"The great fruit of piety is to worship god according to the traditions of one's ancestors" - Porphyry
Welcome!
Ancestral Traditions in a new ezine designed with thinking Pagans in mind. If you are looking for more than run-of-the-mill websites of dubious accuracy, then we in turn are looking for you! Our articles are well-researched and our sources cited. Though bias is almost impossible to avoid, what you will find here is not written to promote some doctrinal or ideological viewpoint, but to shine a light on our collective past, on a religious landscape that is no more and a religious landscape coming into being.
Table of Contents
| » Editorial | |
| » Did You Know? | |
| » Feature Article | |
| » Unmaking the Myth | |
| » Letters to the Editor | |
| » Next Issue |
Editorial
Ancestral Traditions is a logical development of the Mos Maiorum project, a non-pofit educational foundation and supporting website dedicated to the revival of the customs and traditions of our ancestors - our ancestral traditions.
In Ancestral Traditions you will find articles about various aspects of ethnic religion, past and present, as well as a regular features:
- Did You Know?
- The Feature Article
- Unmaking the Myth
"Did You Know?" will address little known facets of religion, history and biography, while the "Feature Article" will examine in depth some issue of Pagan history. The third feature is called "Unmaking the Myth" which will be dedicated to the deconstruction of Christian myth.
In all instances, the goal is to open our eyes to the past. Understanding our past is an essential first step for understanding the present. Events do not happen in a vacuum; one event leads to another. If we do not understand the past, we will be adrift; it will be like having an incomplete set of coordinates. We will know we are standing somewhere, but we will never know exactly where, or how we arrived there. Just as logically, if we do not know where we are, we will not know how to get to where we are going.
The purpose of Ancestral Traditions is not propaganda. It is not about revision. It is our stance that revision to the historical record has already taken place and can be found in the pages of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, as well as the works of the early Christian apologists. It continues to be repeated today. The purpose of this revision was in part wishful thinking. Historical events had to meet the demands of doctrine. A prime example of this is Pslam 22. Since it was thought to discuss the execution of the messiah, the events it described were literally copy and pasted into the Gospel account of Jesus' execution. Nobody had an eyewitness account to hand, and so this stood in its place. In part, this revision served another purpose, that of "pious propaganda" - or "history as it should have been." A prime example of this would be the Acts of the Apostles, written to present an early history of the Christian movement. Acts purports to reveal that period known to some scholars as the Christian Dark Ages, a period of which we know nothing reliable. Acts attempts to fill this void by describing the early activities of Jesus' followers but mostly devotes itself to Paul of Tarsus, the true hero of the story, and it attempts to smooth over the differences that obviously existed (which Paul himself in his Epistles does not deny) between Paul and the Jerusalem Community led by James, the brother of Jesus (known to history as James the Just).
As part of this process of revision, Paganism was made the "other" - as it had been for earlier Jewish authors. Once Paganism had been appointed to this role, Christian authors could begin the process of deligitimization of the traditional cults of the Pagan world, presenting the gods and goddesses as "dumb idols" or "demons" - agents of a mythical being of late development known as Satan. Much of what people think they know about Paganism is a result of this process of revision, of Christian disinformation and propaganda, and much of it has gone into the historical record as "fact." People, millions of them, believe it without question. It is, after all, holy writ!
Our goal then, in these pages, is to illuminate the past, to pull away the veil of the false and shine the light on the facts so long obscured. This is not an attempt to white-wash the Pagan past, which is no way perfect, but an attempt to present the Pagan landscape as it was, and not how Christian doctrine requires it to be.
Initially, Ancestral Traditions will be published quarterly (Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall) until such time that demand justifies an increased publication schedule. Once published, the feature article will go into the article archives on the Mos Maiorum site. Past issues will be archived and accessible here in their entirety.
On the right sidebar, for your convenience and edification, you'll find some useful links to various sites and resources that we consider especially important.
Did You Know?
Having a standardized and universal dating system is a relatively new development? People are used to a dating system based on Christian doctrine, but it was not always so:
AD/CE: A.D. stands for Anno Domini, or “Year of the Lord”, and not, as some Christians believe, “After Death”. It is based on a dating system invented by a monk from southern Russia c. 600 A.D. This system has now been replaced in scholarship by CE, standing for Common Era. The man to whom we owe this system is Dionysius Exiguus, who was born in Scythia Minor, and the cause is the dating of Easter, always a cause of concern in Christianity. Dionysius was living in Rome in 525, when he made his computations. According to these, the Annunciation or Incarnation (as opposed to birth) of Jesus occurred on March 25, AD 1 (Julian Calendar) — or precisely nine months before the Feast of the Nativity. It was Bede who made the new dating system popular in England and on the Continent, Alcuin.
The previous dating system in the Greco-Roman world was either by city year (such as A.U.C. – ab urbe condita - or the date from the founding of Rome, traditionally dated to 753 BC), regnal years, that is, as in “the tenth year of the reign of Augustus” (Justinian required the use of this system in 537 CE), or consular years. For instance, 59 BCE was for the Romans "the consulship of Caesar and Bibulus." A collection of documents, “the archive of a large Jewish family which lived at the south end of the Dead Sea in the Nabataean Kingdom (later Provincia Arabia)” discovered in 1961 in a cave where previously correspondence of Bar Kochba had been found, demonstrates various methods of dating official documents. For instance, “according to the Roman consuls, the Emperor (for example, 9th year of Hadrian = 125 A.D., and the local date of the Arabian Province established by Trajan in 106 (for example, 25th year of the ‘New Arabian Province’ = 130 A.D.)[1]” The last consular year was 541 and ended with the term of Anicius Faustus Albinus Basilius.
Another dating system used in the Pagan world was that of “Olympiads” but this was much less precise, including as it did a four year period. The first Olympics was in 776 BC and the last Olympics in 393 CE. They were outlawed by the Emperor Theodosius the next year and by the middle of the next century the use of Olympiads in dating had fallen into disuse. By the traditional date established by Dionysius Jesus’ birth would have taken place in the fourth year of the 194th Olympiad.
BC/BCE: This stands for “Before Christ” and is generally used when referring to the Era before the birth of Jesus. Unfortunately, due to an error in Dionysius’ original computations (see AD/CE above), Jesus was actually born c. 4 BC, though some estimates range as far afield as 6, 8 or even 11 BC (4 is the last year possible if we are to accept that Herod the Great was king at the time of his birth). Adding to our woes is the absence of any year “0”. This caused confusion in the recent turn of millennium when two schools of thought sprang up in the public consciousness. Some held that the new millennium began with the year 2000, but since there was no year “0” it actually began with the year 2001. Scholarship now uses BCE or “Before Common Era” in place of the old BC as it is a more neutral term. Unlike AD, BC was not in widespread use in Europe before the 15th century.
Notes:
[1] Yigael Yadin, "More on the Letters of Bar Kochba" The Biblical Archaeologist 24 (1961), 95.
Feature Article
The Reason for the Season
by Hrafnkell Haraldsson
We’re all of us in the Western World familiar with the old saying, “The Reason for the Season.” And we all know what a certain segment of society says this means. Bonnie Ricks, writing for the Christian Post, says in unequivocal terms:
As we near the time of Christmas, we see the decorations going up. the people madly shopping for gifts. the hustle and bustle of the Christmas season. Now is the time to stop and reflect just why we really celebrate this time. As Christians, we are the only ones who know the real meaning of Christmas and why it is a time of celebration and what that celebration means to all who will believe. If there were no Jesus, there would be no Christmas.[1]
Her message is not unique. It is commonplace and can be found repeated almost anywhere Christians gather. It reaches absurd levels when repeated by conservative talkshow hosts like Bill O'Reilly. But not everyone is fooled. As Jason Linkins of the Huffington Post writes,
Bill O'Reilly has been, on a yearly basis, one of the most fervent and shrill public figures, wailing about the supposed War On Christmas, because he is precisely dumb enough to believe that Christianity, which has enjoyed an unprecedented run of absolute, total success in the United States - such that every single person who's run the country has been a Christian (and such that it's the only religious holiday in the world that's allowed to put their decorations up TWO MONTHS IN ADVANCE) - is actually fundamentally threatened each time a shop clerk opts to say "Happy Holidays." O'Reilly likes to cast himself as some sort of speaker of truth to power, but it's really all about his pinheaded sense of victimhood.[2]
These same Christians repeatedly talk about “restoring the true meaning of Christmas” as though it has been lost. But what is Christmas? It just happens to be the twenty-fifth day of December that was chosen by fourth century Christians to be a very special birthday celebration, that of the man chosen by them to be called the divine son of the once Northwestern Arabian and now Jewish God, YHWH.[3]
But it’s not like the ancient world was not full of divine beings. The ancients were polytheists after all. And divine birth days were not unknown. A notable one, and one which already happened to lay claim to this particular day, was Mithras, a solar god out of Persia who had come to be worshiped in particular by the Roman army. December 25th, then the date of the Winter Solstice, was then the Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, or "the birthday of the unconquered sun."
Some Christians today are challenging this fact, including the reactionary new Pope, Benedict XVI, who claims that a December 25th date was determined simply by calculating nine months beyond March 25th, regarded as the day of Jesus’ conception (the Feast of the Annunciation).[4]
Other Christian commentators are even advancing the claim that Pagans stole Christmas from the Christians! Christian revisionism is nothing new (the Bible, after all, is one gigantic work of revisionism) but for the Pagans to have stolen the date of December 25th would be to argue not only that somebody had heard of Christianity before the third century (few had) but that the entirely of past Pagan history had never occurred. Thinking in a vacuum is not likely to provide sound explanations.[5]
Not only were Mithraists not the only Pagans to hold this time of year sacred but we have the testimony of Christians themselves as to why Pagan holy days were appropriated, a process called “normative inversion”: “The most efficient way to erase a memory is to superimpose a countermemory; hence, the best way to make people forget an idolatrous rite is to replace it with another rite.” Maimonides (1135-1204), the medieval Jewish scholar who lived in both Spain and Egypt and who wrote in Arabic, illustrated the principle in his Guide of the Perplexed, and as Assman notes, “The Christians followed the same principle when they built their churches on the ruins of pagan temples and observed their feasts on the dates of pagan festivals.” This was justified in their eyes because idolatry is an epidemic which must be cured. John Spencer (1630-1693) agreed with Maimonides “in seeing the principle and overall purpose of the Law as the destruction of idolatry.”[6] Susan Roll writes, repeating the old maxim, “History is written by the victors: the position prevailed will be recorded for all time as the normative version.”[7] It is this normative version that today’s Christians are so vociferously defending.
The Christians, of course, recognized this. We have the testimony of Dionysius Bar-Salibi, twelfth century bishop of Amida, for example:
The reason, then, why the fathers of the church moved the January 6th celebration [of Epiphany] to December 25th was this, they say: it was the custom of the pagans to celebrate on this same December 25th the birthday of he Sun, and they lit lights then to exalt the day, and invited and admitted the Christian to these rites. When, therefore, the teachers of the church saw that Christians inclined to this custom, figuring out a strategy, they set the celebration of the true Sunrise on this day, and ordered Epiphany to be celebrated on January 6th; and this usage they maintain to the present day along with the lighting of the lights.
As Ramsay MacMullen remarks, “By similar inventions other popular pagan celebrations were directly confronted with a Christian challenge.” [8]
More telling, perhaps, is another example. In Egypt and Arabia Pagan processions carried an image of the sun in the image of a newborn child, while priests chanted “Korah [Kore], the virgin, has given birth to Aion!” (Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.18, 9). Glen Bowersock, somehow, comes to the unusual conclusion that this is a sign of Christian influence (Christianity wishes it had been so influential!). But unfortunately for apologists and Pope alike, January 6th was the date on Christmas was originally celebrated. And we don’t have to rely on a 12th century bishop for this fact. We can go back further, to Epiphanius (ca 310-403), who tells us so (Pan. LI.22.3-7 and 29.4-7) On around 428 CE John Cassianus (Collationes X.2) reported that Epiphany in Egypt is 'by ancient tradition' believed to be the time for both the baptism and the birth of Jesus.”[9] As it happens, January 6th is still Christmas Day in the Orthodox Church.
Other Christians of the day were proponents of normative inversion. Among them was Martin of Braga, author of De Correctione Rusticorum (literally, On the Castigation of Country-dwellers – the title says it all). In this work, Martin rants about people celebrating Pagan holidays as Pagans. His solution? He makes a call for the replacement of Pagan practices with Christian ones. The bishop of Javols in about the year 500 also made use of this tactic, “the transference of ritual from one religious loyalty to another” in the words of one scholar. The greatest example we know of is that of Pope Gregory, who made normative inversion official church policy in a letter sent to England (then sliding back into Paganism) in 601. Just as holy places – lakes in particular, but also temples, could be captured, so could holy days. Christmas is the greatest of these captured days.[10]
And the Epiphany itself, on January 6th? Again, the process of normative inversion can be seen at work: January 5/6 was observed as the date of the epiphany of Dionysus, none other than Aion himself. In Orphic circles, Phanes, the god emerging from the cosmic egg, was seen as the new Aion, who was reborn every year in a continuing cycle. Both Osiris and Adonis were also equated with Aion. And Jarl Fossum argues that the idea of virgin birth might have arrived in Alexandria in advance of Christianity.[11] Of course, there will always be doubters. Despite the not inconsiderable evidence, Susan Roll finds it possible to argue that “no historical causality can be conclusively proven.”[12]
We might ask about the divine child while we’re at it. Certainly that, at least, is original to Christianity! But wait! Fossum tells us,
The motif of the birth of the child god is quite widespread; obviously it has a great psychological appeal. The image of the newborn child symbolizes the possibilities of the future and, hence, paves the way for a change of personality. The image of the child is therefore charged with potential.[13]
And the ancient world literally abounded with divine children. We have, for example, the myth of Attis, who was the young male consort of Cybele. Having conquered death, Attis is a god of fertility, associated with the cycle of death and rebirth. He was reborn every spring. In case there is a question of “who was there first”, Cybele came to Rome in 204 BCE (Livy, 29.14.13). This date is uncontested. So popular was this celebration that the story of Attis was being enacted in the fourth century and even under the Christian empire remained a holiday on the imperial calendar, as did Mithras’ birthday on December 25.[14] Both the idea of reborn gods and December 25th were well established in Pagan culture in the century before Jesus’ birth and both are well attested.
And what are the Christian origins of Christianity? They lie in the fourth century. There is no evidence at all of anything earlier than this, whatever claims are made to the contrary. The first mention dates from 354 in a document called the “Philocalian Calendar” ("Codex-Calendar of 354") which incorporates material apparently going back to as early as 336.[15] In earlier times, it seems Christians were no more interested in when Jesus was born than where he was buried, a deplorable lack of curiosity that is unfortunate for scholars and believers alike today.
One noted Christian author, Clement of Alexandria (Stromateis 1.21; 145.6; 1146.4), even went so far as to say curiosity about the date of Jesus’ birth was “gratuitous curiosity.” When possible dates were mentioned, they most certainly did not include December 25th. Instead, we find mention of March 28, April 2 or 20.[16] It seems a logical conclusion to draw then that if December 25th was selected as Jesus’ birthday that it was chosen purposely to conflict or supersede the Pagan holy day. After all, if Christians either didn’t care about the date of Jesus’ birth, or if they normally put it in the spring, Pagans could hardly have stolen the idea from Christians!
December 25th received only grudging and scattered acceptance, mostly in the West, with the East resisting (December 25 is still meaningless in Armenia). In 350, Pope Julius I ordered Christmas to be celebrated on December 25. Christmas arrived on December 25th in Constantinople in 380 and it’s not until 386 that we find John Chrysostom, in Antioch, ordering Christmas to be celebrated by the Christian community there on December 25. December 25 did not come to Alexandria until 432. The Church of Jerusalem stubbornly refused to celebrate that date until the seventh century! Not only was December 25th not originally Jesus’ birthday, but when it was declared so, nobody wanted it. That, in a nutshell, is the true history of Christmas.
But skip ahead seventeen centuries and now Christians can talk about “taking back Christmas” and claim that “Jesus is the reason for the season”! We might well ask in what universe this might be true. It is certainly not true in ours, as we have shown.
And not only do some Christians challenge the validity of Christmas’ Pagan origins, some seek also to downplay it. John Baldovin:
…liturgical communities have traditionally taken the skeletal structure of the existing local liturgical cycle, the main feasts and seasons, and used them as the framework for the celebration of Christmas within their own cultures. A good example of this is the connection between the Feast of the Unconquered Sun at Rome on December 25 in the late third and early fourth centuries and the Christian celebration of Christmas. Even if the origin of this dating of Christmas may lie elsewhere than the pagan solar feast, a theory that has recently been rehabilitated, Christians did make use of the counter-symbolism of Christ the “Sun of Righteousness” for their own purposes. Such a cooptation of the pagan winter solstice and sun worship was not a betrayal of Christianity but rather the sensible adaptation of Christian faith to the existing culture. After all, if God has truly and irrevocably entered into the human condition and human history, then Christian faith can legitimately make use of the symbolism that the world provides. This insight is at the root of Christian sacramentality. To celebrate Christ, the light of the world, in the darkest days of the year – at least in the Northern hemisphere – makes a great deal of sense; it is not the survival of paganism but the recognition of God in nature and history.[17]
We’ve looked at the day. What about the ritual structure? We see where the lights come from above. We still use those, though they’ve lost their sacred meaning. And Christmas trees? Of Germanic Pagan origin – used in midwinter festivals. Of course, trees had long been used in Pagan religions. Jeremiah 10:2-4 condemns the use of trees being cut down and adorned with silver and gold, and poles dedicated to YHWH’s consort, Asherah (a consort stolen from El, the Canannite god upon whom YHWH is modeled) was represented by poles. However, arguments that Jeremiah was condemning “Christmas trees” is not entirely accurate; he was condemning “idolatry.” Even so, we see where the origins of Christmas trees come from – Paganism. The tree as it came down to us via Germanic Christianity,[18] represented Yggdrasil, the World Tree, for the Germans and Norse, and it was decorated just as statues of gods and goddesses were decorated – out of devotion. This decoration of trees also took place in the Roman Saturnalia (December 17-23). But there is more: “Two popular observances belonging to Christmas are more especially derived from the worship of our Pagan ancestors—the hanging up of the mistletoe and the burning of the Yule log.” So wrote Robert Chambers in his 1832 Book of Days, and James George Frazer in The Golden Bough holds that "the ancient fire-festival of the winter solstice appears to survive" in the Yule log custom.[19] It seems that what Christians tend to think of as the components of “their” holiday are no more Christian than the day itself. Even hymns are not originally Christian but were part of Pagan worship, as were processions (Christmas Day Parade, anyone?).
So, we might ask, “What is the problem?” As French scholar Franz Cumont wrote in 1911, “We dislike to acknowledge a debt to our adversaries, because it means that we recognize some value in the cause they defend.”[20] But there is more to it than that. There is the issue of legitimacy. Able to disguise so much before the Enlightenment opened our eyes, Christianity has, since then, suffered from the same sense of inferiority it experienced during the Pagan era. The simple truth is that Christianity is a derivative religion. It is syncretic and offers not a whit of anything new or original, either in its liturgy (stolen from Mithraism) nor its symbolism (god child and Christmas, as noted above), and as for moral teachings, those come from Judaism (or yes, Paganism). Much of the Jewish myth it has inherited were not even original to Judaism but derive from older, Pagan sources, including the Creation Myth and the story of the Flood – which come therefore to Christianity third-hand. In truth, the only thing Christianity has brought to the table is a rabid and unreasoning intolerance, not only to everything outside itself but quite often to forms of itself. Even Jewish sects, no matter how violently they disagreed, did not kill each other
We are living through an era of Christian reaction to the Enlightenment. It may seem delayed – and it is, in some sense – but the forces of the Enlightenment have at last succeeded in backing Christianity into a corner. Losing converts at an astounding rate, it has reacted as any group might, by striking back. There are more works of Christian apology on the market today than at any time since the second century, and the fact that Christianity feels so compelled to explain itself is evidence enough that it is treading water. Add to this a rather unhappy fact for Christians: Neo-Paganism being the fastest growing religion in the world, and modern day Pagans of whatever ethnic tradition want to take back their religion – and their holidays. Christianity could cover up the lie in an age when nobody could read and Scripture was restricted to the priesthood, but the truth can no longer be hidden.
Of course, the best way to deal with the exposure of lies is to tell yet more lies. “December 25 wasn’t really Pagan at all”; “The Pagans stole OUR holiday! Yes, that’s the ticket!” The problem with such assertions is that they have no support in the historical record. We have the words of the early Christians themselves in this regard. We know when Christmas began to be celebrated, and we know Pagans were celebrating a multitude of deities on this day for hundreds of years beforehand. We know there were other savior gods, other child gods being reborn every year. But history and Christianity have never gotten along comfortably. Even today, Christians make some absurd assertions, easily disproven through appeal to various media. Michele Bachman (a Fundamentalist Christian) serves as an example: her well known claim that the media should investigate certain members of Congress for un-American activities was later disclaimed by her, with the explanation, “it’s an urban myth”, this despite the fact that she can be watched making that statement![21] Something as inconvenient as “fact” can have little meaning for those who live and die by ideology, whether political or religious.
However much Christians complain, they have no moral claim to Christmas. No right to be protective of it, and no rational reason to claim that “Jesus is the reason for the season.” Through normative inversion, Christianity has played a trick on history. But history has caught up with the lie and an informed populace is onto the game. The reason for the season are the gods of polytheism, the cycle of death and rebirth, and a celebration of the fact that with the passing of the shortest day of the year and the rising of a new sun, renewed life is on the way. Christians can claim that they have the "true sun" but Pagans know this for the lie it is. This renewal of life was taking place long before any monotheist walked on the earth, and it was a joyous celebration long before Jesus was born. The reason for the season is Pagan, and always will be. To cry foul now is no different than a car thief, caught red-handed, crying that it is his car. It is not. It is our car, and we have come to take it back.
Notes:
[1] The Christian Post, December 3, 2008, http://christianpost.com/article/20081203/the-reason-for-the-season.htm
[2] "O'Reilly's War on Christmas Goes Retail," November 6, 2008. The Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/06/oreillys-war-on-christmas_n_141896.html. And as Linkins points out, this is a real insult to people who actually are experiencing persecution because of their religion (Hint: that would include us Pagans).
[3]For YHWH’s origins, see J. David Schloen, “W.F. Albright and the Origins of Israel”, Near Eastern Archaeology 65 (2002), 59. This northwest Arabian origin is certainly suggested even by the Old Testament itself; Judges 5.5 and Psalms 68.8, as Lane Fox points out, “refer to him in words which probably mean the ‘One of Sinai’ See Robin Lane Fox, The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible (NY: Vintage Books, 1991), 53.
[4] Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Benedict XVI), The Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. John Saward (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), p. 108; cf. p. 100
[5] See William J. Tighe, Calculating Christmas, 2003 and Alvin J. Schmidt, (2001), Under the Influence, HarperCollins, 377-9.
[6] Jan Assman, “The Mosaic Distinction: Israel, Egypt, and the Invention of Paganism,” 52. John Spencer, De legibus hebraeorum ritualibus et earum rationibus, libre tres (The Hague, 1686). For a discussion of the importance of Maimonides’ explanation for idolatry see Guy G. Stroumsa, “John Spencer and the Roots of Idolatry,” History of Religions 41 (2001), 1-23. Against these apologetic notions see P.A. Février, “Natale Petri de Cathedra,” CRAI 1977, 551.
[7] Susan K. Roll, Toward the Origins of Christmas (1995), 273.
[8] Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (Yale University Press, 1997), 155, quoting from the Latin of G.S. Assemani, Bibliotheca orientalis Clementino-Vaticanae 2 (Rome 1721), 164.
[9] Glen Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity (University of Michigan Press, 1996). Jarl Fossum, “The Myth of the Eternal Rebirth: Critical Notes on G. W. Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity,” Vigiliae Christianae 53 (1999), 307. Fossum, 313, argues that “it is palpable that Bowersock is too quick in finding Christian influence in religious evidence from late antiquity.” Aion as Eternity exists in Stoic, Aristotelian and Platonic thought.
[10] Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion. From Paganism to Christianity (University of California Press, 1997), 49, 53-54, 254.
[10] Fossum, 311, points out that “There was a tradition to the effect that Hera renewed her virginity every year by bathing in the spring of Canthus (Pausanias II.36.2).”
[12] Susan K. Roll, Toward the Origins of Christmas (1995), 33.
[13] Fossum, 314.
[14] Michele Renee Salzman, “The Representation of April in the Calendar of 354,” American Journal of Archaeology 88 (1984), 46-47.
[15] The Philocalian Calendar also mentions “December 25th "N·INVICTI·CM·XXX" - "Birthday of the unconquered, games ordered, thirty races.” For an online copy of the document see Tertullian.org, http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/index.htm#Chronography_of_354
[16] Friedrich Solmsen, “George A. Wells on Christmas in Early New Testament Criticism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 31 (1970), 278.
[17] John Baldovin, “The Liturgical Year – Calendar For a Just Community,” 104. Cited in Roll (1995), 56.
[18] For which see James C. Russell, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity (NY: Oxford University Press, 1994).
[19] Chambers book is available in an online edition through Google Books, http://books.google.com/books?id=K0UJAAAAIAAJ. Frazier, The Golden Bough, 736. Frazier’s book is available online at Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3623
[20] Franz Cumont, Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism (New York: Dover, 1956 [1911]), xvii.
[21] Thanks to YouTube, her original comments can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bT01mC9xSA. Her denial that she made those comments can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6Exo7sWvIg
Unmaking the Myth
Many people, including many Christians, have never heard the term Parousia. In a nutshell, this is the second coming. The word is Greek for "appearance and subsequent presence with" and was not originally used in relation to the appearance or re-appearance of a God, but for royalty. It is now used exclusively for the return of Jesus though originally it indicated the return of the "Son of Man" who was not specifically identified by Jesus as himself (Matthew 16:27).
In 2 Thessalonians we see the term used by Paul's congregation with the understanding that those who rejected their message would be punished with "eternal destruction," (1:7-12) though this is not the original meaning as given by Jesus. As it happens, both Jesus and Paul thought the end would come in their lifetimes. By the time 2 Thessalonians came to be written by somebody claiming to be Paul, believers had become anxious about the failure of the Parousia to appear and so the author told his flock that other things had to happen first. In 1 Thessalonians Paul said it would arrive "like a thief in the night" (1 Thess 5:2) but 2 Thessalonians allows plenty of advance warning. What happened? Obviously, the Parousia didn't. Overall, the idea of the Parousia diminishes in the Gospels, being most prominent in Mark, less in both Matthew and Luke, and almost nonexistent in John. The same progression can be seen in the Epistles of Paul compared to the Acts of the Apostles, composed some decades after Paul wrote and when the expectation no longer burned so bright. As Vermes says, "A lively eschatological outlook cannot maintain itself in the context of ordinary routine existence."[1] In Ephesians, a letter not considered by scholars to be genuine, Paul argues that they have already experienced the spiritual resurrection and are already "sitting in the heavenly places." This poses no problems for liberal scholars willing to admit one letter is a forgery, but how do apologists reconcile the fact that one must be wrong if both texts represent the inerrant word of God?
What are the implications for Pagans? First of all, the entirely of Christian existence was predicated on this return of a person that not only cannot be proven to have existed, but also cannot be proven to have been who Christians say he was. Everything from Paul onward was based on the assurance of his return. Hurry up! Be saved! The time is at hand! The trouble was, as we have seen, he never came back. The time was not at hand. The idea came about that everyone had to convert first. That when the world was Christian,Jesus would return. The Parousia would come about.
We see this in Augustine's writings. He believed the end was near. But he believed the end could not come until there had been a "universal teaching of Christianity." He based his reasoning in part on Matthew 24.14, but also Psalm 72.8 ("He shall rule from sea to sea"), arguing that by this was meant "the whole earth and all its inhabitants."[2] This way of thinking has had unhappy consequences for the rest of the world, consequences we are still feeling today as ethnic religion falls before the seemingly relentless tide of Christianity. Using technology shamelessly, as Crusaders once used the "True Cross," missionaries, like the Crusaders of old, work their way through areas where Christianity is still unknown, converting the innocent, tearing them away from the customs and traditions of their ancestors and destroying their culture in the process - a form of genocide. All of this for the return of a person who cannot be proven to have existed and who cannot be proven to have been a god, much less THE god. That is the tragic story of the Parousia.
Notes:
[1] Geza Vermes, The Changing Faces of Jesus, 146.
[2] Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion (1997), 31. Augustine, Letters 199 chs. 46-8.
Letters to the Editor
Next Issue
Next time around we'll be looking at Pagan morality and some biblical contraditions.