From Christ to Christmas – a historical analysis
For many Christians
around the globe, Christmas is linked with the birthday of their lord Jesus
Christ. They believe that he was born on or around December 25 of 1 C.E.
(Common Era). It is inconsequential to them that the story in the Gospels is
often utterly divorced from all historical contexts. There is often no awareness of the
geographical and political relation between the places Jesus visits, e.g.,
Galilee, Judea and Jerusalem, how far they might be from each other, how long a
journey from one place to another might take place. As Michael Baigent et al.
(authors of the book - The Messianic Legacy) puts it, “For the lay
[Christian] congregation, scriptural accounts are regarded as literal history,
a self-contained story no less true for being divorced from an historical
context. Never having been taught otherwise by his spiritual mentors, many a
devout believer has had no need to question the problems posed by such a
context.”
In the Gospel accounts
of the so-called New Testament (NT), Jesus is depicted as a messiah, which in a
strictly literal sense means the ‘anointed one.’ While the term was customarily
referred to David (Dawood) and Solomon (Sulayman), every king of Israel since
the days of king (and Prophet) David was regarded as a Messiah. Not only that.
Around the time of Jesus’s birth, a series of militant, armed oppositions to
Rome was organized and led by rebellious Jews - Simon
son of Joseph
of Peraea (ca. 4 BCE), Athronges (ca. 4-2 BCE) and Judas of Galilee (6
CE) - who all claimed the title of Messiah.[1]
They were recognized as such not only by their immediate followers, but also by
a segment of the Jewish people. Needless to say that there was nothing
intrinsically divine about such Christ figures. Indeed, to assert that any man
was God, or even son of God, in a literal sense and/or the idea of a divine
Messiah would have been, for Jesus and his contemporaries, extremely
blasphemous and absolutely unthinkable.
How did then this myth
of divinity of Jesus evolve? To find the answer we have to look at the 3 Ps –
the place he lived, the period in which he lived and the people
of his period. While much is known about the world in which Jesus the Nazarene
lived, sadly, very little is known about him and the events surrounding his
life. The Gospels, including the whole of the Bible, are sketchy documents,
which no respectable scholar would for a moment consider absolutely reliable as
historical testimony. They portray a world, almost fairy-tale story! But
Palestine at the time of advent of Christianity was a not a fairy-tale kingdom;
it was a real place where people of different religions, sects and cults lived.
There were the Palestinian Jews and pagans, and the Greco-Roman pagans and
others imported from abroad as a result of Roman occupation of the holy land.
And thanks to Saul (or Paul) of Tarsus, an overwhelming majority of the
latter-day followers of Jesus came not from the monotheist Jews but from the
uncircumcised pagans who had hitherto worshipped a multitude of gods to whom
Sunday, and not the day of Sabbath, was the big day.
Unsurprisingly,
therefore, that none of the canonical gospels was written in the very language
in which Jesus had spoken. They were written in Greek. Even his own name - ‘Isa
(pronounced Eesa), the son of Maryam - was corrupted to Greek. He even got
transformed from Jesus the Nazarene (also spelled Nazarean and Nasara’in) to
Jesus of Nazareth.[2]
Corruption in the process of translation has obscured more than names. Whether
by accident or design, it has also served to conceal historical information of
immense importance. For example, we don’t know the term that Jesus had actually
used in his own vernacular to describe the purported Greek term - Paraclete or
Paracletos. A single word may convey a wealth of historical background; and if
the sense of such a word is altered, the revelation it offers is bound to be
lost.
As much as the worship
of mother goddess – Ishtar, Isis, Astarte, Aphrodite, Cybele – commanded large
following amongst the pagans living then in Palestine, the Jews were not immune
from such corrosive influences. There were residues of polytheistic goddess
worship within the framework of Judaism itself, cults dedicated to the ancient
Canaanite goddess Miriam or Rabath. There were also the Samaritan Jews who
insisted that their brand was the only true form. There were also a number of
Jewish sects, and even sects within sects. The most prominent Jewish groups
were the Pharisees, Sadducees (Sadooqis), Essenes, Zealots and Zadokites. Some
of the Jews did not believe in the hereafter. Too many were involved in usury
and immoral acts near the Jewish Temple.
Before the time of
Jesus’s appearance, the messianic expectations were high. The Jews were looking
for a deliverer from their misery. They asked: if God were indeed
All-powerful, how one makes sense of Israel’s misfortune? If God
were indeed All-powerful, how could one expect His permitting His Temple to be
defiled by the heathen Romans? How could one explain
His letting His own authority be challenged by a secular, heathen
ruler in Rome who presumed to arrogate divinity to himself?
It was under such dismal
circumstances that Jesus was born. His mother was Maryam (Mary), a pious Jewish
woman who was raised in the Temple. She was probably 12 to
14 years old when she gave birth to Jesus. According to Gospel accounts, she
was betrothed to Joseph the carpenter. According to Catholic Encyclopedia, the
latter was 90 years old then and was the father of six children, two daughters
and four sons from a previous marriage. The youngest of his children was James
who is mentioned in the NT as "the Lord's brother". According to
Christian apocryphal writings, Joseph died around 18 or 19 C.E. at the very
advanced age of 111.[3]
The year of Jesus’s
birth was determined by Dionysius Exiguus, a Scythian monk, abbot of a Roman
monastery.[4]
His calculation in ca. 533 C.E. was based on the following information:
a.
In the pre-Christian Roman era years were counted from ab urbe condita
(“the founding of the City” [Rome]). Thus 1 AUC signified the year Rome
was founded.
b. Dionysius
received a tradition that the Roman emperor Augustus reigned 43 years, and was
followed by the emperor Tiberius.
c.
Luke 3:1 and 3:23 indicate that when Jesus turned 30 years old, it was the 15th
year of Tiberius Caesar’s reign.
d.
If Jesus was 30 years old in Tiberius’s reign, then he lived 15 years under
Augustus (placing Jesus’s birth in Augustus’s 28th year of reign).
e.
Augustus took power in 727 AUC. Therefore, Dionysius put Jesus’s birth in
754 AUC, which is commonly now equated as 1 C.E.
Unfortunately, for
Dionysius, the gospel according to Luke 1:5 places Jesus’s birth in the days of
Herod, and Herod died in 750 AUC (4 B.C.E.) – four years before the year
in which Dionysius places Jesus birth. Such contradictions within the Gospel
accounts about Jesus’s birth year made 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, to comment 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.” According to Fitzmyer, Dionysius
was wrong; he had miscalculated. Fitzmyer guesses that Jesus was probably
born in 3 BCE.
Still, the birth-year
remains unsettled when we consider the Biblical tradition that Jesus was
supposed to be no more than two years old when Herod ordered the slaughter of
all the boys in and around Bethlehem who were two years old and under (Matthew
2:16). Herod died before April 12, 4 BCE. So, if the Biblical story is to be
believed, Jesus must have been born before 4 BCE. This has led some Christians
to revise the birth year to 6 - 4 BCE. Even then, the problem is not settled
when we notice that Jesus was supposed to have been born during the census of
(Syrian Governor) Quirinius (Luke 2:2). This census took place after Herod’s
son Archelaus was deposed in 6 CE, ten years after Herod's death. So, one way
to accommodate competing versions of Jesus’s birth will be to place the year
somewhere between 6 BCE and 6 CE or shortly thereafter.
Even the Vatican now admits
that Jesus was not born in 1 CE. In the third installment of his trilogy,
dedicated to the life of Christ, Pope Benedict XVI revealed in November 2012
that Jesus may have been born earlier than previously thought. He explains in
his book that Exiguus, who is considered the inventor of the Christian
calendar, “made a mistake in his calculations by several years. The actual
date of Jesus’ birth was several years before.”[5]
As can be seen, the
gospels are unreliable as historical documents. The first of them, Mark, was
composed no earlier than the revolt of 66 CE. They pay scant attention to the
historical backdrop, addressing themselves essentially to the figure of Jesus
and his teachings. Luke’s account in the Acts of the Apostles is essentially an
account of Paul who had undergone ‘Road to Damascus’ conversion after Jesus’s
ascension to heaven. Acts offers a more or less reliable historical account of
Paul’s activities.
Around 39 CE, Paul
returns to Jerusalem and is officially admitted to the Nazarene party,
comprising of the original, true disciples of Jesus that is led by James
(Jesus’s brother from Joseph the carpenter). His reception was rather less
enthusiastic. Because of his years of persecution of the Nazarenes,
most of them
did not trust Paul (formerly Saul of Tarsus). They put Barnabas, one of the most trusted disciples of Jesus, as his mentor. However,
serious differences arise and they part company.[6]
James and the Nazarene party send their own missionaries to undo Paul’s
teachings. The proof of this can be found in 2 Cor.
11:3-4 where Paul claims that they were promulgating ‘another Jesus.’ To the
Nazarenes, it was Paul who had replaced the worship of God with that
of Jesus. “In Paul’s hands, Jesus himself becomes an object of religious
veneration – which Jesus himself, like his brother James and the other
Nazareans in Jerusalem, would have regarded as blasphemous.”[7]
It is from Paul, and
Paul alone, that a new religion begins to emerge – not a form of Judaism, but a
rival and ultimately an adversary to Judaism. This new religion is fused with
Greco-Roman thought, with pagan traditions, with elements from a number of
mystical schools. Once Paul’s cult began to crystallize as a religion in
itself, it dictated certain priorities which had not obtained in Jesus’s
lifetime and which Jesus himself would unquestionably have deplored. In the
first place it had to compete with all the other established religions. In
order to get a strong footing, thus, Jesus had inescapably to assume a degree
of godhood comparable to that of the deities, he was intended to displace. Like
many such deities, Tammuz, e.g., the god of the ancient Sumerian and Phoenician
mystery teachings, had been born of a virgin, died with a wound in his side
and, after three days, rose from his tomb, leaving it vacant with the rock at
the entrance rolled aside. If Paul were to challenge successfully the adherents
of Tammuz, Jesus would have to be able to match the older god, miracle for
miracle. In consequence, certain aspects of Tammuz story were grafted on to
Jesus’s biography. It is significant that Bethlehem was not only David’s city,
but also the ancient center of a Tammuz cult, with a shrine that remained
active well into biblical times.[8]
Anyone interested can
find numerous specific elements in the NT to their origin not in history, but
in the traditions surrounding Tammuz, Osiris, Attis, Adonis, Dionysus and
Mithra. There is a passage in the Mithraic communion that
is similar to the sacrament: ‘He who shall not eat of my body nor drink my
blood so that he may be one with me and I with him, shall not be saved.”[9]
In order to diffuse
itself through the pagan Romanized world, Christianity had to transmute itself.
And in that process it rewrote the historical circumstances from which it
arose. Jesus himself had to be divorced from his historical context, turned
into a non-political figure – an other-worldly, spiritual Messiah who
posed no challenge whatever to Caesar. Thus, all trace of Jesus’s political
activity was de-emphasized, diluted or excised. And so far as possible, all
trace of his Jewishness was deliberately obscured, ignored or rendered irrelevant.[10]
Unlike Paul and the supposed writers of the NT, however, Jesus had no intention
of creating a new religion, and neither had James, Peter, Barnabas
and the Nazarene party in Jerusalem. Like Jesus, they would have been horrified
by the very idea of a different religion. Their distinction came in recognizing
Jesus as the Messiah, which created problem for them from the authorities. In
36 CE, Stephen was martyred by stoning in Jerusalem, and many Nazarenes had
fled the city. Paul was then on the other side. He was a Sadducee,
persecuting the Nazarenes. By 44 CE, Peter, and then
John, and many others were arrested, flogged, and ordered not to speak the name
of Jesus. In the same year, disciple James – the brother of John -
was beheaded. By the following year, guerilla activity on the part of the
Zealots had intensified to the extent that Rome had to take countermeasures. By
48-49 CE, the Roman governor of Judea was seizing and crucifying both the
Zealots and Nazarenes indiscriminately. Still the insurrection intensified. The
Sadducee High Priest, appointed by the Romans, was assassinated by the Zealots
in the mid-50s, and a major terrorist campaign was launched against the Sadducees
who had aligned themselves with Rome.
During 57-8 CE another
Messiah appeared from Egypt. Having gained a substantial following in Judea, he
undertook to occupy Jerusalem by force of arms and drive the Romans from the
holy land. The movement was violently thwarted, but the disturbances continued.
In around 62-65 CE, James, the head of the Nazarenes
party in Jerusalem, was seized and executed.[11]
Larger-scale persecutions followed at the hands of the
authorities, beginning with in 64 CE, when Emperor Nero blamed the early
Christians for the Great Fire of Rome.
It is not difficult to surmise that under the weight of such
persecution, especially after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE
following the First Jewish Revolt of 66-70 CE,[12]
much of the true history and teachings of Jesus were lost, and what came to be
passed on later as Christian doctrines and festivities, as we shall see later,
owes little to Jesus himself, and more to Paul and the Greco-Roman culture in
which it thrived in.
Many of the followers of the early Nazarenes fled to territories where they felt safe
and secure from the tyranny of the Romans and hostile Jews who did not
recognize Jesus as their Messiah.
During Roman Emperor Constantine’s
time, Nazarenes teaching was still thriving and being disseminated in places
like Africa and in territories outside the Roman control, e.g., eastern Syria,
southern Arabia and Iraq (Mesopotamia). The proof can be seen from the writings of
Epiphanius, a Church father, who interchangeably used the
terms Ebionite and Nazarenes in the late 4th century in his
attack on them for rejecting godhood of Jesus and the Church. Ebionites (meaning
the poor) considered Jesus to be a man, and not God. They
adhered to Judaic teachings scrupulously and
rejected Pauline letters. As such, they were
declared heretics
by church fathers.
In one Nazarene text,
Paul is called the ‘enemy.’ The text maintains that Jesus’s rightful heir was
his brother James, and that Simon Peter had never ‘defected’ to Pauline
thought. Peter is quoted as issuing a warning against any authority other than Nazarene
hierarchy.[13]
Nazarene thoughts
survived in Egypt. It was there that the Gospel of Thomas was found, with the
wealth of other Nazarene thoughts left in Naag Hamadi scrolls. Arius, an ascetic Christian presbyter of Libyan birth, possibly
of Berber extraction, and priest in Alexandria, Egypt, saw Jesus as a man, not God, coming,
thus, as opposed to Pauline Christianity.
As the Nazarenes were
hunted down throughout the Roman territories, the followers of Paul, who were
called ‘Christians’ by others, were able to establish their churches along the
Greek-speaking Mediterranean coastline that belonged to the eastern half of the
Roman Empire, and then extensively throughout the empire.[14]
When Paul wrote his Epistle to the Romans around 57 CE, the church in Rome was
already flourishing.
With the widening doctrinal
gaps between the two branches of Christianity, the
Nazarenes - originally the central group in Christianity and still faithful to
Jewish law - were excluded and denounced for holding onto their so-called
unorthodox beliefs on Christology. By the 4th century CE, they would
be called heretics by the more dominant (Pauline) Christians, who were further
emboldened with Roman Emperor Constantine’s patronage and acceptance of
Christianity. The Gentile Christianity remained the sole strand of orthodoxy
and imposed itself on the previously Nazarene sanctuaries, taking full control
of those houses of worship by the end of the 5th century. Rome, the
capital of the Roman Empire, became the most important Christian center.[15]
In the 5th
century, the Pauline orthodoxy of Rome was still attempting to impose its
hegemony over Egypt. The great library of Alexandria was burnt by (Pauline) ‘Christians’
in 411 CE. The last great Neo-Platonic philosopher, a woman, Hypatia,
was stoned to death as she returned from a lecture at the library – again by
‘Christians’ – in 415 CE.[16]
In the 1960s, Prof.
Schlomo Pines, a medievalist scholar, found a collection of Arabic manuscripts,
dating from the 10th century and held in a library in Istanbul, that
includes a number of detailed verbatim quotes from an earlier 5th or
6th century text, which the Arab writer ascribes to ‘al-Nasara’ –
the Nazarenes. The earlier text is believed to have been written originally in
Syriac and to have been found at a Christian monastery in Khuzistan, south-west
Iran, near Iraqi border. Commenting on this manuscript, Baigent et al.
says, “It
appears to reflect a tradition dating, without a break, back to the original
Nazarean hierarchy which fled Jerusalem immediately prior to the revolt of A.D.
66. Again, Jesus is stated to be a man, not a god, and any suggestion of his
divinity is rejected. The importance of Judaic law is again stressed. Paul is
castigated and his followers are said to ‘have abandoned the religion of Christ
and turned towards the religious doctrines of the Romans’. The Gospels are
dismissed as unreliable, second-hand accounts which contain only ‘something –
but little – of the sayings, the precepts of Christ and information concerning
him’.”[17]
The Johannite sects
continued to flourish in the Tigris-Euphrates basin well into the first few
centuries. Even to this day, one of their sects exists. Most of them were
absorbed into Islam when Prophet Muhammad (S) appeared in Arabia.
No
one would dispute that what we call today Christianity – in all its manifold
and often irreconcilable forms – is the result of a prolonged, gradual, often
haphazard process involving much trial and error, much uncertainty, much
schism, much compromise, much improvisation, much a posteriori accretion – and
a great deal of historical accident. At every turn in the coalescence of
Christianity, there are random factors, arbitrary elements, distortions and
modification dictated by chance or by simple social and political expediency.[18]
==-==
Now let’s discuss the
date of Jesus’s birth. Interestingly, the DePascha Computus, an
anonymous document believed to have been written in North Africa around 243 CE,
placed Jesus’s birth on March 28. Clement, a bishop of Alexandria (d. ca.
215 CE), thought that Jesus was born on November 18. Based on historical
records, Fitzmyer, however, guessed that Jesus’s birth occurred on September
11, 3 BCE, which is probably closer to the actual than any other Christian
claims, especially when we recognize that in Luke 2:8 we are told that when
Jesus was born “there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the
field, keeping watch over their flock by night”. December is too cold for
such shepherd activities in either Bethlehem or Nazareth of Palestine (places
associated with birthplace of Jesus).[19]
By mid-October shepherds would bring their flocks from the mountainsides and
fields to protect them from the cold, rainy season that followed.
As can be seen from the
above, none of these dates agrees with December 25. So, how did this date come
to be celebrated later on as Jesus’s birth date?
For the answer we have
to dig into the Roman history. In ancient Rome, the pagan Romans used to
celebrate the Brumalia, a winter solstice festival that lasted almost a month from
November 24 until the Saturnalia, a midwinter festival in December 17-24 to
mark the sun's new birth from its solstice. During this period, Roman courts
were closed, and Roman law dictated that no one could be punished for any evil
deed. 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 Saturnalia festival’s conclusion, December 25th,
Roman authorities believed that by sacrificing this person they were
essentially destroying the forces of darkness. We are told by Lucian, the
ancient Greek writer, poet and historian (in his dialogue entitled Saturnalia),
that during this festival, in addition to human sacrifice, other customs
included: widespread intoxication; going from house to house while singing
naked; rape and other sexual license; and consuming human-shaped biscuits.
For the cult of Sol
Invictus, as noted above, the most celebrated day of the year was December 25, when
the festival of Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, or "Birthday of Sol
Invictus", the birth (or rebirth) of the sun, when the days began to grow
perceptibly longer was observed. The cult of Sol Invictus also meshed well with
that of Mithras, a survival of the old Zoroastrian religion imported from
Persia.
In the interest of unity
in his empire, Roman Emperor Constantine deliberately blurred the distinctions
between Christianity, Mithraism and Sol Invictus. Although he was baptized in
his deathbed, to him, Jesus was a human being and not God. So great was Constantine’s
favor to Christianity that Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, one of the leading
theological figures of his day and a close personal associate of the Emperor, considered
Constantine as the reincarnation of Logos, a Messiah-like figure.[20]
Christian doctrine, as
promulgated in Rome at the time, had much in common with the cult of Sol Invictus
anyway; and thus it was able to flourish unmolested under the sun cult’s
umbrella of tolerance.[21]
There is no record of early Christians observing Sunday as the day of the rest
until 321 CE when Constantine promulgated a law ordering the law courts closed
on the ‘venerable day of the sun.’ Now, in accordance with Constantine’s edict,
it adopted Sunday as its sacred day. Until the 4th century,
moreover, Jesus’s birthday had been celebrated on January 6.
It must be remembered
that no complete version of the New Testament (NT) survives which pre-dates the
reign of Constantine. The NT, as we know it today, is largely a product of the
Nicaea and other Church councils of the same epoch.
In the 4th
century when Roman emperors adopted Christianity as the state religion, the
pagan festivals of Saturnalia and Brumalia were too deeply entrenched in
popular custom to be set aside by Christian influence. Since no particular date
was mentioned in the gospel accounts, the date of Jesus’s birth was set by the
Church under Roman Emperor Justinian in 354 CE to coincide with the last day of
the pagan midwinter festival (i.e., December 25). This was a clever move by the
Church that allowed pagans to accept the new faith without making too much
compromise. By then, Emperor Constantine had already recognized Sunday, which
had been the day of pagan sun worship. The influence of the pagan Manichaeism,
which identified the “Son of God” with the physical Sun, gave these pagans of
the 4th century, now turning over wholesale to Christianity, their
excuse for calling their pagan festival date of December 25 (birthday of the
Sun-god) - the birthday of the “Son of God.”
From the above brief
analysis, it is clear that today’s Christians got their Christmas from the
Roman Catholics who got it from the pagan Romans. The pagan Romans in turn got
it from ancient Egypt where the cult of Osiris was vibrant. The Egyptian
mythology tells us that Osiris, the king of ancient Egypt, was married to Queen
Isis. The myth described Osiris as having been killed by his brother Set who
wanted Osiris's throne. Isis briefly brought Osiris back to life by use of a
spell that she learned from her father. This spell gave her time to become
pregnant by Osiris before he again died. (In another version of the story, Isis
is impregnated by divine fire.) Isis later gave birth to Horus. As such, since
Horus was born after Osiris's resurrection, Horus came to be known as a
representation of new beginnings and the vanquisher of the evil Set. This
combination, Osiris-Horus, was therefore a life-death-rebirth deity, and
thus associated with the new harvest each year. Afterward, Osiris became known
as the Egyptian god of the dead, Isis became known as the Egyptian goddess of
the children, and Horus became known as the Egyptian god of the sky or the
“divine son of the heaven”.
There is a remarkable
similarity between the myths of Osiris and Jesus. Osiris, the god of the
afterlife, was reborn as Horus, the son of Isis. Egyptologist E.A. Wallis Budge
finds possible parallels in Osiris's resurrection story with those found in
Christianity: “In Osiris the Christian Egyptians found the prototype of Christ,
and in the pictures and statues of Isis suckling her son Horus, they perceived
the prototypes of the Virgin Mary and her child."[22]
Biblical scholar Professor George Albert Wells asserts that Osiris dies and is
mourned on the first day and that his resurrection is celebrated on the third
day with the joyful cry "Osiris has been found". [23]
In his book – Human Sacrifices, anthropologist and historian Nigel
Davies asserts that "the agony of Osiris was a sacrifice with a universal
message. As the one who died to save the many, and who rose from the dead, he
was the first of a long line that has deeply affected man's view of this world
and the next." He further argues that the passion and sacrifice of Jesus
Christ is linked conceptually to Osirian and other traditions in the Ancient
world. [24]
After the death of
Osiris, Isis propagated the doctrine of the survival of Osiris as a sprit
being. She claimed that a full-grown evergreen tree had sprung from a dead tree
stump, thus symbolizing the springing forth of the dead Osiris unto new life.
She claimed that on each anniversary of his birth, Osiris would visit the
evergreen tree and leave gifts upon it. December 25 was the birthday of Osiris,
reborn as the son Horus. That explains how Christmas got its origin. Over the
generations Osiris came to be known as Baal, the Sun-god, amongst the
Phoenicians, and as Jupiter in ancient Rome. The names varied in different
countries and languages, but the worship of this false god continued.
According to Stephen
Nissenbaum, professor history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, “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. Since Jews were identified as Christ-killers, for amusement of
the public, Jews were forced by the Catholic Church to race naked through the
streets of Rome.
An eyewitness account
from Pope Paul II’s reign in 1466 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.”[25]
As part of the Christmas
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 in1836 the Jewish community of Rome sent a petition 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.”[26] On December 25,
1881, Christian leaders whipped the Polish masses into Anti-Jewish frenzies
that led to riots across the country. In Warsaw twelve Jews were brutally
murdered, huge numbers maimed, and many Jewish women were raped. Two
million rubles worth of property was destroyed by frenzied Christians.[27]
Because of its known
pagan origin, Christmas was banned by the Puritans and its observance was
illegal in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1681. But nowadays the festivity is
widely celebrated wherever Christian community lives. In Egypt, the Coptic
Christians celebrate the Christmas day on the 7th of January,
corresponding to the 29th of "Kiahk" - a Coptic month.[28]
December 25 – Christmas
Day – has been a federal holiday in the United States since 1870. Popular
customs include exchanging gifts, decorating Christmas trees, attending church,
sharing meals with family and friends and, of course, waiting for Santa Claus
to come. Christmas around the world has become more of a cultural and
commercial phenomenon than a sacred religious one.
In spite of its pagan
origin and associated make-beliefs and customs, Christmas is observed by
faithful Christians around the world as the anniversary of the birth of Jesus
of Nazareth, a spiritual leader whose teachings form the basis of their
religion. Jesus, the son of Mary, surely was one of the greatest teachers of
all time. In Islam, he is revered as a Prophet and mighty Messenger of God.[29]
It took nearly two
millennia for the official church to admit that Jesus was not born on 1 C.E.,
I wonder how long we have to wait before the same church also admits that
December 25 is not the date when Jesus was born!
[1] Simon of Peraea or Simon son of Joseph was a former slave
of Herod the Great who rebelled and was killed by the Romans in 4 BCE. He has been identified as the messiah of Gabriel's Revelation. He is mentioned by Flavius
Josephus. Judas of Galilee or Judas of Gamala was a Jewish
leader who led an armed resistance to the census imposed for Roman tax purposes
by Quirinius
in Iudaea Province around 6 CE. The revolt was crushed
brutally by the Romans. These events are discussed by Josephus in Jewish Wars
and in Antiquities of the Jews. Athronges
was a leader of the Jews during the insurrection under Herod Archelaus. He was
a shepherd. After proclaiming himself the messiah, Athronges led the rebellion
against Archelaus and the Romans. After a protracted struggle Athronges and his
brothers were defeated.
[2] Notice the similarity of
the word Nazarene with the Arabic word in the Qur’an – Nasara – to describe the
followers of ‘Isa (Jesus) – alayhis salam. Nazarenes are described as a member
of a group of Jews who (during the early history of the Christian Church)
accepted Jesus as the Messiah; they accepted the Gospel According to Matthew
but rejected the Epistles of St. Paul and continued to follow Jewish law and
celebrate Jewish holidays; they were later declared heretic by the Church of
Rome.
[4] For discussion around
Jesus’s birth, see, e.g., Addison G. Wright, Roland E. Murphy, Joseph A.
Fitzmyer, “A History of Israel” in The Jerome Biblical Commentary,
(Prentice Hall: Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1990), p. 1247; http://www.simpletoremember.com/vitals/Christmas_TheRealStory.htm
[5] Pope Benedict Disputes
Jesus’ Date of Birth, Time magazine, November 22, 2012, http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/11/22/pope-benedict-disputes-jesus-date-of-birth/
[6] Act 15:39. As to Paul’s
conflict with Peter and others see, Paul's Epistle to the Galatians 2:11-14. See
also: The Messianic Legacy by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry
Lincoln, Delta Trade Paperbacks, Bentam Dell, Random House, NY (1986), p. 75.
[8] Ibid., pp. 78-9
[9] Ibid., p. 79
[10] Ibid., p. 80
[11] Ibid., pp. 72-3
[12] The defeat of the Jewish revolt altered the
demography severely, as many of the Jewish rebels were scattered or sold into slavery.
Josephus claims that 1,100,000 people were killed during the siege, a sizeable
portion of these were at Jewish hands and due to illnesses brought about by
hunger during the seize of the holy land.
[14] The name "Christian" (Greek Χριστιανός) was
first applied to the disciples of Paul in Antioch, as recorded in Acts 11:26.
[15] Rome was rivalled by Constantinople
(Istanbul in today’s Turkey) after emperor Constantine had moved his capital
there. The latter city became the center of Orthodox Christianity, while Rome
came to be associated with Catholic branch of Christianity.
[17] Ibid., p. 107
[19] See the article by John
F. Loftus, “Was Jesus born in Bethlehem?” that discusses controversies surrounding
Jesus’s birthplace http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2006/12/was-jesus-born-in-bethlehem.html
. See also: http://www.religioustolerance.org/xmaswwjb.htm;
http://www.archaeology.org/0511/abstracts/jesus.html;
[20] The Messianic Legacy
by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, Delta Trade Paperbacks,
Bentam Dell, Random House, NY (1986), pp. 45-7.
[21] Op. cit., p. 46.
[22] "Egyptian
Religion" by E.A Wallis Budge, Ch. 2.
[23] "Can we trust
the New Testament?: thoughts on the reliability of early Christian testimony",
George Albert Wells, p. 18, Open Court Publishing, 2004.
[24] "Human
Sacrifice” by Nigel Davies. William Morrow & Sons, p. 37
& p. 66-67, 1981.
[25] The Popes Against
the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism, David
I. Kertzer, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001, p. 74.
[26] Ibid., pp. 33, 74-5.
[28] See, an explanation for the
difference: http://www.christmasarchives.com/christmas_in_egypt.html
[29] For an elaboration on
Islamic understanding of Jesus, see, e.g., this author’s article: ‘Isa – His
life and mission, Media Monitors Network, Dec. 31, 2005: http://asiapacific.mediamonitors.net/layout/set/print/content/view/full/24656
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