Why December 25? The origin of Christmas had nothing to do with paganism

I find your conclusions interesting. I was extremely curious myself about the subject. Even though there is no evidence at all to suggest the gospels were fabricated writings, there are other mentioning of Jesus in secular historical accounts as well. Here's my conclusions.
1. Jesus existed
2. Jesus was executed for his statements and actions
3. Jesus went missing from his grave
4. Some people (including his own flesh brother that didn't follow his teachings) truly believed he rose from the dead.

Not necessarily. The Catholic Church has a vested interest in debunking Mithraism. To have it become common knowledge that much of the "mystery" part of Christianity is borrowed wholesale from another monotheistic religion (probably as a method of winning converts), the Church would lose a lot of its power and prestige. Better for any possible ties to be denounced "in no uncertain terms."

In other words, a source is not authoritative if it's its ox which stands to be gored.

He points out that the ancient Roman religions had no winter solstice festival.

I stopped reading at that point. What was this guy smoking?

Now that's an objective, unbiased source.

Jr. needs to bring more to the game other than his witty repartee. His silence otherwise cedes the point to you Anton.

Here's a good web site for calendars and calendar corrections. They have some interesting articles and web programs.

In other words, a source is not authoritative if it's its ox which stands to be gored.

The Catholic Encyclopedia is a massive and impressive bit of scholarship. Few except the profoundly ignorant dismiss it out of hand as "biased."

What sources have you got proving your view, eh?

I don't accept everything it has as "biased" -- just that which strikes at the foundations of its creed. Indeed, the CE is one of the better sources for Church history and the more subtle tenets of the catechism.

In the same way I find Wikipedia to be helpful for pointing the way to further research, but I don't necessarily dismiss its bias either.

Exodus 3:14 (where God says to Moses, "I am who I am" or "I am who am")...in the Greek Septuagint text it reads:

egO eimi ho On
(with capital O standing for omega)

ego = "I"
eimi = "am"
ho = relative pronoun, masculine, equivalent to "who" or "which"
On = present active participle of the verb meaning "to be," so "being," "existing."

The present participle in Greek shows continuance as opposed to a simple occurrence, so On means "continuing to exist."

The Catholic Church has a vested interest in debunking Mithraism. To have it become common knowledge that much of the "mystery" part of Christianity is borrowed wholesale from another monotheistic religion (probably as a method of winning converts), the Church would lose a lot of its power and prestige. Better for any possible ties to be denounced "in no uncertain terms."

Uh, perhaps you didn't read the excerpt I provided wherein the editors of the Catholic Encyclopedia included citations to works that propagated the very claims you're making. That sounds like solid scholarship to me, not a Church that's afraid of those who make up lies about it.

In the same way I find Wikipedia to be helpful for pointing the way to further research, but I don't necessarily dismiss its bias either.

Thanks. At least now I know which side of the street you walk on. Wikipedia is about as authoritative as a handwritten note tacked to a bulletin board in a college dormitory.

You evidently completely missed the "pointing the way to further research."

Thank you,

Here is Exodus 3:14 culled from the King James version:

3:14 "And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you."

Two crucial questions:
(1) Do the Greek textus receptus or the Greek Septuagint manuscripts, either one of them, make any use of CAPITAL LETTERS. I understand that there are no such things in the ancient Greek. So, making the distinction between "I am" and "I AM", which in English we have done with AllCaps, is an English translation gloss.

(2) It's not the "egO eimi ho On" - "I am that I am" that interests me half as much as the second short, terse, "I am" that appears near the end of that sentence in the English text of 3:14.

Is THAT Greek "I AM" that appears THERE, at the end of Exodus 3:14 in the Septuagint Greek, the same "I am" that Jesus uses?

(In Hebrew, I don't think that the "I am" there is the regular verb, but rather is the name of God, translated as "I am", but not the standard Hebrew for "I am". Obviously that's a crucial distinction. IF Jesus spoke in HEBREW at that point, and the word he used was not the regular Hebrew "I am", but rather, Yahweh... "Before Abraham was, YAH-WEH" - well, that would be PRECISELY the sort of thing that would account for the INSTANT desire of the listeners to kill him on the spot. Only the high priest pronounced that word, and only once a year. If that's what the Greek translates, and if the Greek OT and NT reflect that parallel hinting it, then Jesus did indeed call himself God.

bookmarking for later reading

"The Catholic Church has a vested interest in debunking Mithraism. To have it become common knowledge that much of the "mystery" part of Christianity is borrowed wholesale from another monotheistic religion (probably as a method of winning converts), the Church would lose a lot of its power and prestige."

The problem with your theory is that the timeline's all wrong. You speak of the Catholic Church as having "power and prestige", but in fact it was ILLEGAL, and punishable by death to be a member of it, for the first 300 years of the Christian era. Now, from that time period, BEFORE the Church was legal and HAD any prestige, we have a plethora of documents, particularly the early parts of Eusebius' "History of the Church", composed in the late 200s when the Church was still illegal, and persecuted, but also plenty of documents from the 100s, and not a few from the First Century itself (including the letters and Gospels of the Bible and the Didache of the Apostles). From all of that mass of documents we see a church operating that was not very different from today. We see the debates and fierce internal struggles, but they were between Christians, particularly Gnostics and Arians, and not concerned much with Mithraism at all.

So, you've got an ILLEGAL church, that didn't HAVE any power or prestige during all of those early centuries, and you've got a library of records thrown off by the partisans of that early, illegal Church, and they are self-referential and refer to a good many debates, but are not concerned with Mithraism at all.

All of the evidence points the wrong way.
By the mid-300s, when the Church finally became legal and the persecutions well and truly ended, there was already a very thick, broad, well-documented tradition. We HAVE those documents in our possession and they are available for anyone to read who cares to. We KNOW what the early fathers of the Church, in the Second Century, and the Third Century, were concerned about. Partly, it was about keeping the faith in the face of horrendous Roman torture and slaughter of Christians (in the Apostolic times of the First Century, it was about keeping the faith in the face of the violent onslaught of the Jewish authorities).

The Church then was in the position of the Church today in China. There was no power to "protect". There was no prestige to lose. Mithraism was widely practiced and tolerated. Christianity, when found out, got its adherents pulled apart by lions, burnt to death on iron grills, stretched to die on crosses, and turned into human torches to light nighttime entertainment in the arenas of the Empire. If anything, the Christians had a survival interest to look like the Mithraists or pagans or Jews or, really, anybody but who they were, because who they were was ILLEGAL. Indeed, the Romans called the Christians ATHEISTS, because they worshipped a man. Pliny understood the Christians to be CANNIBALS, who ate human flesh and blood in secret rites. Such were the prejudices and calumnies of the time.

So, looking back at the Catholic Church then, small, beaten, in the toils, and seeing some institution with the power and the prestige to adopt other cultic symbols wholesale, and to suppress the memory of it...this is simply absurd. People who are so utterly convinced they are following the word of God that they are willing to allow themselves to be tortured to death in public by the thousands and thousands for three centuries, who practice their faith underground so as to not be caught and fed to live beasts along with their children, are simply not the sort of people to be syncretists and adopt the formulas of the pagan religions around them. If Christians wanted to be pagans, all they had to do was openly embrace the very legal, very popular mithraism all around them. If they wanted to be monotheists, all they had to do was embrace the very legal, very open Judaism across the Empire. They believed something else. Something strange and dangerous and subversive. They were not the ones ADOPTING and SYNCRETIZING. They were the ones overthrowing the applecart with beliefs such as the idea that their religious duties superseded the laws of the Emperor, that their meek deaths granted them the crown of heaven, etc.

This was not a shy little timid religion not sure about what it believed and subject to adopt whatever was popular. It was a mystic cult of fanatics loyal unto death, which came often, to a set of illegal, and by the standards of the time DISGRACEFUL practices.

All of this we know, because we have a library of documents from those terrible times, and because we have Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, who took the time to synthesize it all for the generations to come, and to lay down for us the history of Christianity, which he began to write which Christianity was still on the torture rack, illegal, disgraceful, hidden and powerless.

TODAY, and in the intervening centuries, the Church, and the Catholic Church especially, have become strong, large, powerful and prestigious. But back at the time you are looking at, back when supposedly these Mithraic rites were being adopted, the Church was anything but those things.

And by the time the Church came through all of those horrors and became legal, and prestigious and powerful, it had already been purified by the crucible of three hundred years of flames and whips and crosses and swords. The Catholics knew who they were, and they knew what they believed, and they were always quite fierce about it. This was the ONLY religion of any size and endurance that the full might of the Roman state sought to wipe out for three centuries, but which in the end conquered Rome utterly and outlived the Empire by 1600 years and counting.

Not one thing in Catholicism comes from Mithraism. Nothing.
There was no syncretism.
And the reason Mithraism died out but Christianity thrived was precisely because of the relative intensity of Christian belief, and flabby paganism of mithraic followers. Paganism died easily, because nobody really believed it. Christianity fought the Roman Empire for three hundred years, head to head, without help, and conquered it utterly, because the Christians' belief in their religion was stronger than the Romans belief in their own government and laws. The Christians didn't LEARN that from anybody, because no other group in the history of Rome was persecuted so viciously, continuously and widely for so long.

The documents of the early Church are there. Read Eusebius. He lived then. You'll see a Christianity that is utterly recognizable, but not powerful or prestigious. Hidden. Persecuted. Like in China. But utterly, fiercely certain of its beliefs.

The latter part of the sentence reads:

houtOs ereis tois hyiois IsraEl ho On apestalken me pros hymas.
(I'm using the capital E to represent eta.)

"Thus will you say to the sons/children of Israel The existing one has sent me to you."

It's hard to put it into normal English...it's just the definite article (I was mistaken earlier when I said it was a relative pronoun--the forms are almost alike but the accent is different) plus the present active participle of "to be."

In John 8.58, Jesus says, "Before Abraham came to be, I am." The Greek there is egO eimi. That's just the normal way to say "I am" in Greek (although the personal pronoun can be left out).

There is no way this can be construed as being the equivalent of dusk or evening which is the opposite.

So....when the Greek says in verse 1, [Now late on Sabbath] this really means at sunrise Sunday morning....12 hours later. I think I got it now. Thankyou so much.

Bump for later read

That is very useful information.

So, when every Bible I own capitalizes the "I AM" in John, and thereby makes the reference, in English translation, to God's speaking to Moses, they are inserting a gloss that has no basis at all in Christian tradition.

Unfortunately, what Jesus said, at least in Greek, doesn't make any sense. "Before Abraham was, I was" makes sense. "Before Abraham was, I am" is meaningless.

Why do you suppose the Jews in John's recounting all became enraged at that and wanted to kill Jesus?

OK, I'll agree about Bethlehem. You've got persuasive evidence.

But they would have "moved up" from the cave/manger setup pretty quickly into regular housing.

Jesus' words don't make sense if he is a regular human being, less than 50 years old (as the Jews speaking to him note)...they do make sense if he is claiming to be eternally existent or at least to have an existence that precedes Abraham's lifetime, and that's how the Jews understand his words.