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I. When was Jesus born?A. Popular myth puts his birth on December 25th in the year 1 C.E.B. The New Testament gives no date or year for Jesus’ birth. The earliest gospel – St. Mark’s, written about 65 CE – begins with the baptism of an adult Jesus. This suggests that the earliest Christians lacked interest in or knowledge of Jesus’ birthdate.C. The year of Jesus birth was determined by Dionysius Exiguus, a Scythian monk, “abbot of a Roman monastery. His calculation went as follows:a. In the Roman, pre-Christian era, years were counted from ab urbe condita (“the founding of the City” [Rome]). Thus 1 AUC signifies the year Rome was founded, 5 AUC signifies the 5th year of Rome’s reign, etc.b. Dionysius received a tradition that the Roman emperor Augustus reigned 43 years, and was followed by the emperor Tiberius.c. Luke 3:1,23 indicates that when Jesus turned 30 years old, it was the 15th year of Tiberius reign.d. If Jesus was 30 years old in Tiberius’ reign, then he lived 15 years under Augustus (placing Jesus birth in Augustus’ 28th year of reign).e. Augustus took power in 727 AUC. Therefore, Dionysius put Jesus birth in 754 AUC.f. However, Luke 1:5 places Jesus’ birth in the days of Herod, and Herod died in 750 AUC – four years before the year in which Dionysius places Jesus birth.D. Joseph A. Fitzmyer – Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies at the Catholic University of America, member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, and former president of the Catholic Biblical Association – writing in the Catholic Church’s official commentary on the New Testament[1], writes about the date of Jesus’ birth, “Though the year [of Jesus birth is not reckoned with certainty, the birth did not occur in AD 1. The Christian era, supposed to have its starting point in the year of Jesus birth, is based on a miscalculation introduced ca. 533 by Dionysius Exiguus.”E. The DePascha Computus, an anonymous document believed to have been written in North Africa around 243 CE, placed Jesus birth on March 28. Clement, a bishop of Alexandria (d. ca. 215 CE), thought Jesus was born on November 18. Based on historical records, Fitzmyer guesses that Jesus birth occurred on September 11, 3 BCE. II. 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.[2]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.E. Christians had little success, however, refining the practices of Saturnalia. As Stephen Nissenbaum, professor history at the University of Massachussetts, Amherst, writes, “In return for ensuring massive observance of the anniversary of the Savior’s birth by assigning it to this resonant date, the Church for its part tacitly agreed to allow the holiday to be celebrated more or less the way it had always been.” The earliest Christmas holidays were celebrated by drinking, sexual indulgence, singing naked in the streets (a precursor of modern caroling), etc.F. The Reverend Increase Mather of Boston observed in 1687 that “the early Christians who first observed the Nativity on December 25 did not do so thinking that Christ was born in that Month, but because the Heathens’ Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian ones.”[3] Because of its known pagan origin, Christmas was banned by the Puritans and its observance was illegal in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1681.[4] However, Christmas was and still is celebrated by most Christians.G. Some of the most depraved customs of the Saturnalia carnival were intentionally revived by the Catholic Church in 1466 when Pope Paul II, for the amusement of his Roman citizens, forced Jews to race naked through the streets of the city. An eyewitness account reports, “Before they were to run, the Jews were richly fed, so as to make the race more difficult for them and at the same time more amusing for spectators. They ran… amid Rome’s taunting shrieks and peals of laughter, while the Holy Father stood upon a richly ornamented balcony and laughed heartily.”[5]H. As part of the Saturnalia carnival throughout the 18th and 19th centuries CE, rabbis of the ghetto in Rome were forced to wear clownish outfits and march through the city streets to the jeers of the crowd, pelted by a variety of missiles. When the Jewish community of Rome sent a petition in1836 to Pope Gregory XVI begging him to stop the annual Saturnalia abuse of the Jewish community, he responded, “It is not opportune to make any innovation.”[6] On December 25, 1881, Christian leaders whipped the Polish masses into Antisemitic frenzies that led to riots across the country. In Warsaw 12 Jews were brutally murdered, huge numbers maimed, and many Jewish women were raped. Two million rubles worth of property was destroyed. III. The Origins of Christmas CustomsA. Christmas TreesJust as early Christians recruited Roman pagans by associating Christmas with the Saturnalia, so too worshippers of the Asheira cult and its offshoots were recruited by the Church sanctioning “Christmas Trees”.[7] Pagans had long worshipped trees in the forest, or brought them into their homes and decorated them, and this observance was adopted and painted with a Christian veneer by the Church.B. MistletoeNorse mythology recounts how the god Balder was killed using a mistletoe arrow by his rival god Hoder while fighting for the female Nanna. Druid rituals use mistletoe to poison their human sacrificial victim.[8] The Christian custom of “kissing under the mistletoe” is a later synthesis of the sexual license of Saturnalia with the Druidic sacrificial cult.[9]C. Christmas PresentsIn pre-Christian Rome, the emperors compelled their most despised citizens to bring offerings and gifts during the Saturnalia (in December) and Kalends (in January). Later, this ritual expanded to include gift-giving among the general populace. The Catholic Church gave this custom a Christian flavor by re-rooting it in the supposed gift-giving of Saint Nicholas (see below).[10]D. Santa Clausa. Nicholas was born in Parara, Turkey in 270 CE and later became Bishop of Myra. He died in 345 CE on December 6th. He was only named a saint in the 19th century.b. Nicholas was among the most senior bishops who convened the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE and created the New Testament. The text they produced portrayed Jews as “the children of the devil”[11] who sentenced Jesus to death.c. In 1087, a group of sailors who idolized Nicholas moved his bones from Turkey to a sanctuary in Bari, Italy. There Nicholas supplanted a female boon-giving deity called The Grandmother, or Pasqua Epiphania, who used to fill the children's stockings with her gifts. The Grandmother was ousted from her shrine at Bari, which became the center of the Nicholas cult. Members of this group gave each other gifts during a pageant they conducted annually on the anniversary of Nicholas’ death, December 6.d. The Nicholas cult spread north until it was adopted by German and Celtic pagans. These groups worshipped a pantheon led by Woden –their chief god and the father of Thor, Balder, and Tiw. Woden had a long, white beard and rode a horse through the heavens one evening each Autumn. When Nicholas merged with Woden, he shed his Mediterranean appearance, grew a beard, mounted a flying horse, rescheduled his flight for December, and donned heavy winter clothing.e. In a bid for pagan adherents in Northern Europe, the Catholic Church adopted the Nicholas cult and taught that he did (and they should) distribute gifts on December 25th instead of December 6th.f. In 1809, the novelist Washington Irving (most famous his The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle) wrote a satire of Dutch culture entitled Knickerbocker History. The satire refers several times to the white bearded, flying-horse riding Saint Nicholas using his Dutch name, Santa Claus.g. Dr. Clement Moore, a professor at Union Seminary, read Knickerbocker History, and in 1822 he published a poem based on the character Santa Claus: “Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, in the hope that Saint Nicholas soon would be there…” Moore innovated by portraying a Santa with eight reindeer who descended through chimneys.h. The Bavarian illustrator Thomas Nast almost completed the modern picture of Santa Claus. From 1862 through 1886, based on Moore’s poem, Nast drew more than 2,200 cartoon images of Santa for Harper’s Weekly. Before Nast, Saint Nicholas had been pictured as everything from a stern looking bishop to a gnome-like figure in a frock. Nast also gave Santa a home at the North Pole, his workshop filled with elves, and his list of the good and bad children of the world. All Santa was missing was his red outfit.i. In 1931, the Coca Cola Corporation contracted the Swedish commercial artist Haddon Sundblom to create a coke-drinking Santa. Sundblom modeled his Santa on his friend Lou Prentice, chosen for his cheerful, chubby face. The corporation insisted that Santa’s fur-trimmed suit be bright, Coca Cola red. And Santa was born – a blend of Christian crusader, pagan god, and commercial idol. IV. The Christmas Challenge· Christmas has always been a holiday celebrated carelessly. For millennia, pagans, Christians, and even Jews have been swept away in the season’s festivities, and very few people ever pause to consider the celebration’s intrinsic meaning, history, or origins.· Christmas celebrates the birth of the Christian god who came to rescue mankind from the “curse of the Torah.” It is a 24-hour declaration that Judaism is no longer valid.· Christmas is a lie. There is no Christian church with a tradition that Jesus was really born on December 25th.· December 25 is a day on which Jews have been shamed, tortured, and murdered.· Many of the most popular Christmas customs – including Christmas trees, mistletoe, Christmas presents, and Santa Claus – are modern incarnations of the most depraved pagan rituals ever practiced on earth. Many who are excitedly preparing for their Christmas celebrations would prefer not knowing about the holiday’s real significance. If they do know the history, they often object that their celebration has nothing to do with the holiday’s monstrous history and meaning. “We are just having fun.”Imagine that between 1933-45, the Nazi regime celebrated Adolf Hitler’s birthday – April 20 – as a holiday. Imagine that they named the day, “Hitlerday,” and observed the day with feasting, drunkenness, gift-giving, and various pagan practices. Imagine that on that day, Jews were historically subject to perverse tortures and abuse, and that this continued for centuries.Now, imagine that your great-great-great-grandchildren were about to celebrate Hitlerday. April 20th arrived. They had long forgotten about Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen. They had never heard of gas chambers or death marches. They had purchased champagne and caviar, and were about to begin the party, when someone reminded them of the day’s real history and their ancestors’ agony. Imagine that they initially objected, “We aren’t celebrating the Holocaust; we’re just having a little Hitlerday party.” If you could travel forward in time and meet them; if you could say a few words to them, what would you advise them to do on Hitlerday?On December 25, 1941, Julius Streicher, one of the most vicious of Hitler’s assistants, celebrated Christmas by penning the following editorial in his rabidly Antisemitic newspaper, Der Stuermer:If one really wants to put an end to the continued prospering of this curse from heaven that is the Jewish blood, there is only one way to do it: to eradicate this people, this Satan’s son, root and branch.It was an appropriate thought for the day. This Christmas, how will we celebrate?AUTHOR: LAWRENCE KELEMEN
and I had a disagreement with this statement: Christmas celebrates the birth of the Christian god who came to rescue mankind from the “curse of the Torah.” It is a 24-hour declaration that Judaism is no longer valid.I would say that entire statement is false. To begin with, most Christians intend for it to represent the birth of Christ, but rarely do any of them actually do this.There is no Christian that I know of that believes Jesus came as hero rescuing them from the Torah- the Torah is even included in their bible, which they regard as the word of G-d, and though they often ignore the richness of the truths it holds (which is unexcuseable), they do not view the Torah as a curse. Torah is the thing which Christianity is based on, without it the Jews would have no need for the Messiah figure that the Christian believe they found in the form of Jesus. Jesus being (to Christians) the fulfillment of Torah. Torah (to Christians) is law- showing that all man is fallible and in need of Grace. Grace (to Christians) is offered in full as the perfect atonement for their lack of ability to follow Torah through Jesus (their sacrificial lamb). It therefore, is not "a 24-hour declaration that Judaism is no longer valid." but a 24-hour declaration that Judaism is valid, whole, and perfect. It is the author, in a state of bitterness which takes this negative view that Christmas is "a 24-hour declaration that Judaism is no longer valid." Please, do not speak for people especially if you do not understand their belief and value system (this goes for all you theology students who know limited facts, and have little experience with another religion).
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Posted by Fiona1234 on 2007-12-25 23:26:44 | Rating: | Views: 220
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I'm not too sure if I understand what you are trying to say...I am a Christian, but I do not believe Jesus was born on Christmas...that is a "man made" day. We should remember more so the death and ressurection of Jesus, because He gave us chance for salvation to those who believe. I don't know about Torah...I know about Jesus. He is all I know and will ever know, I really don't need to understand other religions. If I missunderstood you, please make me to understand your post.
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Posted by me2
on 2007-12-26 13:25:17
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You have to read all of it. I was diasgreeing with one particular statement in this man's conclusion. The statement I disagreed with is this:"Christmas celebrates the birth of the Christian god who came to rescue mankind from the “curse of the Torah.” It is a 24-hour declaration that Judaism is no longer valid." My view is this: "I would say that entire statement is false. To begin with, most Christians intend for it to represent the birth of Christ, but rarely do any of them actually do this.There is no Christian that I know of that believes Jesus came as hero rescuing them from the Torah- the Torah is even included in their bible, which they regard as the word of G-d, and though they often ignore the richness of the truths it holds (which is unexcuseable), they do not view the Torah as a curse. Torah is the thing which Christianity is based on, without it the Jews would have no need for the Messiah figure that the Christian believe they found in the form of Jesus. Jesus being (to Christians) the fulfillment of Torah. Torah (to Christians) is law- showing that all man is fallible and in need of Grace. Grace (to Christians) is offered in full as the perfect atonement for their lack of ability to follow Torah through Jesus (their sacrificial lamb). It therefore, is not 'a 24-hour declaration that Judaism is no longer valid.' but a 24-hour declaration that Judaism is valid, whole, and perfect. It is the author, in a state of bitterness which takes this negative view that Christmas is 'a 24-hour declaration that Judaism is no longer valid.' Please, do not speak for people especially if you do not understand their belief and value system (this goes for all you theology students who know limited facts, and have little experience with another religion)."
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Posted by Fiona1234
on 2007-12-26 22:17:09
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There is something that bothered me (not in an upsetting way, but in a concerned manner) with your reply (keep in mind you asked me to help you understand my view). You said "I don't know about Torah...I know about Jesus. He is all I know and will ever know, I really don't need to understand other religions." Torah is what is referred to in the NT as 'the law'. Everytime you see those words 'the law' the literal hebrew word is 'torah'. Torah is contained within the first five books of the OT (those 5 books are called 'the pentatuch' or "Gensis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Dueteronomy") The Kosher laws (given in leviticus) and the ten commandments are the Torah (although after the end of the OT, Rabbis began to expound upon those laws by trying to make them more strict, and actually added more laws than G-d had written. This is harmless as far as keeping the laws are concerned, but it made them become 'legalistic'- which lead them to expect their messiah to come as a 'conquering king' rather than a 'humble servant' and -according to Christians- they missed their messiah because they were expecting him to act differently- you follow?) So, now you know what I meant when I said "torah" I expect that you will retract the statement "I don't know about Torah...I know about Jesus." Because -according to Christians- Jesus came to complete the law, not throw it out. (John 1:17 NASB- this is not taken out of context). Therefore If you know Jesus (who according to the NT is the fulfillment of 'the Law' a.k.a. Torah) then you know Torah at it's fullest. Let me also address: "He is all I know and will ever know, I really don't need to understand other religions." This is my pet-peeve concerning Christians- how they take pride in shooting themselves in the foot! Your Jesus would be ashamed of his followers action of taking pride in their ignorance. Ignorance is not a cutesy attribute, and blind faith is never encouraged in the NT. Child-like faith is, blind faith is not. You should always know about other people's faith (especially Judaism, since it is undisputedly what your religion is based upon). If you are to be an imitator of Christ you must be well-read and knowledgeable! You have to be a literate person. If you want some examples of Jesus and Paul doing this, here are a few : Luke 2:41-47, 1 Timothy 1:5-15, Acts 17:1-4, Acts 17:16-33. You see? They took time to understand other religious (Paul even quoted Greek Poetry in his debate). It is very important that you study, study, study what you and others believe. The examples set before you by your Christ and Paul encourages this explicitly!
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Posted by Fiona1234
on 2007-12-26 23:16:23
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Whew - that was a long post!
I don't think many Christians actually believe that Jesus was born on December 25th.
It is a day to celebrate the birth of Christ!
Calendars have changed throughout the ages.
No big deal.
Man-made ideas change too.
But where do you place your faith?
That will make all the difference in
your life - not only now - but in Eternity.
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Posted by kathyjoyful2day
on 2007-12-27 14:38:32
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May I just say RAR! Okay I know it is a long post, but you need to read ALL of it before you comment. I said this to the person who commented before you as well. I clearly state that I posted this in response to one particular comment he made (not to make the point of christmas being a high-jacked holiday, which is common knowledge). The author made a comment in his conclusion that bothered me, but I thought it necessary to include his entire work if I was going to debate his conclusion.
Also, if you read my reply posts as well as my basic info. on my profile you will know where I stand. Do not try to evangelize someone who you do not even care enough about to do minor investigation on- I have plainly stated everything and have had to write this several times- you christians are too worried about 'winning a soul' (very appropriate phrase, especially since it very much resembles a competition now rather than being the matter of loving and caring for people- something your Jesus did that you christians have seemed to have lost touch with).
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Posted by Fiona1234
on 2007-12-27 19:08:59
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I'm just trying to understand, but I still know only one...that is Jesus...I need no other...He is Lord of Lords and King of Kings, the only living God. He is my provider...I guess I don't understand what you mean, cause of all that Jesus has done for me..I understand nothing else..The bible is more easier for me to understand...sorry.
If you're not a Christian, I wish and pray for you to give Jesus a try, He really is the only one.
Have a nice day.
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Posted by me2
on 2007-12-28 11:20:18
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Hi again,
yes - perhaps I should have read it all completely before making a comment. But time did not permit that. I could have just left and not made a comment, which may have been best. But instead I wanted to sort of hone in on the most important thing, in case you, perhaps, might be interested.
Hope you have a Happy 2008.
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Posted by kathyjoyful2day
on 2007-12-28 18:39:54
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me2: "Torah" is a hebrew word, it translates "the law" and it refers to the laws G-D gave Moses in the Old Testament. "Torah" is something that both Jews AND Christians follow, and it is a part of YOUR religion that you should be familiar with. The Ten Commandments are a part of "Torah" You cannot understand Jesus and what he did for you, if you do not understand the culture he grew up around. I implore you to study your entire bible more and on a deeper level.
kathyjoyful2day: Again, sorry for being brash, I do not mean to put such a bitter taste in your mouth that would drive you or any other away.
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Posted by Fiona1234
on 2008-01-01 12:14:57
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