(December 20, 2017 at 12:44 pm)Minimalist Wrote: https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/dail...=ZE7ADTZ02
Quote:How December 25 Became Christmas
Quote:The Bible offers few clues: Celebrations of Jesus’ Nativity are not mentioned in the Gospels or Acts; the date is not given, not even the time of year. The biblical reference to shepherds tending their flocks at night when they hear the news of Jesus’ birth (Luke 2:8) might suggest the spring lambing season; in the cold month of December, on the other hand, sheep might well have been corralled. Yet most scholars would urge caution about extracting such a precise but incidental detail from a narrative whose focus is theological rather than calendrical.
The extrabiblical evidence from the first and second century is equally spare: There is no mention of birth celebrations in the writings of early Christian writers such as Irenaeus (c. 130–200) or Tertullian (c. 160–225). Origen of Alexandria (c. 165–264) goes so far as to mock Roman celebrations of birth anniversaries, dismissing them as “pagan” practices—a strong indication that Jesus’ birth was not marked with similar festivities at that place and time.1 As far as we can tell, Christmas was not celebrated at all at this point.
In any shitty fish story - the fish always gets bigger!
The purpose of the wise men bringing gifts to baby Yeshua was to illustrate the sentence in the 4th Commandment about "And none shall appear before Me empty-handed." By bringing gifts it showed that the guys recognized baby Yeshua as a living deity although they had no relationship to his family at all or to anyone in Bethlehem. The current date of December 25 is irrelevant to the the fairy tale and totally meaningless.
Today most people exchange gifts on December 25 as a way to maintain social bonding and not as a religious observance.
If we followed biblical holidays we would be observing the Feast of Unleavened Bread (the 3rd Commandment) and the Feast of Weeks and the Feast of Ingathering at the year's end (the 6th Commandment). Then there's always the new moon festivals.
