Obviooously that’s improbable. Only a loon would claim Agapius was a textual critic.
Was he working directly from Josephus, then? My impression was it was probably copied multiple times in addition to the translations.
Not to mention that Agapius was a Christian Arab, so if anything it is very unlikely he would have had any motivation to downpeddle any Christian interpolations.
Does this guy’s ‘Was Zeitgeist right?’ series have any truth behind it?’ from what I’ve seen, ehat he does back it up with evidence. I didn’t watch all of his videos for fear I might lose my sanity however:
“There are references to Sol Invictus and December 25 before the official Roman adoption of Christianity.”
There are? Okay - cite them.
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Great to see you here!
There is no textual evidence.
“There is no textual evidence.”
There is no evidence at all explicitly connecting “Sol Invictus” and Dec 25. The only evidence which may do so is a single ambiguous reference in the so-called “Calendar of Philocalus”, which was an almanac and list of significant dates and events dated to 354 AD. For December 25 the calendrical part of this document has the entry “N.INVICTI.CM.XXX.” which is generally transcribed as “N = Natalis (“birthday/nativity”) INVICTI = “Of the unconquered one” CM = circenses missus (“games ordered”). XXX = 30″ or “Thirty games were ordered for the birthday of the unconquered one”. Which “unconquered one”? It is generally thought that this title refers to the sun god Sol Invictus, the “Unconquered Sun”, though this is not definite given that the same document also refers to other feasts of the Sun more explicitly (e.g. SOLIS·ET·LVNAE·CM·XXIIII (August 28th) and LVDI·SOLIS (October 19-22). A much later source, the twelfth century Christian Syriac scholiast on Dionysius Bar Salibi, did record that “the pagans were wont to celebrate the birthday of Sol on December 25” and so attributed the date of Christmas to this, but it is not clear where he – centuries later – got this information.
And all this is well after the conversion of Contantine. So the claim above by gbrooks9 that “here are references to Sol Invictus and December 25 before the official Roman adoption of Christianity” is only correct if we take “the official Roman adoption of Christianity” to refer to Theodosius’ adoption of Christianity as the state religion in 381 AD. Even then, the 354 AD reference is still not clear.
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“By the way, have you heard about this guy, Michael Sherlock? He is another atheist who promotes bad history.”
This is the first time I’ve heard of him, though it appears he did sociology at my old university. He just recycles other bad new atheist pseudo history, so he’s hardly worth a refutation in his own right.
The takeover of pagan holidays by the church is a very popular myth, repeated over and over every year. It’s part of the Christmas holiday special offerings.
In anticipation of such a request, I started to “drill down” into the journal articles looking for a clean
citation. To my surprise, and frankly a little shock, I was surprised at the sheer number of articles
(formal or not) where the December 25 date was glibly associated with the revival of Sol as a
Roman calendar date.
And yet … when push came to shove … this was only “a surmise”… a plausible assumption. The
actual ancient texts were silent on the matter!
I actually wrote to Steven Hijmans (via Academia.edu) to see if he knew of any more recent developments. It was his 2003 article that actually spelled out the fact there was no specific mention of December 25 in connection with Emperor Aurelian, circa A.D. 274. Until I hear from him, I have been contemplating what else could be done.
Within his footnote 24, Hijmans writes: “There is no explicit evidence stating that the feast of December 25 was instituted by Aurelian. In fact the Calendar of 354 is our only conclusive evidence for an official feast day in honour of Sol on that day. Other sources certainly suggest that the winter solstice was marked as more than a purely astronomical event, referring to it as the natalis of Sol. In the Calendar of Antiochus there is a discrepancy of three days between the actual solstice (marked for December 22) and the birth of the sun, marked for December 25…”
I was a little surprised that Hijmans doesn’t seem to be aware of the astronomical significance of the 3 days after the actual Solstice; December 25 is when the Sun awakens from its “3 day coma” that begins with the Solstice. I wouldn’t be at all surprised that sicne the publication of his article in 2003, 15 years ago, the author has been brought up to speed on the ancient significance of December 25, in contrast to the actual Winter Solstice. Nothing could be more relevant to a Resurrection Religion like Christianity.
If I assume the worst case, and that there is not going to be a way to “prove” that Aurelian did anything at all with December 25 (and thus doing so before Christianity had become an officially tolerated/accepted religion of State), there is still an important point of discussion: the very earliest discussion so Jesus being born on December 25 would now become the only other way to evaluate how the dynamic between rival Pagan and Christian “symbologists” played out - - while there was really no reason at all to think December 25 made any kind of a likely date as the authentic birthday of Jesus.
You had half a dozen people telling you this repeatedly, a few weeks ago.
The problem with the half dozen people is that it was impossible for them to get detailed about when and where the “conventional wisdom” was flawed. “They” were simply using the Imperious Tense. And doubled-down by saying absurd things like there was absolutely no pagan interest in December the 25th.
Even Hijmans article provides enough evidence that the Pagans were interested in the date of December 25, and that wasn’t even his intent.
Furthermore, there’s enough awkward information to go around for everyone. On the very first page of Hijmans’ article we read the following, with footnote #3 providing the dramatic climax! Julius Africanus was alleged to be the perfect example for why the Winter Solstice was unimportant to Christians, because his calculations were based on the Equinox. Ha.
That is completely untrue. You were given several very detailed references, including Hijmans,.
No one said that.
That’s not awkward information. That’s telling you someone claimed Africanus calculated the date as December 25, but there’s no evidence for it. Additionally that footnote says absolutely nothing about the Equinox.
Perhaps you should have done that basic homework before you made the statement I challenged. I find it tends to work better when you do it that way around.
If I assume the worst case, and that there is not going to be a way to “prove” that Aurelian did anything at all with December 25
There is nothing to “prove” this assumption because the assumption is false.
there is still an important point of discussion: the very earliest discussion so Jesus being born on December 25 would now become the only other way to evaluate how the dynamic between rival Pagan and Christian “symbologists” played out - - while there was really no reason at all to think December 25 made any kind of a likely date as the authentic birthday of Jesus.
Your problem is that you’re working from a false premise - that the date of Christmas was derived from some pagan point of origin. The date actually seems to be derived from the traditional date of his death - March 25 - and the idea that a prophet died on the day of his birth or conception. Which was adopted from a Jewish tradition.
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Is the idea of Aurelian doing anything with the 25th also bunk then?
For the sake of facts, I will temporarily break my embargo in corresponding with you, @Jonathan_Burke.
I wrote that in that prior discussion, there were those who “. . . doubled-down by saying absurd things like there was absolutely no pagan interest in December the 25th.” And you responded accordingly:
Until you retract all of your foolishness, I’m going back on my embargo. Have a lovely week.
[Be sure to click on the image below to read just some of the relevant sections of the thread.]
(sigh… too small… here it is in two parts)
. . . followed by part 2
Nothing you quote says there was “absolutely no pagan interest in December the 25th”. On the contrary, both Korvexius and I said that it is possible that somewhere in the pagan world, at some time there was some kind of pagan interest in December 25, but the fact is there is no evidence for it. We told you this repeatedly.
Incredibly, you repeat your false claim about my footnote which speaks of Tammuz, even though you also show in your screenshot that I corrected you about that. You claimed that my footnote said “in one of your footnotes, Tammuz was recognized in connection with December 25 by the Babylonian priests”. I pointed out that this was not true, and explained what the footnote actually said. I told you this.
“None of my footnotes said anything at all about Tammuz being connected with December 25, either by Babylonian priests or anyone else.”
You cite my footnote 28. Here it is.
[28] ‘What is involved is a myth of a god descending to the underworld at the time of the summer solstice in Tammuz, and remaining in the underworld until the winter solstice six months later.’, Livingstone, ‘Mystical and mythological explanatory works of Assyrian and Babylonian scholars’, p. 257 (1986).
Very obviously that says absolutely nothing about Tammuz being “recognized in connection with December 25”. It doesn’t even mention December 25, and says nothing whatsoever about “Babylonian priests”.
The note which says “In fact, Tammuz is connected specifically to December 25 (Dictionary of Atheism, Skepticism, and Humanism), by Bill Cooke”, is a note that you wrote, not me. That is not in any of my footnotes.
o.m.g.
Your rejection of the footnote in the Facebook article is incoherent.
It clearly connects Tammuz to the Winter Solstice. So… your only objection is that you don’t believe Tammuz is documented in association with December 25?
o.m.g. You gotta be kidding.
I provided more than one quote from @ManiacalVesalius himself insisting that December 25 was a Lie !!!
You saying there is no evidence that pagans (non-Christians) ever had an interest in December 25 is exactly what I’m talking about. Find a scholar anywhere in the world who claims there is no evidence of this.
I think you may be the only one… I don’t include Korvexius… because I am skeptical he would rank as a history or religious scholar. He doesn’t seem to know about ancient astronomical traditions, nor does he seem to understand the mythological applications of those traditions.
Note: There are some historians who describe the ancient characterization of the “Winter Solstice” as not specifying a single day - - since from the observor’s viewpoint, the Solstice runs from Dec 22 to Dec 24 in terms of the Sun’s behavior. December 25 is when the sun is “re-born” or “on the move” … and so this can frequently lead to fuzzy references to either a single day, or more than one day.
See now you are abandoning your original claim. Remember, you claimed that my footnote said “in one of your footnotes, Tammuz was recognized in connection with December 25 by the Babylonian priests”. But it not only says nothing about December 25, it says nothing about Babylonian priests. Nothing at all. Your claim was complete fiction.
You provided more than one quote from him that the idea that there was a specific pre-Christian festival on December 25 was fictional, because there is no evidence for it at all. I said exactly the same thing. Both of us said it in the context of the pre-Christian Roman empire. Both of us said that it’s possible that some pagan society somewhere in the world at some time in the pre-Christian era did hold some kind of festival on December 25, but we don’t have any evidence for this either.
The fact is that you went on and on and on about Christians borrowing the date December 25 from some preChristian pagan festival, but no matter how many times you were asked to identify this mysterious pagan festival you were completely unable to do so. You kept saying you were going to present the evidence, and you never did. You were told repeatedly that there was no evidence for such a festival and no evidence that Christians hijacked the date, and you continued to repeat the claim regardless. Now Tim has turned up and put you to the question yet again, and you’ve finally acknowledged that you have no evidence for the claim and you realise it was just an empty assumption. So you’ve finally acknowledged the fact which everyone else was telling you about repeatedly, weeks ago.
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