Myth #1: “All Christians celebrate Christmas on December 25th.”
Actually, they don’t. It is true to say that in most places around the world Christmas Day is celebrated on December 25th (and thus Christmas Eve is the preceding day, December 24th). However, the Armenian Apostolic Church observes Christmas on January 6th. Eastern Orthodox Churches that still use the Julian Calendar celebrate Christmas on the Julian version of December 25th, which is January 7th (!) on the more widely used Gregorian calendar, because the two calendars are now 13 days apart. So December 25th; January 6th; January 7th. They are all ‘Christmas days’!
Myth #2: “Jesus was born on December 25th.”
December 25th existed as a religious holiday for the pagans prior to being appropriated by the early Christians as the ‘birthday’ for Jesus Christ. The date December 25th was particularly important in the cult of Mithras, a popular pagan god in the early Roman Empire. The Christian writer Robert Myers, in his book ‘Celebrations’ (a history of holidays), admits:
"Prior to the celebration of Christmas, December 25th in the Roman world was the Natalis Solis Invicti, the Birthday of the Unconquerable Sun. This feast, which took place just after the winter solstice of the Julian calendar, was in honor of the Sun God, Mithras, originally a Persian deity whose cult penetrated the Roman world in the first century B.C. ... Besides the Mithraic influence, other pagan forces were at work. From the seventeenth of December until the twenty-third, Romans celebrated the ancient feast of the Saturnalia. ... It was commemorative of the Golden Age of Saturn, the god of sowing and husbandry."
In order to make Christianity more palatable and appealing to the heathens and pagans in the Roman Empire, the church leaders simply took Saturnalia, adopted it into Christianity, and then eventually many of the associated pagan symbols, forms, customs, and traditions were reinterpreted (i.e., "Christianized") in ways acceptable to Christian faith and practice. (In fact, in 375 A.D., the Church of Rome under Pope Julius I merely announced that the birth date of Christ had been "discovered" to be December 25th, and was accepted as such by the "faithful." The festival of Saturnalia and the birthday of Mithras could now be celebrated as the birthday of Christ!)
Myth #3: “Jesus was born in Bethlehem”
The idea that Jesus was born in Bethlehem is preposterous, illogical and ahistorical. Why? First and foremost, what husband would take a nine-month pregnant woman on a ninety-mile trek from Nazareth to Bethlehem – which took around a week in those days! - at a time when only heads of households were obligated to register for a census and when the census would have been stretched out over a period of weeks or even months? And even if, for some strange reason, he did, why did he not take better precautions for the birth? Why not take Mary to her relative Elizabeth’s home just a few miles away from Bethlehem for the birth of her baby?
The fact is that there was no need for Joseph and Mary to even travel to Bethlehem – not only because the censuses carried out by the Romans did not expect people to return to towns occupied by their ancestors thousands of years earlier (42 generations separated Joseph from his forefather David) but for the plain and simple historical fact that there was no universal census at the time of Jesus' birth. As has long pointed out by historians, the only census conducted by the Romans during that era was conducted in A.D. 6-7, which was twelve or more years after the birth of Jesus in around 5 or 6 B.C.
In addition, Jesus never refers to himself in the Gospels as a “Bethlehemite” or to his birthplace as Bethlehem. Instead, he is referred to in the Gospels only as “Jesus the Nazarene” or even Jesus “of Galilee”. And, interestingly, neither the Gospel of Mark nor the Gospel of John makes any reference to Bethlehem, and even ‘St’ Paul – who could be described as the real founder of Christianity - is silent on the subject throughout his epistles and other Biblical writings. In fact, outside the (isolated) Gospels of Luke and Matthew there is no evidence whatsoever to support the contention that Bethlehem was the birthplace of Jesus. According to the Oxford historian Robin Lane Fox:
“Luke’s story is historically impossible and internally incoherent…Luke’s errors and contradictions are easily explained. Early Christian tradition did not remember, or perhaps ever know, exactly where and when Jesus had been born. People were much more interested in his death and consequences. After the crucifixion and the belief in the resurrection, people wondered all the more deeply about Jesus’ birthplace. Bethlehem, home of King David, was a natural choice for the new messiah. There was even a prophecy in support of the claim which the ‘little town’ has maintained so profitably to this day…a higher truth was served by an impossible fiction.”
Myth #4: “Three Wise Men attended the birth of Jesus.”
This is one of those myths that has been pushed down all our throats since we were performing in nativity plays back in primary school – i.e. that there were three wise kings, bearing gifts, travelling on camels to visit the infant Jesus as he lay in the manger. Yet the Gospel of Matthew (2:1) tells us: "Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem…" That is the extent of it – no more, no less. There is no mention, for example, of “three” wise men, or even of “kings”, and no mention of “camels”. Also, the Bible (in Matthew, 2:11) states: "After coming into the house they saw the Child with Mary His mother; and they fell to the ground and worshiped Him.” Note: this verse refers to a child in a house, rather than a baby in a manger – so the visit of the wise men did not even occur during the birth of Jesus but was, in fact, a post-birth event; a post-Christmas event.
As the Archbishop of Canterbury himself admits in his recent radio interview, "Matthew's Gospel doesn't tell us there were three of them, doesn't tell us they were kings, doesn't tell us where they came from. It says they are astrologers, wise men, priests from somewhere outside the Roman Empire, that's all we're really told."
So perhaps school nativity plays can now start casting more than three kids to play the (semi-mythical) “wise men”?
Myth #5: “Christmas trees are Christian.”
The most annoying question I’m asked by Christians during this period is: “So, are you not celebrating Christmas? Not even a tree?” No, I reply, not even a tree! In fact, of all the associated holiday paraphernalia, the ‘tree’ has the least relevance, the least connection, to Christmas and Christianity.
The tradition of cutting down and decorating evergreen trees is a pagan tradition, borrowed from the pagans by Christian leaders in Germany around four hundred years ago. In fact, in the Old Testament, God goes out of His way to condemn the pagans for this particular custom and warns the believers not to ape them:
"Thus saith the Lord: Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them. For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe. They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not." (Jeremiah 10: 2-4)
So, folks, those are my ‘top five’ Christmas myths. Do you have any you want to add? If so, then head for the comments section of this blog. Oh, and here’s one last holiday factoid (if not a ‘myth’) to leave you with: eating a turkey lunch on Christmas day is not actually an integral, authentic or historic part of the Christmas tradition. As Luke Honey writes on the Spectator’s Coffee House blog:
“Up until the 1890’s, most English families if they were lucky, ate goose; turkey was a luxury only enjoyed by the few. The Anglo-American Christmas, as we know and love it today, is really a Victorian invention: influenced by the sentiment of Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, Prince Albert’s cosy family celebrations at Windsor; and in the last century, the schmaltz of Hollywood movies such as Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life.”
Merry Christmas! (Or perhaps: "Bah, humbug!")
5 comments:
The Ethopian Orthodox Church, one of the oldest in the world, does not celbrate Xmas on 25th December. They celberate it in January (I don't remember the exact date).
It is not important what Christ's birthday is and where he was born which is shrouded in myth , what is most important is the celebration of Xmas on one day - 25 Dec - by almost 99% of the Christians in the world. Look at Muslims and how they celebrate the two important Eids and the Prophet's birthday. This year the Ramadan and Id-ul-Adha were each celebrated on three different days int UK and this happens every year. And the Sunnis and Shias, the two major Muslim sects, celebrate the P's birthday on two different days in the same month. Shame on them.
Welcome Sceptic! I have to acknowledge and accept your very valid point about the Muslim splits over the dates of the various Eids and the Prophet's birthday. The two distinctions I would make are these:
1) Muslims do not pretend that there are not disagreements over dates, which are the subject of legitimate (and much-needed) historical debate by Muslims. There are no 'myths' to dispel vis a vis the Islamic calendar as there is with the Christian calendar.
2) The Prophet, to quote Ernest Renan, was born "in the full light of history". The basic facts of his life and death are well-known to us all, Muslim and non-Muslim. Jesus' life however is, as you say, "shrouded in myth" which is why the historical and theological foundations for modern trinitarian Christianity are sadly so tenuous.
- The Radical
Originally I was bemused as to why Rowan Williams had chosen this week to debunk the Wise Men myth (thus spoiling a few carols in the process) - a less understandable move than, say, a non-Christian blogger doing so. But thank you for showing the context of the comments, which shows he wasn't really debunking anything, and was instead just being his usual thoughtful self. It is a relief to see that the various myths Radical has highlighted do not damage or affect the standing of Christianity. And of course much of Christian and, yes, Islamic religion - including, say, the Virgin Birth, also believed by Muslims but less easy to believe than the Wise Men by non-believers - is a matter of faith. But as someone who has repeatedly visited the Church of Nativity, a venue which is like Calvary accepted by non-Christian historians as the correct site, I believe in that too. And I am unconvinced by the incredulity over Mary and Joseph's long flight there. First, Mary did visit Elizabeth (see The Visitation) while pregnant; secondly Jesus grew up in Nazareth and Galilee and that is where he practiced his early ministry, so it is natural that those are the places He refers to in the Scriptures. And thirdly is the journey - even if it did take a week - any less believable than, say, the Prophet Mohammed's Night Journey from Mecca to Jerusalem?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lailat_al_Miraj
NICE Blog :)
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