Why are some Christian holidays based on prior pagan ones?

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Just wondering, because I heard Christmas came from a pagan tradition.
 
coolcatholicguy said:
Just wondering, because I heard Christmas came from a pagan tradition.
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My Greek mythology is a bit rusty, but I don’t remember the part where Zeus was born in Bethlehem, wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manager 😉

Christmas is celebrated in late Dec because Christ is light unto the darkness. The days grow longer after Christmas time.

Likewise, the Feast of St. John the Baptist is held in late June (24) because John the Baptist noted that “I must dimish…He must increase” ( John 3:22-30)

So there is great theological symbolism in the dates.

Now the pagans had also noted the winter solstice and summer solstice, and celebrated them, but for different reasons.

But it would be a stretch to say that Christians celebrate those times simply because pagans did.
 
A very good question. I don’t have the answer. I’m a convert (last year). But before that, this very issue was one anti-Catholic promotion that did snag me…like, yeah…why is it that Christmas is Dec 25 (Winter Solstice), instead of when Jesus really was born? (Heavy, serious research suggests that Christ would have likely been born on one of the fall Jewish Feasts, such as Day of Atonement, for instance. …but I don’t know…:o
 
N.B. There have been a lot of studies about the actual date of birth of Christ. Benedict XIV, I believe, definitively concluded that Dec. 25 was the actual date. I assume the same is true of St. John Baptist. Neither is on the actual solstice. Some customs surrounding Christmas, especially in Germany, were, indeed, adapted from pagan customs in order to bring the people over to the truth. Nothing in them is intrinsically evil, so there is nothing wrong with it.
 
coolcatholicguy said:
Just wondering, because I heard Christmas came from a pagan tradition.
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CatholicGuy:

Easter is celebrated because that’s when Christ died & rose again from the dead (During the Jewish Passover - hardly a Pagan Holiday). We call it Easter because of our English Language, but most of the rest of Christendom calls it “Pascha” (a word based on the Hebrew word for Passover.

Pentecost coincides with the Jewish “Feast of the Booths” - When the Jews celebrated the “Birthday of Israel”, when God made His Covenant with Israel and gave His Law to Israel. Since the Holy Spirit descended on The Church and Manifested Himself as he did on Pentecost, we can say the “Birthday” of the Church (the New Israel) was and is on Pentecost.

We have to accept that the Lord gave Church the Authority to set the dates for Celebrations of the Events in the Life of our Lord and his Mother and events in the Life of His Church…

Your Brother in Christ, Michael
 
My parish priest said that the church created these holy days of obligations on days when other religions were celebrating holidays. It was a way for Christian converts to be focused on Christ while lessening the temptation that these new Christians would be drawn back into the traditions from which they had come. Most of these days require a person to attend church. Before the 1960’s people had to fast from midnight prior to receiving communion at mass in the morning. The holidays, which comes from the words holy days, were not the secular party time that many have become today.
 
Say that a pagan holiday takes place on the sunniest day on the year. Why not have a Christian holiday that takes place on that same day because of the nice weather? It doesn’t mean anything’s wrong with it. That’s just some unreasonable Anti Christian/Anti Catholic attack that is dumb and unintelligent.
 
coolcatholicguy said:
Just wondering, because I heard Christmas came from a pagan tradition.
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Time was when I, like most people, took it for granted the winter solstice and, in particular, the Roman Feast of the Birth of the Unconquered Sun were simply pagan celebrations that hung around into Christian times. In fact, when I set out to write this book I still thought this. But I discovered the reality is far more complicated and interesting. Indeed, it turns out this widely assumed “fact” that “everybody knows” is probably another sample of pseudo-knowledge. For according to William Tighe, a church history specialist at Pennsylvania’s Muhlenberg College, “the pagan festival of the ‘Birth of the Unconquered Sun’ instituted by the Roman Emperor Aurelian on 25 December 274, was almost certainly an attempt to create a pagan alternative to a date that was already of some significance to Roman Christians. Thus the ‘pagan origins of Christmas’ is a myth without historical substance.”
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For the fact is, our records of a tradition associating Jesus’ birth with December 25 are decades older than any records concerning a pagan feast on that day.
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(source)
 
Brendan said:
Christmas is celebrated in late Dec because Christ is light unto the darkness. The days grow longer after Christmas time.

Likewise, the Feast of St. John the Baptist is held in late June (24) because John the Baptist noted that “I must dimish…He must increase” ( John 3:22-30)

So there is great theological symbolism in the dates.
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And some simple logic, too. Luke tells us that Mary was with Elizabeth from Jesus’s conception until John’s birth, some 3 months later. Natural gestation says that Jesus would be born about 6 months after that. June to December is, that’s right, 6 months.

Sam, the Neon Orange Knight
 
the Church placed key Christian feasts on the same day or around the same time converts used to hold pagan feasts. this way they can continue celebrating feasts but now is centered on Christ instead on centering on pagan gods
 
It was never recorded when Jesus or John the Baptist were born, it was obviously of no importance to the New Testament writers - possibly because keeping birthdays wasn’t a custom for most of the Jews.

The time around Christmas was used by several pagan religions at different times because it was around the Winter equinox. The Church merely chose to sanctify what was a popular time of celebration to help people adjust from pagan lives to Christian lives.
What’s wrong with that?
 
What puzzles me is that in the early church there was a rather large and important debate called the Quartodeciman controversy where there was contention about whether the traditional Jewish days for Pascha should be continued or whether the Friday-Sunday observance should be followed. This was settled without schism or rancour. However there is no equivalent debate about changing the birthdate of Jesus. The day must have been known to the early Christians and its hard to imagine that the knowledge of that date would be deliberately perverted in order to align the day of Christ’s birth with a pagan holiday.

Therefore I believe as have Christians throughout history that Christ was born on Christmas day. St. Cyprian wrote “O, how wonderfully acted Providence that on that day on which that Sun was born…Christ should be born”

Since Cyprian was a saint of the church and therefore not given to lieing I believe we need to take his statement on face value and conclude that Christ was born at the winter solstice when the sun begins to increase again.

Also there is no evidence that there was a pagan religious celebration on that day before the birth of Christ.
“[W]hile the winter solstice on or around the 25th of December was well established in the Roman imperial calendar, there is no evidence that a religious celebration of Sol on that day antedated the celebration of Christmas, and none that indicates that Aurelian had a hand in its institution,” according to modern Sol scholar Steven Hijmans."
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In fact its reasonable to suppose that there was a deliberate attempt by paganism to supplant Christianity by putting pagan temples on holy sites and creating pagan celebrations on Christian holy days.

Therefore I am convinced that Jesus was born on the 25th December
 
coolcatholicguy said:
Just wondering, because I heard Christmas came from a pagan tradition.
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since when is “I heard” a legitimate source?
do you say “Why is Bob cheating on his wife?” because “I heard someplace that Bob is cheating on his wife.”
 
Yes the thread is certainly a “Why do you beat your wife?” type question.
 
Brendan said:
My Greek mythology is a bit rusty, but I don’t remember the part where Zeus was born in Bethlehem, wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manager

.
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it is more than rusty it is not even Greek. A Persian demigod, Mithras, is supposed to have been born in a stable in midwinter, nowhere near Bethlehem, and his cult also tied its rites to the return of the sun following the winter solstice. yes many pagan myths have kernels of truth revealed in Hebrew and Christian scripture, or are distortions of truths in Hebrew and Christian scripture. Coincidentally timing of Christian feasts coincided with earlier pagan ones and in some cases even “baptized” popular culture by revealing the true nature of the celebrations, for instance, of the growth of the sun=Son as the days lengthen and so forth. Bear in mind also that feasts such as Pentecost which were founded on Jewish feasts had in their dim past links to the surrounding cultures in which the Hebrew religion and culture developed.
 
puzzleannie said:
it is more than rusty it is not even Greek. A Persian demigod, Mithras, is supposed to have been born in a stable in midwinter,
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That is actually a falsehood. I got a minor in Art History, all the Persian representation of Mithras’ ‘birth’ show him springing forth from a rock.

Later, in Greco\Roman times, the story evolved into Mithras being born out of what was referred to as the Cosmic Egg. That along with Mithras’ slaying of the Primordal Bull to release the bull’s life energy for mankind, are the two main symbolisms of Mithranism.

The emphasis on both stories was Mithras as the transitional force between the Primordial existance of the Universe and the “Ordered” existance of the Universe. In the Greco Roman mythos, all that existed prior to Mithras was a great swirling cloud of matter, with no organization. Mithras brought order to that.

So the Greco Romans looks at the same symbolism in the increasing lenght of days after the Solstice to describe the effect of Mithras on the world that the Christians did for Christ.

But any tale that Mithras was supposedly born in a stable is really worthy of Snopes. The whole point to Greco\Roman worship of Mithras was that Mithras’ birth is what allowed stables, or even caves, to be made.
 
coolcatholicguy said:
Just wondering, because I heard Christmas came from a pagan tradition.
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This is a common misunderstanding, often used by anti-Catholic groups to level calumny at the Church.

THERE ARE NO CHRISTIAN HOLIDAYS BASED ON PRIOR PAGAN ONES!!!

As has been accurately noted above in this thread, ALL Christian holidays are BASED upon events in the life of Christ and the Church He founded.

It is true that there were precursers in Paganism to these events. For example, there were Pagan myths of the resurrection of the dead, the sacrifice of one for the many, a mother giving birth to a son who was Divine, etc. None of these stories are the origin of the Christian faith. They are testimonies that the great redemptive plan of God has been present in the human psyche since the beginning of time, whether humanity has recognized this, or not.

It is also true that the Church fixed the date of Christ’s birth at the time of the winter solstice because we do not know the exact date of His birth, and the Church was drawing the attention of the faithful away from Pagan celebrations toward Christ.

The celebration of the Resurrection is only called “Easter” in the West. In the East, it has always been called Pasca, after the Jewish celebration of the Pascal Sacrifice. The word “Easter” comes from the reference to the East, where the sun rises, and where we see the star of the Son rising. Again the Church wished to encourage the faithful to abandon Pagan feasts and focus their attention upon Christ and His great plan.

After the de-crimminalization of Christianity by the Edict of Milan, the Christian Church began to take over the Pagan temples baptize them, redecorate them, and rename them to represent important Christian people and events. But none of this is “based” in Paganism.
 
I just wanted to add that there’s nothing wrong with taking an existing festivity and giving it a Christian theme instead. In fact, the Church has done this even in the 20th century. In 1955, May1 (already considered May Day, the day of the worker in many places) was established as the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker.
 
Everyone keeps talking about pagan holidays. If you will notice, many of the Jewish holidays were celebrated at the same time as Christian holidays. As for Jesus being born on December 25, it’s possible. The bible indicates that Jesus was born after a harvest season. It’s logical that the census would have been taken during a time when the people weren’t working the fields.

It is interesting that we used to celebrate the 12 days of Christmas about the same time as Hannukah.

Regardless of how the holidays came to be celebrated on the dates on which they are currently celebrated, let’s just keep them holy.👍
 
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