on whether you choose the truth of the Bible or go along with the world’s
masses as they indulge in the deception of profane practices.
Paul
admonished, “Wherefore come out from among them and be separate, says
Yahweh, and touch not the unclean thing and I will receive you,” 2 Corinthians 6:17.
You may
respond, “But how can I deprive the children of this holiday?”
If there is no
Creator in heaven, then it doesn’t matter.
You can have as good
a time as the Babylonians who worshiped nonexistent “gods” and who actually
started the whole holiday under another name.
But if there is a
Heavenly Father then you cannot do both – you cannot mix pagan practices with
the holy.
The
Eternal Yahweh said, “Be not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for
what fellowship has righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion has
light with darkness?” 2
Corinthians 6:14.
You cannot fool
yourself that you’re really observing Christmas because of the birth of Yahshua
the Messiah.
The fact is,
Christmas is firmly anchored in a winter solstice festival of ancient pagans,
which we will see.
Christ-mass
Cristes-masse was a
Catholic mass that grew out of a feast day established in the year 1038.
The
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1946 edition, candidly says, “Christmas was not
among the earliest festivals of the church.”
For the first 300
years the religious writers are silent regarding the Christmas observance.
An Armenian writer of
the eleventh century states that a Christmas-like festival was first celebrated
in Constantinople in 373.
In Egypt the Western
birthday festival was opposed during the early years of the fifth century, but
was celebrated in Alexandria as early as 432.
In 1644 the English
Puritans forbad any merriment or religious services by Act of Parliament on the
grounds that Christmas was a heathen festival.
They were so opposed
to its observance that they ordered a fast on December 25.
But why didn’t the
early converts celebrate Christmas?
To answer that, we
must go back to the great mother of pagan worship – Babylon. The founder of the
Babylonish system was Nimrod, grandson of Ham, one of Noah’s three sons.
Genesis
10:9 says, “Nimrod was a mighty hunter before Yahweh.”
The word before means
“in defiance of.” Nimrod set up his own kingdom based on a man-ruled government
and worship of himself.
An entirely pagan
religious system grew out of worship of this “hero.”
Gradually, through
trade, influence of Babylon spread to other nations as they incorporated its
government and religious system.
Mother and Child
Reunion
The universal mother
and child theme, which has been passed down over the centuries through many
different cultures and which remains strong today, had its start with the
Babylonian Semiramis.
Babylon had
mother-child worship, as did ancient Egypt, India, Rome, and Germany through
Celtic paganism (Egypt,
Bunsen, vol. 1, p. 444; Hindoo Mythology, Kennedy, p. 49; Dymock’s Classical
Dictionary; Babylon Mystery Religion, p. 13).
The husband of
Semiramis was Nimrod, who built the wicked city Nineveh, while his father Cush
was responsible for the tower of Babel in opposition to Yahweh (Alexander Hislop, The
Two Babylons, p. 26).
When Nimrod died,
Semiramis immediately proclaimed that her husband had become deified and was
resurrected to life through Tammuz.
According to The
Encyclopedia of World Religions, Tammuz was the god of vegetation. Every year a
festival was held at which his “death” and “resurrection” were celebrated.
To depict his
resurrection, the Babylonians believed that an evergreen tree sprang out of a
dead tree stump.
The old stump, or
yule log, symbolized the dead Nimrod, and the new evergreen was Nimrod
resurrected in Tammuz (Babylon
Mystery Religion, p. 152). Green holly, popular at Christmas, has long been a
symbol of eternal life and it played an important role in portraying the
rebirth of Nimrod, seen as the “Unconquerable Sun.”
Winter Solar Festival
Was Yahshua born on
December 25? Historians have long
theorized that His birth was in the autumn and not in the dead of winter, as
the sheep were still in the open fields.
“It
was an ancient custom among Jews of those days to send out their sheep to the
fields and deserts about the Passover (early spring), and bring them home at
commencement of the first rain,” Adam Clarke Commentary, vol. 5, p. 370.
From the middle of
November to the middle of April is the rainy season in the Mideast.
Because of the cold,
dampness, and sometimes snow, shepherds take their flocks into sheepfolds at
night (Daily
Life in the Time of Jesus, by Henri Daniel-Rops).
Ezra 10:9 speaks of
those in Jerusalem sitting outside in early December and shivering in the
freezing rain.
Yahshua
considered the severity of the winter in Judea when, in His prophecy of the end
times (Matthew
24:20),
said, “Pray that your flight be not in the winter…”
How, then, did
December 25 become the birthday of the Messiah?
Alexander
Hislop explains: “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” The
Two Babylons, p. 93.
The
Catholic Encyclopedia confirms the merger. “The well-known solar feast of
Natalis Invicti [The Nativity of the Unconquered Sun] celebrated on 25
December, has a strong claim on the responsibility for our December date,”
vol. 3, p. 727.
Mithraism’s Mark
Recall that the Roman
world was originally pagan, totally steeped in heathen customs and practices.
They loved festivals
and would organize a banquet at the slightest pretext. Chief among these was
the Feast of Mithras, celebrating the deity’s birthday on December 25.
Mithraism was merely
a spinoff of the ancient Babylonian worship of Tammuz.
In Egypt it was
believed that Osiris (Tammuz) was born on December 25.
Often portrayed as
brilliant as the sun, the deity Mithras was known as “The Invincible Sun,” or
“The Sun of Righteousness.” Mithraism promised immortality to its faithful.
Further
details on the relationship between December 25 and sun worship are brought to
light in The Golden Bough (p.
416): “In
the Julian Calendar the twenty-fifth of December was reckoned the winter
solstice, and it was regarded as the Nativity of the sun, because the day
begins to lengthen and the power of the sun to increase from that turning point
of the year. Now Mithras was regularly identified by his worshipers with the
Sun, the Unconquered Sun, as they called him; hence his nativity also fell on
the twenty-fifth of December.”
The merger of
Mithraic beliefs with the customs and traditions surrounding the birth of the
Savior was largely because Mithraism was popular at the time of the Messiah’s
birth.
“Between
1400 B.C.E. and 400 C.E., Persians, Indians, Romans, and Greeks worshiped
Mithras. He was particularly important in the Roman Empire in the 2nd and 3rd
centuries,”
Encyclopedia
of World Religions, p. 94.
The pagan feast of
the Saturnalia, which the Romans celebrated in honor of the deity Saturn from
December 17 to 24, eventually encompassed the Feast of Mithras.
Many of the practices
of Christmas trace to the Saturnalia celebration.
A Beckoning Blend
How, then, did these
rank, pagan festivals of sun worship become entwined with the worship of the
Savior of men? The same way December 25 came to be accepted.
The New Schaff Herzog
Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge explains:
“The
pagan Saturnalia and Brumalia were too deeply entrenched in popular custom to
be set aside by Christian influence. The recognition of Sunday (the day of
Phoebus and Mithras as well as the L-rd’s Day) by the emperor Constantine as a
legal holiday, along with the influence of Manicheism, which identified the Son
of [Yahweh] with the physical sun, may have led Christians of the fourth century
to feel the appropriateness of making the birthday of the Son of [Yahweh]
coincide with that of the physical sun.“
The pagan festival
with its riot and merrymaking was so popular that Christians were glad of an
excuse to continue its celebration with little change in spirit or in manner.
Christian preachers
of the West and the Nearer East protested against the unseemly frivolity with
which [Yahshua’s] birthday was celebrated, while Christians of Mesopotamia
accused their Western brethren of idolatry and sun-worship for adopting as
Christian this pagan festival.
“Yet
the festival rapidly gained acceptance and became at last so firmly established
that even the Protestant revolution of the sixteenth century was not able to
dislodge it,”
p. 48.
Merely to placate the
heathen and bring them into the church, the pagan festival of Christmas was
adopted.
In other words, they
could have both their cherished old Saturnalia as well as their new faith –
merely cloaked in a different name!
The Church Slowly
Absorbs Xmas
But it took nearly
400 years before the church began to accept Christmas into its calendar. It
wasn’t without objection and it wasn’t until the end of the fourth century that
it was declared official, The
Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 3, p. 725.
A great amount of
confusion initially surrounded this merger of the Saturnalia with the nativity.
The people were
confusing sun worship with worship of the Son of Yahweh.
But whether the
masses adopted the celebration of Xmas or not, the fact remains that nowhere in
the Bible is the command to observe the Savior’s birthday.
The early converts
would have nothing to do with it. In fact, His precise date of birth is
obscured because Yahweh never intended His birth to be a cause for celebration.
Yahweh punished ancient
Israel for becoming involved in heathen rituals (see 2 Kings 17:9-23; Acts 7:39-43).
He commands not to
celebrate the Savior’s birth, but to remember Yahshua’s death at Passover,
Will your Heavenly
Father look the other way if you indulge in the same kinds of false festivals
that Israel was forbidden to keep?
If you
are searching for an assembly with strong family values and with an
uncompromising stand on the Bible look no further. We believe in both the Old
and New testaments and teach the true Name of the Heavenly Father, Yahweh. We
also proclaim the Son, who was originally named Yahshua, a name that means
“Yahweh is salvation.” The Savior’s mission is reflected in His Name–to bring
the message of salvation to earth. We look to our Savior for salvation,
realizing that only through Him do we find redemption and forgiveness of sins.
We also observe the seven annual Feast days, along with the seventh-day
Sabbath. If you earnestly desire a refuge from this world and man’s traditions,
we welcome you here and pray that you will take the time to consider what we
teach and represent
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