Hi, I'm David Bercot, and tonight we're going to be talking about holidays—which ones are genuinely Christian, and which ones were originally pagan holidays but which the institutional church attempted to Christianize. As you've no doubt figured out, our English word "holiday" originally meant "holy day," but today the word would have almost the exact opposite meaning from what it originally had.
Now it's a day when people don't have to go to work; it's generally associated with festivities and amusements, most of which are anything but holy. Of course, most of the holidays that we celebrate here in the United States don't even pretend to be "holy" days; rather, they are secular holidays commemorating famous people or events. So we're not going to be talking about any of these secular memorial days or holidays; rather, we're going to focus on the ones that at one time were supposed to be truly holy days.
To this end, the two holidays that we're going to be discussing at the greatest length are Easter and Christmas, and particularly Easter, but we'll also be talking about some of the other holidays as well as time permits. But let me say at the outset that there is probably no other subject that is as enshrouded in popular myths and misunderstanding as are the church's holidays.
Now, I realize that there's a lot of Christian books out there already that talk about various holidays and where they originated, but what's going to be different about our discussion tonight is that what we talk about tonight is going to be based on primary sources. A primary source is an original source. For example, if you want to know what Jesus taught, the primary source are the four Gospels. There are plenty of Christian books out there that discuss what Jesus taught, but all of those are secondary works.
It's somebody else saying, "This is what he said," instead of just getting it from the horse's mouth. And going for primary sources often means that we have to dig until we actually come to the original source document that other people are basing their statements on. But you know, quite often there is no original document. You'll find that something that is supposed to be historical fact, when you keep digging to see, "Okay, where is the original source for this information?" you find there isn't any.
It was all something that somebody made up, and then this false information was repeated by others, and after a while it gets repeated so many places everybody just assumes it's true without ever digging to see if it's based on some kind of verifiable fact. Well, tonight in our discussion we're going to begin with Easter. As most of you know, I grew up with Jehovah's Witness, and so I was taught from childhood that Easter was a pagan holiday.
We were told that the name Easter came from the pagan Germanic goddess Oster or Easter or Ostera, various forms of it, and we were also told that this Germanic goddess was actually the same goddess as Astarte, who was the Phoenician goddess of fertility and sexual love. And according to the witnesses, this Astarte was really just a remake of the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, who was really Nimrod's wife.
Something else we were told as Jehovah's Witnesses is that Constantine created a fusion religion of Christianity and paganism, and it was at that time that Easter, Christmas, the Trinity, the cross, and a whole host of other things were introduced into the church. Now, the source that Jehovah's Witnesses based a lot of these claims on was a book entitled The Two Babylons. The book is still in print, and probably a lot of you have read it.
Anyway, that's what I grew up believing, and even after I left the witnesses, I still thought that all of this was true about Easter and Christmas that we had learned. And I'm not saying right now that it wasn't; we're going to talk about that. So I was really surprised to find when I began reading the early Christian writings that way back in the second century, nearly 200 years before Constantine and the Council of Nicaea, Christians were celebrating Easter.
Only they didn't call it Easter; they called it Pascha, which is Greek for Passover. One of the passages that really caught my attention was this one I'm about to read to you from Irenaeus, written about the year 170 or 180. He says, "When the blessed Polycarp was visiting in Rome in the time of Anicetus—Anicetus was the bishop of Rome about the year 155—they were at once well inclined towards each other, not willing that any quarrel should arise between them upon this matter, which was the observance of Pascha.
For Anicetus could not persuade Polycarp to forgo the observance of his Pascha customs inasmuch as these things had always been observed by John, the disciple of our Lord, and by other apostles with whom he had been conversant." That is, Polycarp, he had been a personal disciple of John. "Nor, on the other hand, could Polycarp succeed in persuading Anicetus to keep Pascha in his way, for Anicetus maintained that he was bound to adhere to the usage of the presbyters who preceded him.
And in this state of affairs, they held fellowship with each other." Now, this passage is very noteworthy because Irenaeus, who wrote it, who at the time he wrote it was bishop in the French city of Lyon, what was in Gaul at that time, and he had been a personal disciple of Polycarp, and Polycarp had been a personal disciple of John. So when Irenaeus says that this conversation took place between Polycarp and Anicetus, that carries great weight because he probably heard about it firsthand from Polycarp.
And if Polycarp said that the way he observed Pascha was the way John had passed it down and some of the other apostles, that comes from pretty good authority. So when I first read that passage nearly 20 years ago, I realized right off that Easter is not a pagan holiday, that it dates back to the time of the apostles, and that we have sound historical evidence that the apostle John celebrated it and passed on a custom concerning it.
Actually, the very name that the early Christians called this day by suggests that it dates back to New Testament times because they called it by a Jewish name, Passover. Now, I don't mean a Hebrew name; Pascha is Greek, but it means Passover. But you see, by the beginning of the second century, the church was predominantly Gentile, and by the middle of the second century, probably 90% of the members of the church were Gentiles.
So if this Pascha, this special day, was first begun celebrated by Christians in the second century, why would they call it Passover? Passover had no connection, no special meaning for the Gentiles. Certainly, they would have called it Resurrection Day or something like that.
The fact that this holy day was called by the name Passover or in Greek Pascha makes me think that the Jewish Christians in the first century are the ones who first began keeping this day, and no doubt they kept it as a replacement for their Jewish Passover. Now, I can't prove any of that because there's no mention of it in the New Testament, but we know beyond any doubt that Christians were celebrating it in the middle of the second century.
Smyrna, where Polycarp was bishop and the other churches in Asia Minor, observed Pascha on the same day that the Jews celebrated their Passover, which is Nisan the 14th. My guess is that is when all Christians originally celebrated Pascha. Otherwise, I don't think they would have called it by the name Passover.
But somewhere along the way, some Christians began celebrating Pascha not on the night of the Jewish Passover, but on the first Sunday following the Jewish Passover because it seemed more appropriate to always celebrate Christ's resurrection on a Sunday or the Lord's Day, the day on which Christ was resurrected. Now, we don't know when or where the custom of making Pascha always fall on a Sunday, where that originated.
All that we do know is that sometime by the year 150 and probably several decades before, it was the practice in Rome to always celebrate Pascha on the first Sunday after the Jewish Passover. And Rome was such an influential church; once it adopted this custom, well, it was followed by almost all of the other churches in the West and eventually the churches in other places as well.
In fact, by the time we get to the end of the second century, it appears that the only place where Christians still observed Pascha on Nisan the 14th was in Asia Minor, which is modern-day Turkey, where the apostle John had lived his last years. Now, originally, the fact that certain regions of the empire celebrated Jesus's death and resurrection on differing days wasn't considered any big deal. From the historical record we have, it appears that it was the bishop of Rome who first made it an issue.
Irenaeus gives us the history that we read just a few minutes ago about the meeting between Anicetus and Polycarp around the year 155 AD, at which time these two bishops were able to accept the fact that each had different customs. So an issue had come up by the year 155, but there was still such a spirit in the church of, "We don't have to have perfect uniformity.
We can have a church of oneness without everything having to be exactly the same." But about 40 years later, Victor, who was bishop of Rome at that time, began making a lot of claims about the preeminence of the Roman bishop, and he threatened to excommunicate all of the churches in Asia Minor and Syria who were still observing Pascha on Nisan the 14th. Irenaeus tried to intercede on behalf of these churches, but Victor still excommunicated Polycrates, who was the bishop of Ephesus at that time.
And by the time you get into the third century, the churches that were still observing Pascha on Nisan the 14th were viewed by the other churches as quasi-heretical. They were called quartodecimans, meaning the 14th. In fact, many of the references in the early Christian writings to Pascha concern this conflict on how it should be celebrated. I want to read to you some of these passages.
From Melito, who was a bishop writing about the year 170, we read, "When Servilius Paulus was proconsul of Asia at the time that Sagarius suffered martyrdom, there arose a great controversy at Laodicea concerning the date of Pascha, which had fallen due at that time." Theophilus of Caesarea writes this about the year 180, "In Alexandria too, they observed the festival on the same day as ourselves, for the Pascha letters are sent from us to them and from them to us." Again, this one is from Polycrates about the year
190.
He's the bishop of Ephesus who Victor, the bishop of Rome, excommunicated over this. He wrote, "In Asia, great luminaries have gone to their rest who will rise again on the day of the coming of the Lord. These all kept Pascha on the 14th day in accordance with the gospel." Okay, Anatolius, writing about the year 270, writes, "The other party keeps the day of the Lord's Passion as one replete with sadness and grief.
They hold that it would not be lawful to celebrate the Lord's mystery of the Passover at any other time but on the Lord's day." Well, despite this controversy, it should be clear from these quotations that Pascha or Easter is not a pagan holiday that the Roman Catholic state church tried to Christianize. There was no controversy in the early church about the propriety of celebrating Pascha or the act of doing it. They were all keeping this special day.
The only issue was on what day it should be celebrated, whether on the Jewish Passover or on the Sunday following it. Well, this controversy on when to celebrate Pascha ended with the Council of Nicaea, where that council, with the backing of Constantine, the emperor, declared that all Christians had to celebrate Pascha on Sunday, as most of the churches were doing at that time. And it appears that most of the quartodeciman churches went ahead and accepted this decision.
Some of them didn't, and they continued on as an independent church until sometime into the fifth century. Now, there was a second issue with regard to how to calculate which Sunday Pascha should fall on each year. The basic rule is that Pascha would fall on the first Sunday after the Paschal full moon. Well, in Antioch and in much of the West, they normally accepted whatever calculation the Jews came up with for their Passover.
However, in Alexandria, they made their own independent calculation of the Paschal full moon, requiring that it always fell after the spring equinox. The Jews would sometimes celebrate Passover before the spring equinox, and the Christians in Alexandria said that the Jewish calendar was off and they were miscalculating Passover and hence were affecting when Christians were holding their Pascha. Well, at the Council of Nicaea, the Alexandrian method was adopted as the way that the whole church should follow.
So Pascha was to be celebrated on the Sunday immediately following the first full moon that falls on the day of or after the spring equinox. This following quotation I want to read to you, it was written down about the year 390, may date back to several decades earlier than that, but it really reflects the spirit of the times. It says, "It is your duty, brethren, to observe the days of Pascha exactly. No longer be concerned about keeping the feast with the Jews, for we now have no communion with them.
In fact, they have been led astray in regard to the calculation itself. You should not, through ignorance, celebrate Pascha twice in the same year or celebrate this day of the resurrection of our Lord on any day other than a Sunday." So by the fourth century, this was viewed almost, well, I shouldn't even say almost, as an article of faith that they all had to celebrate Pascha on the exact same day, and it was like it was a grave sin to do it on some other day.
The irony, though, is that even after the emperors got involved and the state church tried to force a uniform practice everywhere, Pascha was still often celebrated at different times by different regions. The reason was because the Julian calendar, the solar calendar used by the Romans, calculated a year as being 365 and one-fourth days, and so they added a leap year every four years like we do today.
Well, they were very close, I mean very, very close to what an actual year is, but a true solar year is actually 11 minutes and 14 seconds less than 365 and one-fourth days. As a result, over a period of time, the Julian calendar got out of sync with the true solar year. And then there were some other chronological subtleties that resulted in different countries calculating Pascha in differing ways. Well, now let's talk a few minutes about how Christians observed Pascha.
The method of observing Pascha was uniform throughout the whole church in three respects. First, it was preceded by fasting. Number two, normally the congregation would meet together the night before Pascha for an all-night prayer vigil and worship. Then number three, at dawn or at some other point in the early morning hours, the Christians would begin to celebrate Christ's resurrection with praise and with breaking their fast with food.
Also, by the third century, it had become quite common for new converts to be baptized on the morning of Pascha. Actually, it was this issue of fasting prior to the resurrection and then rejoicing and eating after dawn that was at the heart of the controversy of when to celebrate Pascha because in many of the larger cities like Rome, you had people who had moved to the city from all different places in the Roman Empire, and often they brought their Paschal customs with them.
So some Christians in some of the little house churches would be rejoicing and feasting while other Christians in another house church, for example, were still fasting. And that's why the leaders felt it was desirable to have uniformity among the churches so everybody would be fasting at the same time. Everybody would be rejoicing at the same time. Well, be that as it may, it should never have come at the expense of excommunicating people.
Let me read to you some of the passages from the early Christians that describe some of these Pascha customs. Tertullian wrote, this was in a work in which he pointed out a number of reasons why a Christian woman should not ever marry a pagan.
He said, "Finally, what unbelieving husband will without anxiety endure her absence all the night long at the Pascha solemnities?" That was written about the year 205, showing that it was the normal practice then to be up all night at the church on the night before Pascha morning. Tertullian also wrote, giving us some interesting insight. He said, "We consider fasting or kneeling in worship on the Lord's Day to be unlawful.
We rejoice in the same privilege also from Pascha to Pentecost." So not only was Pascha itself a day of rejoicing, but the rejoicing continued all the way through the day of Pentecost, which was another special holiday for the church. Origen wrote about the year 248, "We ourselves are accustomed to observe certain days. For example, there is Pascha.
He who considers that Christ our Passover was sacrificed for us and that it is his duty to keep the feast by eating the flesh of the word never ceases to keep the Paschal feast, for Pascha means a Passover.
So he is ever striving in all of his thoughts, words, and deeds to pass over from the things of this life to God." Commodianus, writing about the year 240, says, "They will assemble together at Pascha that most blessed day of ours and let them rejoice." Dionysius of Alexandria, he was a bishop there around the year 262, says this in a correspondence of his, "You have sent to me most faithful and accomplished son in order to inquire what is the proper hour for bringing the fast to a close on the day of Pascha.
You say that there are some of the brethren who hold that it should be done at cockcrow. However, others say that it should end at nightfall. It will be cordially acknowledged by all that those who have been humbling their souls with fasting should immediately begin their festal joy and gladness at the same hour as the resurrection took place.
However, no precise account seems to be offered in scripture as to the hour at which he rose." Dionysius continues, "We make the following statement and explanation to those who seek an exact account of the specific hour, half hour, or quarter of an hour at which it is proper to begin their rejoicing over our Lord's rising from the dead.
Those who are too hasty and give up even before midnight, we reprove as irresponsible and intemperate." And then finally, from the apostolic constitutions that I'd read to you a minute ago, they were compiled around the year 390, although a lot of the things in them would date back to a time before then. It reads, "Break your fast when it is daybreak of the first day of the week, which is the Lord's Day. From the evening until the cock crows, keep awake. Assemble together in the church. Watch and pray. Entreat God.
When you sit up all night, read the law, the prophets, and the Psalms until cockcrow. Baptize your catechumens, those were hearers, learners, and read the gospel with fear and trembling and speak to the people such things as will assist their salvation. And from that point on, that is, once the cock crows, leave off your fasting and rejoice. Keep a festival for Jesus Christ, the pledge of our resurrection is risen from the dead." Well, you may be wondering how long was this fast before Pascha.
The answer is that it varied greatly from church to church or even from individual to individual. Some Christians or some congregations fasted only on the Saturday before Pascha. More commonly, churches fasted on both Friday and Saturday, commemorating the time that Jesus was in the tomb. And then there were other churches that fasted the entire week before Pascha. And even in some places, Christians fasted for 40 days before Pascha in remembrance of Jesus's 40-day fast in the wilderness.
However, that was not a very common practice. So, as you may be figuring out, this was the origin of Lent. Lent is not something of a pagan background and is not something that the Roman Catholics invented. It's a carryover of the time of fasting before Pascha that the early church observed. On the other hand, fasting for 40 days had never been something obligatory on Christians, at least not before the time of Constantine, and it wasn't the normal practice.
And I don't think the forced practice of it has been a very good thing for the church. In people's minds, it very quickly came to be associated with earning some kind of merit with God by fasting for all of these days. And because the people who were fasting weren't really people who were radical disciples of Jesus Christ with hearts that were burning with love for the Lord, what the church had to do was keep relaxing the rules of what constituted a true fast.
So, in the end, the Lenten fast, at least in the West, basically came down to eating fish instead of beef or other meat during Lent. Now, you probably have noticed that the things that are conspicuously absent from the descriptions that we have read of Pascha are any references to eggs and to rabbits. I think we can say without any hesitation that Easter eggs and rabbits are not of Christian origin and are almost certainly a pagan corruption or addition to what is otherwise an authentic Christian holiday.
In fact, it is the foremost Christian holiday of the year. Before leaving the subject of Pascha, let's talk a bit about the term Easter. Actually, it's only in English and in some Germanic languages that the commemoration of the resurrection of Christ is called Easter or something similar to that. In most Western languages or Eastern, this holiday is still known as Pascha or some variant of it. For example, in Spanish, it's called Pascua, a direct derivative of Pascha.
Nevertheless, as English-speaking people, we certainly need to ask the question, was Easter or Ostera the name of a pagan Germanic goddess? You know, there are so many books that say that Easter is named after this pagan Germanic goddess that most of my life, I've just simply taken that as something that's beyond dispute. However, in the process of digging deeper into this whole thing, I found that this isn't something that's beyond dispute.
Everybody says that the name Easter comes from a pagan Germanic goddess of fertility, but you know, no one produces any evidence to back up their claim. What I've discovered is that all of these claims we have all heard about a Germanic goddess named Easter or Ostera, you know, they all come from one single source, and that is the Roman Catholic English church historian Bede, who lived in the early 8th century.
It is Bede who states in one of his works entitled On the Reckoning of Time that the name Easter is derived from the name of an Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring named Easter or Ostera. And that's it. That's the only historical evidence that we have of that claim. Archaeologists and historians have not been able to find any evidence of the existence of such a goddess. There are no written records, no artifacts, no ruins that bear her name. Now, to be sure, Bede is a respected early medieval scholar.
If it were someone else who had said that, probably the notion would have just been dismissed and most of us would have never heard of it. At the same time, while historians respect Bede's knowledge and his scholarship, they also recognize that he's not infallible. Now, nobody in Bede's day was worshiping this goddess Easter or Ostera. So, Bede was either making a conjecture or he was relying on hearsay on that.
On the other hand, what is beyond question is that the Anglo-Saxons had a month in their calendar that was named Easter Monot, which corresponds roughly to our March, April. So, a number of historians think that Pascha was called Easter by the Anglo-Saxons not because of some pagan goddess of spring, but because it normally fell during their month of Easter Monot. Now, one thing I have found is that no scholar has found any connection between the word Easter and Astarte or Ishtar.
And that has surprised me because, again, I've heard that connection practically my whole life. Etymologists, those are people who study the origin of words in a language, seem to all agree that the word Easter is derived from the basic German word meaning east. And also, the old German word for dawn sounds very similar to the word Easter. And of course, it likewise has its origin in the word east because the sun rises in the east.
So, we need to be very careful when we start making claims about the origin of words just because they sound similar to another word in another language. A good example I can think of years ago when I was a Jehovah's Witness, I was conducting a Bible study with this young man who was not a member of the Worldwide Church of God, but he was reading a lot of their literature. And he had bought into their doctrine of British Israelism, that the English were actually the descendants of the lost tribes of Israel.
And in proof of that, he pointed out that you have names like the Danube River. See Danube and the tribe of Dan. How about the Danish nation, Dan? There's a town in England, Danbury. Uh-huh, there's Dan again. So, any word that had Dan in it, I guess, or any other name that would be related to an Israelite name was given as proof that, see, they had journeyed across Europe. Well, that's just total unscientific nonsense.
It's not how you study the origin of language, just going out there and guessing because a word sounds similar to something else. Because two words can sound very similar in languages and have no connection whatsoever. An example that comes to my mind is the Spanish word embarazado. Now, Spanish is a direct derivative of Latin, and English has a lot of Latin root words in it. So, very often when there's a word in Spanish that sounds similar to a word in English, they do mean something similar.
So, I naturally assume that embarazado must mean embarrassed. And so, I was using that word when I've been down in Honduras saying, "Estoy muy embarazado." I'm very embarrassed because I was always doing dumb things that I was embarrassed about. Well, I didn't find out until much later that embarazado doesn't mean embarrassed; it means pregnant. So, here I was, a guy telling people that I'm very pregnant. I'm sure they thought I was really, really strange.
So, when we start looking at words that seem similar, it's not a scientific way to prove that there's a relationship between those words. And like I say, I haven't been able to find any etymologist who sees any connection between Ishtar and this Germanic goddess who may never have existed named Easter. Instead, the origin is the word east, from which the Germans got their word for dawn as well.
Okay, so to sum it all up, Pascha is a Christian holiday that dates as far back as the middle of the 2nd century, at least, with some strong evidence that it was observed by the apostle John, if not by all of the apostles. We've talked about colored eggs and Easter bunnies were not part of the original Christian holy day, and they do seem to be pagan additions. I don't think anybody disputes that.
And we've seen that the name Easter is actually used only in English-speaking countries, and then in German, there's a similar name that they give to this holiday. But everyone else calls it by some form of Pascha or something different like that. Now, the name Easter may be derived from a Germanic goddess of spring, but it could just as likely be derived from the Anglo-Saxon spring month of Easter Monot, or from the Anglo-Saxon word for dawn, because that's the time of day when the celebration of Pascha began.
Now, let's move on to Christmas. This holiday is said to celebrate the birth of Christ. However, I've read every pre-Nicene Christian writing that's in existence today, and I've been totally unable to find even one single reference to anyone celebrating the birth of Christ before the time of Constantine. In fact, I've only found one reference as to a possible date that Jesus was born.
This was in a writing of Clement of Alexandria, written about the year 195, and it says, "Therefore, from the birth of Christ to the death of Commodus are a total of 194 years, one month, and 13 days. There are those who have calculated not only the year of our Lord's birth, but also the day. They say that it took place in the 28th year of Augustus, on the 25th day of Pachon.
Others say that he was born on the 24th or 25th day of Pharmuthi." When I first read that and saw the reference to the 25th day, I thought, "Hmm, maybe that's December 25th." However, when I did some digging to find out what those months were, they don't correspond exactly with our months. The 25th day of Pachon was actually May 20th on our calendar, and the other one would come out to April 19th or April 20th on our calendar.
So, the only reference we have in the pre-Nicene writings that talk about the day of Christ's birth state that he was born sometime in the spring, either April or May. But even there, Clement says nothing about anyone celebrating the day of Christ's birth, and no other writer mentions that either. Although Origen does mention that people could still go to Bethlehem and see the cave where Jesus was born. Apparently, the stable he was born in was housed inside of a cave, if that tradition is correct.
Although I couldn't find anything about Christmas in the early Christian writings, I did come across in Tertullian's writings the following descriptions of pagan festivals, such as the Saturnalia, which was celebrated by the pagan Romans around December 25th. And listen to how he describes those pagan ceremonies. This first reference is addressing pagans, written about the year 197.
He said, "On your day of gladness," talking about the Saturnalia, "we Christians neither cover our doorposts with laurels nor intrude upon the day with lamps. At the call of public festivity, you consider it a proper thing to decorate your house like some new brothel." And again, he said, "The Roman traders clad their doorposts with green and branching laurels. They smoked up their porches with lofty and brilliant lamps." Okay, another writing from the year 200.
And in this one, he was addressing whether it was proper for a Christian to accept employment at a public school. And he goes through what some of the issues would be that a Christian would face. He says, "What less of a defilement does he incur on that ground than does a business that is publicly consecrated to an idol? The Minervalia are as much Minerva's as the Saturnalia is Saturn's. Yes, it is Saturn's day, which must necessarily be celebrated even by little slaves at the time of the Saturnalia.
Likewise, New Year's gifts must be caught at, and all the presents of midwinter and the feast of dear kinsmanship must be exacted. The schools must be wreathed with flowers. The same thing takes place on an idol's birthday. Every ceremony of the devil is frequented. Who will think that these things are befitting for a Christian teacher?" All right, now these next three writings are written as rebukes to Christians who were participating in some of these holidays.
He says, "The Saturnalia, New Year, midwinter festivals, and Matronalia are frequented by us. Presents come and go. There are New Year's gifts. Games join their noise. Banquets join their din. The pagans are more faithful to their own sect. For even if they had known them, they would not have shared the Lord's Day or Pentecost with us. For they would fear lest they would appear to be Christians.
Yet we're not apprehensive that we might appear to be pagans." Again, he says, "Nowadays, you will find more doors of heathens without lamps and laurel wreaths than of Christians." And again, he says, "This is talking about what a wife would go through if she were married to an unbelieving husband.
And among these, the wife of an unbelieving husband will be agitated by the odor of incense on all the memorial days of demons, at all solemnities of kings, at the beginning of the year and at the beginning of each month. She will have to exit by a gate wreathed with laurel and hung with lanterns as from some new place of public lusts." And then again, in the year 212, Tertullian wrote, "You Christians have your own registers, your own calendar. You have nothing to do with the festivities of the world.
In fact, you are called to the very opposite, for the world will rejoice, but you will mourn," quoting there from Jesus. Now, you can find those quotations in the Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs under the subject of holidays, comma, pagan. So, when did professing Christians begin celebrating the birth of Christ? And when was December 25th chosen as the supposed date of his birth? Well, it all happened in the post-Constantinean church in the 4th century.
However, there were no councils or decrees that created Christmas. There is no evidence that Constantine himself had any connection with it. The earliest evidence we have for the existence of Christmas is a liturgical calendar dated AD 354, where Christmas is listed among other feast days. The earliest Christian sermon that's been found dates back to the year 360. It was delivered by a bishop in North Africa who was a staunch opponent of the Donatists.
So, it appears that this new Christian holiday, putting Christian in quotation marks, was started in the Western Roman Empire sometime after the year 325 AD, and then it spread rapidly from there to the eastern part of the empire. By the year 400, it was being celebrated practically everywhere throughout the Roman Empire. But still, we don't know who started the practice or exactly where.
Almost all scholars would agree that December 25th was chosen in order to coincide with and to counteract the Roman Saturnalia and the Roman feast days that celebrated the winter solstice when the days began getting longer. From reading the writings of Christians in the 4th century, it's obvious to me that they convinced themselves that that is when Jesus was actually born, just like his death and resurrection was in the springtime. And I would say, like them, that that was no accident.
God planned it that way that when the whole world comes back to life in spring, that that is a reminder of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Well, these Christians of the 4th century said when the sun is, quote, "born again," that is, when the days start to become longer, that that coincided with Jesus' birth, the Sun of Righteousness. Well, all of that is pleasant sounding, but there's absolutely no evidence to suggest that.
And if the pre-Nicene Christians didn't know when he was born, and the guesses that were around at that time placed his birth in the spring, then this matter of believing he was born on December 25th is just something somebody made up.
And from reading Tertullian's description of the Saturnalia and the midwinter festivals, it seems quite obvious that the Christmas customs of hanging wreaths on the front door of somebody's house, of decorating houses with colored lights, and giving gifts is a direct carryover from the pagan Roman festivities. Now, I want to address some of the common misconceptions about Christmas. Let's begin with the name Christmas. It's a compaction meaning Christ's Mass.
Recently, I read a tract that said, "What two things could be more opposite than Christ and the Mass?" Now, I'm certainly no ally of the Roman Catholic Church, but our opposition to Rome needs to be based on truth and understanding, not on rumor and misunderstanding. There is nothing evil about the word Mass. I know I used to think that the word is somehow intrinsically connected with the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation or the belief that a Roman Catholic priest is re-sacrificing Jesus Christ.
However, the English word Mass is simply an anglicization of the Latin word Missa, which means to dismiss. The early Christian worship services ended every Lord's Day with the congregation celebrating communion together. However, before they began communion, those who were not yet members of the congregation were invited to leave the service. So that's maybe why the communion service came to be known as the dismissal, because the unbaptized persons were dismissed before it began.
Or the communion may have come to be known as the dismissal, because at the end of communion, the presiding leader would say, "Ite, missa est," which is Latin for you are dismissed. Either way, the term had become a common synonym for communion long before the dogma of transubstantiation or the doctrine that a priest is re-sacrificing Christ at every Mass or anything like that. It's an innocent word.
The other misconception that so many of us have, and I know I did for most of my life, is that all sorts of heretical teachings are being recited by a Catholic priest when he celebrates Mass. And this misconception was enhanced by the fact that until Vatican II, the Mass was still said in Latin, so people didn't know what he was saying up there.
Well, one day I decided to go to the primary source, that is, to a Catholic missal, the book that sets forth the prayers and recitations that are said during a Roman Catholic Mass. And to my surprise, I found that nearly all of it was very biblical.
Now, there are many, many unbiblical practices in the Roman Catholic Church, but the actual words of the Mass, the words that are said publicly, are not in opposition to Scripture, and they don't contain any references to Mary or any reference to re-sacrificing Jesus Christ. So Christ's Mass simply means Christ's communion, and there's nothing evil about it. What about Santa Claus?
Several years ago, an evangelical fundamentalist asked me, "David, do you know what you get when you rearrange the letters in the word Santa?" And I said, "No, what?" "Satan," she replied. Well, it's that sort of ignorance that prompts me to continue writing books and recording messages. We Bible-believing Christians can sometimes be so incredibly dumb, and I don't mean to put people down, but we're so quick to believe rumors and half-truths and downright falsehoods. Santa is simply Latin for saint.
It's also the Latin word for holy. It doesn't have anything to do with Satan, no connection whatsoever. Santa Claus is simply an anglicized corruption of Saint Nicholas. There is no etymological connection between Santa and Satan, just as there is none between Easter and Astarte. They may sound similar, they may have similar letters, but they are not in the least bit related.
Something else about Santa Claus, I have searched long and hard and have not been able to find one scrap of evidence that there is any pagan connection or origin to Saint Nicholas. There seems to have definitely been a real Nicholas who was later viewed as a saint. Now, the various stories about him are more than likely myths because you don't read anything about it in the histories of the 3rd and 4th century church written by Eusebius and Socrates and others.
The red and white costume that people today associate with Santa Claus or Saint Nicholas is simply a modification of a medieval bishop's robe and mitre. Now, all of this nonsense about the North Pole and reindeer and all of that, as far as I can find out, goes back no further than the famous poem The Night Before Christmas. Again, it's not of pagan origin. But please don't misunderstand me. I'm not defending Santa Claus.
I'm simply saying we should be aware of what truly is of pagan origin and what is of Christian origin or modern secular origin. And when I say Christian origin, I'm meaning the institutional church. I realize that as a whole, it was not that Christian. So what do we do with Christmas? Well, ultimately, that's up to you to decide. Christmas is a holiday created by the 4th century church for the purpose of canceling out the Roman Saturnalia and various pagan celebrations of the winter solstice.
And I think I'd have to admit that the church was actually fairly successful in their endeavor. Nobody celebrates the Saturnalia or the winter solstice anymore, except now for new agers who are a relatively new phenomenon. But until the new age movement, the Saturnalia had completely disappeared. So the church did achieve what it set out to do.
On the other hand, there can be little doubt that many of the Christmas customs, such as decorating one's house with colored lights and wreaths, is a carryover from the Saturnalia. Other Christmas customs, such as Santa Claus or sending out greeting cards, are of a Christian or secular origin, and they don't seem to have any pagan connection. Well, some Christians feel we should stay completely away from Christmas, have nothing to do with it, and I have no quarrel with that at all.
Others point out that there's nothing sinful or inappropriate in remembering Christ's birth, even though it wasn't an early Christian practice. And even though December 25th is unlikely to have been the actual date of his birth, the church has used it now for so long that it's now the only practical date on which to remember his birth. They say it's not wrong to remember his birth, to sing carols or nativity hymns, and to enjoy a family holiday together on December 25th.
And I don't condemn that view either, but what I think is inconsequential. As I said, the ultimate decision needs to be up to you and up to the church to which you belong. But the purpose of this message is to try to put the facts out there so you can make a wise and appropriate decision.
Now, I want to briefly cover some of the other well-known holidays, but we're not going to spend very much time on them because none of these other ones have any reference in the early Christian writings or even in the writings of the 4th century. I can tell you beyond any doubt that neither Halloween nor Valentine's Day nor New Year's Day were celebrated by the early Christians, and there's no evidence that they were even celebrated by the post-Nicene Christians of the 4th century.
You may remember in one of the passages we read of Tertullian that he spoke of New Year's Day as one of the Roman festivals, so we know the Origen of it. Now, because New Year's Day was a pagan Roman holiday, doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong for us to take note of a new year when it comes on our calendar, but we would certainly not want to imitate the world in what they do on New Year's Eve. When I was writing the book Let Me Die in Ireland, I did extensive research on the ancient Celts and their religion.
And in the course of that research, it became quite clear to me that Halloween is simply a secularized imitation or continuation of the Celtic pagan festival of Samhain. This was New Year's Day on the Celtic calendar. But now the name Halloween is actually Christian, or at least Catholic. The Roman Catholic Church tried to stamp out Samhain by moving All Saints' Day, which was already a Catholic celebration, to November 1st.
It was a day to remember all of the dead in Christ, but particularly those saints that did not already have a special day celebrated on their behalf. The name Halloween is simply a shortened form of All Hallows' Eve. That is the eve, the evening before All Hallows' Day or All Saints' Day, which is November 1st. But the elements of what we know as Halloween are almost all simply a continuation of the Celtic Samhain. It was the biggest and most significant holiday of the Celtic year.
The Celts believed that at the time of Samhain, more so than at any other time of the year, the ghosts of the dead were able to mingle with the living because at Samhain, the souls of those who had died during the year traveled into the other world. So people gathered to sacrifice animals, fruits, and vegetables to the dead. They also lit bonfires in honor of the dead and to aid them on their journey and also to keep them away from the living.
And on that evening before Samhain, the Celts believed that all manner of beings were abroad: ghosts, fairies, demons, that sort of thing. So I think we can all see that that's one holiday we want to keep far away from. Incidentally, before we leave the Celts, I do want to mention that Saint Patrick's Day, as far as I was able to find, is purely a Christian holiday without any pagan origins. I searched deep and long, and I could find no pagan connections with that day at all.
Now, I would put Saint Valentine's Day in the same category as Halloween. The ancient Romans during the month of February had a feast that they called Lupercalia. During this festival, a dog and two male goats were sacrificed to the god Faunus, and then two young men would be anointed with the blood from these sacrifices. Afterwards, these two young men ran around the Palatine Hill there in the center of Rome with thongs that had been cut from the sacrificed goats.
And these thongs or leather whips were called Februa. Girls would line up along the route, along this hill in Rome, to receive lashes from these whips, and this was supposed to ensure fertility for them. It's pretty certain that there never was a real Saint Valentine. He was supposed to have been martyred during the last great persecution, but there is no such person mentioned in Eusebius's writings and his history of the time periods or in Socrates or in any of the other martyrologies that are in existence.
So the man Valentine is a myth, and Valentine's Day is simply the Roman Lupercalia given a false Christian name. Finally, let's talk about Thanksgiving. From everything I've been able to dig up, our Thanksgiving Day here in America seems to be definitely of Christian and American origin without any pagan connections at all. Now, of course, pagans had feasts of Thanksgiving in the fall, just like the Jews did and everybody else.
But that there's any connection from the pagan feast to our Thanksgiving, there's absolutely no historical record to suggest that at all. Now, we're all familiar with the first Thanksgiving held by the pilgrims in 1621. Now, actually, that was just a one-time event. It wasn't something the pilgrims did every year.
The first national Thanksgiving in America was declared by the Continental Congress in 1777, and there were several other nationwide Thanksgiving days declared by President Washington and by his successors all the way up to 1815. And then after 1815, none of the presidents declared a day of Thanksgiving until we get to 1863 when Abraham Lincoln declared a national day of Thanksgiving on the last Thursday in the month of November in the year 1863. And that's the origin of Thanksgiving as we know it today.
Now, Lincoln didn't make it a fixed annual event. Every year, a new presidential proclamation had to be made, but every president did that until finally, in the year 1941, Congress made Thanksgiving a fixed legal holiday on the fourth Thursday of November of every year. Well, in the course of tonight's discussion, we've traveled all the way from the 2nd century up to the year 1941 into the present day.
I hope all of this has been of help to you in sorting out the truth about these various holidays, what truly is Christian and what is actually pagan. And then armed with this information, hopefully now you can make an intelligent and spiritual decision on what you and your family should do concerning these various holidays. Good night.