Christ and Christmas
- Details
- Category: Theophobia
- Last Updated on Monday, 25 March 2013 18:10
- Published on Saturday, 08 December 2012 04:56
- Written by LEW
- Hits: 151
It is once again the season to be silly, that is Christmas. Though more and more it is referred to simply as the holiday season, which is probably closer to historical origins. This is because certain segments of the population want to take the Christ out of Christmas. And they are probably not be altogether wrong.
The 25th of December, or Christmas, is considered a celebration of the birth of Christ. But the simple fact is that no one living today knows when Jesus was born. If we were to make an educated guess based on information and clues in the Gospels, a date in April would be a much more likely candidate.
Part of the reason we do not know the date is that apparently the early church was more concerned with the death and resurrection as the defining part of the life of Jesus. Yet for some reason and at some point the church found it necessary to determine the birth date of Jesus and celibate it. It does not take much research to find that the Roman Catholic Church around 270 to 280 AD, almost 300 years after the fact, selected this date to displace several pagan celebrations and make Christianity more palatable to the masses. Hence Christmas was originally a pagan holiday, and the selection was more a political maneuver than anything else.
Both the gospels of Mark and John do not even mention the birth of Jesus. And if we work logically from what is recorded in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, we come to a date around April.
As Christians, we should celibate the whole life of Jesus; his birth, ministry, death, and resurrection. However, we should not celibate it on some arbitrary made up date, we should celibate it every day of the year. We should put the Christ back in every day, not just December 25th. Rather from January 1st through December 31st.