Universal Birthday
The accusation that their shared birthday of December 25th proves
that the figure of Jesus of Nazareth was lifted from these pagan
worthies is a staple of atheist web-sites. The Protestant authors
who originated the accusation did not, of course, claim that Jesus
did not exist nor that He was copied from these deities. They sought
rather to point out that the Bible does not provide His birth-date,
nor did the church of the first few Christian centuries know much
about it. They wondered, when did His birthday become December 25th?
Was it at the same time and for the same reason as these pagan
worthies, whose birthdays were also not originally celebrated on December 25th? Christmas,
scorned by the Puritans, has become so popular that many who know nothing
else about Jesus know that He was born on December 25th. But was He? For
that matter, were Osiris and Dionysus?
Compiling vital statistics for pagan non-entities presents its own unique
challenges, including diverse traditions. But according to Plutarch, originally
Osiris' birth was celebrated, along with that of other major Egyptian
deities, during the five days tacked on to the close of the Egyptian year:
“The following myth is related in the briefest terms possible, divested of everything unnecessary and superfluous.
They tell that the sun having discovered Rhea secretly copulating with Saturn, laid a curse upon her, that she should not bring forth
a child in either month or year: that Hermes being in love with the goddess copulated with her; and afterwards playing at counters with
the Moon and winning from her the seventieth part of each one of her lights, out of the whole composed five days, the which he added
to the three hundred and sixty, which days now the Egyptians call 'additional,' and keep as the birthdays of the gods; that on the first
of these was born Osiris, and that, a voice issued forth with him in the birth, that 'the Lord of all is entering into light.'”
(Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, Chapter XII)
The Egyptian new year began during
the summer, which is when Osiris celebrated his birthday. When was
Dionysus' birthday? He has at least two; he was "twice-born." His
mother, Semele, priestess and lover of Zeus, fatuously asked her
omnipotent boyfriend to show himself to her in all his glory. Thus
liberated to do meteorology, he fried her with his thunder-bolt. He
dissected her unborn child from her smoking body and, quite
naturally, sewed it into his thigh, where the child grew to term.
This unique way of entering the world makes a little more sense
when the reader realizes Dionysus personifies the vine. In autumn
the grapes are harvested: this is his first birth-day. His second
birth is celebrated during the Lenaia, in January, when the new wine
has fermented. Other observances associated with Dionysus
commemorate subsequent life events of the vine, such as pruning, flowering,
etc.; all of his varied life milestones are celebrated much the same
way, with drunken rioting.
How did Osiris' and Dionysus' birthdays get
moved to December 25th? Though not originally solar deities, they came
to be squeezed into the solar mold. The quality of the argumentation
establishing their new solar identity is displayed by Macrobius:
"That Adonis too is the sun will be clear beyond all
doubt if we examine the religious practices of the Assyrians...In the story which
they tell of Adonis killed by a boar the animal is intended
to represent winter, for the boar is an unkempt and rude
creature delighting in damp, muddy, and frost-covered places
and feeding on the acorn, which is especially a winter fruit. And
so winter, as it were, inflicts a wound on the sun, for in winter
we find the sun's light and heat ebbing, and it is an ebbing of
light and heat that befalls all living creatures at death."
(Macrobius, The Saturnalia, Book I, Chapter 21:1-4).
Get it? The boar is damp and muddy, kind of like winter, so Adonis is really the sun.
What about those boars who are dry and fluffy, snorting in the summer sun? Never mind. According
to Macrobius, not only are the dying-and-rising vegetation gods
really the sun, but so are Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Hercules, and the
whole rest of the pagan crew. To this author, all gods are really
the sun, and all goddesses are really the earth. This is fitting
after all, as god is really One:
"That the discourse may not wander too far afield, by mentioning
all the gods by name, let me tell you what the Assyrians believe
about the sovereignty of the sun. To the god whom they revere
as highest and greatest of the gods they have given the name
of Adad, a name which, being interpreted, means 'One One.' Him,
then, they worship as the most powerful god, but they associate
with him a goddess called Adargatis, and to these two deities,
by whom they understand the sun and the earth, they ascribe full
power over all things." (Macrobius, The Saturnalia, Book I, Chapter 23:17-18).
The pagan polytheists had not originally believed, however, not while they were still
alive and kicking, that all their gods were
one. It was only when there were few surviving polytheists to dispute the
point with the Christians or with the solar monotheists that it was
conclusively established that the pagans believed in only one
god, the sun, and that the profusion of deities who multiplied throughout
their stories were only intended as varied names and operations of
this one, sole (Sol, get it?) deity.
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The sun is worshipped in one form or another by almost all pagan
peoples. He can be a surprisingly minor deity like the Greek Helios,
Hyperion, or Sol in his original Roman garb; or he can be a major
deity like Apollo, a sometime sun god. There is inevitably confusion,
overlap, and mutability in the pagan pantheons, because these collectors' cabinets of deity
grew by accretion; no one sat down and planned them. In some places he was always
Mr. Big: the colossus of Rhodes was a statue of the sun. Sol Invictus rose from the
minor leagues to the very top of the Roman pantheon under the tutelage of emperors
from away, the unlamented Elagabalus and Aurelian. This latter solarist
emperor decreed Sol's promotion to chief god in
the late third century. "The sun-god, Helios or Sol as distinct from
Apollo, had not played an overly important role in Greek religion at
the time of Pericles or Plato. But under Asiatic and Egyptian
influence he rose to supreme magnificence in the Hellenistic age. .
.It was the natural climax of a development extending over centuries
when Aurelian proclaimed the 'Never Vanquished Sun' (...'Sol
Invictus') the supreme divinity of the Roman Empire."
(Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts, Albrecht
Durer and Classical Antiquity, p. 257). Emperor Aurelian came by his solarist views honestly,
he learned them on his momma's knee: she was a priestess of the sun.
The old Roman religion revolved around the twelve Capitoline gods. But
foreign sects were advancing during the early Christian centuries, both
softening up the old pagan establishment and competing
with the eventual victor. Every foreign cult already had a devoted nucleus
of foreign-born slaves, imported in chains, in Rome, and popular observances like Isis-worship
added many native-born adherents. The devotees of the sun evidently felt it would be solarism's
gain to draft popular deities like Osiris and Dionysus into the solarist
camp by moving their birthdays to the winter solstice.
Nature displays a likeness to death and rebirth in the annual dying-off
of vegetation in autumn and its renewal in the spring. Agriculture likewise
moves from sowing to reaping, back to sowing again. The annual apparent
decline, and then resurgence, of the sun, is also a little like a death
and rebirth. These two natural paradigms of death and rebirth don't necessarily track together, however;
in most climes, mid-winter is not a busy time for the gardener. Because the dying-and-rising vegetation
gods are more plausibly tied to the agricultural calendar, one cannot know
how many followed Aurelian's religious reform and how many ignored it.
Religious reforms from above do not always take, as Pharaoh Ikhnaton
discovered when he tried to impose solar monotheism on Egypt
centuries prior.
Because Aurelian's religious reform occurred three centuries into the Christian era, some Catholic apologists accuse him of
copying the date from the Christians. But solar monotheists were no less sincere in their convictions than anyone else, and December 25th
is in the vicinity of the winter solstice. It was not an important date to Aurelian
and his co-religionists because the Christians honored it, if indeed they did,
but because his god, the sun, 'turns around' on it. His god, having grown so enfeebled he could not defeat winter's chill blasts, now tosses
away his walker, dances with renewed vigor, and begins his arduous climb back up the sky.
The solarists' ambition to incorporate all other religious
observance into their own cult was not a matter of liberating the other
deities to be what they already were, namely stand-ins for the sun,
because they were not that. The pagans deified other heavenly
luminaries, not just the sun; they deified also many features of the
natural world, like the sea, the earth, the rivers, the winds; they
deified the crops in the field; besides that they deified deceased
kings and living emperors, along with a wide variety of
unclassifiable entities and plenty of non-entities: swamp gas and bad
dreams. Not everything is the sun; most things aren't. Yet the solarists
wanted it all. They went around stealing cult objects from the other temples
to deposit them in their own, or so they were accused of doing:
"But when he [Elagabalus] first entered the city --
to leave out what was done in the provinces -- he enshrined
Heliogabalus [the sun god] on the Palatine Hill next to the
temple of the emperors, and built a temple for him, being eager
to transfer to that temple both the emblem of the Mother Goddess
and the fire of Vesta, the Palladium, the sacred shields and all
the objects sacred to the Romans, so that no god should be
worshipped at Rome except Heliogabalus. He used to say,
furthermore, that the religion of the Jews and Samaritans and
the rites of the Christians ought to be transferred there, so
that the priesthood of Heliogabalus might include the mysteries
of every cult." (Lives of the Later Caesar (Augustan History),
Penguin edition, p. 292.)
This arrogant act of appropriation was not a discovery; these
stolen temple objects were not all about the sun all along. Our
three Decembrist deities, Dionysus, Osiris, Adonis, who were
belatedly discovered to be the sun, only became the sun very late in
their careers. They were not originally forged in that mold, but
only squeezed into it late in antiquity. The atheists force history
to run in reverse when they say that Jesus, a historical person
whose life was recorded many years before Dionysus, Osiris and
Adonis ever became solar deities, was modelled after them, offering as
proof December 25th.
An autocrat cannot, by edict, make something so which is not so.
If Osiris and Dionysus are real entities, their birthdays remain as
they were. But fictions are whatever you will make of them. The atheists
ought not to be so gullible: since Osiris and Dionysus' birthday did
not become December 25th until centuries after the New Testament was
written, the figure of Jesus of Nazareth cannot have
been copied from these pagan worthies. If there is a resemblance, it
is in the common promise of a life to come, not by virtue of a shared
birth-date. Curious enquirers who wonder how Dionysus treats those
who trust in him, like his devoted servant Agave, may find it illuminating to read of his
promises made and promises kept:
This is not a god who calls, Come unto me, all ye who labor and
are heavy laden. Those who know him best, hide when he comes. It is
difficult to escape the impression that either Euripides or someone
close to him must have been an alcoholic who sought, but did not
find, freedom from Dionysus.
Close Enough for Government Work
The problems associated with correlating different calendars, even fixing a
common date between a lunar calendar and a solar calendar, can be quite daunting: just ask the
bishops who met at Nicaea, and labored with such under-appreciated
diligence to arrive at a once-per-year passover date. Dates are quite
important to people; but it cannot be forgotten, in treating of
dates in the ancient world, that many people were not using a perfectly
accurate calendar. Some calendrical systems even left room for manual
intercalation, which throws an unpredictable wild card into the
system. We are forced to accept December 25th as the winter
solstice; why? At present the winter solstice occurs around December
21st. Prior to Pope Gregory's calendrical reform
the Julian calendar still wandered just a bit; it takes careful aim
to jump past the ten days Gregory axed and land in just the right spot. Writing
shortly after Julius Caesar's calendrical reform,
Varro
identifies December 24th as the winter solstice; the Julian calendar's
over-aggressive leap year schedule would have pushed it forward a
little in the following centuries.
No fancy equipment is needed to find the day nearest the winter solstice,
as atheist web-sites allege; all that is required is a gnomon, a piece
of paper and a pencil, and a lunch-hour lengthy enough to sit and watch
for the shortest shadow of the day. The longest such pencil-mark is made
on the day of the solstice: it is the longest shortest shadow. These dates
are not imprecise because no one could find the solstice, but because the
length of the calendar-year was 'off' until Pope Gregory fixed it, a rare
occasion when something good came out of the Tridentine church. The best
ancient number was pretty darn good: "The most exact calculation of
the tropical year which the ancient world was acquainted with, that
of Hipparchus, put it at 365 d. 5 h. 52' 12"; the true length
is 365 d. 5 h. 48' 48"." (Theodor Mommsen, History of Rome,
footnotes to Book V, Chapter XI, Kindle location 36369). The
imprecision of ancient calendars means we must allow ancient dates to shed a penumbra
all around them, spreading out to encompass nearby dates, so that
realistically anything within a week is close enough.
Because not all peoples had fully mastered this material in
antiquity, the modern inquirer must append an 'or thereabouts'
to legacy dates. The pagan Julius Caesar understood that the year
was 365-1/4 days long, which is almost right. The Egyptian government was
already aware of this:
". . .and, in order also that the seasons may always do
as they should, in accordance with the now existing order of the
universe, and that it may not happen that some of the public feasts
held in the winter are ever held in the summer, the star changing
by one day every four years, and that others of those now held in
the summer are held in the winter in future times as has happened
in the past and as would be happening now, if the arrangement of
the year remained of 360 days plus the five days later brought into
usage (be it resolved) for a one-day feast of the Benefactor Gods
to be added every four years to the five additional days before the
new year, in order that all may know that the former defect in the
arrangement of the seasons and the year and in the beliefs about
the whole ordering of the heavens has come to be corrected and made
good by the Benefactor Gods." (The Canopus Decree, 238 B.C., quoted
in 'The Jewish People in Classical Antiquity,' by John H. Hayes and
Sara R. Mandell, pp. 91-92).
When the prior (pretty good) figure of 365 came to be known in Rome is
unclear,— it had long been in use in Egypt,— though somebody thought it could be back-dated as far as Numa: "And then besides, King Numa dedicated the statue of the
two-faced Janus; a deity who is worshipped as presiding over both
peace and war. The fingers, too, are so formed as to indicate three
hundred and sixty-five days, or in other words, the year; thus
denoting that he is the god of time and duration." (Pliny, Natural
History, Book XXXIV, Chapter 16 (7).) Some manuscripts of Pliny,
however, have 355 instead of 365. Plutarch, in his Life of Numa, offers the
same information: "Numa reckoned the variation to consist of eleven
days, as the lunar year contains three hundred and fifty-four days, and
the solar year three hundred and sixty-five." (Plutarch's Lives, Life
of Numa, Chapter XXVIII). While 365 isn't so bad, that wasn't the basis of
the traditional Roman calendar.
Scientific astronomy flourished at Alexandria,
albeit of a Ptolemaic bent, and it is to the credit of Julius Caesar that he realized this
foreign product was far superior to the hopelessly backward Roman calendar: "The
republican calendar, which strangely enough was still the old decemviral calendar — an imperfect adoption of the octaeteris
that preceded Meton — had by a combination of wretched
mathematics and wretched administration come to anticipate the true
time by 67 whole days, so that e.g. the festival of Flora was
celebrated on the 11th July instead of the 28th April. Caesar
finally removed this evil, and with the help of the Greek
mathematician Sosigenes introduced the Italian farmer's year
regulated according to the Egyptian calendar of Eudoxus, as well as
a rational system of intercalation, into religious and official use.
. ." (Theodor Mommsen, The History of Rome, Book V, Chapter XI,
Kindle location 34731).
Though the best ancient calendars are
good, not everyone used the best calendar. Certainly the Jews were never talked out of their
Babylonian lunar/solar calendar, with its variable year-length. Moreover
the Sanhedrin retained the liberty, into Talmudic times, of making manual, unscheduled
interpolations. The Roman and Egyptian calendars, though excellent solar calendars, is it happens,
fail to keep faith with the moon, turning the 'month' into an
arbitrary period untethered from the lesser time-keeper. In the older Egyptian civil calendar, as criticized in the
'Canopus Decree,' the length of the year is controlled to 365 days
exactly. This, unfortunately, is wrong; the actual length of the
solar year is just shy of 365-1/4 days. That is why the festivals
'wandered.' Julius Caesar corrected the Roman calendar to 365-1/4 days, a reform which Pope Gregory later
'tweaked' to arrive at our present stable and reliable calendar,
wherein the same months recur yearly at the same seasons. Like
sliced bread, this is a luxury which much of the world never knew;
most ancient calendars are 'off' much of the time, lurching from one
intercalation to another like an unbalanced wheel.
The months in the Egyptian civil calendar were controlled to 30 days
in length. Twelve 30-day months leaves us short of 365 by 5; these five
extra days were tacked on to the end of the year, which fell in mid-summer. It is characteristic of this system that,
if not corrected, the months will 'wander' through the seasons, the year being slightly too short.
It will indeed happen that summer festivals will end up celebrated in the winter, and vice versa. This
365-day calendar is of great antiquity: "Around 2,900 B.C., a civil calendar
was adopted based on a solar year of 365 days. It had 12 months of 30 days
each -- with three 10-day weeks -- plus five days between the old and new
years set aside for religious feasts." (What Life was Like on the
Banks of the Nile, edited Denise Dersin, p. 22).
Egyptians also used a lunar calendar, even more ancient than the errant civil calendar, controlled
by the rising of the dog-star Sirius. The first new moon after this luminary's re-appearance in the dawn sky
was the first month of the new year. The rising of this star greatly interested Egypt's farmers, because it
tracked with the Nile's annual flood. This was the people's calendar of ancient Egypt.
A similar approach: a lunar calendar corrected, not according to a regular schedule of intercalation but
annually, by an astronomic event, was taken by the bishops at Nicaea in their dating of Easter. The bishops
adopted neither the Jewish (Babylonian) lunar/solar calendar nor Julius Caesar's Gentile calendar; instead they defined Nisan
as the first month after the vernal equinox: a lunar calendar corrected annually by an astronomical event,
like the Egyptian popular calendar. There was also a third Egyptian calendar, a compromise between the two
already mentioned. In 25 B.C. Augustus Caesar corrected the Egyptian civil calendar to track with the Julian.
As this improved calendar was not in universal use, this Coptic calendar counts as a fourth variant.
Because the uncorrected 365-day calendar loses nearly six hours
every year, over the centuries the months in the old Egyptian civil
calendar wandered through the seasons. If uncorrected by manual
interpolation, by the Christian era, the year would have made
the entire circuit twice since its establishment, and have come round to
approximately where it must have started: with the new year falling in
the summer. The Christian era begins, promisingly enough, with pretty good
calendars in place in Rome and Egypt; however, not everybody, as
best as one can determine by reading the popular astronomical surveys of
calendar lore, was actually using those calendars. The older
calendars still had a tendency to live on as people's calendars. These
considerations complicate the discussion of ancient chronology.
Clement of Alexandria
An early discussion of the date of the nativity is found in Clement of
Alexandria. Another early reference cited is in Hippolytus, the third century
anti-pope, or rather works conventionally assigned his authorship, but the manuscripts are in conflict, and thus the date, the
important thing, might be interpolated. Clement helpfully provides,
not one, but multiple potential dates for Christmas. . .in different seasons!
One is the twenty-fifth of Pachon, an Egyptian month:
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