Reasons for the Seasons

Origins of the Christian Holidays

Jason Hunt

• Publisher: Barefoot Prophet Media
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781087963778
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Discover the most fascinating and in-depth meanings behind the symbols and stories of the Christian Holidays. Should Christians really celebrate Easter, Christmas, Halloween, and other holidays? Why has the true meaning of these holidays been hidden from the church?

Does the Bible provide us a clear path for the celebration of holidays? All of these questions will be answered in this book. Now is the time to reform your life and get in line with the will of God!

1

Pagan Origins

To the ordinary public and average Christian, the connection between Paganism and Christianity is relatively remote. The common notion is that Christianity was a miraculous disruption of the old world order; that the pagan gods fled away in dismay before the sign of the Cross and at the sound of the name of Jesus. This view was and remained encouraged by the institutional church to enhance its authority and importance; yet, it is pretty misleading and contrary to the facts that every serious Bible student knows well.

 

The majority of Christian traditions and festivals are directly derived from, and related to, preceding idol and nature worships. Through a great deal of storytelling and falsification, this great deception has largely remained out of sight.¹

 

At Jesus’ time and for hundreds of years before, the Mediterranean world had been the scene of many pagan creeds and rituals. There were scores of Temples dedicated to gods great and small, ranging from Apollo and Dionysus among the Greeks, Mithras in Persia, Adonis and Tammuz in Syria with Attis in Phrygia, and Osiris, Isis, and Horus in Egypt. Baal and Astarte were found among the Babylonians and Carthaginians, and so on. 

 

The gods united ancient societies in service with the ceremonies and holy days. Extraordinarily interesting is that notwithstanding great geographical distances and racial differences between the adherents of these various cults and differences in the details of their services, the general outlines of their creeds and ceremonies were, if not identical so similar it is incredible. Roughly all or nearly all of the deities above mentioned believed about their god²:

 

1.  They were born near Christmas Day.
2.  They were born of a Virgin-Mother. 
3. They were birthed in a Cave or Underground Chamber. 
4. They led a life of toil for humanity.
5. They were called Healer, Mediator, Savior, and Deliverer. 
6. They descended into Hell or an Underworld. 
7. They rose from the dead and became the pioneers of mankind to the Heavenly world. 
8. They founded communities of followers into which various styles of Baptism received disciples. 
9. And they were commemorated by Festivals typically celebrating their birth as an annual tradition.

How did so many cultures space so far apart hold such similar beliefs? The Tower of Babel is the definitive Biblical answer. As you may recall, all the people of the world spoke one language and knew of only one God at one time, that is, before they decided to build a tower. When the Spirit of the Lord confused the languages of man, it caused men to spread into different areas of the land, thus resulting in other nations, tribes, people, and languages. This convolution is why the ancient people in Mexico have the same flood stories as those in Egypt and Persia. So, ancient people utilized the same stories to create new religious systems and beliefs, all straying from what God originally intended.

 

For the sake of further understanding, allow me to give a few brief examples.

 

Mithras was born in a cave on the 25th of December.³ He was born of a Virgin.⁴ He traveled far and wide as a teacher and illuminator of men. He slew the Divine Bull (a symbol of the entire earth/humanity), and his primary festivals are the winter solstice and spring equinox. He had twelve companions (the twelve months) and was buried in a tomb, from which he rose. Followers celebrated this resurrection annually with great rejoicing. He was called savior and mediator and shown as a lamb in some artistic renderings. His followers held sacramental feasts in remembrance of him. 

 

According to the Greek historian and philosopher Plutarch, Osiris was born on the 27th of December. As King of Egypt, he taught men civility and “tamed them by music and gentleness, not by force of arms”;⁵ he was the discoverer of corn and wine. He was betrayed by the power of darkness, Typhon, and slain and dismembered. “His death happened,” says Plutarch, “on the 17th day of the month Athyr, when the sun enters into the Scorpion.” (This is the sign of the Zodiac which indicates the oncoming of winter). His body was put in a box, but three days later came back to life, as in the cults of Mithras, Dionysus, Adonis, and others. Annually, an effigy was placed in a coffin and was brought out before the adherents of the cult and was saluted with cries of “Osiris is risen, his sufferings, death, and his resurrection were enacted year by year in a great mystery play at Abydos.”⁶ (Much like the Passion plays of today)

 

The following cultic myths are more agricultural and rely less upon the cosmological signs. 

 

Tammuz (aka Adonis), the Syrian god of vegetation, was a handsome youth born of virgin Nature. He was so handsome that Venus and Proserpine (the goddesses of the upper and underworlds) fell in love with him. To reconcile their claims of love, he would have to spend half the year in the upper world (summer) and half with Proserpine in the underworld (winter). He was killed by a wild boar (Typhon) in the autumn. And every year, the maidens “wept for Tammuz” (see Ezekiel 8:14). As flora and fauna rebirthed in the spring, a festival of his resurrection was held. The women set out to seek him. Having found the supposed corpse, place it (an idol) in a small coffin or hollowed tree and performed wild rites and lamentations, followed by even more tumultuous rejoicings over his supposed resurrection. 

 

Some adherents would sojourn to Aphaca in the North of Syria, where a famous grove and temple resided. The Temple of Astarte (See Judges 6:25; Astarte is the Greek spelling of Easter), near a wild woodland full of trees, the birthplace of the river Adonis. The area was identified by water rushing from a cavern under lofty cliffs; here (it was said) every year, the youth Adonis/Tammuz was annually wounded to death, and the river would run red with his blood.⁷ There was a scarlet anemone (a flower) that bloomed among the cedars and walnuts in this region. 

 

The story of Attis is also very similar. He was a fair young shepherd Phrygia, beloved by Cybele, the Mother of the gods. He was born of a Virgin (Nana) who conceived by putting a ripe almond or pomegranate (depending on the region that told it) in her bosom. He died, either being killed by a wild boar, the symbol of winter, or castrated himself like his own male priests, but he (Attis) bled to death at the foot of a pine tree. The sacrifice of his shed blood renewed the fertility of the earth. In the ritual celebration of death and resurrection, his effigy was fastened to the trunk of a pine tree (Compared to Crucifixion). The worship of Attis (aka Mithras) was prevalent and was specifically honored by military commanders of the time. Mithraism (sun worship) was ultimately incorporated with the established religion at Rome somewhere about the commencement of Roman Catholicism.

 

Lastly, Krishna, the Hindu god, is also in agreement with the general divine career indicated insofar. These points of agreement are too important to be overlooked and too numerous to be fully recorded. Krishna was born of the Virgin (Devaki) in a Cave,⁸ and a unique star announced his birth. Leaders sought to destroy him, and for that purpose, the leaders ordered a massacre of infants at the time of his delivery. Krishna performed many miracles, including raising the dead, healing lepers, and the deaf and the blind, and championing the poor and oppressed. He also had a beloved disciple named Arjuna, before whom he was transfigured.⁹ 

 

His death is told differently; he is either being shot by an arrow or crucified on a tree, depending on the region wherein you hear the story. Regardless, he also descended into hell; and rose from the dead to ascend into heaven in the sight of many people. He, too, will return at the last day to be the judge of humanity.

 

The preceding origins are a mere snapshot of the many legends concerning pre-Christian deities. If you are a Bible student, you will quickly identify the themes of the virgin birth, death, burial, and resurrection of a savior contained within them all. Early church fathers were fully aware of the many similarities of such traditions, and having no way to explain them, they just blamed the Devil. They claimed the Devil had caused people to adopt such beliefs, centuries before Christ was on the earth. They also lumped Judaism in with other such cults, so a seething disgust for all things Jewish entered the church as early as the late second century, which we'll delve into in later chapters. 

 

Famed early church scholar Justin Martyr, for example, describes the institution of the Lord's Supper as narrated in the Gospels and then goes on to say: "Which the wicked devils have IMITATED in the mysteries of Mithras, commanding the same thing to be done. For, that bread and a cup of water are placed with certain incantations in the mystic rites of one who is being initiated you either know or can learn." ¹⁰ Tertullian, a Latin scholar and the first to use the word trinity when referencing the God-head, also says that "…the devil by the mysteries of his idols imitates even the main part of the divine mysteries."¹¹ "He baptizes his worshippers in water and makes them believe that this purifies them from their crimes. Mithras sets his mark on the forehead of his soldiers; he celebrates the oblation of bread; he offers an image of the resurrection and presents at once the crown and the sword; limits his chief priest to a single marriage; he even has his virgins and ascetics."¹²

 

The explorer Cortez, too, complained that the Devil had taught the Mexicans the same things God had led to Christendom. The issue, however, was that Roman Catholicism had adopted the practices of these pagan religions; it was not the other way around! 

 

Justin Martyr, in the Dialogue with Trypho, says that the birth in the Stable was the prototype of the birth of Mithras in the Cave of Zoroastrianism; and boasts that Christ was born when the Sun takes its birth in the Augean Stable, coming as a second Hercules to cleanse a foul world.¹³ St. Augustine said, "We hold this (Christmas) day holy, not like the pagans because of the birth of the Sun, but because of the birth of him who made it [the sun]." The Catholics believed this because the Catholic birthplace of Jesus is located in a cave.

 

Having a slightly better grasp of the pervasive pagan influence over the early church, why is it that Paganism has influenced Christianity to such a degree? Is it because Christianity is just another made-up pagan cult? Perish the thought! As noted earlier, the early church fathers strayed from their Jewish Roots and attempted to hold a council (Nicaea) without any input from Jewish (Messianic Jews, Essenes, Nazarenes) brothers. Had the early church fathers had any proper understanding of the Torah (Old Testament), they would have concluded that the pagan influences had nothing in common with the true Gospel of the Jewish Jesus. 

 

Today, however, we have grown up in a faith built upon the foundation of diverse beliefs, those of Paganism- Romanized Christianity- and Pseudo-Judaism. The first established "Christian" (and I use that term loosely) religion was Roman Catholicism. Then 1200 years later came the Protestant Reformation. The Reformation led to splinter groups forming over time, such as (in no particular order) the Bohemians (Hus), Lutherans, Anglicans, Presbyterians, then we have the Methodists, Anabaptists, Baptists, etc. and we came to the twentieth century with the Pentecostals and Charismatics. While each group has been instrumental in revealing a piece of truth based on scripture, all, and I do mean all, are still based upon the liturgical and artificial traditions of the original Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Church is built upon the very bloody foundation of Paganism.

 

We must get back to the book of Acts where the church began! Jesus trained the faithful church elders while He was here in the flesh, then He sent His Holy Spirit to continue teaching them and those to come until He returns in His Kingdom. If any denominational group would have looked to the scriptures and done what they said to do, instead of what had been done before (James 1:22), the church today would be functioning much more like the original congregation in the Book of Acts. The modern church would be set apart from the world instead of being intimately involved with it. 

2

The Origins of Easter

Contrary to what you may have learned your entire Christian life, the story of Easter does not begin with the resurrection of Jesus Christ but starts in the book of Genesis. In ancient times, a man called Nimrod was the grandson of Noah’s son Ham. Ham’s son Cush married a woman named Semiramis. Cush and Semiramis had a son called Nimrod. After his father’s death, Cush, Nimrod married his mother and became a powerful King.¹ The Bible tells of this man, Nimrod, in Genesis 10:8-10 as follows: “And Cush begat Nimrod, he began to be a mighty one in the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord: wherefore it is said, even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord. And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar.”

Nimrod became a demi-god to the people and Semiramis, his incestuous mother/wife, became the powerful Queen of the Heavens of ancient Babylon. An enemy eventually killed Nimrod, and his body was cut into pieces and sent to the various p...