 You're listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit nakedbiblepodcast.com and click on the support link in the upper right-hand corner. If you're new to the podcast and Dr. Heizer's approach to the Bible, click on newstarthere at nakedbiblepodcast.com. Welcome to the Naked Bible Podcast, episode 195, his Christmas, a pagan holiday. I'm the layman, Trey Strickland, and he's a scholar, Dr. Michael Heizer. Merry Christmas, Mike. Yep, Merry Christmas. Yeah, Santa Claus, you're getting ready. You're going to leave some cookies out and all that good stuff. Yeah, we're a bit beyond doing all that stuff. I don't think we ever did anything with Santa Claus. We were pretty honest with our kids. It's like your mom and dad work hard. This is a special day. We think about Jesus' birth and God's blessed us to get you some cool things. So we didn't do the other. Well, my kids are still young enough that I might use the naughty and iceless. To my advantage. So it does come in handy every now and then. We let them know what we let them know what some other people do to have a mild threat. I think they saw it through it pretty quickly. Yeah, yeah. I'll do Christmas cards. Now, we haven't done one of those for for quite a while. We're, I don't know, we just sort of never get around to it. And this this year, you know, we have the, you know, the people are separated and we have the two daughters that live elsewhere. So it's we're going to get together. But nobody's really here very long on the same day. And we were going to take a picture, but it rained all day here with and they wanted to do an outside one so that never happened. And there you go. You know, we're pretty bad too. Well, Mike, we had planned on having a guest with us on this episode, Dr. Burton, but due to technical difficulties, he wasn't able to join us. Yeah, it's unfortunate. Well, Mike, you get an early Christmas present in the fact that you're in the fantasy Super Bowl and I am not. So teardrop. Yeah, yeah. But I have to admit, I'm not not feeling real good. You know, it's going to be an interesting weekend because I'm without my biggest weapon in the Super Bowl final here in the podcast, Fantasy League. And that's Antonio Brown. So I've been riding him the whole year. And he goes gets hurt, you know, right just in time for the final game. So it's going to be pretty close. Switching gears into a serious topic. We all that was serious. Well, no, not serious enough, I guess. We're about to take it to an 11 right now. And seriousness because, you know, you always hear about Christmas being a pagan holiday or, you know, you get a lot of these holidays that us Christians celebrate and people accuse us of it's just a pagan holiday and whatnot. So I'm hoping you can bring clarity and set the record straight once and for all. Yeah, well, we're going to make a we're going to take our shot at that. You know, but but you're kind of right in your observation that, you know, the people who are really sort of the most uptight about this, you know, are certainly the Hebrew roots crowd, you know, because they want to dump the whole, you know, Christian liturgical year and calendar. So you have that. But I think it's because of Gnostics, especially in pagans. You know, they like to tweak Christians over like the December 25th date and some other things. And so that makes Christians uncomfortable. Maybe even, you know, the JW is, you know, it used to be the JW is now it's more than Gnostics and the pagans who are on this this thing. And it makes it uncomfortable for Christians who just just want to celebrate the day, you know. And so now you have to think about or deal with all this stuff. The way I'm going to approach this episode is really in two areas. You know, we're asking the question, is Christmas a pagan holiday? And I see two area breakdowns here. One is the date. And I'm going to telegraph up front that I don't think that the December 25th date is a pagan date or has anything really to do with, you know, the the soul and victims, you know, solstice kind of stuff. It is it is not a date that derives from that. So the date is not a pagan thing. Second category would be the practices, you know, some of the things that are associated with the celebration. And some of those are certainly deriving from, you know, pagan practice, what we might think of as pagan practice. But that's actually not sort of a slam dunk kind of issue because I'm going to suggest when we get to the part two area to that you can't really have, you know, let me put it this way that there's an issue when it comes to are we doing pagan things, i.e., is this idolatry or something like this? There has to be some awareness and some intent. And they're actually biblical examples where Israelites, especially, quote unquote, used pagan objects and imagery. And it was not an issue, theologically. And so I think we need to to think a little bit more carefully when it comes to practices. And yet, you know, be honest that some of this stuff we do has no attachment at all to the biblical story of Jesus or anything like this. And there were things that accrued over time. Just like ancient Israel, I mean, there were things like this. And so maybe some of that biblical material about the Israelites when it was not a theological issue, maybe that's a helpful analogy to think about the practices. But when we get to that point, I think listeners will better understand what I'm talking about here. But let's just start with the date, the first area here. You know, the argument is that Christians took December 25th from the pagans, specifically the pagan festival of soul and victus for the birth of the unconquered son. Again, that's what soul and victus means, unconquered son that was instituted by the Roman emperor Aurelian on 25th of December. I mean, that the Christians stole this day from the pagan. So it's an originally pagan day. And so consequently, the celebration of Jesus' birth on December 25th is a pagan celebration, just by definition. Now, listeners to this podcast, probably know either from the episode we did on this or maybe something on the blog or something I've said in an interview, I believe that Jesus was born in September 11th and 3 BC. And again, for those who say, well, that's not possible because Herod died in 4 BC and you got to have a year or one or two years between the birth of Jesus and Herod's death. And so 3 BC can't work. Well, you're you're sorely mistaken. The 4 BC death of Herod is one of those great unexamined certainties in biblical studies. I've blogged about this. I've directed people to peer-reviewed articles. I have four of them. I don't know. I think three of them, maybe all four are in the folder that if you subscribe to my newsletter, you get access to the folder of articles, things that I can't just post online. But there are serious, deep problems with the 4 BC death date of Herod, serious problems that scholars who are experts in chronology have collected and they've presented in a coherent fashion and showing that the death of Herod is better dated to late 2 BC or 1 BC. And so the September 11 3 BC death date does work. The death of Herod is no obstacle to this. And there's there's a lot that goes into this. If you've read my novel, The Portent, again, this is part of the storyline. I'm actually working on a book about astronomy and its use and abuse in biblical interpretation. So this isn't the last you'll hear from it. But we're going to focus on December 25th here because that's the date that gets debated, because that's the date that most Christians, not all Christians, the in the East, they don't use December 25th. But most Christians that we know of have Christmas on December 25th. And so the argument is that that was stolen from the pagans. Now, I've blogged recently on this directing people to an article from Touchstone magazine that appears online by William. I don't know if you pronounce his name, Ty or Teague, it's T-I-G-H-E. And the article is entitled Calculating Christmas, the story behind December 25th. The author of that article refers readers to where he gets most of his information. That's from Thomas J. Talley's book, The Origins of the Liturgical Year. And that's a liturgical press title. It's out of print, but you can still find it used. That's where I got my copy. And Talley's book is an academic, a scholarly presentation of what's behind December 25th, and it is not a pagan. Day, OK, so what I'm going to do here in the first part, when we talk about the date is I'm going to read, I'm going to summarize some of, again, Ty or Teague's article on Touchstone magazine. We'll have a link to it on the episode page, but I'm going to summarize parts of it and I'm going to quote parts of it as well. But realize that it's based on Talley's book. He has much more detailed scholarly book. And specifically, if you get Talley's book from basically page 85 onward and specifically page 91 onward, you get a more, again, academic presentation of what we're going to do here. So let's just start in with with the the web article here. It begins this way, again, just summarizing this and partly reading. He writes, the idea that the date was taken from the pagans goes back to two scholars from the late 17th and early 18th century. And the author, again, Ty or Teague, again, I'm going to try not to keep mentioning how I don't know how his name is pronounced, but the author here names these two scholars. One is Jablonsky, who was a German Protestant. The other was a Catholic, Dom Jean Hardouin. And I'm probably butchering that French name as well. He was he was a Benedictine monk. And they their work on December 25th is really what's at the heart. Here we go again with 18th, 19th century scholarship that is at the center of so much of what goes on in in Internet theology, Christian Middle Earth stuff. Again, you know, folks, we really have learned things since the 18th and 19th century, surprise, surprise. But a lot of this goes back to the work of these two two individuals. Jablonsky wanted to show that Christ's birth on December 25th was a paganization of Christianity that the church just embraced, you know, for whatever reason. He thinks of it as a degeneration of Christianity. Doing this was not a good thing. Whereas the Catholic, again, and Catholics are sort of known for this sort of syncretistic approach. Hardouin tried to show that the Catholic Church adopted pagan festivals for Christian purposes. In other words, as an evangelistic tool to pagan without paganizing the gospel. Now, the author of our Internet article is going to object to this. He's just telling us that, hey, this idea that Christians stole the date comes from Jablonsky and Hardouin, Protestants and the Catholic 17th, 18th centuries. There's 1700s, 1800s, you know, and onward. So this is this is how he starts his article. This is where it comes from. Now he writes elsewhere in the Julian calendar created in 45 BC under Julius Caesar. The winter solstice fell on December 25th. And therefore, it seemed obvious to Jablonsky 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 festival calendar before Aurelian's time, nor did the cult of the sun play a prominent role in Rome before him. And that was a direct quote. So then he goes and he talks about Aurelian a little bit. There were two temples of the sun in Rome that were actually supposed to be maintained by the clan that Aurelian was part of, you know, but it didn't have a direct December 25th attachment to that cult. Both of those cults of the sun fell into neglect in the second century for as a result of, you know, some different things going on religiously, specifically connected to Mithraism, that became more popular than these cults of the sun. And back to the article to quote again, he writes, 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. 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 a Christian celebration, so much better because he hated Christians. OK. So what the what are the author of our article here is going to argue is that it was actually the other way around that Aurelian stole the date from Christians, not that Christians stole the date from pagans. And there's a good deal of evidence that this, you know, what that he marshals that this is indeed the case, that this is not a pagan date. It is a date that pagans stole from Christians and not the other way around that, again, you often read on internet theology or in books published by Gnostic publishing societies and whatnot. Again, consider the context for a lot of that stuff. So his position and again, people will have the link to the article on this. His position is that Aurelian actually stole an important Christian date. Now, the question arises then, is there evidence before Aurelian that December 25th was an important date to Christians? Is there evidence in that? If so, then it would appear that this is in fact what happened, that December 25th before Aurelian was important to Christians associated with the birth of Jesus and that the pagans stole it from Christians. So it is not a pagan date, at least it wasn't until the pagans stole it from Christians. Now, is there evidence for that? The key paragraph in the online article, and again, he's getting a lot of this from Talley's book, is this, I'm just gonna read, you know, straight through it here. Is it just the easiest way to present it? And again, inviting all of you to go up and read the actual article, he writes, 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 AD 336. And I'll just break in here. This is what you're gonna hear again from the pagan sources that want to say that Christians stole the date from pagans back to the excerpt here. 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, third centuries. The evidence indicates in fact that the attribution of the date of December 25th was a byproduct of attempts to determine when to celebrate Jesus' death and resurrection. Now, let me stop there, that's important. What he's saying here is that December 25th, even though Christians didn't have it on the calendar before Aurelian as part of the liturgical year, there was a lot of discussion and a lot of Christians believed that the birth of the Messiah was on December 25th long before Aurelian. It just didn't make it into the official holiday. We're gonna find out in a moment why because there was a dispute over it. There's another date that comes into play here. But the date associating December 25th, what we would call December 25th with the birth of the Messiah predates Aurelian. And it's a byproduct. The reason that they figured that date out, or again, I think there's another date that there's a controversy here we'll get to in a moment. But the reason why that date was associated with the birth of Jesus by a large segment of the church, large population of Christians, was because you could essentially do math. They were really more concerned with what the day of the crucifixion and the resurrection was. And so once those were sort of fixed, you could do the math and calculate the birth, okay? So the birth date is a byproduct of the effort which was extreme. I mean, there's a mass of scholarship on the quote, unquote, Easter computus. Okay, the whole idea of when do we date the crucifixion and the resurrection. Resurrection specifically, that was a huge deal in the early church for obvious reasons. They wanted to celebrate the resurrection. It's fundamental to Christianity. So in the obsession to find that date, the birth date, again, just sort of developed. I mean, people took the time to, well, if this is when he rose, can we possibly calculate when he was born? And so people did that. And December 25th was an early date for that effort to try to do it by math. Okay, back to the quotation now. Again, there's evidence he says that the attribution of December 25th was a byproduct of attempts to determine when to celebrate his death and resurrection. How did this happen? There's a seeming contradiction between the date of the Lord's death as given in the synoptic gospels. That's Matthew, Mark, and Luke. 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 the 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 he says we cannot enter here, for sure. I mean, like I said, there's just a massive amount of scholarship on this. Back to the quote. 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 AD 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 April 7th of April in 30 AD or the 3rd of April in 33 AD. Okay, end of quote for now. So in other words, what the author of our reference point, our reference article is suggesting is that the effort to situate the death and resurrection of Jesus in real time would naturally have led to some effort to back dating the birth. But again, there's more to it than this. So Teague or Tai, Dr. Tai continues, 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 day of Passover. Now this is me breaking in now and boy, that was another big deal as well because of the whole lunar calendar, which he's gonna describe here. So back to the quote. Since the Jewish calendar was a lunar calendar consisting of 12 months of 30 days each, every few years, a 13th month had to be added by a decree of the Sanhedrin to keep the calendar in synchronization with the equinoxes and the 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 because hey, they weren't Jews, it's a different community. Despite that difficulty that they would have had in following all this, 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, Jews and Gentiles and very likely embroiled them in endless disputes among themselves. Elsewhere he writes, 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 the empire. Greek Christians seemed to have wanted to find a date equivalent to the 14th of Nisan in their own solar calendar. And since Nisan was the month in which the spring equinox occurred, they chose the 14th day of Artemisian, the month in which the spring equinox invariably fell in their own calendar. Around AD 300, the Greek calendar was superseded by the Roman calendar. And since the dates of the beginnings and endings of the months and these two systems did not coincide, 14 Artemisian became April 6th. In contrast, second century Latin Christians in the West, in Rome and North Africa appear to have desired to establish the historical date on which Jesus died. By the time of Tertullian, they had concluded that he died on Friday, the 25th of March, AD 29. Teague has an aside here, basically that that's impossible because that wasn't a Friday. And Passover in AD 29 did not fall on a Friday. But anyway, this is what they decided. So back to the article here. So in the East, we have April 6th. Again, for the day associated with the death of Jesus. We have April 6th in the East. In the West, we have 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 was the birth. The early Christians applied this idea so that March 25th and April 6th were not the only supposed dates of Christ's death, but also of his conception and birth as well. Now, this is really, let me stop here. This is really gonna mess things up because they're spending all this time trying to associate the death of Jesus and of course then the resurrection with the Passover question and specifically the Last Supper question of the Gospel of John. This is what the fight was about. And so once they have working dates, then there are people who come along with this notion that, hey, maybe these two dates are also the birth and the conception because of this, let's just call it a myth, that prophets and Jesus was certainly a prophet, died and were born or conceived on the same day. Again, it was sort of this folklorious kind of thing. So now we've got even more of a mess. It took us long enough to produce two dates, one in the West, one in the East for the death of Jesus. And now we've got this other idea creeping in. Now back to the quotation. The assignment of March 25th as the date of Christ's conception prevailed at one the day, add nine months to March 25th and you get December 25th. Christmas, the birth, December 25th is a feast of Western Christian origin. Okay, the Latin part of the Roman Empire, the Western part of the Roman Empire. In Constantinople, it appears to have been introduced in 379 or 380 from a sermon of Saint John Chrysostom. At the time, a renowned ascetic and preacher in his native Antioch. It appears that the feast was celebrated there on the 25th of December in 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 never adopted it. And to this day, they celebrate Christ's birth manifest into the manifestation to the Magi and the baptism on January 6th. Thus, December 25th as the date of Christ's birth appears to owe nothing to pagan influences upon the practice of the church during or after Constantine's time. The pagan feasts which the emperor are really an institute 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. Again, it's math. They were fixated almost from the beginning, first century, with achieving the correct date for the death of the Messiah. And again, going more or less with John's gospel. Again, we're not here to evaluate whether that's right or wrong and whether they had the right dates or not. Again, you all know what I think. I don't think that December 25th has anything to do with the actual birth date of Jesus or any of these other dates. So you have to factor in more than math here. And again, a little heads up here to novel readers of mine. And again, those who are aware that I'm working on this other book with astronomy. When we talk about Jewish calendar here, we're talking about the calendar used in Jerusalem, Pharisees and Sadducees. That was not the only calendar. And in fact, that was viewed by the Qumran Essenes as being a human corruption. They actually, the Essenes actually attribute the Jerusalem calendar, the calendar of all Judaism that we're talking about here to the watchers. They think that, again, they had their own calendar that was perfect. And so they believe that it came from the mind of God. I'm not gonna get into the Qumran calendar here, but it was a 364 day calendar. What was perfect about it is that every Sabbath occurs on the same day. Every Passover occurs on the same day. All the feasts are on the same days in the calendar year. You have all the numbers from seven to 12 to 24, to 36, all the numbers at 70, all of these numbers that we see in scripture having apparent special significance are linked back into what the Qumran folks believed was the perfect mathematical calendar that derived from the laws of nature and the mind of God. You didn't need to invent a 13th month to find the date of Passover. This is actually why they split from the Pharisees and the Sadducees. It was over calendar and liturgy and ritual. They thought that it was human tampering and ultimately a problem created by the watchers to adopt this sort of calendrical tinkering method. I don't wanna say too much about that, but again, what we're talking about here is what the early church was wrestling with because they're trying to deal with what the Jews were doing, what the synoptics are saying, what John is saying, all this kind of stuff. They're trying to come up with a date for the death of Jesus that fit into that calendar. And again, they're doing the best they can. They're trying to situate it. They have to make decisions and they come out with two dates. Again, the one in March, the other one in April and all that and then you get this idea of, oh, well, he would have died on the same day he was born and then let's think about the conception and the birth. Again, there we go. Again, just all the stuff that we just read. They're doing that stuff from the very first century onward because of the concern to know when to celebrate the resurrection. The birth stuff is a spin-off. It's derivative from the resurrection discussion. So the date itself would have been known, would have been an article of discussion long before Aurelian. And again, if you want all the academic data for that, don't depend on the internet article. Go to get Talley's book, The Origins of the Liturgical Year and you're gonna get all the nuts and bolts for it. So this notion again, that December 25th was, there were Christians in the days of Aurelian looking around like, oh, we need to celebrate the birth. Well, let's steal that pagan date over there. That's just bunk, okay? It was really the other way around. Now, back to another question this raises and something we've sort of already touched on. Is there ancient evidence that December 25th or now January 6th, since we have to factor in this other date, again, the calculations that we made to this point, is there ancient evidence that December 25th or January 6th was considered the birth of Jesus prior to Aurelian in textual terms, okay? And we know they could have done the math. We know that the topic was a big concern from the very beginning. We know they're noodling this from the first century on. But is there textual data that predates Aurelian to sort of back up this stuff? Well, let's take December 25th first. We're gonna go back to January 6th. There's the text tradition of Hippolytus, specifically his commentary on Daniel, which Hippolytus lived in AD 170 to 240. So he is before Aurelian, okay? Hippolytus' commentary on Daniel, specifically Daniel 423 is one of the earliest witnesses to the December 25th tradition for Christ's birth. Again, he writes this, quote, for the first advent of our Lord in the flesh when he was born in Bethlehem, eight days before the Collins of January, which is December 25th. I know it sounds weird, but just go with me here. And if you want all the dates and the details, Tally's book, and you could also look at books on ancient calendar like Beckwith. Start over again. For the first advent of our Lord in the flesh when he was born in Bethlehem, eight days before the Collins of January, December 25th. The fourth day of the week, Wednesday, while Augustus was in his 42nd year, that would be two or three BC, but from Adam, 5,500 years, so on and so forth. So they're situating, this quote is situating the advent, the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem to December 25th, and then they're aligning it with these other things. Augustus is years from Adam, all that kind of stuff. So this is Hippolytus. Hippolytus is almost a century before Aurelian. So there you go. I mean, you have people discussing it. What about the January 6th date? Now, this is the one used in the Eastern church. This is from Beckwith's book, Calendar and Chronology, Jewish and Christians. It's a burial title, 2001 pages 72 to 74. I'm gonna read it because not only do we have evidence for a birth of Jesus associated with December 25th prior to Aurelian, we also have textual evidence for the January 6th one in the Eastern church. So this tells you that Christians in both parts of the empire have already pun intended. They've already done the math. They've already been thinking about this long before Aurelian and associating a particular date with the birth of the Messiah. It just happens that the dates differed in the West and the East. So here's Beckwith. The other date for Christ's nativity, however, can be traced back with greater certainty behind that it's even earlier than Hippolytus. To Clement of Alexandria who before the year 200 dates Christ's nativity on January 6th. This is over a century before any festival of the nativity on January 6th is recorded. Now, let me stop there. Did you catch that line? They had fixed the date of the nativity, the birth of Jesus, before a century before they ever bothered celebrating it. The same thing is true with December 25th. If you remember earlier in the episode, I read something from the internet article about pagans like to point to certain dates as the first textual reference to the celebration of Christmas, celebration of December 25th for Christmas. Big whoop, okay? They knew the math before they ever started celebrating it. And the math is much older than Aurelian. December 25th is not a pagan date. Now, whether they're deliberately or accidentally doing it, the pagan sources or the Gnostic sources that love to do this or the Hebrew root sources are confusing the celebration of the event with the calculation of the date, okay? Those are two different things. The early church didn't really bother celebrating the birth. They were certainly fixed on celebrating the resurrection. That was the big day. They didn't really bother celebrating the birth, but they knew, at least they thought they knew, they had calculated, they'd done the work to figure out when the date of the birth was, long before Aurelian, okay? Let's go back to Beckwith here. This is over, again, the January 6th date, he's talking about the Eastern date now. This is over a century before any festival of the Nativity on January 6th is recorded. Could Clements' dating then be due to a historical tradition that the Nativity took place at that time? Clements' evidence to be found in his stromata or miscellaneous 121 pages and lines 140, 144 through 146 is not without ambiguity since he quotes a number of opinions about the dates of Christ's birth and crucifixion isn't that interesting. There are a number of opinions a century before Aurelian about the birth date of Jesus. They're thinking about it, okay? December 25th didn't just pop into somebody's head while he was watching the Festival of Soul Invictus. Okay, again, this notion is false. So, again, back to the quote. Clement comments about the opinions of a number of dates of Christ's birth and crucifixion, commending perhaps ironically the precision of those who propound them. By what method these dates were arrived at, we do not know, but all of them except May 20th could be dates for the Passover and March 21st as a date for the spring equinox. If the traditional Eastern date of January 6th was known in the Church of Alexandria in the last decade of the second century, that's the 100s, okay? It is as old as any of these speculations and older than any evidence linking the Nativity with the pagan festival on the winter solstice. Moreover, if it was known in Alexandria in the last decade of the second century, it was probably also known there half a century earlier, for in the same passage of Clement, after speaking of dates for the Lord's birth, he says, and the followers of facilities hold the day of his baptism as a festival, spending the night before it in readings. And they say that it was the 15th year of Tiberias season, the 15th day of the month, Tibi, and some that it was the 11th of the same month. Facilities likewise belong to Alexandria, where he taught in the second quarter of the second century, and though he was a heretic, he would have known the traditions of the Alexandrian Church. Tibi 15 and Tibi 11 correspond in the Julian calendar to January 10th and January 6th. It's the end of the beckwith quote. Now this again seems proof positive for what Dr. Teague in our internet article is arguing, and Tali again in his more academic work, specifically that early Christians had calculated or surmised the dates for the birth of Jesus prior to Aurelian, and one of those dates was December 25th. This also means that either December 25th or January 6th predate the beginning of what we now know as the Catholic Church. So the charge that December 25th is a Catholic invention and so deemed sinister for that reason alone is false. Okay, this predates that as well. Now that, I'm just gonna leave that there again. We're dividing up to the topic, the episode into two categories. One is the date, is the date December 25th for Jesus' birth, even though I don't buy that date, but is that date pagan? The answer is no, it is not. Category two, area two. What about the practices and the customs? Okay, now to me, this is a different story. Now you have again, you've got trees, you've got the gift giving, you've got Santa Claus, all this kind of stuff. I mean, none of these has a direct biblical attachment. There are ways that people have tried to take the Bible and sort of baptized these things as though they were parts of Christian tradition, but that, again, there's no evidence for that. So we have to be thinking about, again, how these things accrue to the celebration. We're not talking about the calculation, now we're talking about the celebration. How do these things accrue to the celebration of the birth of the Messiah? And what do we make of that? How should we think about that? We have to be thinking in terms of analogies and really, I would also say kind of what's in a person's mind and a person's heart. Couple of general observations, general sort of statements here. I'll make number one, idolatry and some groups, whether they're pagan or sort of the extreme Hebrew roots crowd are gonna be looking at what Christians do on December 25th today to celebrate the birth of Jesus. They're gonna call it things like idolatry. So idolatry, however, really, I would say requires willful worship or maybe knowing, kind of know what you're doing. I'm doing this thing as an act of worship. Even if you don't really know why you're doing it, the legacy of it, the history of it, if you think that putting that tree in your living room or whatever is somehow an act of worship, well, then we might have a problem here because of its association. I've never actually met a person who thinks that putting up a Christmas tree is an act of worship. It's just something you do. It's cultural. So there's an issue here. Are we looking at the tree thing or any of these other things as acts of worship? That that's one facet of the discussion. There are other ones that we'll get to, obviously. So I would be concerned if people were thinking that, I would be concerned with just broadly speaking, again, that doing things like putting up a Christmas tree results in you losing, to use the cliche, losing the reason for the season. And that, of course, is the birth of Jesus. And I think that that's a problem because of the commercialism and the trappings of it. Again, I actually think that's more serious than any of this, this is pagan kind of stuff. So that's one thought, this whole idolatry thing. It requires some knowledge. It requires some intent. It requires some linking of it to worship, that sort of thing. Second thought, when it comes to images or objects, an idea like there's an evil pagan association is also subjective to some degree. That is, a factor in its illegitimacy or permissibility is to some extent dependent on the response of the viewer or the participant. Now, there are some classic examples of this actually in the Old Testament of what I'm talking about here. Some are positive, there's at least one negative, but let's just jump into a couple of them. Let's start with the relevant commands in Exodus 20. This is part of the 10 commandments. It's gonna sound familiar. So Exodus 20, verses three through six. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them. For I, the Lord your God, I'm a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers and the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. Now, don't make yourself a graven image of any likeness of anything that's in heaven above, earth beneath or the water under the earth. This is the three-tiered cosmology we've talked about a number of times here. Again, this whole ancient Israelite cosmology, it's here mentioned in Exodus 20, it's outlined, heaven above, earth, then beneath the earth, all that stuff. Now, we learn from this passage in Exodus 20. We learn a certain thing here that I think gets missed here. We learn that images alone are not the issue. It's bowing down to them. It's offering them worship. That's the problem. How do we know that? Well, because God instructed Moses and Israel to make images of heavenly things and even earthly things for use in the tabernacle and the temple. God told them to do that after issuing this command. Classic example is the cherubim. The cherubim are clearly drawn artistically and even the term etymologically from pagan culture. Conceptually, scholars have argued for the Ark of the Covenant being really, and frankly it is pretty much the spinning image, of an Egyptian palanquin. And then they argue that the cherubim are essentially Israelite versions of the wing goddesses, Isis and Nephis. If you know what a palanquin is, it's a box. It's like, I hate to say it this way, but it's like the Ark. It's a box with a lid. On the sides of it, the two long ends, you'll often find an image of Isis and an image of Nephis on these two goddesses. They were protective of the content of the Ark. And Egyptians would often put idols of the deity inside the Ark and then they'd carry it around to different locations and do this or that in festivals and whatnot. So there are some scholars who would say, well, this is kind of obvious. Moses in Egyptian context makes this box. He's seen this before. I mean, they don't put idols in it, but they put the tablets of stone and Aaron's rod and all that kind of stuff. And it's mobile. You carry it around. It's got the wing cherubim not on the two sides, but on the top and they face each other. You know, all this stuff. Well, let's just for the sake of argument, let's just say that some of that, something there is relevant to the construction of the Ark because it's kind of hard to argue that it has nothing to do with it, to be honest. You know, that there's some sort of cultural linkage with protective divine beings over a sacred presence because the Ark inside the Ark was supposed to be the presence of God. When you transported it, that's where the presence was attached to if we want to use this language. And the cherubim are protective deities. And some would say this is, the Egyptian context is very evident here. I would agree with that, but we also have the issue or in some cases, some would say the problem that cherubim is not an Egyptian term. Cherubim is an Akkadian term. It comes from Mesopotamia, you know, the Caribou. These are divine guardians of sacred presence. It's the same thing. It's just not, we have a Mesopotamian element. We have an Egyptian element. And this I think gets us into the authorship of the Torah, the editing of the Torah. We're not gonna rabbit trail there. But either way, you have two divine beings, divine objects that come from pagan art, pagan practice, pagan cultural trappings that are used in Israelite religion and God is okay with it. God tells them to build this. Now, why is this okay in light of the commandments in Exodus 20? Because you don't bow down to the cherubim. You're not bowing down to the object of the ark. You're worshiping in your heart and in your mind the presence, the God of Israel, the trappings, which incidentally, the God of Israel told you to make. Okay, sidebar there. But the trappings are not the issue. Okay, they're not objects of worship. You have not violated, God didn't violate his own command when he told them to make this. When the Israelites, you know, carry this thing around when they attach significance to it. They don't, they're not violating the commands. Why? Because they're not bowing down to the objects. They're not bowing down to the cherubim. They are worshiping in their heart and in their mind the presence associated with this thing, the God of Israel himself. It's a heart, thought, intent issue. Now, again, I think you can sort of see the point here. At least I hope. Is this analogous to things like Christmas trees? Well, in short, the honest answer is that it could be. If someone's thinking of a tree as representing a pagan deity, it would be easy to say, don't use them. I mean, and you could have this situation, I'll grant it. I mean, people in modern times, maybe you have a former pagan. Maybe they read lots of theosophical books or Gnostic books or, you know, whatever. And they just can't help in their heart and in their mind to associate this object with a pagan deity or something, a pagan object. Well, then it's really good for them to not have them have one in their home. It's really good for them and for other people to have that conversation. Maybe you would want to take down your Christmas tree or not have one if somebody who married into your family really has this problem. That's what you do for the weaker brother. This is a principle of Christian liberty that, again, I don't know how this stuff gets lost in this discussion, but it often does. Paul was willing to give up things that were perfectly fine, in deference, out of deference and love for a weaker brother, someone that just, this was a struggle. He was perfectly willing to not eat meat, to not do X, Y or Z to be a help. Now, the flip side of this is you have people who are professional weaker brothers. And I'm using that term deliberately because I've known a lot of these people in life. I've known a lot of them. That they're really not stumbled in their heart. This really isn't something that makes them sort of tremble inside and affects the worship of Jesus in their own hearts. They just don't like something. And so they're making it an issue. That's the professional weaker brother. Oh, what can I be weak at next that I don't like? See, that attitude is different internally than the person who is really troubled. Okay, you're gonna have Christians at Corinth that, look, I just can't eat that meat. I just can't do it. Even though Paul said, look, if it's sold in the shambles, go ahead. You know, if it comes right off the altar, don't do that because then you're in fellowship with demons as 1 Corinthians 10. You're gonna have people that I don't care if Paul says it's okay if it's sold in the shambles. That's the King James language for the marketplace. I don't care, I still can't do it. Paul would say we understand. And knowing you and your testimony, you're not trying to be divisive. You're not trying to present yourself as superior. We know this troubles you and we're just not gonna do it for you because we love you. That's different than just saying you people just aren't as spiritual because you're eating that meat. If you were really spiritual, you wouldn't eat it. That's different. This is a hard issue. Trust me, I have known many professional weaker brothers. And honestly, they need to be called out. This is not an issue on either side of superior spirituality. This is an issue of the heart. This is an issue of humility, of fear and trembling in your own relationship with the Lord. If this really genuinely troubles you, you need to tell your brother who can do this, who isn't troubled, who doesn't have these associations. You need to have that conversation. And that brother should, out of love for you, do what they can to remove the obstacle. But again, that typically isn't the way things function in church or even in Christian relationships. We wanna sort of joust for superior spirituality. And we want to sort of forcibly educate the weak. That is not Paul's attitude. It's not Paul's attitude. Now, what Paul did was he made it known to both groups where he was at. He made it very known because he wrote the First Corinthians Epistle that, you know what, I can eat the meat. I really can. Doesn't bother me. Doesn't bother me. I'm not worshiping flunkies here. I can do it. But I want you all to know that I will give it up. If it's a genuine help to someone who stumbles. That is the right attitude. He doesn't forcibly educate the weak. Okay. And he doesn't endorse the professional weaker brother. Now, back to our topic here. Sorry for the little Sermonic rabbit trail. But I think again, some of this is really analogous, you know, to what, you know, we're looking at here with some of the practices of the celebration of Christmas. Now, admittedly, this might be an unlikely circumstance. What if someone says trees shouldn't be part of Christmas for believers in any regard because they were indeed pagan symbols? Well, the problem with that, thinking again is the Old Testament. You know, although it's an awkward analogy again, you have these objects. Let's just move away from the Ark and cherubim. Let's just talk about trees. Trees were well-known symbols of deities and divine encounters across the board in ancient Near Eastern religion. It's not just Israelite stuff. I mean, I've blogged before. Again, you know, go up to my website, search the website for trees, okay? There are a number of passages where trees served to mark divine encounters with Yahweh. There's also the idea of trees marking, you know, the presence of Yahweh because of the association. It's the cosmic mountain stuff. And in this case, it's the cosmic garden. The 70 trees, the 70 palm trees at Aleem, you know? Is that a coincidence? Yeah, I don't think it's a coincidence. You know, why? Because trees mark paradise. They mark oases. And in an arid culture, these were wonderful places. Of course, we would associate wonderful places with the places where God would dwell and God would meet with people. This is why they planted trees. It's why they buried, you know, they're dead next to trees, you know? Because, well, this is where the Lord is. We want our dead to be with the Lord, you know? We've talked about these things earlier on the podcast. We've done episodes about sacred trees. We've blogged about sacred trees. The fact of the matter is Israel was not alone here. There were other cultures, other religions that viewed trees as sacred. It could be a symbol of life, a symbol of paradise, a symbol of where the divine world is, marking divine encounter. That wasn't just Israel. It was, you know, other cultures as well. Now, it also had a negative association when Israelites, you know, would look at not trees and like the Canaanites would use, like if they're talking about the tree, well, okay, we get that, you know? We think your gods are flunkies, we're not worshiping Baal or whatever, you know? But we understand the concept. They would outwardly reject, though, fertility rights that would be associated with groves, ashera poles, ashera trees. Again, so there's a bit of a sort of a neutral and then a very negative thing going on here. But the fact of the matter is just to focus our attention here. Trees were sacred across the world, really basically from the beginning of historical time. They just were. And so that includes the Old Testament. It includes patriarchal religion. Patriarchs were not pagans, okay? Abraham was not a pagan. Isaac and Jacob were not pagans. Joshua wasn't a, you know, but nevertheless, you have this association with their divine encounters, with, you know, locations that are marked later on by trees. Now, what they also would do is they would erect matzabot. These are stone pillars, okay? They would do this as well. And sometimes, you know, there are instances where the stone pillar was sort of a stand-in for a tree and all that kind of stuff. But again, they would do this. Standing stones are sacred pillars. Across the board used in pagan religion. And think of Stonehenge and Dolmans and stuff like that for a more modern example, or at least a less ancient example. Across the board, stone pillars were used in pagan religions for religious purposes. But you have the patriarchs doing this. They would build stone pillars, erect stone pillars at places of divine encounter. Jacob and Genesis 28, you have Exodus 24, you know, it's okay to have an object marked by an encounter. You just don't bow down to it. You just don't bow down to it. You know, in Exodus 24, Moses erects 12 standing stones, one for each tribe. Why? Because it commemorates the meeting at Sinai with God. Read the passage. Read Exodus 23, read Exodus 24. This is why he does it. He's not doing it. I wanna slip in a little paganism here. Nobody's gonna notice. You know, it's not why they do it. It has everything to do with thought and intent and meaning. Okay, there are these passages where Israelites who are faithful worshipers of Yahweh do things with trees. They do things with standing stones, but they don't bow down to the object. They're just there to commemorate something else. Okay, let me say that again. They use standing stones. They use trees to commemorate or not to bow down to the object, but to commemorate something else. I would suggest to you that it's at least plausible. It should at least be part of the conversation that you know what? You bring a Christmas tree into your living room. Don't bow down to it, please. I've never known anybody who does or did. Don't bow down to it. Let it commemorate something, i.e. not the great sale, we just had it coals, okay? Let it commemorate, do something for your memory to help you think about the birth of the Messiah. Even though there was no tree in the Bethlehem story, okay? It can still bring this to memory. And in my experience, this is what Christians do. I mean, I wasn't raised in a Christian home, so we didn't really think about any of this at all. You know, it was just a cultural thing, but even in our house, you know, it was like, well, you know, hey, it's December 25th, baby Jesus, you know, kind of stuff, even though my parents were not believers or anything like that, they at least had that cultural, you know, Christian sense. And that's better than saying, hey, we're gonna erect this tree now, we're all gonna bow down to it. This'll be fun. I mean, nobody's doing that. Nobody's doing that, again, that I've ever met in my entire life. I guess you can, somebody do that, and if that's somebody comes to Christ, well, then this is gonna be a problem for them. And so, again, we need to have that conversation. So I guess it's possible, but it's quite foreign. Again, standing stones and trees were used in patriarchal religion to commemorate theophany. You know, the appearance, divine encounter with Yahweh. And it was okay. It was. Now in our day, again, we don't associate Christmas trees with anything specifically biblical. So I'll admit again, the analogy is not perfect, but we do learn, again, from biblical usage of pagan symbols or objects, that there were at least some of them that were used in limited instances and such a way to commemorate something Yahweh, the true God had done, but not to represent him. It wasn't him. We're not making an idol of him. And even when God allowed and commanded certain objects to be made of things in heaven, you know, and on earth, you know, the cherubim, the ark, all that kind of stuff, you don't bow down to them. That was the point of the command. You don't bow down to them. They are not substitutes for God. A tree would not be a substitute for God. It just marked a divine encounter, a memory device, a location device. It was primitive GPS, okay, whatever. It marked a spot where something sacred happened so that it would draw your mind to the presence. This is where Jacob met Yahweh. That would be significant. And because we believe, you know, that, hey, sacred trees have something to do with the presence of Yahweh, you know, this tree over here that's been here for a couple hundred years that marks something or, you know, somebody else had a divine encounter with Yahweh and we're gonna bury someone that we love right there because we want them to be in the presence of Yahweh. These are simple thoughts. They're permissible thoughts. They're good theological thoughts in the sense that they don't divide someone's loyalty or deflect someone's loyalty away from the true God. This is Old Testament, okay, it's biblical. You know, nowadays, you know, after the cross, you know, we're not thinking in these terms, obviously, plus, you know, not only about the cross, but also just, you know, being so many centuries removed, but culturally, these things do get added to the Christmas story in different cultures. And again, I'm saying at least think about what's in a person's heart? What's in a person's mind? And you say, well, that's not good enough. Well, then I guess you would have, you know, really been upset with Jacob or Isaac or Abraham or Joshua, you know, maybe you would be. Now, I would say though, as well, let's do the flip side of this. Before we conclude that the use of trees should be given a thought, again, I don't wanna say that, I'm actually encouraging us to think about it and think about it, you know, and perhaps, I think a workable analogy, not a perfect one, but a reasonably workable one. We ought to recall that other heavenly objects fashioned for the worship of Yahweh were absolutely condemned. Again, the example here is Ezekiel 8. We cover this in our series in Ezekiel. I'm gonna read Ezekiel 8, 16 through 18. And he brought me into the inner court of the house of the Lord, again, this spirit entity, spirit figure, ushering the prophet around. He brought me into the inner court of the house of the Lord, behold, at the entrance of the temple of the Lord, between the poor and the altar, were about 25 men with their backs to the temple of the Lord. That's a key line with their backs to the temple of the Lord. And their faces toward the east, worshiping the sun toward the east. Then he said to me, have you seen this, oh, son of man, is it too light a thing for the house of Judah to commit the abominations that they commit here, that they should fill the land with violence and provoke me still further to anger? Behold, they put the branch to their nose, therefore I will act in wrath. My eye will not spare nor will I have pity. And though they cry in my ears with a loud voice, I will not hear them. Again, this thing about their backs to the temple, Greenberg, this is from, I just pulled this in from our Ezekiel podcast on this particular chapter. Greenberg's commentary on Ezekiel, he comments about where this is situated between the porch, between the, trying to look at the ESV, between the porch and the altar, yet uses the same language here. And he says this, in Joel 2.17, this area is where priests pray to God on a fast day. It appears to have been a special sanctity within the inner court. Mishnah Kaleem 1.9 ranks it only less than that of the sanctuary proper. The eighth of 10 degrees of sanctity. That's some rabbinic tradition there. This sacred space is taken by men who give the sanctuary their backs and they bow toward the sun. Such contempt for Yahweh is counted as the climactic abomination. The abomination here is that they turn their backs to the temple and they worship the sun. Now, the sun is kind of interesting. And in our episode in Ezekiel, we had some long, you know, quotations from Lepinsky's article on Shemesh, you know, the sun in Hebrew, in DDD, Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible. And there's a lot of material in the Old Testament about associating Yahweh with the sun in certain, you know, there's a bit in judges. You know, it's never, how can I say this? Some of the associations were sort of more innocent than others. You know, some of them are really, you know, crossover into idolatry here. Certainly the Ezekiel 8 instance. Let me just read an excerpt. Let's see here, the horses and the chariots of the sun. This is from Lepinsky's DDD article. In 2 Kings 2311, as well as Ezekiel's vision of the men prostrating themselves before the rising sun, Ezekiel 816, are somewhat different. In fact, the horses and chariots were placed at the entrance of the temple of Yahweh and the men were practicing their cult in the same temple facing eastwards towards the gate by which Yahweh, the God of Israel has entered the sanctuary. So their backs are to the sanctuary, but this is their least pointing to where he enters it. These features indicate that the sun's chariot was Yahweh's vehicle and that the men seen by the prophet were not sun worshipers per se, but they were devotees of Yahweh. Just as the child's sacrifice performed in the Valley of Hidon was intended to honor Yahweh himself. Of course, God has really ticked with us. He's ticked with both, but they think that they're doing something okay is the point. Back to Lepinsky's article, Josiah had abolished this particular form of Yahweh worship, destroying the horses and the sun's chariot placed at the entrance of the temple in 2 Kings 2311. Relics of this ritual practice are found perhaps in the blessing of the sun, the Birkat HaKhamah, a rabbinic prayer service in which the sun is blessed in thanksgiving for its creation and it's being set in motion in the firmament on the fourth day of the world, Genesis 1.16 through 19. The ceremony is held once every 28 years, so on and so forth. So Lepinsky's saying, and even in rabbinic literature, we see a little bit, something like this. He writes about, again, this rabbinic ceremony, the blessing starts with Psalm 8412 where the Psalmist states blindly that Yahweh is sun and cover, an antithetic image that suggests a sunlight granted by the Lord and the protection he provides against, heat. It contains Psalm 19 that preserves a fragment of an old hymn to the sun. It ends with Isaiah 3026. The light of the sun shall be sevenfold as the light of the seven days. Lepinsky adds, there can be little doubt that the sun was conceived in biblical times as a vivid symbol of Yahweh's glory. Yahweh's coming is described already in Deuteronomy 33.2 and Habakkuk 3.3 and 4 as the rising of the sun. And his glory comes from the east according to Isaiah 59.19, Ezekiel 43.2, Ezekiel 44.2, while Isaiah 60 verse 19 announces that Yahweh's glory will replace the sunlight when the new Jerusalem will arise. Again, it's solar symbolism in Israelite thinking. You say, well, what's the point here? The point is that, again, we have Old Testament examples where these, quote unquote, the things that pagans would use or do are okay as long as the God of Israel is being honored and not dissed. He is the one to be worshiped, not the object. And in the Ezekiel 8 passage, we see an example of they're turning their backs to where the presence actually is and they're bowing to the sun where the presence is not because the presence has entered the temple. So that is abominable worship. They're bowing to the object instead of bowing to the presence, the thing that the object is supposed to symbolize or some attribute that the object is supposed to symbolize like the Lord's glory. They're turning their backs on the Lord's glory in Ezekiel 8 and that's why it's abominable, but you still nevertheless have this, again, things that we would associate and the Israelites would associate with pagan stuff, but the issue very clearly is who are you worshiping? Who are you worshiping? And again, a lot of this kind of talk from the Old Testament is foreign to us because we don't necessarily use objects. If you're not in a liturgical church, you're not even really terribly concerned with a liturgical calendar through the year. Again, a lot of this stuff is foreign to us, but my whole point in doing this is that there are Old Testament examples, both positive and negative examples that show us the principle, the principle that it isn't the object that matters. What matters is what you're thinking about the object. What matters is are you worshiping the object instead of the thing it's supposed to remind you of that's worthy of worship? Okay, that's a principle and you can see it in scripture. And what I'm suggesting is that maybe we ought to ask ourselves those kinds of questions before we criticize a Christian who has a Christmas tree, okay? Maybe we ought to be thinking a little bit more deeply about it and actually look at scriptural examples of this kind of thing and asking ourselves, well, why is it okay here and not okay there? What's the principle there? Well, I've just told you what the principle was. We should be reading again the text and thinking about the text in its own context instead of some, you know, theosophical website or instead of some book that was written in the 19th century specifically to shoot at the Catholic church. It's just a suggestion. Again, we might wanna try to come up with scriptural content that at least helps us to think about these things. And the issue in scripture in these instances that we've gone through today are not the object. It's what is the object of worship? You know, if you're bound down to the object, if the object is a substitute for God or in this case, Jesus, then you've got a problem. That is a problem. That would be idolatry. But if you're not giving any thought to the object as a thing to be worshiped or as a stand-in, a substitute for Jesus, the Messiah or the God of Israel, well, that's something different. That's something that the Old Testament itself was fine with. So we have to judge our heart here. Not something in our living room or not in our living room. And again, it's not a spirituality contest, but that's sort of what it's become here. Again, at least in some respects. Now, you know, there are other questions here. You know, we can actually, you know, go on and on, you know, with a lot of this stuff, but I would say there, let me just throw this out. I might wanna throw two more things out here because there's one I think is really interesting and the other one is just sort of a random, you know, thought, I'll start with a random thought here. I think for people who would, who just go hard and fast that, you know, things like Christmas, you know, trees, you know, Santa Claus, you know, honestly, Santa Claus has a sordid history. And I personally don't really like the Santa Claus thing because it's very easy for Santa Claus to displace Jesus. Yes, we can say, well, Santa Claus kind of based off in this old tradition of St. Nicholas, you know, who gave gifts to poor kids and it kind of modeled maybe sort of kind of after the wise men who gave gifts to baby Jesus. And I mean, you can create these connections, but honestly, it's very easy for Santa to displace Jesus. You know, the reason that we have things, you know, that we're able to give you gifts is because God has prospered us. You know, God has been faithful to us. We are able to do this for you because God, you know, has blessed us, God has made this possible. And Jesus is the Son of God, He's God in the flesh. It's because of His sacrifice, you know, we can have a relationship with God. All that gets drowned out or substituted for in many cases by, you know, Santa Claus, St. Nicholas. So to me, again, Santa Claus certainly has pagan, you know, associations with it. There are other versions of the Santa Claus legend that aren't too great, you know, basically, he confronts someone, you know, St. Nicholas, you know, confronts someone who just murdered a few kids and put them back together and all that kind of stuff. Just, I mean, there's lots of alternative stories to this that some of them aren't things you'd want to read to your kids. But to me, that's all incidental. The real question is, is there a substitution going on here? You know, we want to be careful with that. All of that, we could rabbit trail on, but I'd rather ask this question specifically to the people who don't really care to give the date any thought or, again, the use of an object, any thought that they just want to, you know, it's all pagan. I'm not, I don't need to think about it, but we're going to do this to be more spiritual than somebody else. Do those same people use the week names? Names of the week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday? If those come out of your mouth and you're a pagan, I could use your same logic and say, well, I'm not going to think about that either. I'm going to assume that you're an idolater because you invoke names, you invoke names of pagan deities in the days of the week. You must be following those deities. You must be giving them honor because you're mentioning their name positively. You use those names like every week. You must be really attached to those names. I'll bet you mention those names more than you say Jesus. I mean, I could do ridiculous stuff like that to point out the inconsistency. These are cultural trappings. How about, do you use the month names in the Hebrew Bible for the months? We use the biblical names. We're not using Jupiter. We're not invoking Him, June or June or July or bars. We're not doing this thing, associating our month names with pagan deities. We're more spiritual. We're using Nissan and some of these other Jewish names. Great, they come from Babylon. The Jewish month names are Babylonian. Again, there are just things like this that it gets silly pretty fast and you can make it kind of absurd pretty fast if you wanna press people for consistency. But instead of doing that, again, we need to be thinking about are you completely substituting again, which should be the object of worship for something else? Now that is a more fundamental question that gets to the heart of these awful buzzwords like idolatry. It's really a matter of the heart where your heart and your mind is focused because again, look at what the Old Testament analogies are. They're using certain objects. They're doing these things. They are part of the trappings of Israelite worship but God doesn't condemn them if those objects are not being bowed down to and he is not being removed or disrespected. In other words, he retains a central place, the exclusive place of worship. That's the better discussion to have rather than again, silliness like this topic often turns into because, I can turn it on its head and go after the paganists, okay? And show all sorts of inconsistencies with the way they live their own lives, even down to using Hebrew terms that in the case of the calendar have a deep association with Babylon. I could do that. And it would be just as silly on my part to do it. Of course they're not idolaters, okay? But these things largely don't even get thought about. Consistency is never really on the radar in what we're doing. It's a spirituality contest. The last thing I wanna mention is an article by Aaron Gleason. Aaron is one of those who have been participating in doing some research for divine counsel stuff in church fathers and he's a writer. He writes online. In this case, it's for the federalist, federalist.com. We're gonna have this link on the episode page but he has a really interesting article that's drawn from the research, a scholar whose last name is Murphy. The article is entitled How Christmas baptizes Norse mythology into powerful Christian archetypes. Now, I wanna read parts of this just to make the point that he's making. The early church did do syncretistic things and we, because of books like maybe Hislop, again it's back to the 19th century stuff that again really isn't thought through very well. We tend to think that the church is doing this not to evangelize the gospel because people would look at the Catholic church and say they don't have the gospel anyway so on and so forth. And again, there's an argument to be made there. You can win that argument based upon our experience today of how Catholicism tends to articulate its own faith mixing in lots of works and all this kind of stuff. I get that. But in the early centuries where people were trying to evangelize pagans, they would do syncretistic things and sometimes they worked better than others. Let's just put it this way. Sometimes this led to disaster and again just a real admixture theologically doctrinally of paganism with Christian stuff. That I'm never gonna approve of. And even in this case, I'm not offering an explicit endorsement but I just think it's really interesting to see how this worked in the minds of pagans in the Scandinavian world. So I'm gonna read a few excerpts from this article and if you've seen the Thor movie some of this is gonna sound familiar but please don't get distracted by Hollywood because they ruin some of the imagery here. But okay, jumping into Gleason's article here, he says, the Christmas tree is a perfect symbol of Christian theology, this is his argument. It depicts the complete good news of Christ but to see this we would need to understand what the tree means and where it comes from. Let's look at the tree's origins and that begins with Norse mythology. He says Norse mythology centers upon a tree. This is not exactly novel. Trees are sacred in almost every culture and religion to varying degrees. And he talks a little bit about why that's the case then he says the tree at the center of Norse mythology is unique. It's called Yggdrasil. Modern people tend to think of it and depict it as a gigantic ash tree with the nine realms of the gods and the elves and the dwarfs sit on the branches and the roots. Again, if you think back to the original Thor movie, I think it's the first or maybe it's the second one. He's explaining where Asgard comes from to his girlfriend there. You get a little bit of this imagery. But again, we need to think a little bit better than that as far as what the Norse mythology actually was. Yggdrasil, the tree was essentially existence itself. The world itself was the tree. By world, Gleason writes, I don't mean earth. Earth was a realm, again, to the Norse midgard or as Tolkien called it, middle earth. Our realm of midgard was small within the world of the cosmic tree. In the middle of all that cosmic tree stuff, all the branches was the bifrost. Okay, what we call the Milky Way. Again, when they looked up, they're thinking about the cosmic tree in terms of the cosmos, okay? The sun goes down, the sky is laid bare and that's how they're thinking of this thing which connects all of the stars, life itself, the cosmos. That's what they're thinking about with this tree. In the middle of that runs the Milky Way. That was what they called the bifrost. Back to the Thor movie, okay? We've discovered this white path through the night sky is actually an arm of our spiral galaxy and we know that. But to the Norse, the bifrost was a bridge between Asgard and Midgard. Asgard where Thor and Odin live in Midgard's earth. Asgard was the home of the Aesir, the greatest Norse gods, Odin, of course, being their chief. Odin's name, or excuse me, Yggdrasil, that term meant the awesome one's gallows. Now this takes you right into the heart of Norse mythology and Gleason writes here about Odin. Odin is a strange god by ancient standards. Tolkien's Gandalf is explicitly patterned after him. The only real difference is that Odin carries a spear and is missing an eye. Aside from that, he looks like Gandalf from the top of his gray, white, brimmed hat to the bottom of his dirty boots. This visage that could pass for a homeless man disguised the awesome one as he wandered about the earth. In contrast to other ancient gods, Odin benefited humanity both metaphysically and ethically. He was generally not depicted as a god requiring elaborate propitiation. In ethical terms, he modeled the humility and cost of gaining wisdom. This is seen as the story of how he sacrificed his eye to gain wisdom, but even more significant is his search for the runes. Odin is not trying to get wisdom. So he sacrifices an eye to do this. He's looking for runes. And the poetic Eta recounts it like this. This is Odin speaking about himself. Now, listen to the words. I know that I hung on a windy tree, nine long nights, wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin, myself to myself, on that tree of which no man knows, from where its roots run, no bread did they give me nor drink from a horn, downwards I peered. I took up the runes, screaming I took them, then I fell back from there. It's the end of the passage. To us this seems bizarre and esoteric, but to the North men, the finding and the giving of runes to humanity was equivalent to being made in God's image. Odin wins the runes through the sacrifice of himself, and then he gives the runes to humanity. Now the relevance to Jesus, again, to the North was pretty obvious. The North men saw the obvious parallels between Jesus on the cross and Odin on the tree. And that tree was Yggdrasil, the awesome one's gallows, place where God was hung. Yggdrasil is the cross. And of course on the cross is the God who came as a nondescript man. Before they came to know Jesus, the North men celebrated a holiday called Yule. They celebrated Yule by honoring the mothers, their mothers in their culture, with an all night vigil on December 25th. The mothers were almost certainly the three wise hags known as the Norns, who continually refreshed the cosmic tree Yggdrasil with the waters from the well of Urd. One part of Yule's celebration was to bring evergreen trees into homes and halls. The evergreen tree thus became, or thus came to symbolize Yggdrasil as much as the ash tree did. In fact, it's a far more appropriate symbol because the evergreen trees were reminders of two things. First, that winter could be defeated as evergreens do every year. And second, that one day Yggdrasil would defeat Ragnarok, the Norse end of the world. Yggdrasil, who suffers the horrors of Ragnarok but survives the cataclysm. The great tree itself opens at the end, revealing two children who will repopulate the new earth. Because of these beliefs, the North men saw in Jesus their own worldview completed. He hung upon the cross like Odin for the sake of humanity. By clinging to the cross, we can all escape God's wrath at Ragnarok. Again, these are just some excerpts from Gleason's article. So what I wanted to do here was illustrate how, again, the missionaries back in these early centuries who become familiar with the religion of, in this case, the Norse men, they see points of their own, of the Nordic theology that are very easy parallels. And here's the question. This goes back to our episode with Gerald McDermott about the worship of other gods, was God planting truth amidst this punishment situation where he had divorced the nations of the earth from himself to assign them to other gods, the Deuteronomy 32 worldview. Is God planting truth among them to capitalize it on some day? Are there vestiges of truth about the true God that survive and God is going to capitalize on that some day? Again, that's a discussion the early church fathers had. And this is just another illustration of the same discussion. Are these elements in Nordic religion, are they vestiges of ideas that God knew would mean something to them in a foundational way, really in an evangelistic way sometime in the future? Again, that was a discussion that academics have today. It was a discussion early church missionaries had, early church writers had. It's a discussion that missionaries to the Nordic people had as well. And they saw in these things opportunity to bridge to truth. So they weren't looking for opportunities to take truth and become more pagan. It wasn't always an issue of palatability. In some cases, there were real bridges. There were real analogies to build on here, to get people to believe. And specifically to believe that, you know, that thing that you believe about owed and hanging on a tree, well, that actually happened in real time. There was a God man who actually hung on a tree and died for you. You know, and we're here to tell you that this happened, you know, in Jerusalem in this place called Jerusalem that you may have never heard of. And centuries ago, you know, we have our message because it was taught to us over the generations from eyewitnesses to this event. And the man was Jesus of Nazareth. He was God, man, and he came to earth, hung on a tree so that you could have salvation from the end of the world. You could have eternal life. So again, I bring up the example, not only because it's really interesting, it's really fascinating, but also to make the point that these things should not be caricatured. It's very easy to construct, again, what we think of and what at the time, you know, would have been known as the Catholic Church. It's really, it's an easy villain. It's an easy thing to villainize. If your Protestants, you know, Protestants have done this, you know, for a long time and evangelicals and whatnot. I have a number of disagreements with Catholic theology where I think it's not biblically based in the words, it's not text driven. It's sort of theology by analogy. And sometimes the analogies are kind of strange. And you know, I have fundamental disagreements there, but I think it's unwarranted to basically make the Catholic Church the villain for everything we don't like and use the easy villain, the easy target to refuse to think about why were some of these things done and why did some of these things seem to work really effectively, you know, as far as, you know, getting people to convert from paganism to Christianity. And we can sit here and we can say, well, that wasn't real Christianity because, you know, look at all those wars that, you know, started in all this bad stuff. You know, I've watched Vikings on HBO or whatever channel it's on. Boy, they were awful. You know, they're just, it's just syncretism. It's gobbledygook. And again, you could say that about Luther's Reformation and it would be unwarranted. Yeah, Luther's Reformation led to lots of wars in Europe, decades of wars and they were bad. And it was politicized. But foundationally, you know, Luther took people back to a really important truth, you know, salvation by grace through faith, not linked to a specific church or a specific set of works. The point is that we need to be a little more careful in our thinking here. We can't just throw the baby out, you know, with the bathwater because we could throw just basically practically everything, everything we have in the Christian world is going to be abused. It's going to be manipulated. It's going to be politicized. I mean, this is why on Naked Bible, we try to get people to go back to the text. I'm not concerned with trying to separate the wheat from the calf in modern Christendom or even ancient Christendom. You know, we want to go back to the text. And the Nordic stuff here is just an illustration of, well, you know, maybe everything was, didn't have a bad motive. Maybe it's just a little, you know, it's too much of a reflex to just say, well, you know, having a tree that's just all pagan and the people who did this wanted to become more pagan. You know, they certainly didn't want to try to really be fostering truth and actually telling people about, geez, well, that's not true. It's a mixed bag. Okay, it's a mixed bag. But what we ought to really have our focus on on this topic and really any other topic is how do we, how can we look at scripture and think better about the topic? And so in this episode to wrap up, we've tried to approach is Christmas a pagan holiday in two ways. One was the date and again, the calculation of the date and the date itself, December 25th, even though I don't think that's when Jesus was born. That is not a pagan date. It is a date that was arrived at through various mathematical extrapolations, specifically as a byproduct to validate or I shouldn't say validate, but to remember, to commemorate something explicitly scriptural. That is the resurrection, the crucifixion and the resurrection of Christ. Fixing that the commemoration of that event in real time was an obsession in the early church and the date for the birth was derived therefrom at least a hundred years earlier than Aurelian. Yeah, at least a hundred years earlier. So the date is not pagan. The practices again, I think this is an issue of Christian liberty. You know, this is, this ought to be an issue of conscience and not a spirituality contest. Those are two entirely different things. Old Testament Israelites used, even at God's command, they used objects, symbols and objects that were part of pagan traditions and it wasn't bad theology. It wasn't idolatry. It wasn't a violation of anything per se. The issue was, is it a substitute for Yahweh? That's evil. And are you worshiping the object itself instead of Yahweh? That's evil. And so these are the kind of ways that we need to look at scripture and try to come up with ways to think about what we're doing. I would say if you wanna divorce yourself from the Christian calendar and follow the Jewish calendar, but you're not again making it a spirituality contest, it's an issue of conscience. You just, you know, it just connects you more to the Old Testament, whatever, by all means do that. Go ahead, do that. But again, don't judge someone else for not making the same decision because then you've just turned it into a spirituality contest. Paul is very clear in the epistles about, it doesn't matter what, you know, about dates, foods and feasts and all this kind of stuff. What matters is Christ. And he let everybody know that I have the freedom to do this or not do this. But he also on the other, on the flip side of the coin is he also let everybody know I am, I love the weaker brother. And if I need to give up something that I could do for the sake of others, I'll do it. Don't even have to think about it. I'll do it. But again, I don't want to rehearse, you know what the territory has been over in the episode. So again, that's how I would look at this whole thing is Christmas, a pagan holiday. No, it's not. It can be made that. It can certainly be twisted and turned into that. And in our culture, more and more, it's about not thinking about Jesus. But that's more easily done with commercialism. But these things that we criticize, again, certainly the date is not pagan. The practices, again, we need to evaluate our consciences or that we need to evaluate the practices on the basis for our own consciences and the conscience of others, other Christians, other believers, but do not make it a spirituality contest. Mike, can you subconsciously be guilty of idolatry though? I mean, for example, you're not explicitly saying out loud, I have replaced God with money. But if you are completely consumed with your job or anything else like that, I mean, can you be guilty of idolatry subconsciously? I think the short answer is, yeah, I think that can happen. Subconsciously, you'd have to, every person has to evaluate what's going on on the inside. And you could say, well, could there be a person that situation where nobody even really thinks about it, they're just doing it. That's what you're talking about with the subconscious thing. And yeah, and it may take someone from the outside, a family member, or somebody else to just ask a question like, is really your job the source of your happiness? Is this really what essentially your faith is in? You attach the reason why you have these things or why you are what you are, that you're stationed in life exclusively to your job. And the Lord doesn't even pop into your head. Then you've got a problem. But there are a lot of people, I think who, it could be anything, that the question is not even going to occur to them. And so this is why I think we need to be immersed in scripture, we need to be having conversations with other believers to at least help us to think thoughts that we can use to evaluate our own hearts and things like that. But I'm all in favor of that, that that's community. Again, it's trying to attach our beliefs and how we think to scripture. That's what we should be doing. What oftentimes these things turn into is they turn into opportunities for us to look at somebody else, not look at ourselves, but for us to look at somebody else and either thinking our hearts that were better, were more spiritual, or we say something not to get them to maybe ask themselves a question that they really need to ask. In other words, not out of sincerity, concern for the other person, but it becomes a dig. It becomes again something that we're saying this to the other person because we want them to get the message that you've got problems, dude, and I don't. So it's, these things can happen. So my short answer would be, yeah, I can see scenarios where that would be the case. But this is why we need honest people in our lives. We need community, we need again to be conscious every day of trying to live life in light of your scripture, in light of the Lord, in light of who he is, what he's done, and all those things that we might talk about on Sunday. We need to be thinking about him every day. All right, Mike, well, that's gonna be another good Christmas special, and I'm glad to know that to my Christmas tree and Wreath and everything else isn't gonna get me in trouble. Just don't bow down to them. Okay. There you go. All right, Mike, well. Don't assign any spiritual importance to them. Let them just be a reminder. Absolutely. Well, there you have it. All right, well, we want to wish everybody a merry Christmas this year, and I want to thank you everybody for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. God bless. Thanks for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit www.nakedbibleblog.com To learn more about Dr. Heizer's other websites and blogs, go to www.ermsh.com.