Dec

Origin of Christmas

Posted by: richard in Doctrine

According to this article, it doesn’t have anything to do with pagan celebrations (and the pagans actually tried to hop on the shirt tails of the Christians), but rather the consensus that Christ was conceived on March 25 (the Feast of Annunciation)… and nine months later equals December 25.

HT: The Flying Inn

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 0932 and is filed under Doctrine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 comments so far

Chris Hubbs

Interesting. This seems to fly in the face of most of what I’ve heard from sources both pagan and Christian. What do you think, Richard?

December 4th, 2007 at 1032

richard

It goes against a lot of what I’ve heard, too. I happened to read this blog post right after I posted that, and it seems to make sense.

Especially the point that early christian leaders weren’t stupid, and it seems unlikely that they would just import pagan dates to appease people.

But I don’t have any first hand knowledge of the history, and even if I read so-and-so’s book, who’s to say their understanding is correct. History can get interpreted all over the map.

Either way, though, I don’t have a problem celebrating christmas. If it was a pagan celebration, it *obviously* is not now… everyone knows it is a christian holiday, where we celebrate the Incarnation. If that weren’t the case, people wouldn’t try to use other expressions for the holiday in an attempt to be more inclusive.

So either the christian faith lead the way, or the christian faith grew to be more prominent… either way, we can freely celebrate christmas on December 25.

December 4th, 2007 at 1103