21 - Origins of Christmas

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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So, here we are, and the few of us that got the memo that we still have church on Sunday, and even though it's

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December 25th, and obviously some folks are traveling and things, and I suppose some folks may be stuck in northern

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Arizona, I understand it's a winter wonderland up there after the snows and stuff yesterday, but I mentioned that we might sneak into the church history series a little discussion of the history, because we are in the time period where, let's see, we're in the

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Alexandrian school, and so yeah, we're right in the time period where most of the controversy exists regarding the subject of the origination of holidays as a whole, and certainly the issue of Christmas.

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Now, if you read almost anything that has been printed in the past 50 -60 years, you will have encountered the fact that even amongst most

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Christians, the accepted narrative is that the early

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Christians borrowed from pagan religions. I've heard some people say,

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I remember even when I was in school, now I think about it, some people saying that what the

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Christians were doing is, since there was Saturnalia around the time of the winter solstice, which of course,

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I know this is really depressing for us Phoenicians to think about, but you do realize the days are getting longer and longer again, right?

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You know what that means, it's coming again, and we just thought it left just recently, so yeah, here it comes again.

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Anyway, but obviously there was a tremendous amount of religious activity associated with the 21st, 22nd of the year.

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Ancient man certainly recognized the movements of the stars and the sun and things like that, and so the idea is that since there were pagan festivals going on, the

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Christians just borrowed that, and some even theorized that since it was during a period of persecution, that way the

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Christians could celebrate and not be noticed, because all the pagans were celebrating too, and so no one would notice if they were celebrating something else, so on and so forth.

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But the, well, I don't know, if you're lost in the crowd type thing, everybody's celebrating, so you can celebrate too.

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So the idea being that this is a pagan celebration that's basically been baptized and brought over from paganism, and normally there are a few lines of argumentation.

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First of all, it is very obvious that we are not given a date for the birth of Christ in Scripture, and we certainly are not given a commandment to mark the date, to set the date apart, anything along those lines.

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There's no question about that. Secondly, we're told that it could not possibly have been in this time of year, and generally the argument there is, well, there would not have been shepherds out in the fields abiding with their flocks by night in the dead of winter.

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And so most of the time what you'll hear is, well, it was probably in the springtime sometime, we just don't know, but it's just all tradition, and let's not worry ourselves too much about it.

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Now, of course, the Puritans didn't like any of that, smacked way too much of Romanism for them, and so there are still people today that will get very, very, very, very focused upon this particular issue.

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They really, really, really will. So what do you do with all of that?

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I mean, how do we understand our own views on this subject, and how we can understand these things?

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I mean, I don't know what you've got going on today, but most people do spend time with their family, and I would imagine a few gifts have been exchanged, and are we being inconsistent on these things?

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Well, I just want to mention a few things and try to keep it in the church history realm to try to provide some balance here.

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First of all, just in regards to that objection about shepherds in the fields with their flocks, I don't know if you remember a couple nights ago, but it was just a couple nights ago, didn't even get down to below 60 at my house, we had a subtropical system come through there that was pumping, that was warm, it was warm air, it was moist, and you'd want to have the flocks out at that time, because it's cheaper to have the flocks in the field than to be paying for grain or feed for them in a sheltered place, and so Israel does have a very similar climate to Arizona at that point.

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And so, A, I don't think that would necessarily follow, and B, there were certain flocks that were always kept out, and those would be the sacrificial flocks for the temple.

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As long as the temple worship was going on, there had to be flocks for the sacrifices. And so, some people try to make a connection there, the sacrificial flocks, and those are the shepherds, and that's speculation, but it is a defeater to the objection that, well, it couldn't have been this time of year because of the shepherds in the field, and blah, blah, blah.

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Where did the date come from? Well, I guess the first question that we have to ask is, what's the earliest evidence we have of Christians mentioning anything about celebrating the birth of Christ?

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And that's a little bit difficult to answer. It depends on where you are.

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As you probably know, there is a difference between the

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East and the West, once again, as to the actual date of the celebration, just as in the what controversy?

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Who said that? Wow, man. Have you been practicing that?

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We're not taking him on in Bible trivia anytime soon, that's for sure. He's ready to go.

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Yes, as in the quarter decimal controversy, you have differences between the

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East and the West, and interestingly enough, in the exact parallel way, the

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East especially emphasized that they had apostolic evidence, not only for when to celebrate

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Easter, but also when to celebrate the birth of Christ, and when do they do it?

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January 6th. Now, when you think about it, what is January 6th?

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It's 12 days after today. Sorry about that, Josh. You wanted to get back into the game there.

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I got you. So, the 12 days of Christmas actually go from December 25th to January 6th.

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This became, over time, a feast period that would sort of include both dates, one at the beginning and one at the end.

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So, it depends on whether you're in the East or the West, as to which date is going to be referenced.

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In the West, there seems to be decent evidence that as early as the 250s or so, you start getting some comments that seem to indicate that the

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Christian making that comment had in mind the idea that Christ was born around December 25th.

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Part of this was due to the idea that the annunciation of the angel to Mary became associated with March 25th, and what's nine months after March 25th, but December 25th.

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There are various reasons and arguments that were put forward, but interestingly enough, none of them had to do in this time period, with the

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Christians sitting around going, hmm, let's see, we're being persecuted by the pagans, let's see how we can look more like them.

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That's not what the Christians wanted to do. That's not what they were trying to do. The idea that there was a desire on their part to look like the world around them, or to do anything like this, there just simply isn't any evidence for that at all.

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One of the arguments that is put forward has to do with the

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Roman cult of Mithraism. Mithraism arose in the

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East, moved more to the West, it became particularly popular in the second and third centuries.

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People have tried to say it's the source of Christianity itself. That's ridiculous. It arose too late to have any type of major impact in the major cities where Paul was.

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It's absurd, but parallels will be drawn between Mithra and Mithraism, and we'll say, see, this is where it came from.

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What's interesting is, when you look at what's happening with Christianity, especially in the second and third, into the fourth century,

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Christianity is on the rise, and the pagan religions are collapsing. Remember, we have

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Emperor Julian the Apostate, who tried to bring Rome back to its greatness by going back to persecuting

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Christians, and going back to the ancestral gods, and things like that. But those religions were collapsing, because the empire was collapsing, and those pagan religions had always been associated with the state.

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So when the state starts going down, religion starts going down along with it. So why would the

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Christians be looking to borrow from what's diminishing and decreasing, when it's totally against what their beliefs are, and their whole history is in the first place?

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It's very strange. You need to understand that in our day, so much of what you will hear on television, read in books, is a part of the history of religions movement.

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And what this is, is a movement where, basically, it's

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Darwinian evolutionary theory applied to religion. And so there can't be anything unique in religion.

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So anything that looks like it's unique in one religion, has to have been borrowed from another.

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And so you're constantly looking for parallels. This results in what's called parallelomania.

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Parallelomania. Let me give you a good example of parallelomania. How many of you have heard of the

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Zeitgeist movie? Just a couple of you. Believe me, that shows that we don't have too many millennials in here.

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Because it's unfortunately far more viewed amongst the younger folks than us older folks.

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But here is what the Zeitgeist movie says concerning Horus. Now one of the arguments that is made is, well, the

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Jesus story, I've been told Dionysus was the basis of the Jesus story.

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Horus, Osiris, Mithra, all of these, I've heard thrown out there as the alleged history of where Jesus came from.

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Now imagine if you actually believed this, and it's put forward in a rather schnazzy

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YouTube video. Horus was born of the virgin Isis on December 25th in a cave.

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A star in the east announced his birth, and he was visited by three wise men. He had an earthly father named

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Seb, which translates to Joseph. He was baptized by Anup, the baptizer. He had 12 disciples.

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He performed miracles, walking on water, raising El, Osiris. He gave a sermon on the mount.

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He was crucified between two thieves. He was buried for three days and was resurrected. He was called Christ, anointed one, the way, the truth, and light,

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Messiah, son of man, et cetera. Now, you don't have, you are the product of the public educational system.

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And in our day, that means critical thinking is not the foremost thing that you're taught in classes any longer.

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And so you look at that, and it sure looks really troubling.

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I mean, if that's the case, I mean, that's a tremendous number of parallels. And this comes earlier.

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So, obviously, you can't seriously believe that Jesus is who he said he was if this story came earlier, right?

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And so, how do you respond to something like that? I mean, most of us don't have degrees in Egyptology.

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Most of us don't have books on Horus or Osiris or Isis sitting on our shelves.

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The only reason I do is because I've had to deal with Mormonism. Now, why would

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Mormonism be relevant to that? Anybody know? Why would Mormonism and Egyptology have anything to do with each other?

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Anybody know? Book of Abraham, exactly. Well, two things.

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Book of Abraham, first of all, because there is a book in LDS scripture called the Book of Abraham, which allegedly, it has, it actually has what are called facsimiles, one, two, and three, which are from Egyptian funerary documents.

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So that's interesting. And it's one of the clearest examples of the fact that Joseph Smith had no clue what he was talking about.

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But the Book of Mormon itself was allegedly written in Reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics.

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So, whatever in the world that is. Is that Calvinistic Egyptian hieroglyphics? I really don't know.

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No one's ever seen it, so nobody knows. But, yes, I do have a fair amount of material on Egyptology in my library.

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But how would you respond to any of this? Well, the fact of the matter is, not a single statement that I just read, not a single statement, is even semi -true.

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Every single one of them is a complete lie. A complete lie. The only thing that is even close is that, well, first of all, virgin

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Isis. There are not many virgins in Egyptian religion at all.

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Horus was not born of virgin Isis, and he was born sometime near the winter solstice.

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So you just sort of guess, ah, December 25th, that's close enough, so you just throw it in there. There's nothing about a cave, nothing about a star, nothing about three wise men, nothing about Seb.

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Seb does not translate to Joseph. Never heard of Anup the Baptizer. He may have had three disciples at best.

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He performed miracles in the underworld, because he's the god of the underworld.

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No one ever heard anything about Sermon on the Mount, nothing about being crucified, nothing about two thieves. He was buried for three days and was resurrected.

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I love when people talk about resurrection in Egyptian mythology. Because if you become alive in the underworld, that's not the same as resurrection in the

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Bible. Basically, that would be like saying the

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Jesus story was based on the walking dead. Look at all the resurrected people. Not quite. A little bit of a difference in the parameters there.

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And never is he called Christ, anointed one, the way, the truth, light, Messiah, son of... nowhere. Nowhere.

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It's just 100 % lies. And I don't know how many hundreds of millions of hits that video has gotten, but I can guarantee if it was monetized, they've made some real money off those lies, just as Dan Brown did off of the

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Da Vinci Code and so on and so forth. And so, where does this come from? It comes from the history of religion stuff.

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It comes from parallelomania, where if it's in this religion, then it must be in that religion too.

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And they must have borrowed from one another. Totally ignoring the context of those religious faiths.

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So, for example, when someone talks about dying and rising gods, well, there were gods who died and rose in paganism, but they were the gods of the crops.

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And so, you had the cycle, and you had the fall, and then winter, and then spring, and resurrection, and yeah, but those were all pagan.

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Those were all polytheistic. None of those were in the context of a monotheistic one god created all things, separate from his creation, all that kind of stuff at all.

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To try to force a parallel where there is such fundamental discontinuity is really difficult.

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Yes, sir? Don't we have a fundamentally better answer for that, though, too? Because we believe that the

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Tower of Babel actually happened. So, we do believe that there was once a group of people who had the same belief.

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Yeah, but that wouldn't have anything to do with the Christ story. No, that's not what I'm getting at. But I'm talking about the parallel between multiple religions.

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If they all started with Noah, and they all came from the same family group, it would explain why we have all these different kinds of religions.

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Well, the only problem is most of the really distinguishing marks of Babylonian and Assyrian religion and things like that would have been after the flood.

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That's when they developed. So, I don't know that that would really be a response at that point.

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At this point, I'm talking specifically about alleged parallels to Christ, which is way later than that. So, this parallelomania, it's all over out there.

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And when we accept it, as many

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Christians have, we're really putting ourselves in a bind at that point to be consistent in our argumentation when defending one thing and defending key elements of the faith over against defending what we would call adiaphora, things that don't really matter.

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We need to try to be consistent. Now, I think I mentioned last year, if I recall correctly, and I'm going to try to simplify this as much as possible, because the article that I am referring to,

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I think, didn't I pass it out one year? I've got to look at you guys, you're supposed to remember all these things.

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You're the church historians. Didn't I? Brother Soto, didn't

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I? I seem to recall, not that long ago, having run five or six copies of this particular article, and I said, if you want to do more reading, and I don't know if anyone took any of them, but I brought them anyways.

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Maybe it was just so boring to everybody that I just took them all home and it was very sad.

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Anyway, rejected once again. But there is a fascinating article by Dr.

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Roger Beckwith. Now, when I say fascinating, I have never read anything by Roger Beckwith that would make your hair stand on end, that would make your heart race.

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His writing is scholarly and deep and slow and detailed, and let's just say, for most people, extremely laborious.

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But I really came to have great respect for this guy because he wrote a book, which we make available through the ministry, actually, called

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The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church. And it's just the best book

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I've ever read on the title, The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church.

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So, in other words, what books did the New Testament Church believe were canonical before there was a

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New Testament? So, what about the apocryphal books, the books called pseudepigrapha, lost books of the

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Bible, all that kind of stuff. And again, the book is not an easy read.

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Lots and lots of footnotes and very scholarly, but it's really good. So, when

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I heard that he had written a lengthy article on this subject in another book, I tracked it down.

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Is there anything in the New Testament that you can think of that might give us some type of a clue as to what time of year

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Jesus was born? If it wasn't the sheep abiding in the fields, what else might there be?

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And I had never thought of this before. But we are given a historic...

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Now, you all know that Jesus wasn't born in year zero, right? The Gregorian and Julian calendars, there were problems.

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And it's about four years off. Jesus was born about four years B .C. So, there's issues there.

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We don't know exactly. You know, look, history is difficult along these lines.

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But I never thought about the fact that we are given one interesting piece of information.

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And that is that there is a relationship between Jesus' birth and who else's birth.

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I think they got to you before you did. I'm not sure if you were wandering a little bit there or just what.

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It just could be because, given the speed of sound, I heard them first. John the

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Baptist. Well, if we can't figure out what time of year Jesus was born, what good is it knowing what time of year

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John the Baptist was born? Um... Who was

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John the Baptist's papa? Not Zacchaeus, as one very tricky elder we know tried to get us with Wednesday night.

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Okay. Zechariah. And we happen to know the tribe and the family that Zechariah is of.

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So we're given that genealogical information in Luke. Guess what else we have? Most people don't know this.

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One of the interesting things is there are some messianic prophecies that... You sort of need to know who the priests were and who is of the tribe of what.

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And interesting, after the destruction of the temple in AD 70, all those records... There's no way of keeping them anymore.

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But we do have records from before the destruction of the temple. And we actually know what's called the

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Courses of the Priests. The Courses of the Priests. Sometimes the most boring historical stuff that you'd ever see in a journal someplace ends up being really important information.

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Sort of like the names, the patronyms. You know, there are people who have been collecting the names off of bone boxes for decades.

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And you would think, wow, that's a job I'd like to have. But what we've been able to do is to demonstrate that the

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Gospels use the exact same frequency of patronyms, names that we find in bone boxes from the first century in Israel.

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And none of the other Gnostic Gospels have even tried to do that. So we can tell which Gospels...

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Just from that you can tell exactly which Gospels came from the first century in Israel and which ones didn't. Who knew?

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Whoever even thought to think about it. Well, we have the Courses of the

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Priests. In other words, we know what order that they were to be serving in and we know which of those orders

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Zechariah was a part of. So, you can start...

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Now, it's more complicated than this because you've got to go, what about this? I need to bring this together.

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I need to draw from this. But if you put it all together as Beckwith did...

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Now, Beckwith is your quintessential scholar.

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When a scholar publishes something, they're having to cover every possible objection because, believe it or not, there's politics in scholarship and there are people who are going to want to pick you apart for this, that, and the other thing.

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And so, they try to be extremely careful and conservative in what they say.

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Not go too far out there. But to make a rather long and complicated story fairly short, you can figure out when

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Zechariah would have been serving in the temple.

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We know from that when Elizabeth became pregnant and we know what the relationship between Elizabeth's pregnancy and Mary's pregnancy was.

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And so, guess what, when you backtrack that information... Now, of course, it doesn't give you a day.

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It gives you a window of about two to three weeks.

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And the two to three week window pretty much falls between December 25th and January 6th for the birth of Christ.

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Given when Zechariah would have been serving in the courses of the priest.

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You can't do that after the destruction of the temple. You can't really do the genealogies amongst the

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Jews after the destruction of the temple. But they did beforehand. We still have those records, thankfully. And so it's rather fascinating that the one bit of historical information that you actually can connect points to that very time frame.

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So then you connect that with the fact that when you look at the earliest references from Christians, their arguments are always based upon the

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Annunciation. They're based upon Biblical observations. Not, well, hey, you know, the pagans are having fun today.

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We even decided we could have fun today, too. That's not even close to what they're saying.

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How far back then could we confidently trace some kind of...

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Probably the January 6th date. Minimally.

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I'm being very, very conservative. I don't think you have any problem saying that the

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January 6th date goes to the early 200s. And the December 25th date in the

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West, probably the 250s. And since that's when it first is mentioned, it's sort of mentioned in passing.

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Not like, hey, we just came up with something new. So you can probably assume that you're talking second century when those celebrations begin to be had amongst the early church.

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Now, obviously, that's also, depending on where you are, again, a period of persecution.

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And so it's not like these would be things that would be thrown out there in the open and there would be public processions or anything like that.

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That would not be a possibility. So we don't know anything about the nature of these things. And we certainly know that in later development, you have going far beyond anything that the early

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Christians conceived of or thought of. But the main thing is when we look at the subject historically and we look at that time period, you'll hear people say things like, well,

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Constantine came up with this. Constantine was clueless. Constantine Sol Invictus.

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Again, as soon as you hear folks making statements like that, your radar needs to be on, the red lights need to go off, and you need to shove a copy of the

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Da Vinci Code in their mouth or something like that. Because there's plenty of extras sitting around.

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There really are. So many of those were published. You're probably running into somebody who's just going off of some oddity they saw on the

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Internet at some point and taking it as established fact. It is hard at this time period in church history.

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Might we find something in Origen's writings that haven't been translated into English yet? I suppose.

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There's stuff that comes to light every once in a while. I remember when I debated Bart Ehrman just a few months earlier, a papyri had come to light and was translated for the first time that talked about how many manuscripts had been destroyed in one particular church in Egypt in the persecutions in the 310s.

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Nobody had seen that before, but it's highly relevant, very instructive, very useful.

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So could more light come from further discoveries, translations, things like that?

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Sure. But when you, at this time of year or in a couple of weeks, well a couple of months, when we start getting toward the resurrection, the

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BBC, the Australian Broadcasting Company, ABC down there, we think our media is leftist controlled.

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Man, I'll tell you something. When I was down in Australia, I was just like, you've got to be...

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I know even here a lot of the cable don't even make pretense anymore of being fair.

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They're just wide open about it. But it's even more so. It's just accepted down there how biased.

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And when it comes to the subject of Christianity, the filter that the media runs is always on maximum negative.

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If anything can be presented that would in any way assist someone in disbelief, assist someone in abandoning belief, that's the filter that's going to be used.

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And when you see this stuff that comes out every single year, I'm not saying be skeptical just because you're a

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Christian, you should be skeptical of anything that's not Christian. That's not what I was saying. But all this parallelomania and everything that's based upon the history of religion school that everything has to be borrowed from something else, you should be able to smell it.

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Hmm, what was that you just said? So that must have come from...

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Do you have any documentation of that? Do you have any evidence? Did you find any early

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Christians who were saying, hey, that looks like something really cool in that religion over there, we need to make it part of ours.

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Or was the argument going on in the church at that time, as we're seeing looking at Tertullian and things like that, apostolic tradition, we're right because we can trace ourselves back to the apostles, not, hey, we're innovators, we're coming up with new stuff.

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So how can you put both of them together? Very, very, very few of the people who write on Christianity, nobody who writes for any of the major media on Christianity ever approaches it from a meaningful historical perspective.

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Just put that down. I mean, that's just what we have to deal with. And especially when it comes to this subject, you would think that if someone were trying to pretend to be a journalist, that there might be some mention of some of the early references and some of the fact that Mithraism was on the decline and Christianity was on the rise, and so the idea that the

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Christians borrowed from a dying religion to come up with this or that or the other thing is just ridiculous. You'd think there'd be some mention of that, that there'd be something about the

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Beckwith research and stuff like that, but no, you're not going to find that.

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Just get used to the fact that in Western society today, you're only beginning a part of the story.

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You really, really are. So with that, we have a couple of moments for a couple of questions, if you would like.

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Yes, sir? Can you contrast Christmas with Resurrection Day as far as was

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Resurrection Day being celebrated earlier? Oh, yes. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, think of the, you said it, the

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Quarter Decimal Controversy is as early as early 2nd century.

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So, yeah, it's much earlier. And then the second question with that, when did you switch, whereas in the early church it seems like Resurrection was a big deal, and nowadays modernized, you know, church history,

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Christmas is like the biggest celebration. Well, I have mentioned that the

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West is more focused upon crucifixion and resurrection than the

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East, which is more focused upon incarnation. So, again, there is an East -West mindset difference on that issue.

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But, no, that's ancient. That's ancient. No, not that piece, but the switch between us focusing on...

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Well, no. Well, that's almost completely

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Western, and that's very, very modern. Yeah, it's very, very modern. Yeah, very much so.

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Yes, sir? Hey, Dr. Boyd, would you say that, is this a true statement, that God ordained the date of Christmas, December 25th?

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I'm sorry, he decreed the date, but he ordained it through Constantine.

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Is that a true or false statement? False. False statement? False statement. Oh, yeah. God decreed the date of the incarnation.

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We don't know when that was. Constantine had zippity -dippity -doo -dah to do with December 25th.

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There's no historical evidence whatsoever that Constantine had anything to do with that. As I said,

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Christians were celebrating either the 25th of December or January 6th, depending on whether you're in the

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East or the West. Seventy years before Constantine came along, so you can't, sorry, it's another thing that poor

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Constantine gets blamed for. He gets blamed for a lot of stuff, but you can't blame him for that. We don't know the date, but what

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I've pointed out is the arguments that this is all just borrowed from paganism do not take into account the

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Mithraism and all the rest of that stuff, simply don't take into account the evidence that I mentioned from Beckwith, the

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Courses of the Priests, and issues along those lines, that there is good and early evidence of a midwinter date from the scriptures.

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It doesn't tell us which day it was. Obviously, the specific date was ordained by God from eternity past.

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That's called God's eternal decree, and no question about that. There is no command to celebrate that day, and so it's not made known to us.

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It's not important to be made known to us. Constantine had nothing to do with it, nothing at all.

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Since God is sovereign, he established that day through Constantine.

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No, he didn't. No, he didn't. I'm sorry, that's historically a false statement. That's historically a false statement.

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Hello. Oh, I'm sorry. This is called Sunday School. Yes, you can come in.

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It's okay. I mean, you might as well now because everyone's looking at you. Hi, Artie.

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How are you doing? Hey, everybody say hi. Hi, how are you doing? And we're wrapping up anyway.

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Hello. How are you doing? Anyway, so just some thoughts, and I hope it has more application than just today because this kind of, well, we need to find these parallels and paganism -type stuff very, very common, unfortunately, in even more important areas, and that is when it comes to the resurrection, virgin birth, specific areas that are not adiaphora, that are not areas of freedom.

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And so we need to be sensitive to those particular issues as well.

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Okay? All right, let's close the Word of Prayer. Father, once again, we thank you for this beautiful, cold, crisp day.

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We thank you for the fellowship of the saints. We thank you for allowing us to be here together. We ask that you would bless our time as we go in to worship you.

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Bless the presentation of your Word. Give me strength, Lord, to speak with clarity.