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 myth—like 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 flat—often 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.
He did - that's why the Jewish Sabbath is on Saturday.
Or how Tiu's Day, Woden's Day, Thors' Day or Frie's Day have nothing to do with the Germanic gods!
"I[f] 'son of God' equals God, then aren't Christians making themselves equal with God?"
The clearest expression of Jesus' divinity is not made in the "Son of Man" or "Son of God" sections, but elsewhere.
From his own mouth, he used the great I AM self-referentially, SHOCKING blasphemy to his hearers...unless he was God.
And John begins his Gospel: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God...and the Word became flesh..."
So, Jesus was the Word made flesh, and the Word is God. Therefore, Jesus is God, the great I AM of Genesis, which is what he called himself in John's Gospel.
Jesus said he was Yahweh. That's as direct a claim of divinity as is possible.
God clearly warned the Israelites to avoid doing that-- not to intermarry, to avoid the "high places", the ashtaroth, the household gods, etc. of Joshua, Judges, etc. These men were faithful to God's Word to the point of death as they established Christianity(don't put new wine into old skins) . Therefore it is incumbent on Christians not to roll over and accept the thought that there was the degree of syncretism you suggest. As remote and obscure as your sources necessarily are, and as subjective as interpretation of history is, anyway, all that really remains is the agenda(just like reading NYT today.) Do you believe in the literal bodily resuurection, and the literal virgin birth , or is your Christianity too broad minded for that old time religion?
"What is the evidence that Paul belonged to the Sanhedrin?"
There isn't any. He wasn't. My statement was in error.
What I should have said was that Saul served the Sanhedrin as an investigator and prosecutor prior to his conversion, not that he was himself a member of the 71. That would have been correct.
In my eagerness to make the point that Saul of Tarsus was certainly Jewish, I ran past the facts and made and error.
We are prone to do this out of religious zeal.
It's a trap easily fallen into.
And we should always try to resist it, and correct ourselves when we find we have done it.
As to the specific time that the Judaism became formally matrilinear, it is difficult to pinpoint.
The Jewish War and destruction of the Temple mark a clear break in history, because after that the Jews were no longer geographically as compact or secure. The Jewish CENTER was broken, and the religion and ethnic group fell everywhere into ill repute because of the war against the Empire.
Certainly in the aleas of warfare, many many Jewish women were enslaved and raped by Roman soldiers and their auxilia.
But the Jewish traditions regarding Jesus suggest that Jesus was ben Pantera, son of the Panther, which may be a gloss on the Pantera legion. In other words, Jesus was the son of a prostitute and a Roman soldier. Such was the opinion of an earlier part of Jewish tradition. This is not exactly emphasized in the modern world of get-along gemutlichkeit, in which the words of hatred for Judaism and Jewish authorities contained in the New Testament are jarring. We should remember that the hatred was mutual, and that the Jews of the era were the established power, and murdered a lot of Christians. Saul of Tarsus was a prosecutor out there ferreting out Christians for arrest, torture and death. The anti-Jewish polemics of the New Testament were those of an oppressed minority believing it possessed the truth but fighting for its life, and the destruction of the Temple was viewed, by the Christians of 70 BC, as proof that God had destroyed the Jews and condemned them to perdition, etc.
Anyway, to return to the matrilineal concept, we can't point to a single document that says when it became so - no such document exists. But we do know that before the Romans was the Hellenic era and the Maccabean dynasty, and terrible traumas from foreign invasions, etc. Certainly after the destruction of the Temple the matrilineal principle became recorded in the Jewish traditions. But was this made up out of wholecloth, or did it represent a traditional understanding? Probably the latter.
Beyond that, a high-ranking Jew like Saul of Tarsus, committed and zealous and studying within Jewish circles, was certainly a Jew by birth, both patrilineal and matrilineal. Think well about TODAY, when changing religion is really no big deal, when deal and horror does not await anybody who challenges anything, and when yeshiva is wide open to anyone of any faith who wants to enter it. Just how many young Christians or Gentiles are devotedly focused on joining the rabbinate? Probably none.
Now retrograde to the ethnically bigoted, utterly closed-minded, violent and xenophobic First Century Palestine. Could Saul the Gentile have become a prosecutor in the Sanhedrin, and a committed student of Judaism in the inner circle? No. It was impossible. Could a Roman have simply showed up, said he wanted to adopt the religion, and actually been admitted to the inner circle, and entrusted with the most delicate matters of faith?
No.
I have read enough to know that all four accounts differ considerably on this. But the point was that Mary Magdalene discovered the empty tomb around dawn on Sunday. That doesn't mean that it wasn't empty Saturday at 11:59 pm. The Scriptures don't fix the time only the discovery.
Obviously not close enough. Read further in Matthew -
Matthew 28:1-10
1 After the Sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to view the tomb. 2 Suddenly there was a violent earthquake, because an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and approached the tomb. He rolled back the stone and was sitting on it.
The opening of the tomb in the other gospel parallels is indicative of the time of the resurrection. It is nonsensical to think that the moment of resurrection was 11:59 PM Saturday when the associated opening of the tomb, and appearances of Jesus indicate otherwise.
Well three other accounts don't jive with this one, so why pick this one over the others? Also, further reading into Matthew gives us this in 28:6 "He is not here: for he is risen, as he said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay."
Again, the Scriptures plainly state that the tomb was already empty. Does this somehow shake your faith, whether it was Friday, Saturday, Sunday or Monday? I doubt that the day matters at all, it is the event that is celebrated.
That's not the greek that would be associated with my bible, or any other accepted translations. Dawn does not equal dusk. The greek word here is Epiphosko (tranliterated) which means "to grow light, to dawn " this is further supported by the word used for "end" - Opse (transliterated) which has as its definition "after a long time, long after, late late in the day, i.e. at evening the sabbath having just passed, after the sabbath at the early dawn of the first day of the week
Only a perverted greek interpretation would come anywhere close to what you claim is the interpretation.
In a very closed sense you are correct. However, that ignores the greater context of what is recorded, and in the light of the context is an incorrect understanding. Words mean things and context provides the understanding of the desired definition of words. BTW, there is nothing in the gospel narratives indicating that the women were carrying lamps, nor were Peter and John when they went to the tomb. This would make sense if it were the daylight hours of Sunday, not the night time hours of Saturday night.
I was not refering to Roman persecution, but persecution by Jewish authorities. Up until approximately AD 64 the Romans considered Christianity to be an Jewish cult, and therefore 'tolerated' until Nero singled it out for persecution. However, Christians were persecuted by Roman and other civil authorities prior to this as docmented in Acts.
Ah, you stated it far better than I.
The other gospels provide more and less detail, similar to testamony given by different witnesses at a trial. Matthew provides a little more detail in the timing. For instance, the others do not mention the angel rolling back the stone, but in the other narratives the stone is rolled back without explaining the how. Different witness, different details, none contradicting the other.
Again, the Scriptures plainly state that the tomb was already empty. Does this somehow shake your faith, whether it was Friday, Saturday, Sunday or Monday? I doubt that the day matters at all, it is the event that is celebrated.
It matters in that Jesus had stated that he would be raised on the third day:
Mt 16:21, 17:23, 20:19, 27:64 (understood by the Jewish leadership); Lk 9:22, 13:32, 18:33 (again, understood by the Jewish leadership), 24:7, 24:46
The when is important as it seals His claim to be Messiah and God.
Third day from when? If it is in the usage of today, that would put it on Monday. If your mailman tells you on Friday that he will return with a package in three days, when will you expect to see him?
"To say that Jesus was physically with God in the beginning is to read into the verses in the Gospel of John, theology that is simply not there."
I wasn't making this point, but a different one: that Jesus was God.
That's what it says. Word = God. Word became flesh in Jesus. Word = Jesus. Therefore, God = Jesus.
The temporal sequence of who and when it not my concern, but rather to demonstrate the basic truth, which seemed to be in the original questioner's question, that Christian religion does not consider Jesus to simply be a very holy prophet, or merely the son of God like you or me, but actually God incarnate, unlike you are me.
In other words, to put it directly, Jesus is God, and Christians specifically worship Jesus. They don't worship God THROUGH Jesus. They worship Jesus, because Jesus is The One True God.
Christian theology can then parse out the mystery of the three persons of the Trinity and their interrelationship and temporal existence. But that's "High Theology" which can be indulged in only after one has accepted the central premise: Christianity is the direct worship of God Jesus.
That's why Jesus was executed for blasphemy. At least in John's account he said he was God. In the other accounts, he is more elusive..."The Son of Man". In John, Jesus outright applies the divine name, the Great I Am, to his own person: "I tell you, that before Abraham was I AM."
Jesus said he was Yahweh.
Can't get more blasphemous (or flippin' insane) than THAT.
Unless he was.
To dawn also means to begin.... like toward the first day of the week. This, in the Hebrew way of looking at things, would be close to sundown.
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