OR:
It ain't what you don't know that'll hurt ya. It's what you know that ain't so!
To sum up:
1. Early Christians celebrated Jesus' death
& conception on March 25
2. March 25 + 9 months = December 25
3. Third century pagan leader of faltering pagan empire appropriates December 25 (due to its popularity with Christians & others) as a pagan holiday
4. New pagan holiday gains some traction with pagans
5. Fourth century Christians, ever seeking ways to save the unsaved, co-opt the new pagan holiday that was a co-opt of their (Christian) holiday
6. Seventeenth century Protestant German attempts to tear at Roman Catholic legitimacy by reading about the second, Christian co-option (incomplete information), seeing it occurred on the winter solstice, and assuming that the original pagan holiday was somehow connected with the winter solstice (invalid assumption)
7. Aha! What floats? Ducks, witches,
& small pebbles. Therefore , if a woman weighs as much as a duck, she must be a witch!.
http://markshea.blogspot.com/2006_12_01_markshea_archive.html#116611119750997638It is vital we not get bogged down in minutiae and miss the blazingly obvious. So, for instance, we must not get distracted by the irrelevant question of whether Roman Christians were right to place Jesus' birthday on December 25. Nor should we waste time saying, "Ah ha! Some early Christians relied on the unbiblical Jewish tradition of 'integral age' or Chrysostom's 'rabbinic tradition'!" Again, granted: the date of Christmas isn't found in Scripture. But that isn't what matters.
The crucial thing is not, "Did the early Christians get the date of Christmas right?" It is, rather, "What mattered to them as they determined the date of Christmas?" And when you look at that, you again immediately realize that what dominates their minds is not Diana, Isis, sun worship, or anything else in the pagan religious world. What interests them is, from our modern multicultural perspective, stunningly insular. Their debates are consumed, not by longing for goddess worship, or pagan mythology, or a desire to import Isis and Diana into the Faith, but the exact details of the New Testament record of Jesus' death, alloyed with a Jewish-not pagan-theory about when Jewish-not pagan-prophets die. They don't care a bit how pagan priests ordered their worship in the Temple of Diana at Ephesus. They care intensely about how Levitical priests ordered their worship in the Temple of Solomon at Jerusalem. These Christians are completely riveted on Scripture and details of Jewish and Christian history and tradition. They don't give a hoot what sun worshipers, Osiris devotees, or Isis fans might think.
This just tickles the heck outta me, as a non-RC Christian. Why? Because it is so...
humanizing of the pagans, for one thing. They were'nt just bumps on a log wondering where the heck all their adherents were going. They got in the game for the hearts & souls of the Roman population. They saw the Christians had a good thing, tried to glom on to it, and were moderately successful.
