Please stay on the discussion at hand and not use a Red Herring and deflect this to a discussion about me as a way to change the topic. Thank you.
The ancients did not select the best and only evidence that was around 200 AD - which would have led them to go with March or April - and thus we would not have Christmas being torn up because of their actions in choosing a celebration of Christ’s birth that was too close to comfort to certain pagan holidays. Blame them, not me.
What wisdom they had in choosing the 25th of December, instead of going with the best evidence they had, which Clement provided!!!!
BTW, by bring in people celebrating their birthday on other days other than the one they were born on, is an apples to oranges argument, as these “many people” aren’t Christ the Lord, and the day chosen for his birth was not in keeping with the evidence they had then to go with from 200 AD.
I am not trying to change the subject, I am trying to understand why you bring the subject up.
As for: “The ancients did not select the best and only evidence that was around 200 AD - which would have led them to go with March or April - and thus we would not have Christmas being torn up because of their actions in choosing a celebration of Christ’s birth that was too close to comfort to certain pagan holidays. Blame them, not me.” is a fallacious statement, since you cannot know if we would be in the same situation or not had His birth been celebrated at a different time.
How Did Christmas Come to Be Celebrated on December 25?
A. Roman pagans first introduced the holiday of Saturnalia, a week long period of lawlessness celebrated between December 17-25. During this period, Roman courts were closed, and Roman law dictated that no one could be punished for damaging property or injuring people during the weeklong celebration. The festival began when Roman authorities chose “an enemy of the Roman people” to represent the “Lord of Misrule.”
Each Roman community selected a victim whom they forced to indulge in food and other physical pleasures throughout the week. At the festival’s conclusion, December 25th, Roman authorities believed they were destroying the forces of darkness by brutally murdering this innocent man or woman.
B. The ancient Greek writer poet and historian Lucian (in his dialogue entitled Saturnalia) describes the festival’s observance in his time. In addition to human sacrifice, he mentions these customs: widespread intoxication; going from house to house while singing naked; rape and other sexual license; and consuming human-shaped biscuits (still produced in some English and most German bakeries during the Christmas season).
C. In the 4th century CE, Christianity imported the Saturnalia festival hoping to take the pagan masses in with it. Christian leaders succeeded in converting to Christianity large numbers of pagans by promising them that they could continue to celebrate the Saturnalia as Christians.
D. The problem was that there was nothing intrinsically Christian about Saturnalia. To remedy this, these Christian leaders named Saturnalia’s concluding day, December 25th, to be Jesus’ birthday