FreshCaffeine

And it's the perfect occasion to tell you that I love you! Happy Valentine's Day, sweetie!

Happy Valentine's Darling.. I love You!!

The popularly held thought that most Christian holidays are somehow related to or derived from earlier pagan ones is for the most part unfounded. You'll often hear, for example that Christmas is really a survival of Saturnalia, etc. However, few of these assertions actually hold up. They are a sort of lazy man's history that isn't bothered with producing proof. Rather they assume that the proximity of the dates or the activities of one are causes when at most they are weak correlations if that. For those interested here is an article on Christmas. To the best of my knowledge Valentine's Day has nothing to do with Lupercalia.

Calculating Christmas
William J. Tighe on the Story Behind December 25

Many Christians think that Christians celebrate Christ?s birth on December 25th
because the church fathers appropriated the date of a pagan festival. Almost no one minds, except for a few groups on the fringes of American Evangelicalism, who seem to think that this makes Christmas itself a pagan festival. But it is perhaps interesting to know that the choice of December 25th is the result of attempts among the earliest Christians to figure out the date of Jesus? birth based on calendrical calculations that had nothing to do with pagan festivals.

Rather, the pagan festival of the ?Birth of the Unconquered Son? instituted by the Roman Emperor Aurelian on 25 December 274, was almost certainly an attempt to create a pagan alternative to a date that was already of some significance to Roman Christians. Thus the ?pagan origins of Christmas? is a myth without historical substance.

A Mistake

The idea that the date was taken from the pagans goes back to two scholars from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Paul Ernst Jablonski, a German Protestant, wished to show that the celebration of Christ?s birth on December 25th was one of the many ?pagan-izations? of Christianity that the Church of the fourth century embraced, as one of many ?degenerations? that transformed pure apostolic Christianity into Catholicism. Dom Jean Hardouin, a Benedictine monk, tried to show that the Catholic Church adopted pagan festivals for Christian purposes without paganizing the gospel.

In the Julian calendar, created in 45 b.c. under Julius Caesar, the winter solstice fell on December 25th, and it therefore seemed obvious to Jablonski and Hardouin that the day must have had a pagan significance before it had a Christian one. But in fact, the date had no religious significance in the Roman pagan festal calendar before Aurelian?s time, nor did the cult of the sun play a prominent role in Rome before him.

There were two temples of the sun in Rome, one of which (maintained by the clan into which Aurelian was born or adopted) celebrated its dedication festival on August 9th, the other of which celebrated its dedication festival on August 28th. But both of these cults fell into neglect in the second century, when eastern cults of the sun, such as Mithraism, began to win a following in Rome. And in any case, none of these cults, old or new, had festivals associated with solstices or equinoxes.

As things actually happened, Aurelian, who ruled from 270 until his assassination in 275, was hostile to Christianity and appears to have promoted the establishment of the festival of the ?Birth of the Unconquered Sun? as a device to unify the various pagan cults of the Roman Empire around a commemoration of the annual ?rebirth? of the sun. He led an empire that appeared to be collapsing in the face of internal unrest, rebellions in the provinces, economic decay, and repeated attacks from German tribes to the north and the Persian Empire to the east.

In creating the new feast, he intended the beginning of the lengthening of the daylight, and the arresting of the lengthening of darkness, on December 25th to be a symbol of the hoped-for ?rebirth,? or perpetual rejuvenation, of the Roman Empire, resulting from the maintenance of the worship of the gods whose tutelage (the Romans thought) had brought Rome to greatness and world-rule. If it co-opted the Christian celebration, so much the better.

A By-Product

It is true that the first evidence of Christians celebrating December 25th as the date of the Lord?s nativity comes from Rome some years after Aurelian, in a.d. 336, but there is evidence from both the Greek East and the Latin West that Christians attempted to figure out the date of Christ?s birth long before they began to celebrate it liturgically, even in the second and third centuries. The evidence indicates, in fact, that the attribution of the date of December 25th was a by-product of attempts to determine when to celebrate his death and resurrection.

How did this happen? There is a seeming contradiction between the date of the Lord?s death as given in the synoptic Gospels and in John?s Gospel. The synoptics would appear to place it on Passover Day (after the Lord had celebrated the Passover Meal on the preceding evening), and John on the Eve of Passover, just when the Passover lambs were being slaughtered in the Jerusalem Temple for the feast that was to ensue after sunset on that day.

Solving this problem involves answering the question of whether the Lord?s Last Supper was a Passover Meal, or a meal celebrated a day earlier, which we cannot enter into here. Suffice it to say that the early Church followed John rather than the synoptics, and thus believed that Christ?s death would have taken place on 14 Nisan, according to the Jewish lunar calendar. (Modern scholars agree, by the way, that the death of Christ could have taken place only in a.d. 30 or 33, as those two are the only years of that time when the eve of Passover could have fallen on a Friday, the possibilities being either 7 April 30 or 3 April 33.)

However, as the early Church was forcibly separated from Judaism, it entered into a world with different calendars, and had to devise its own time to celebrate the Lord?s Passion, not least so as to be independent of the rabbinic calculations of the date of Passover. Also, since the Jewish calendar was a lunar calendar consisting of twelve months of thirty days each, every few years a thirteenth month had to be added by a decree of the Sanhedrin to keep the calendar in synchronization with the equinoxes and solstices, as well as to prevent the seasons from ?straying? into inappropriate months.

Apart from the difficulty Christians would have had in following?or perhaps even being accurately informed about?the dating of Passover in any given year, to follow a lunar calendar of their own devising would have set them at odds with both Jews and pagans, and very likely embroiled them in endless disputes among themselves. (The second century saw severe disputes about whether Pascha had always to fall on a Sunday or on whatever weekday followed two days after 14 Artemision/Nisan, but to have followed a lunar calendar would have made such problems much worse.)

These difficulties played out in different ways among the Greek Christians in the eastern part of the empire and the Latin Christians in the western part of it. Greek Christians seem to have wanted to find a date equivalent to 14 Nisan in their own solar calendar, and since Nisan was the month in which the spring equinox occurred, they chose the 14th day of Artemision, the month in which the spring equinox invariably fell in their own calendar. Around a.d. 300, the Greek calendar was superseded by the Roman calendar, and since the dates of the beginnings and endings of the months in these two systems did not coincide, 14 Artemision became April 6th.

In contrast, second-century Latin Christians in Rome and North Africa appear to have desired to establish the historical date on which the Lord Jesus died. By the time of Tertullian they had concluded that he died on Friday, 25 March 29. (As an aside, I will note that this is impossible: 25 March 29 was not a Friday, and Passover Eve in a.d. 29 did not fall on a Friday and was not on March 25th, or in March at all.)

Integral Age

So in the East we have April 6th, in the West, March 25th. At this point, we have to introduce a belief that seems to have been widespread in Judaism at the time of Christ, but which, as it is nowhere taught in the Bible, has completely fallen from the awareness of Christians. The idea is that of the ?integral age? of the great Jewish prophets: the idea that the prophets of Israel died on the same dates as their birth or conception.

This notion is a key factor in understanding how some early Christians came to believe that December 25th is the date of Christ?s birth. The early Christians applied this idea to Jesus, so that March 25th and April 6th were not only the supposed dates of Christ?s death, but of his conception or birth as well. There is some fleeting evidence that at least some first- and second-century Christians thought of March 25th or April 6th as the date of Christ?s birth, but rather quickly the assignment of March 25th as the date of Christ?s conception prevailed.

It is to this day, commemorated almost universally among Christians as the Feast of the Annunciation, when the Archangel Gabriel brought the good tidings of a savior to the Virgin Mary, upon whose acquiescence the Eternal Word of God (?Light of Light, True God of True God, begotten of the Father before all ages?) forthwith became incarnate in her womb. What is the length of pregnancy? Nine months. Add nine months to March 25th and you get December 25th; add it to April 6th and you get January 6th. December 25th is Christmas, and January 6th is Epiphany.

Christmas (December 25th) is a feast of Western Christian origin. In Constantinople it appears to have been introduced in 379 or 380. From a sermon of St. John Chrysostom, at the time a renowned ascetic and preacher in his native Antioch, it appears that the feast was first celebrated there on 25 December 386. From these centers it spread throughout the Christian East, being adopted in Alexandria around 432 and in Jerusalem a century or more later. The Armenians, alone among ancient Christian churches, have never adopted it, and to this day celebrate Christ?s birth, manifestation to the magi, and baptism on January 6th.

Western churches, in turn, gradually adopted the January 6th Epiphany feast from the East, Rome doing so sometime between 366 and 394. But in the West, the feast was generally presented as the commemoration of the visit of the magi to the infant Christ, and as such, it was an important feast, but not one of the most important ones?a striking contrast to its position in the East, where it remains the second most important festival of the church year, second only to Pascha (Easter).

In the East, Epiphany far outstrips Christmas. The reason is that the feast celebrates Christ?s baptism in the Jordan and the occasion on which the Voice of the Father and the Descent of the Spirit both manifested for the first time to mortal men the divinity of the Incarnate Christ and the Trinity of the Persons in the One Godhead.

A Christian Feast

Thus, December 25th as the date of the Christ?s birth appears to owe nothing whatsoever to pagan influences upon the practice of the Church during or after Constantine?s time. It is wholly unlikely to have been the actual date of Christ?s birth, but it arose entirely from the efforts of early Latin Christians to determine the historical date of Christ?s death.

And the pagan feast which the Emperor Aurelian instituted on that date in the year 274 was not only an effort to use the winter solstice to make a political statement, but also almost certainly an attempt to give a pagan significance to a date already of importance to Roman Christians. The Christians, in turn, could at a later date re-appropriate the pagan ?Birth of the Unconquered Sun? to refer, on the occasion of the birth of Christ, to the rising of the ?Sun of Salvation? or the ?Sun of Justice.?

William J. Tighe, a Touchstone correspondent, is Associate Professor of History at Muhlenberg College. He refers interested readers to Thomas J. Talley?s The Origins of the Liturgical Year (The Liturgical Press). A draft of this article appeared on the listserve Virtuosity.

I would like to ask you your opinion on the origin of Easter and it's possible association with fertility goddesses and spring equinox.

I'm happy to oblige. Easter as a dated holiday has absolutely nothing to do with the spring equinox nor fertility goddesses nor fertility rituals. Easter is not connected to the trhee mentioned above. It is directly dependent upon the dating for the Jewish celebration of Passover. Passover is a holiday with none of the above connections. It is associated with the sacrificial offering of a lamb that provided protection from the tenth plague visited upon the Egyptians. The account of the origin of the holiday may be found in the Old Testament of the Bible. It's told in Exodus chapters 12 and 13. There are later refinements to the celebration reported in later Bible passages and in Jewish tradition. I don't think it's possible to construe the celebration of Passover as in any way dependent or related to fertility religions et cetera. If you read the above passages you will see what I mean.

In the Gospel of John in the New Testament Jesus and his death is depicted as corresponding to the sacrifice of the Passover lamb. So there's no connection at the origin end of things.

However, in the period after 400 AD or so certain folk practices with fertility religious symbols and practices do begin to accrete to Easter in some areas of the ancient world.

How did this come about? One of the Roman emperors (perhaps it was Theodosius) proclaimed a law in the late 300s that considered everyone in the Roman empire a "Christian" regardless of their beliefs (I think Jews were excepted). By that time nearly all of the other religions in the Mediterranean basin had already died out of their own accord. They simply did not offer people hope for the future and they were abandoned. This was the conclusion of a natural process that lasted centuries and commenced long before Christians had any power or civil authority, in fact it began when they were a despised and presecuted religion. In the process of incorporating people into the church quickly and with little preparation some of the practices associated with pagan religions were brought with them such as the symbol of eggs. The church never approved of these theologically but there was little it could do. Eventually these practices were given, by the people who practiced them, a reinterpretation as a Christian symbol.

Thus the popular view that Easter is based on fertility religion has it backward. Easter began without such a connection, did not invite such a connection, and finally those who brought the connections into the church reinterpreted them in light of Christian belief.

Judaism throughout its history has been diametricslly opposed to the fertility religions of the ancient near east. Have you done much reading on ancient fertility religions? A comparison of the practices of such religions with either Judaism, Christianity, or Islam will show a stark contrast. Fertility religions were based on the idea that it was possible through various practices to manipulate particular deities into providing rain for crops. (This why fertility religions never really got going in Egypt--they have the flooding Nile to provide water for crops and no need to manipulate a god,goddess into providing water). In general there were two common practices that were a part of fertility religions. The more common practice was sacral prostitution. Religious shrines had attached to them male and female slaves who served as prostitutes. Persons who wanted to ensure fertility for their crops would offer a sacrifice and engage in a highly ritualized act of sexual intercourse with a temple prositute. The thought was that the sex act on earth influenced the deity to provide rain. The symbolism was that the god in questuion had sex with the goddess and the semen was the equivalent of rain. Both male and female worshippers participated, the sex acts were both heterosexual and homosexual depending on the preference of the worshipper providing the sacrifice.

The second practice was the sacrifice of infants, usually the first born son, to a deity. The baby was typically thrown into a furnace.

A moment's reflection will show very little connection between the beliefs and practices iof such fertility religions and Judaism, Christianity, or Islam.

As far as the spring equinox that is more a practice of pagan worship in northern Europe, far from the origins of Easter both geographically and temporally. As Christianity spread into northern Europe during the post Roman period a process similar to what happened in the Roman empire occurred.

There are a few differences. The first difference is based on a different idea of the self. Today we see ourselves as individuals. We make our own choices. Nobody can tell us what to believe. This is a radical departure from the way the mass of human beings have thought over most of the history of the world. Typically, whoever is in charge (king, chief, whatever) makes a choice and everyone else accepts it. Early Christianity spread into northern Europe thusly. In Denmark a few monks presented the Christian religion to King Harald Bluetooth in the late tenth century. After consideration he decided to become Christian. When he did, everyone in Denmark was baptized and became a Christian too. The process of people bringing in pagan beliefs and later Christianizing them occurred then pretty much the way they did during the late Roamn empire.

This is not a phenomenon associated soley with Christianity. Islam has spread in exactly the same way. IIRC several South American Indian tribes converted en masse to Christianity in the 1970s and 1980s. Several Nigerian groups converted en masse to Islam in the 19th century. Currently the leaders of the untouchable castes in India are considering Islam and Christianity as alternatives to Hinduism. They are tired of the way they are treated as a result of Hindu belief. They intend to pick either Islam or Christianity as their new religion. When they arrive at their conclusion it is expected that som 40 million untouchables will convert with them to the religion chosen by their leaders. You can imagine that in India at least some of the Hindu practices will be brought into the new religion and eventually reinterpreted in line with the bliefs of the new religion.

Sorry for the length but the question required this much at the minimum.

Hey Skank, while you're on a roll, where does the word Easter come from? I mean, why do Christians call it Easter?

Only English speaking Christians call Easter, Easter. The name the Church has used for the observance of the resurrection of Christ from the beginning is Pascha. The Greek and Russian Orthodox still use it. This is a form of the Hebrew word for Passover, pasch or pesach. I don't have a book handy to look up the Latin word but I believe it is merely a Latinization of the word, pascha. The Old Christian churches in Syria, Egypt, Armenia, Ethiopia, etc., all use a form of Pascha.

How then did the term become Easter in English and the related word "ostern" in German (and other related words in other northern European languages)? You may recall that in the early church there was a desire to have Pascha always fall on a Sunday.

Here is an excerpt from a site with a note on calculating Easter:

Prior to AD325, churches in different regions celebrated Easter on different dates, not always on Sundays. The Council of Nicea (AD 325) clarified this a bit by stating that Easter would be celebrated on Sundays. Still a number of methods were used until a method defined by Dionyisius Exiguus was adopted in about AD 532. This was not widely accepted until it was described and defended by the Venerable Bede in his De temporum ratione (AD 725). [Thanks to Jim Morrison (70451.2106@compuserve.com) for the previous four sentences.]

Aloisius Lilius (d. 1576) devised the system that would become the basis of the Gregorian Calendar, as well as the tables that would be used to determine the date of Easter. Christoph Clavius modified the tables slightly, and was one of the prime defenders of the Gregorian calendar. The tables used to determine the date of Easter (in the West) since AD 1583 are these modified tables of Clavius. All algorithms for calculating the date of Easter since then are based on these tables.

Easter is the Sunday after the Paschal Full Moon. The Paschal Full Moon may occur from March 21 through April 18, inclusive. Thus the date of Easter is from March 22 through April 25, inclusive. The date of the Paschal full moon is determined from tables, and it may differ from the date of the the actual full moon by up to two days. This definition, along with tables, etc. may be found in "The Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Ephemeris and American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac". This definition that uses tables instead of actual observations of the full moon is useful and necessary since the the full moon may occur on different (local, not UT) dates depending where you are in the world. If the date of Easter was based on local observations, then it would be possible for different parts of the world to celebrate Easter on different dates in the same year.

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Back to me.

The paschal moon and pascha happen to occur in the general vicinity of a pagan holiday observed by some in northern Europe. It is purely coincidence that this should be so, certainly no one in AD325 gave it a thought as there were virtually no Christians in northern Europe at the time.

If you compare the names of the days of the week in southern European (romance) languages with those of northern European (teutonic) languages you will see that they are quite different. For example in Spanish sabado and domingo (sabbath and Lord's day) bear little resemblance to Saturday and Sunday (Saturn's day and sun's day).

In the same way that northern Europeans kept their pagan designations for sabbath and Lord's Day they also kept the pagan name of the holiday nearest pascha as the name of Easter. I believe the Venerable Bede is one of the first to note this.

The question is, does this mean that Easter is a pagan holiday? My answer is, of course not. The name Easter is a mere linguistic artifact not a theological statement. It is yet another example of the process I mentioned in my previous post whereby some pagan accretions become attached to Christianity without altering the substance of Christian belief.

"without altering the substance of Christian belief" is an interesting phrase.

I say that because the "pagan accretions" have certainly modified Christian Easter behavior. I mean, you guys call it by the name of a pagan God, you celebrate with pagan symbols, and you use the same language of rebirth and new life that pagans would have used to talk about the arrival of spring.

I mean, I remember the hour every year that Christian families go to church on Easter Sunday, but that really pales in comparison to the amount of time and effort that goes into the commercialism and pagan celebrations. The bunnies and eggs seem to take up a lot more of most Christian's time and thoughts than the Passion.

[By the way, I thought that if you were going to comment that you'd mention the Lupercalia Sausage connection. Oh well.]

Just a few comments serious and silly before I put this thread to bed. I like your wry sense of humor . But just as you are quite precise in your discussions of CSS and XML standards, I'm compelled to point out the utter vacuity of the position you jocularly put forward, after all, it's my job. :-)

You seem to suggest that coloring a few eggs and letting children hunt for them, children's stories of a bunny leaving candy, and using a name for a current holiday that 1500 years ago in a language that preceded Old English referred to a pagan deity somehow amounts to Christians participating in pagan celebrations. Looks like quite a stretch to me.

What was the character of pagan fertility celebrations 2000, or 1700, 1500, or 1300 years ago? Ritual sex acts calculated to influence weather by means of sympathetic magic. Child sacrifice. I see a lot of that in Christian homes around the spring equinox.

Ah, I remember those days as a child growing up, the good old days. Somehow I seem to have gotten off the track. I probably should not have deferred making that sacrifice of my oldest child. What a lousy practitioner of that fertility religion I am! Perhaps I can catch up this next Easter with my sacrifices and ritual sex acts. What are you doing over the Easter holiday?

To follow your line of thinking we're both practitioners of Old Norse religion because we refer to certain days of the week by the Old Norse names of their deities.

And of course words carry their full original meaning through time no matter how many centuries pass. I suppose that makes you a Muslim, your name meaning "The beauty of [the Islamic] religion." And it makes me a mighty warrior since my name means "great spear [carrier]."

As much fun as all this is it can never be considered seriously by anyone with a passing familiarity with the history of religions or the development of human language. Thanks for the chuckles. Still reading Charles Panatti I see. I've mislaid my books by him. Say--do you have my Panatti? Just wondering.

Nope - don't have your Panati - but I've been looking for one of my own. That guy was great. I have a copy of "Origins" at work, but I can't seem to find "Endings" anywhwere. Luckily I memorized all of the good bits. =-)

I like that you brought up child sacrifice and stressed twice now how Christianity, Islam and Judaism are so far separated from that tradition. Could you please tell the class the most important moment in the founding of the Jewish faith? And the same for Christianity, if that's okay.

Oh heck, why wait for you to wake up: Abraham being ordered (and willing) to kill his child by God, and God allowing (really, ordering) his child to be tortured and killed. Now who's being naive? =-)

Moreover, I think that Easter is a really good example of a holiday that was taken over by the Christians while retaining its pagan nature. It's a spring-time holiday like most fertility holidays, it shares the element of child sacrifice, and it contains the same basic "death and rebirth" storyline that most other spring holidays have. (Do you mind if we call Jesus Persephone from now on?)

Heck, the key ingredient to the story is that because of one really good child sacrifice, nobody has to perform one ever again - so it's just the pagan tradition with a more palatable and salable approach. You guys are some marketing geniuses!

Kinda seems like a rip-off of the pagans all around. Do you guys have any holidays you didn't swipe?

come on now boys, this doesn't have to turn into a battle.