Merry Christmas!!!
And a Happy New Year!!
God bless you one and all as we celebrate the birth of our lord and Savior. On FaceBook, X, or other media, we may see silly people posting from ignorance about how Christmas is just a reworked pagan festival. This isn’t true because December 25th was recognized as Jesus’s Birthday as early as the second century when Christians were still being persecuted and did not have any social or political power. During this period, most Christians were working on separating themselves from pagan festivals, games, and other holidays to mark them out as children of God and not servants of pagan demons. It wouldn’t be until after Constantine converted Rome to Christianity in the 4th century that Christians would have the social and political power to hijack pagan customers and beliefs (and they did), with Pope Gregory the Great in the 6th century recommending that pagan temples not be destroyed, but converted to churches (he also fixed our calendar with the leap year).
The Date we celebrate for Christmas comes from the belief of an ancient Jewish sect that the Messia would die on the same day he was conceived. So, in the second century, Tertullian of Carthage, a Christian scholar, calculated the date of Jesus’s crucifixion on the 14th of Nisan from the Jewish Lunar Calendar to be the 25th of March on the Roman Solar calendar. After that, it was just counting forward 9 months to the 25th of December as Jesu’s birthdate. While we may never know the actual day Jesus was born, we can celebrate this miracle knowing that it has its roots not in Pagan festivities but in Jewish myths. Here is an excellent article about the topic.
I apologize for my absence. It has been crazy around here, with several plumbing problems, Christmas preparations, wrestling season in full swing, and other hurdles. I promise I have several articles in the works and will return soon. Also, as my gift to you, I am granting all subscribers free and paid 3 weeks of full access for free as a gift. If you are a free subscriber, that means you can read the full archive and have full access to everything published in the next several weeks; for paid subscribers, that means your next billing date will be three weeks further in the future than it was before.
Luke 2:8–14
8 And in the same region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. 9 And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear. 10 And the angel said to them, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. 11 For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. 12 And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.” 13 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying,
14 “Glory to God in the highest,
and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!”
God Bless you all, and thank you for your support.
-Sam