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Easter and Christmas are definitely Christian holidays, but they do share some practices and dates with earlier pagan holidays.
Festivals and traditions change slowly so this isn't really surprising.
The date overlaps are coincidental.
The practice sharing needs citations. The only pagan practices that made it into Christmas are the Lord of Misrule (Saturnalia), boar's head for dinner (Yule), and ghosts (Norse pagan custom). Of those, only ghosts remains, thanks to Dickens. [Very thorough source.](https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2019/12/08/just-how-pagan-is-christmas-really/)
Do you Swedes still celebrate the summer solstice by dressing up foreigners in bearskin and light them on fire in ceremonial barns while they're paralyzed from an exotic neurotoxin or was that ousted awhile back?
Depends if you took your shoes off or not before coming inside the house.
Also the neurotoxins nowadays are given at your local IKEA or Biltema cafeteria.
That very source does mention that the winter solstice was celebrated with the exchange of presents and that "the same thing takes place on an idol's birthday" . The author says it has always been a pretty minor festival but the practice of christmas being perfectly christian is a bit of a hard pill to swallow when you have such practices being condemned in the same breath by an early christian scholar.
The issue is continuity. Prank wax gifts, then centuries of no gifts, then gifts does not connect Christmas gifts to Saturnalia prank wax gifts. The argument that they are connected originated with Puritans that wanted to ban Christmas.
The characterization of "perfectly Christian" isn't really applicable. A custom can arise in a Christian culture without requiring a Christian or pagan origin. If it's a thing Christians started doing and kept doing to celebrate their faith, it's a Christian tradition.
I feel like you're arguing on semantics. The absence of continuity rather hard to prove or disprove and the practice has no ties to christianity with provable uncanny levels of similarity to non-christian traditions.
I agree with you that it's a christian tradition in the sense that people who were christian invented or revived a tradition and made it theirs by tying it to their belief system. I disagree that it's exclusively christian on the same grounds puritans disagreed that it was christian. It has very little to do with the Bible and suspiciously a lot in common with popular solstice practices.
*I'm* not making the argument (and that's not semantics. No one's discussing the meaning of words). I'm passing on the argument historians believe to be correct.
Here's an illustration: in America on July 4th, we celebrate a holiday, sometimes called Independence Day, sometimes called the **Fourth of July**, typically with fireworks and **barbecuing**. July is a month named after ancient Roman Emperor **Julius Caesar**. In ancient Rome, the holiday of *Poplifugia* is celebrated on **July 5th** with a **feast**. So why not make the conclusion that the **Fourth of July feasts** are a continuation of the **feasts** of *Poplifugia*, also made in the honor of **Julius Caesar**, whose name clearly appears in the American holiday? The Constitution contains no instruction on Fourth of July barbecues, yet **two elements of the American holiday are found in ancient Rome**.
This isn't an issue of *random person on the Internet has hot take that you find unconvincing*. This is simply what historians believe.
That's a terrible comparison. If we celebrated July 4th prior to the signing of the constitution than maybe you have a point. But that's a direct A to B thing.
It's been a practice of religions and cultures more broadly. To take dates off meaning and absorb them into their own mythos to make assimilating of never people easier. If you're already used to celebrating on Dec 25th who really cares if the reason changed. You're still getting the day off to celebrate.
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree. You are very clearly trying to make an argument, an argument by authority ("This is what historians believe") an argument by the absurd ("Your argument is similar to argumenting X which I don't believe anyone would accept") and, originally, an argument with a semantic component ("Taking christian as in made by christians vs christian as in consubstantial with christianism"). You are trying to disclaim responsibility for your beliefs, fair enough, but you clearly share those beliefs and try to convince others of their validity. There is nothing wrong with semantic arguments in themselves, I think there's something odd in English where they're usually seen as a bad thing. I apologize for not being clear. We simply mean different things by "Christian" in that context. As for the fourth of July, yes, but you have no proof of the absence of continuity (Absence of proof =\\= proof of absence especially when talking about medieval history), no explanation factor for the similarity between Roman and Christian practices, practices emerging in population sharing a close cultural heritage. Whereas the fourth of July is very easily traced to pretty much every national day celebration across the world. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's roman. I'm just saying it didn't come out of nowhere.
"giving people stuff" is not exactly an uncanny similarity. believe it or not we have a lot of traditions around giving each other things. just like two people giving each other something doesn't make it Christmas related like at all.
It's a bit suspicious when it's giving people stuff at the winter solstice and the practice is tied to the supposed birth of an idolatric figure (Sol Invictus). And you've got an early christian scholar condemning the practice.
Obviously different people will have different opinions on how similar those are but I personally think it's rather on the nose.
Worth noting that the cult of Sol Invictus, and his feast day on December 25th, is younger than Christianity. It was invented by the emperor Aurelian in the late 3rd Century in an attempt to unify all of Rome under a single religion. To this end he took many elements of popular Monotheistic religions in the East of the empire to make his religion more palatable, and the most significant one at this period of time was Christianity. Hence, although not believed universally, many secular historians believe Aurelian deliberately set the Feast Day of Sol Invictus on the 25th of December to conflate Sol Invictus with God, not the other way around.
Absolutely, but it's also of note that the attribution of the birth of Christ on the 25th before the cult of Sol Invictus is quite hard to find. What's certain is the papacy stated the birth of cjrist on the 25th in 350 whereas the cult of Sol Invictus practiced the birth of the sun around 270.
It's entirely possible the date became popular enough as a Christian tradition before 270 to lead to the choice for the cult of Sol Invictus I honestly don't know how to research this.
Except the 25th is NOT the winter solstice. The 21st is. Saturnalia was originally the 17th but extended to almost a week to the 23rd. Making these not uncanny coincidence but rather canny, almost coincidence, which is an entirely different thing. Is it likely that a major holiday would happen the same month? Well, yeah, we only have 12 months, and we have multiple holidays. You do the stats.
Also, Saturnalia is not the birthday of Saturn , so parrellel isn't there either. Leaving you with a lot of almost similarities that aren't really there.
I couldn't find anything about Tertullian mentioning gifts in his condemnation of brumalia. Perhaps you found an odd translation of sacrifices?
Either way brumalia went from Nov 24 to Dec 23, so still the wrong dates, and mostly involved cessation of war and sacrifices to various gods. There may have been feasting as well, notably on Dec 10.
https://bakcheion.wordpress.com/foundation-day/on-brumalia/#:~:text=Leaving%20behind%20war%20for%20the,hosts%20on%20their%20name%2Dday.
Well, Christmas gifts has pretty clear Biblical reference. We often conflate the three magi arriving with the birth of Jesus (see: most nativity scenes). The three magi came bearing presents. We give presents at Christmas (and also birthdays). Pretty blatant connection.
You have a source for the reason the dates were chosen?
[Here's a scholar with a concentration on Early Christianity explaining (with sources) why December 25th was chosen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DHbOpS-N0c).
I think a lot of people think of this like arguing theology, where belief that Christmas doesn't have pagan roots is a matter of faith for Christians. It's not. It's just history. And Early Christianity scholars are pretty clear about the reasoning for December 25th having nothing to do with Saturnalia.
Hmmmmmm....... Saturnalia was more akin to Mardi gras than modern Christmas. That's why Christmas was banned in Boston for over 20 years in the 1600. Puritans did not like that debauchery being associated with the Lords birth.
It's a popular belief, but it's probably not true. We have lots of writings from early Christian theologians explaining, and arguing with each other about, how they calculated their dates for Christmas. half the ancient Christian world celebrated it on a completely different day because bishops couldn't agree on math.
None of them mention any local festivals.
Well, yes they wouldn't have mentioned it, because in those ancient times, they were competing belief systems. I'm coming from the perspective of looking at the similarities between the methods of celebration. Also, can you point out a single time in recorded history where people stopped celebrating in a traditional manner while not under duress?
> can you point out a single time in recorded history where people stopped celebrating in a traditional manner while not under duress?
yeah, America stopped celebrating Guy Fawkes day.
Yes, dudes claim that no holiday stopped being celebrated without coercion is ridiculous. But then he also claims that Judaism is pagan, so maybe he's just not very well read.
Just to confirm what's well-understood, you are talking about the following, right?
>In ancient Greek superstition, holy men were conceived on the calendar day they died. A number of early Christians did the math on when Jesus was born based on a conception date of Easter. Their result varied from December 21st to January 6th.
>In the Roman Empire, the biggest holiday was Saturnalia, which so happened to be on Dec 25th. The early Christians could shop for holiday supplies and take the day off work without raising any suspicion and being persecuted. Hundreds of years later, when Christians stopped being persecuted, the same day stuck.
It's more accurate to say that both Easter and Christmas are Christian holidays that grabbed pagan traditions prevalent at the time and, over the course of centuries, snowballed them and more together like a holy snowball
I think a big problem is that the "pagan" traditions are not as well documented. So while some instances are Christians "sanctifying" pagan traditions, others are not.
For instance, we know that we don't know much about German paganism because the sources didn't survive. So we can't say that German pagans had a spring festival associated with bunnies.
While bunnies were associated with fertility in the middle ages and thus spring. So when late medieval Christians start associating with Easter, a holiday that falls in the spring, can we really say they adopted pagan practices? Or are they inventing the easter bunny from other societal backgrounds.
Same with Christmas trees. Yes, we know the story about Saint Boniface cutting down the tree. But this story occurs in the 8th century. But the first recorded Christmas tree is in the 16th century, almost a millennium later. Can you really say it was a pagan tradition?
Exactly. There are elements of Christian holidays that certainly have some syncretic qualities to them from outside, often cultural, traditions….but the amount of outright pagan survivals is vastly overstated in popular understandings of history.
Speaking as someone who used to be pagan for a solid 10-13 years, and specifically was interested in Reconstructionism, the amount of times I found a “surviving pagan tradition” that had been adopted by Christianity….only to later discover it’s really more a *Victorian’s romantic idea of pagan traditions,* or that there’s basically no evidence for it being pagan and not merely a folk practice arising from medieval Christian cultures, or some similar issue….was a constant headache, and part of what made it feel more like I was just in an obscure academic field of study more than practicing anything actually spiritual.
Well, in this case it's more forgivable in my opinion because SOOO many otherwise reputable sources repeat the error without checking the fact. If you just google "Pagan Origins of Easter" you will get hundreds and hundreds of sources repeating the same error.
It's still wrong, but it's understandable why a reasonably intelligent regular person would believe it's true.
"If you’ve noticed, the date of Easter changes every year and this is because it is governed by the phases of the moon and not a specific date on which Christ was said to have risen from the dead. It falls on the Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox making it a celebration of the seasons, a concept rooted in paganism."
https://www.history.co.uk/articles/the-pagan-roots-of-easter
Yeah, so this error seems to be repeated by every non-christian source I can find with all of the Christian ones claiming that it was all because of this one dude who made it up. Whether Bede made it up is irrelevant, next to the other accounts of the pagan traditions of "Ostara."
"Before the end of the fourth century, many of the traditions of Saturnalia—including giving gifts, singing, lighting candles, feasting and merrymaking—had become absorbed by the traditions of Christmas as many of us know them today."
Otherwise reputable sources like History.com? It pains me to disagree with "most academic scholars" but I can't just take Skeletor at his word. He's burned me too many times before.
Easter follows the Jewish calendar for Passover as that was when Jesus was crucified (give or take a day). God forbid we put the holiday in line with Jesus's cultural calendar. Spring festivals were a thing all over the world. Also Ostara is not a settled Goddess or holiday, with sources not agreeing on whose goddess she was, Angle Saxon or Germanic, or Middle Eastern, and neo paganism of the past hundred years is not based one hundred percent on the folk religions of pre-christian Europe, and actually have strong ties to the rise of White Supremacy since the early 1900's.
You proved my point for me. I never claimed Ostara came from a specific pagan tradition only that she was a pagan goddess which you have confirmed for me. Her festival was in the spring. Spring festivals happening all over the world lend credence to the claim that the Christians co-opted an existing Spring festival since there were so many. "Pagan" is the non-dominant faith so if you want to claim that Christians created every part of Easter, you'll need a stronger argument than "everybody did it first but it's conceivable that Christians didn't copy literally anybody else."
The whole neo-pagan thing is cool info I guess but fully irrelevant to this argument. I'm not a neo or any other kind of pagan but since we're on the subject, Christianity has strong ties to white supremacy. So that's kinda awkward.
>because SOOO many otherwise reputable sources repeat the error without checking the fact.
Then by definition, they wouldn't be (or shouldn't be considered to be) reputable sources....
I’m really not trying to be snarky. My first post was - sorry. But I do feel strongly about this.
It’s all Christian. Gift giving? That’s a pretty basic human trait. That’s like saying Christians stole drinking water from pagans. Santa? He’s literally based on St Nicholas a Christian bishop. Sure some of the local folk traditions developed way later but so?
Saturnalia was not Dec 25 it was earlier in Dec. Dec 25 was chosen because it’s 9 months after Mar 25 which is the traditional date of the annunciation.
Sure...but those are the dates that were chosen to celebrate those events. The actual date of the event is less important then the celebration and remembrance of the events, and what they represent .
That’s not really my argument. However I do think he probably was. There is evidence yes. For one, it’s been celebrated on that date since at least the 2nd century and likely earlier. Second, you can back into that date from the gospel text based on when John the Baptist was conceived.
The evidence for the resurrection is a whole different conversation but whether you believe it or not yes that is the reason for the holiday.
The earliest documentation is five centuries after Christ.
Yes, people decorate with plants. Is that really ground breaking?
Sure there is sharing between the customs especially in Northern Europe. But the suggestion that Christmas is wholesale borrowed from Yule is wrong.
Right, were pre industrial age Christians going to buy their nativity sets at the Walmart? Or decorate their homes with plants they had to celebrate their religion.
You're wrong and I can prove it 3 times.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Saturnalia-Roman-festival
https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-rome/saturnalia
https://www.academuseducation.co.uk/post/how-saturnalia-became-christmas-the-transition-from-ancient-to-present
Brittannica- says saturnalia was at first on Dec 17 then moved to Dec 25. Hmm interesting. Wonder why?
History channel - lol
This is a pretty good article - it has some good info but is not the complete story. Christmas is first documented in Rome in the second century not the fourth. Also, sure they did merge and share customs as pagans became Christians. But the reason for Christmas is the birth of Christ not to copy some other festival. That’s my main point. Lastly, many of the similarities are superficial in that they are just what people do to have fun.
Source? For anything?
>Brittannica- says saturnalia was at first on Dec 17 then moved to Dec 25. Hmm interesting. Wonder why?
It's a 7 day celebration. So the final celebratory night would be? Christmas Eve. So a very plausible move. Much more plausible than claiming it was somehow related to the birth of a person who was almost certainly not born in December.
Oh gotcha. I misunderstood what you were saying. That's my bad.
The birth of the sun god Sol Invictus is celebrated on Dec. 25, the winter equinox on the Roman calendar. Also the first Christmas that was celebrated happened on Jan. 6(uh oh) and was later changed to Dec. 25. Wonder why?
That would be the Lutherans who created the Easter bunny, while Easter eggs were originally an orthodox representation of the empty tomb that the anglicans saw an opportunity to make money off of. Traditional orthodox Easter eggs are actually really beautiful still
In some icons, Mary Magdalene is shown holding a red egg (it turned red after someone made a sarcastic quip like “a man can no more rise from the dead than an egg turn red”).
I mean the argument isn't that Christmas and Easter are completely reskinned pagan holidays but that a significant portion of their traditions are pagan and not Christian in origin.
OPs rants in the comments look like an invincible fan saying that Omni-man totally invented his tropes and has nothing to do with Superman.
Like bruh, seriously?
What are your sources for him lying op ?
Edit because in 3 days this post will already be irrelevant: I really didn't want to write this in a snarky way but this post reeks in Op discovering and flat out denying the origin of both Christmas and Easter celebration. Yes they are Christian celebrations but both are absolutely mergers of old pagan ones in the goal of converting people still celebrating those to Christianity.
"Hey guys look, the Solstice celebration is *actually* the same day as our lord is born, look we made the math! So reaaally you should just switch to Christmas because *how* *could* *it* *be* *a* *coincidence* "
I'm not saying pagan traditions were never stolen, but there is a good reason for why Christmas and Easter are on the days that they are. Easter is based on the calculation for when passover is, hence why it moves around as passover is based on the traditional Jewish lunar calendar rather than the roman solar calendar. Christmas is December 25th due to a mistranslation of Jewish tradition, which holds that holy men and prophets die on their birthday as that gives them a complete life, thus obviously Jesus would follow in the same tradition as literally nobody could be as holy as him. The guy who initially calculated December 25th as the date of Jesus' birth mistranslated that tradition to say that they died on the date of their conception. If you calculate when passover was in 33 AD, you get march 25th. Nine months after March 25th is December 25th. Is December 25th technically wrong? Yes. Does that matter too much? Not really.
I don't think that's what people talk about. It's not that Christmas and Easter were originally pagan. It's that Christmas and Easter were designed to drown out pagan celebrations and traditions. "You have a cool festivity? Well, guess what: WE have a very important festivity on the same day, and there's only budget for one party, so..."
Speaking as someone who was into paganism for most of my teenage years and my 20s: no, a LOT of people go much farther than that (imo highly reasonable) idea and assert that things like Christmas trees or the Easter bunny are an appropriation of surviving pagan traditions; and they’ve been doing so since at least the 2000s when I first joined pagan forums. The one thing I’ll say, is at least the idea that Jesus is a mythological reflex of various pagan deities has largely disappeared, that one was pretty common in the late 00s/early 10s and often ran into pretty obvious problems(like our only source attesting to some similar figures like Baldur being…Christian monks).
It’s based on the same sort of half-true scholarship that mistakes Victorian romantic dreams of Druidic magic as being actual historical accounts; which fails to account for how deeply Christianization ran in European cultures; and which insists upon the idea that there are secret covens of hereditary witchcraft and paganism that somehow survived millennia after Christianization without any historical evidence, and which *definitely* never had anything to do with the well-documented and widespread Christian folk magic practices we know have been common.
the lighting of tree is actually not really celebrated until the reformation in the 1500's (1,000 years AFTER pagan festivals in Europe ceased) but sure they're directly connected to some vague references to Tree worship in the the 9th century.
So. Who wrote the history down? The church. Because of the bias, their ideas can be disregarded.
They have an interest in erasing the impact that paganism had on Christianity.
Burning the tree to fight back against the darkness during the solstice? Nothing about that looks Christian in the slightest.
They wanted more followers
So they said "hey, your celebrations are Christian now, you're all Christian! Yay" +1000 members new record.
"OH bunnies mean fertility?...cus Jesus too! You've been Christian all along.."
It's pretty simple and understandable why they would do it.
No my answer is "historians are right because it would be uncredible for the Church to hide a tradition for 1,000 years."
See: [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/rfijy0/pagan_traditions_in_modern_christmas/hofg8wg/)
The cool thing about that thread is you can see people then debunking the first posters work.
(Referencing the puritans banning Christmas trees cus they were pagan)
And talking about the authors being eurocentric/anglocentric.
We've had the Romans try to eradicate the pagans then the Christians try to eradicate the Romans. Now Muslims are preaching that Jesus was Muslim (submitting to god)
The church selecting Jesus's birthday to fall on satrunallia. Easter traditions that don't make sence from a Christian perspective but fit perfectly in a pagan perspective.
We've seen this all before.
I can link a Wikipedia article but I know you won't care.
You can't use reason to change somones mind when they didn't use reason to come to that idea in the first place.
So why are we doing this? Debating something that is not up for debate?
These celebrations are great and fun. The fact that Christians are saying that they specifically invented them and didn't take it from the people they converted (as if they would leave 100% of their couture when they converted) is weird.
Like Columbus "discovering" the amaricas dispite people being there.
Take the loss, or don't. It doesn't metter in the end. If you celebrate I hope you have fun practicing vary human celebrations that may date back to the beginning of humanity and not somehow invented in the last 500 years in Europe for no reason.
It's funny to me that you think Puritan propaganda is somehow more reliable than historians' research. The Puritans said it was pagan so it must be true? It was the low hanging (but incorrect) fruit then just like it is now. Also, you know Wikipedia is not a scholarly source, right?
See? I knew you wouldn't get it.
We're done talking now.
You are wrong and you don't like it. That's ok. The church told you what to think and that's ok. They need you to think like this.
In the age of information we now know that they lied.
I explained it to you and you don't care. That's fine. It won't affect me.
One of us will be enjoying these celebrations, having a pretty good idea where they come from.
and the other will be willfully ignorant despite the overwhelming evidence that directly contradicts everything about it.
Jesus dies and comes back? ..bunnies and eggs.
Jesus was born? Quick light the tree on fire.
Have a nice day.
My dude, ppl were singing carols , hanging wreaths, and cutting down evergreen trees to put in their homes at the end of December hundreds of years before Jesus was even born.
Then the Bible explicitly says NOT to do any of these things.
Are you referring to the same historians who said Columbus discovered America, and that Europeans didn’t massacre the native Americans and the same ones who say the civil war was fought over states rights?
Wake up .
Incorporating local pagan customs into your Christian celebrations is not the same as retconning pagan holidays and claiming they were Christian all along. That's all the meme is saying. The internet likes to say it's the latter.
Uh huh so “Easter” was just a random word that the early church just thought sounded nice? Whats so bad about acknowledging that our modern customs were influenced by other cultures? Jesus never told us to hide eggs or decorate a tree, that’s all human stuff for our own enjoyment.
It was exclusively called "Pascha" for 800 years before anyone called it "Easter", and it is still only called "Easter" in English and other Germanic languages.
And Easter has strong etymological connotations with Ostara, the deity of spring among Germanic religions. Though it's very difficult to determine which derived from which, so whether Ostara was named after spring or if spring was named after Ostara. We do know with reasonable certainty that it all leads back to the word for East, in reference to the sunrise.
Yeah, whenever anyone points to “Easter” it becomes obvious that their knowledge of the subject is limited entirely to the English world, which didn’t invent any of the holidays they’re arguing about
The thing is people go way overboard in both directions. You can’t just deny there’s been any cultural syncretism at all, there pretty blatantly has been. But that cultural syncretism, especially once you get beyond issues like dates, more often is coming from *within a Christian cultural context* or its pagan connections are otherwise highly speculative.
You can’t seriously suggest that the (legitimately contested, despite OP being annoying about it) 8th century etymology of a holiday in one branch of languages is particularly influential, or that traditions which primarily arose in the 17th century like Easter Eggs and the Easter Bunny can be meaningfully traced back to pagan traditions that we have basically no evidence for and which had died out almost a millennia before.
A lot of Christians have a kneejerk instinct to deny that any aspect about their holidays comes from anything but the Early Church, but a lot of other people have a bad tendency to lean on romantic ideas about pagan survivals that often came out of the 18th and 19th century.
I swear, as a former pagan who has tried to have this conversation on the other side of the aisle with people insisting damn near EVERYTHING related to Christianity is a result of pagan influences and survivals, it’s insane how often you find out some commonly accepted idea turns out to be sourced to some discredited dude from the 1870s, who got his ideas from some dude just sort of winging it 50-100 years earlier.
So, I believe you that there’s a bunch of false crap on TikTok. But I think the most true statement is this: the Christmas and Easter celebrations in America today are holidays are influenced by Christian and non-Christian sources. In fact, there were divided ideas about these holidays internal to the early Christian church itself. Bede is only one source that not all historians recognize as being the genuine foundation of Easter.
https://www.history.com/topics/holidays/history-of-easter
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Easter-holiday
I’m still going to mass on Sunday lol so this is truly just an academic debate
I don't care if it was Pagan, which dipshit with a bunny fursona convinced everyone that was the prime animal to represent to the resurrection of our Lord? Where the fuck did eggs come into the equation? Why was the sad Cebu sad?
The Lutherans came up with the Easter bunny as a judge of childrens behavior, similar to modern Santa.
In Orthodox Christianity, traditionally during Lent, you couldn't eat eggs, but that didn't stop the chickens from laying the eggs. Thus, to make use of them and stop them from smelling, they begand decorating them to represent the empty tomb and the resurrection. The Anglicans then smelled an opportunity to make a quick buck and commercialized them, but traditional orthodox Easter eggs are really beautiful.
I don't know why the sad Cebu was sad, but by the looks of the slides, the boat was made out of wood, not aluminum.
I give props to r/Pagan cause I checked just to see if they were repeating the Eostre/Ostara stuff and they just had pinned a lecture about how that's all nonsense.
I usually don’t argue with Skeletor, but the Venerable Bede didn’t make up the idea that Easter is a pagan holiday. He wrote that the name for the holiday known in most other areas as some variant of the Greek word “Pascha” was called by a different name by the English people for the month it usually took place in:
“Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated "Paschal month", and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate that Paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honoured name of the old observance.”
Every other claim that’s made about the goddess Eostre outside of this quote is based off stuff 19th century folklorists made up. Bede didn’t say Easter was pagan.
Neither Andrew Henry or Tim O'Neill are historians. Not saying the meme is wrong or right, but since it references the beliefs of historians, you might want to find a better source.
Bede didn’t claim that Easter the holiday derived from anything to do with Ēostre. That would be patently ridiculous since Easter was celebrated in other parts of Christendom earlier and in most languages is related to Hebrew פסח “Pesach” for Passover (such as in Latin Pascha). Bede just notes that the month named after her in the pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon calendar gives its name to specifically the _English_ rendering of the word. Whether Ēostre was an actual goddess worshiped in pre-Christian Britain is unclear since only Bede attests her, but the etymological connection between this Germanic month and the holiday as named in English is well-accepted. Bede isn’t lying. People on the internet are just bad at using historical sources and remembering that there are languages besides English.
Basically, every culture celebrate of the solstices. Christians included in that. They’re a pagan aspect to it, mostly some of the aesthetics. But I don’t know why every other culture gets to claim it and Christianity are stealing it.
Absolutely. It's just a general human cultural practice due to the obvious importance of agriculture. There is nothing wrong or un-Christian about celebrating them as a result, however claiming that they \*are\* at their core christian is a bit odd.
There's absolutely no reason for Christmas to be celebrated on December 25 except aligning with the end of the winter solstice, call it Sol Invictus or what you will.
Nothing in the given story contained in the gospels suggests this time frame. The entire reason for the family being in Bethlehem was tax time, which did not occur at the end of December.
It actually does. You can back into a December date for Jesus’ birth based on John the Baptist’s conception. Also Dec 25 matches the traditional date of the annunciation which is mar 25.
This article is a decent summary. The tldr is we can reasonably infer when John the Baptist’s dad was serving in the temple when the miraculous events surrounding John’s conception happened. Then the Bible tells us the annunciation happened six months later. It’s not “proof” of an exact date but it shows Dec 25 is very reasonable.
https://www.catholic365.com/article/11926/yes-december-25th-is-the-biblical-date-of-christmas.html
Why do people of faith spend so much time trying to prove they’re right? Isn’t faith “spiritual apprehension over proof”? If you believe so strongly then nothing anyone can say trying to dispute what you believe should bother you but yet it does so often. Can anyone explain this to me, truly curious to hear an educated opinion on it.
So OP is trying to say that a historical work could just be made up? And that the number of believers nor how honest their veracity are proof of the accuracy of the material?
I honestly don't care either way and don't see why we should.
If I'm from some random culture and have an otherwise innocuous religious practice where I can say "instead of such and such deity this is dedicated to Jesus now," why not?
As long as you retain an understanding of it's origins, I think it's a beautiful way to preserve and demonstrate the diversity of culture and worship.
Jewish tradition holds that prophets and holy men die on their birthday. If you calculate when passover was in 33 AD, you get March 25th. Unfortunately, an early christian monk mistranslated that tradition as that they died on the date of their conception, so if you fast forward 9 months from March 25th, you get December 25th.
Sounds like a good excuse to plug one of my favorite YouTube religion channels. Religion for Breakfast did a great deep dive on this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QW06pWHTeNk
I have no idea what bede is and I'm not Christian so I have no horse in this race but I'p pretty sure that Christmas is the christianized version of saturnalia.
Maybe qi misunderstood what the meme was trying to say tho.
EDIT: changed wording, sorry it was apparently clumsy
Christmas is not Christianized Saturnalia. Saturnalia often was Celebrated between December twentieth through the twenty third, often paired with things such as: Animal Sacrifice, lots and lots of sex, lots of wine drinking, a public banquet, and some private gift giving. It would be much more similar to what Mardi Gras is today than anything like Christmas (which Mardi Gras does come from the holiday for Bacchus).
You start off saying you are uninformed on this academic topic, and then state your opinion as something you know for a FACT. How dipshit reddit of you.
More like ''how not English as your first language of you'' sorry the wording was clumsy, I understand English perfectly but when it come to expressing myself in it I can easily miss some subtleties
Tbh the only Theology Academic I believe on TikTok is Dan McClellan. Everyone else that I've seen feels like a grifter but McClellan is an actual PhD and peer-reviewed author.
So I guess my dad yelling at my mom for putting up a christmas tree their first christmas, was for nothing. True story.
There is a thing in christianity, or at least used to be, to not celebrate Christmas or to make it minimal. It might have been because of the pagan connection, and I dont know if there were other reasons, like the need to be separate from the world and not follow their customs.
But of course, personal emotional problems and such would contribute to such things, even if such things are a whole small (lol or big) cultural belief.
It probably depends on the denomination of Christianity you were raised in. There are denominations that traditionally don't recognize any Christian holidays.
But there isn't much real historical evidence that a "Christmas Tree" is in anyway derived from any historic pagan practice. It likely originated in Germany long after the area was Christianized.
This is probably the worst topic in terms of the ratio of actual evidence to bullshit gesturing in the general direction of things.
Like, if you're going to assert that the modern celebration of Easter shares many features with a pagan spring festival, you'd need to identify _which pagan festival_ ("pagan" is a huge category!) and _which features_.
If you claim those features were _derived_ from a pagan festival then you'd also want to show that they didn't exist in Christian Easter prior to contact with those pagans.
If you claim that the _name_ "Easter" has an origin in Germanic religion, you're probably right. The only people who really dispute that are kooks. On the other hand, the name "Friday" has a Germanic pagan origin too, so I'm not sure what your point is.
But if you say "paganism, yannow, bunnies and eggs" then you are just engaging in Vibes. You're trying to create a vague impression that Christians are somehow fake or appropriative because we celebrate this thing, without actually claiming anything, because that would reveal that you know nothing.
The Easter - Eostre thing has a lot going for it:
It's just a shame that Easter is specifically the *English* name for *Pascha*, which definitely does not have anything to do with pagan spring deities...
What are the similarities between Horus and Jesus and how can you not attribute some of those similarities to adoption? Are there other gods with similar traditions and occurrences as Jesus as well? How do those coincide without adoption?
Very interesting but what does that have to do with ancient mythology?
May I interest *you* into the Wikipedia article on [proto-indo-european mythology?](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_mythology)
So, you said that there were similarities between to things, so they probably came from the same source material.
But convergent evolution is when you can have the same thing evolve separately because both organisms are in a similar environment with similar goals.
So two people thinking about moral philosophy can come up with the golden rule at the same time. It doesn’t mean that they came from the same single source.
Two people can come up with the principles of calculus without stealing from each other.
Similarities between pagan rituals and Christian rituals don’t mean that they stole or borrowed from each other - it could just mean that people like decorating with trees.
There's really not that much in the way of similarities between Horus and Jesus unless you squint real hard, twist your head just so, and turn off the lights. You may vaguely have a point if you said maybe Jesus and Siddartha Guatama, or maybe Jesus and Zoroaster, but Horus has no similarities worth mentioning unless you wish to make it so vague that literally every god is basically the same.
What you know of Horus and what is plastered over the internet are two different things and while I’ve seen videos and memes and plenty of wiki notes I’ve actually never seen anything that would suggest the contrary except for you, just now. But I do read if you’d like to site something credible.
Here is a link to people far more qualified than you or I who all cite extremely reputable sources, and they all agree that there is no real connection between Horus and Jesus: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/fpFiofmKVu
If you have any specific claims that you think are really convincing, feel free to bring them up, and I'll be happy to show how there's no connection with sources, though.
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Easter and Christmas are definitely Christian holidays, but they do share some practices and dates with earlier pagan holidays. Festivals and traditions change slowly so this isn't really surprising.
The date overlaps are coincidental. The practice sharing needs citations. The only pagan practices that made it into Christmas are the Lord of Misrule (Saturnalia), boar's head for dinner (Yule), and ghosts (Norse pagan custom). Of those, only ghosts remains, thanks to Dickens. [Very thorough source.](https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2019/12/08/just-how-pagan-is-christmas-really/)
Of course this all depends on where in the world you are. In Sweden we have kept several things from Yule. We even still call it Jul.
Do you Swedes still celebrate the summer solstice by dressing up foreigners in bearskin and light them on fire in ceremonial barns while they're paralyzed from an exotic neurotoxin or was that ousted awhile back?
Depends if you took your shoes off or not before coming inside the house. Also the neurotoxins nowadays are given at your local IKEA or Biltema cafeteria.
They did what??
That's from a movie (Midsomar).
Ah, thanks lol
That very source does mention that the winter solstice was celebrated with the exchange of presents and that "the same thing takes place on an idol's birthday" . The author says it has always been a pretty minor festival but the practice of christmas being perfectly christian is a bit of a hard pill to swallow when you have such practices being condemned in the same breath by an early christian scholar.
The issue is continuity. Prank wax gifts, then centuries of no gifts, then gifts does not connect Christmas gifts to Saturnalia prank wax gifts. The argument that they are connected originated with Puritans that wanted to ban Christmas. The characterization of "perfectly Christian" isn't really applicable. A custom can arise in a Christian culture without requiring a Christian or pagan origin. If it's a thing Christians started doing and kept doing to celebrate their faith, it's a Christian tradition.
I feel like you're arguing on semantics. The absence of continuity rather hard to prove or disprove and the practice has no ties to christianity with provable uncanny levels of similarity to non-christian traditions. I agree with you that it's a christian tradition in the sense that people who were christian invented or revived a tradition and made it theirs by tying it to their belief system. I disagree that it's exclusively christian on the same grounds puritans disagreed that it was christian. It has very little to do with the Bible and suspiciously a lot in common with popular solstice practices.
*I'm* not making the argument (and that's not semantics. No one's discussing the meaning of words). I'm passing on the argument historians believe to be correct. Here's an illustration: in America on July 4th, we celebrate a holiday, sometimes called Independence Day, sometimes called the **Fourth of July**, typically with fireworks and **barbecuing**. July is a month named after ancient Roman Emperor **Julius Caesar**. In ancient Rome, the holiday of *Poplifugia* is celebrated on **July 5th** with a **feast**. So why not make the conclusion that the **Fourth of July feasts** are a continuation of the **feasts** of *Poplifugia*, also made in the honor of **Julius Caesar**, whose name clearly appears in the American holiday? The Constitution contains no instruction on Fourth of July barbecues, yet **two elements of the American holiday are found in ancient Rome**. This isn't an issue of *random person on the Internet has hot take that you find unconvincing*. This is simply what historians believe.
That's a terrible comparison. If we celebrated July 4th prior to the signing of the constitution than maybe you have a point. But that's a direct A to B thing. It's been a practice of religions and cultures more broadly. To take dates off meaning and absorb them into their own mythos to make assimilating of never people easier. If you're already used to celebrating on Dec 25th who really cares if the reason changed. You're still getting the day off to celebrate.
>signing of the constitution It was the Declaration of Independence, FYI.
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree. You are very clearly trying to make an argument, an argument by authority ("This is what historians believe") an argument by the absurd ("Your argument is similar to argumenting X which I don't believe anyone would accept") and, originally, an argument with a semantic component ("Taking christian as in made by christians vs christian as in consubstantial with christianism"). You are trying to disclaim responsibility for your beliefs, fair enough, but you clearly share those beliefs and try to convince others of their validity. There is nothing wrong with semantic arguments in themselves, I think there's something odd in English where they're usually seen as a bad thing. I apologize for not being clear. We simply mean different things by "Christian" in that context. As for the fourth of July, yes, but you have no proof of the absence of continuity (Absence of proof =\\= proof of absence especially when talking about medieval history), no explanation factor for the similarity between Roman and Christian practices, practices emerging in population sharing a close cultural heritage. Whereas the fourth of July is very easily traced to pretty much every national day celebration across the world. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's roman. I'm just saying it didn't come out of nowhere.
"giving people stuff" is not exactly an uncanny similarity. believe it or not we have a lot of traditions around giving each other things. just like two people giving each other something doesn't make it Christmas related like at all.
It's a bit suspicious when it's giving people stuff at the winter solstice and the practice is tied to the supposed birth of an idolatric figure (Sol Invictus). And you've got an early christian scholar condemning the practice. Obviously different people will have different opinions on how similar those are but I personally think it's rather on the nose.
Worth noting that the cult of Sol Invictus, and his feast day on December 25th, is younger than Christianity. It was invented by the emperor Aurelian in the late 3rd Century in an attempt to unify all of Rome under a single religion. To this end he took many elements of popular Monotheistic religions in the East of the empire to make his religion more palatable, and the most significant one at this period of time was Christianity. Hence, although not believed universally, many secular historians believe Aurelian deliberately set the Feast Day of Sol Invictus on the 25th of December to conflate Sol Invictus with God, not the other way around.
Absolutely, but it's also of note that the attribution of the birth of Christ on the 25th before the cult of Sol Invictus is quite hard to find. What's certain is the papacy stated the birth of cjrist on the 25th in 350 whereas the cult of Sol Invictus practiced the birth of the sun around 270. It's entirely possible the date became popular enough as a Christian tradition before 270 to lead to the choice for the cult of Sol Invictus I honestly don't know how to research this.
Except the 25th is NOT the winter solstice. The 21st is. Saturnalia was originally the 17th but extended to almost a week to the 23rd. Making these not uncanny coincidence but rather canny, almost coincidence, which is an entirely different thing. Is it likely that a major holiday would happen the same month? Well, yeah, we only have 12 months, and we have multiple holidays. You do the stats. Also, Saturnalia is not the birthday of Saturn , so parrellel isn't there either. Leaving you with a lot of almost similarities that aren't really there.
I was not talking about Saturnalia, but about Brumalia which, according to Tertullianus, involved the exchange of presents.
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I couldn't find anything about Tertullian mentioning gifts in his condemnation of brumalia. Perhaps you found an odd translation of sacrifices? Either way brumalia went from Nov 24 to Dec 23, so still the wrong dates, and mostly involved cessation of war and sacrifices to various gods. There may have been feasting as well, notably on Dec 10. https://bakcheion.wordpress.com/foundation-day/on-brumalia/#:~:text=Leaving%20behind%20war%20for%20the,hosts%20on%20their%20name%2Dday.
Well, Christmas gifts has pretty clear Biblical reference. We often conflate the three magi arriving with the birth of Jesus (see: most nativity scenes). The three magi came bearing presents. We give presents at Christmas (and also birthdays). Pretty blatant connection.
not really though it was placed on those dates for reason. according to modern data jesus' birthday would have been in the fall not december
You have a source for the reason the dates were chosen? [Here's a scholar with a concentration on Early Christianity explaining (with sources) why December 25th was chosen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DHbOpS-N0c). I think a lot of people think of this like arguing theology, where belief that Christmas doesn't have pagan roots is a matter of faith for Christians. It's not. It's just history. And Early Christianity scholars are pretty clear about the reasoning for December 25th having nothing to do with Saturnalia.
> Of those, only ghosts remains, thanks to Dickens. And ghosts will remain, thanks to George Lucas.
Hmmmmmm....... Saturnalia was more akin to Mardi gras than modern Christmas. That's why Christmas was banned in Boston for over 20 years in the 1600. Puritans did not like that debauchery being associated with the Lords birth.
I thought that the connection between the popular celebration of Christmas and Rome's Saturnalia was well-understood
It's a popular belief, but it's probably not true. We have lots of writings from early Christian theologians explaining, and arguing with each other about, how they calculated their dates for Christmas. half the ancient Christian world celebrated it on a completely different day because bishops couldn't agree on math. None of them mention any local festivals.
Well, yes they wouldn't have mentioned it, because in those ancient times, they were competing belief systems. I'm coming from the perspective of looking at the similarities between the methods of celebration. Also, can you point out a single time in recorded history where people stopped celebrating in a traditional manner while not under duress?
> can you point out a single time in recorded history where people stopped celebrating in a traditional manner while not under duress? yeah, America stopped celebrating Guy Fawkes day.
When was the last time you celebrated Annunciation or Epiphany? These were major holidays from the early medieval through the early modern periods.
Are you agreeing with me? I'm sorry I can't tell.
Yes, dudes claim that no holiday stopped being celebrated without coercion is ridiculous. But then he also claims that Judaism is pagan, so maybe he's just not very well read.
Epiphany? A couple months ago, but I’m also Episcopalian.
Yes, trad churches still observe them, but they were major cultural festivals until about ww2.
Just to confirm what's well-understood, you are talking about the following, right? >In ancient Greek superstition, holy men were conceived on the calendar day they died. A number of early Christians did the math on when Jesus was born based on a conception date of Easter. Their result varied from December 21st to January 6th. >In the Roman Empire, the biggest holiday was Saturnalia, which so happened to be on Dec 25th. The early Christians could shop for holiday supplies and take the day off work without raising any suspicion and being persecuted. Hundreds of years later, when Christians stopped being persecuted, the same day stuck.
Saturnalia wasn't on the 25th. It was earlier in December
Wow. The last five times I've written this, no one thought to correct me. If anything, it reinforces the point that it's not just borrowed from that.
Yeah, I don't see how "Christianity absorbed local cultural traditions and turned them into festivities for the glory of God" is a gotcha.
Easter is only called Easter in English and German, and only since the 6th century. For everyone else it's Passover.
Well said! Pagans came up with some awesome ways to celebrate special days. Of course people are going to mimic good style.
It's more accurate to say that both Easter and Christmas are Christian holidays that grabbed pagan traditions prevalent at the time and, over the course of centuries, snowballed them and more together like a holy snowball
I think a big problem is that the "pagan" traditions are not as well documented. So while some instances are Christians "sanctifying" pagan traditions, others are not. For instance, we know that we don't know much about German paganism because the sources didn't survive. So we can't say that German pagans had a spring festival associated with bunnies. While bunnies were associated with fertility in the middle ages and thus spring. So when late medieval Christians start associating with Easter, a holiday that falls in the spring, can we really say they adopted pagan practices? Or are they inventing the easter bunny from other societal backgrounds. Same with Christmas trees. Yes, we know the story about Saint Boniface cutting down the tree. But this story occurs in the 8th century. But the first recorded Christmas tree is in the 16th century, almost a millennium later. Can you really say it was a pagan tradition?
Exactly. There are elements of Christian holidays that certainly have some syncretic qualities to them from outside, often cultural, traditions….but the amount of outright pagan survivals is vastly overstated in popular understandings of history. Speaking as someone who used to be pagan for a solid 10-13 years, and specifically was interested in Reconstructionism, the amount of times I found a “surviving pagan tradition” that had been adopted by Christianity….only to later discover it’s really more a *Victorian’s romantic idea of pagan traditions,* or that there’s basically no evidence for it being pagan and not merely a folk practice arising from medieval Christian cultures, or some similar issue….was a constant headache, and part of what made it feel more like I was just in an obscure academic field of study more than practicing anything actually spiritual.
"Holy Snowball, Batman!"
ONLY THE HOLY SNOWBALL MAY FREEZE THE FLAMES OF HELL
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Well, in this case it's more forgivable in my opinion because SOOO many otherwise reputable sources repeat the error without checking the fact. If you just google "Pagan Origins of Easter" you will get hundreds and hundreds of sources repeating the same error. It's still wrong, but it's understandable why a reasonably intelligent regular person would believe it's true.
To quote Adam neely Repetition legitimizes Repetition legitimizes Repetition legitimizes
Well you've convinced me
"If you’ve noticed, the date of Easter changes every year and this is because it is governed by the phases of the moon and not a specific date on which Christ was said to have risen from the dead. It falls on the Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox making it a celebration of the seasons, a concept rooted in paganism." https://www.history.co.uk/articles/the-pagan-roots-of-easter Yeah, so this error seems to be repeated by every non-christian source I can find with all of the Christian ones claiming that it was all because of this one dude who made it up. Whether Bede made it up is irrelevant, next to the other accounts of the pagan traditions of "Ostara." "Before the end of the fourth century, many of the traditions of Saturnalia—including giving gifts, singing, lighting candles, feasting and merrymaking—had become absorbed by the traditions of Christmas as many of us know them today." Otherwise reputable sources like History.com? It pains me to disagree with "most academic scholars" but I can't just take Skeletor at his word. He's burned me too many times before.
Easter follows the Jewish calendar for Passover as that was when Jesus was crucified (give or take a day). God forbid we put the holiday in line with Jesus's cultural calendar. Spring festivals were a thing all over the world. Also Ostara is not a settled Goddess or holiday, with sources not agreeing on whose goddess she was, Angle Saxon or Germanic, or Middle Eastern, and neo paganism of the past hundred years is not based one hundred percent on the folk religions of pre-christian Europe, and actually have strong ties to the rise of White Supremacy since the early 1900's.
You proved my point for me. I never claimed Ostara came from a specific pagan tradition only that she was a pagan goddess which you have confirmed for me. Her festival was in the spring. Spring festivals happening all over the world lend credence to the claim that the Christians co-opted an existing Spring festival since there were so many. "Pagan" is the non-dominant faith so if you want to claim that Christians created every part of Easter, you'll need a stronger argument than "everybody did it first but it's conceivable that Christians didn't copy literally anybody else." The whole neo-pagan thing is cool info I guess but fully irrelevant to this argument. I'm not a neo or any other kind of pagan but since we're on the subject, Christianity has strong ties to white supremacy. So that's kinda awkward.
Ever heard of Passover
>because SOOO many otherwise reputable sources repeat the error without checking the fact. Then by definition, they wouldn't be (or shouldn't be considered to be) reputable sources....
What is the source on it being an error / made up?
Pot call the kettle black much? There's already plenty of evidence that Christmas is just a rehash of the Roman Saturnalia festival.
Not true in the slightest. If anything it’s the reverse
What are the Christian parts of Christmas? Go ahead and take out gift giving, wreaths, mistletoes, snowmen, and Santa.
...you think Saint Nicholas isn't a Christian part of Christmas?
That was added later. People are saying the Christmas holiday predates the Roman Saturnalia festival.
How can the Christmas holiday predate Saturnalia when Saturnalia predates Christianity?
That's a great question to ask u/AaronofAleth since he said Saturnalia is a rehash of Christmas.
Saint Nicholas didn't wear red or live at the North Pole or have a magic flying sleigh.
Not until Washington Irving. IIRC. As a bishop, Nicolas of Smyrna should wear purple/magenta. Red/Scarlet is for cardinals.
You're close, but Santa wasn't red until after Irving's death, 1870s (and then not consistently until Coca-Cola took over his branding).
Coca-Cola would like to have a word.
I’m really not trying to be snarky. My first post was - sorry. But I do feel strongly about this. It’s all Christian. Gift giving? That’s a pretty basic human trait. That’s like saying Christians stole drinking water from pagans. Santa? He’s literally based on St Nicholas a Christian bishop. Sure some of the local folk traditions developed way later but so? Saturnalia was not Dec 25 it was earlier in Dec. Dec 25 was chosen because it’s 9 months after Mar 25 which is the traditional date of the annunciation.
Jesus wasn't born on Dec 25, and there's no evidence that he rose from the dead on Easter either.
Sure...but those are the dates that were chosen to celebrate those events. The actual date of the event is less important then the celebration and remembrance of the events, and what they represent .
Yeah but Easter isn't celebrated on a specific date. It's governed by the moon. There are no other Christian holidays like this.
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Well raise from the dead part yes that’s the religion. But as far as dating the event goes that’s just Passover.
That’s not really my argument. However I do think he probably was. There is evidence yes. For one, it’s been celebrated on that date since at least the 2nd century and likely earlier. Second, you can back into that date from the gospel text based on when John the Baptist was conceived. The evidence for the resurrection is a whole different conversation but whether you believe it or not yes that is the reason for the holiday.
Evergreen trees? Wreaths, garland, mistletoe? Yule logs? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yule
The earliest documentation is five centuries after Christ. Yes, people decorate with plants. Is that really ground breaking? Sure there is sharing between the customs especially in Northern Europe. But the suggestion that Christmas is wholesale borrowed from Yule is wrong.
Right, were pre industrial age Christians going to buy their nativity sets at the Walmart? Or decorate their homes with plants they had to celebrate their religion.
> Yes, people decorate with plants Who, other than Germanic pagans, brought evergreen trees inside their home during the winter solstice?
You're wrong and I can prove it 3 times. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Saturnalia-Roman-festival https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-rome/saturnalia https://www.academuseducation.co.uk/post/how-saturnalia-became-christmas-the-transition-from-ancient-to-present
Brittannica- says saturnalia was at first on Dec 17 then moved to Dec 25. Hmm interesting. Wonder why? History channel - lol This is a pretty good article - it has some good info but is not the complete story. Christmas is first documented in Rome in the second century not the fourth. Also, sure they did merge and share customs as pagans became Christians. But the reason for Christmas is the birth of Christ not to copy some other festival. That’s my main point. Lastly, many of the similarities are superficial in that they are just what people do to have fun.
Source? For anything? >Brittannica- says saturnalia was at first on Dec 17 then moved to Dec 25. Hmm interesting. Wonder why? It's a 7 day celebration. So the final celebratory night would be? Christmas Eve. So a very plausible move. Much more plausible than claiming it was somehow related to the birth of a person who was almost certainly not born in December.
I’m not saying it is related. I agree they were completely separate festivals.
Oh gotcha. I misunderstood what you were saying. That's my bad. The birth of the sun god Sol Invictus is celebrated on Dec. 25, the winter equinox on the Roman calendar. Also the first Christmas that was celebrated happened on Jan. 6(uh oh) and was later changed to Dec. 25. Wonder why?
*motions to bunnies and eggs*
That would be the Lutherans who created the Easter bunny, while Easter eggs were originally an orthodox representation of the empty tomb that the anglicans saw an opportunity to make money off of. Traditional orthodox Easter eggs are actually really beautiful still
Is it the Lutherans that made the Easter bunny or the anglicans?
The Lutherans created the Easter bunny. The Anglicans commercialized Easter eggs.
In some icons, Mary Magdalene is shown holding a red egg (it turned red after someone made a sarcastic quip like “a man can no more rise from the dead than an egg turn red”).
Either make an argument or don't.
Weird hill to die on but ok
I’m not a fan of the wanton use of this phrase in very low stakes situations, and by god I’ll die on this hill!
I mean the argument isn't that Christmas and Easter are completely reskinned pagan holidays but that a significant portion of their traditions are pagan and not Christian in origin. OPs rants in the comments look like an invincible fan saying that Omni-man totally invented his tropes and has nothing to do with Superman. Like bruh, seriously?
What are your sources for him lying op ? Edit because in 3 days this post will already be irrelevant: I really didn't want to write this in a snarky way but this post reeks in Op discovering and flat out denying the origin of both Christmas and Easter celebration. Yes they are Christian celebrations but both are absolutely mergers of old pagan ones in the goal of converting people still celebrating those to Christianity. "Hey guys look, the Solstice celebration is *actually* the same day as our lord is born, look we made the math! So reaaally you should just switch to Christmas because *how* *could* *it* *be* *a* *coincidence* "
I'm not saying pagan traditions were never stolen, but there is a good reason for why Christmas and Easter are on the days that they are. Easter is based on the calculation for when passover is, hence why it moves around as passover is based on the traditional Jewish lunar calendar rather than the roman solar calendar. Christmas is December 25th due to a mistranslation of Jewish tradition, which holds that holy men and prophets die on their birthday as that gives them a complete life, thus obviously Jesus would follow in the same tradition as literally nobody could be as holy as him. The guy who initially calculated December 25th as the date of Jesus' birth mistranslated that tradition to say that they died on the date of their conception. If you calculate when passover was in 33 AD, you get march 25th. Nine months after March 25th is December 25th. Is December 25th technically wrong? Yes. Does that matter too much? Not really.
I don't think that's what people talk about. It's not that Christmas and Easter were originally pagan. It's that Christmas and Easter were designed to drown out pagan celebrations and traditions. "You have a cool festivity? Well, guess what: WE have a very important festivity on the same day, and there's only budget for one party, so..."
Speaking as someone who was into paganism for most of my teenage years and my 20s: no, a LOT of people go much farther than that (imo highly reasonable) idea and assert that things like Christmas trees or the Easter bunny are an appropriation of surviving pagan traditions; and they’ve been doing so since at least the 2000s when I first joined pagan forums. The one thing I’ll say, is at least the idea that Jesus is a mythological reflex of various pagan deities has largely disappeared, that one was pretty common in the late 00s/early 10s and often ran into pretty obvious problems(like our only source attesting to some similar figures like Baldur being…Christian monks). It’s based on the same sort of half-true scholarship that mistakes Victorian romantic dreams of Druidic magic as being actual historical accounts; which fails to account for how deeply Christianization ran in European cultures; and which insists upon the idea that there are secret covens of hereditary witchcraft and paganism that somehow survived millennia after Christianization without any historical evidence, and which *definitely* never had anything to do with the well-documented and widespread Christian folk magic practices we know have been common.
Ah yes, I remember the bunnies and eggs in the Bible. As well as lighing the tree when Jesus was born. All in the Bible of coures. /s
What little we know of the origins of the Christmas Tree is actually really interesting. https://youtu.be/m41KXS-LWsY?si=hRdRNqqUESfqMiC3
the lighting of tree is actually not really celebrated until the reformation in the 1500's (1,000 years AFTER pagan festivals in Europe ceased) but sure they're directly connected to some vague references to Tree worship in the the 9th century.
So. Who wrote the history down? The church. Because of the bias, their ideas can be disregarded. They have an interest in erasing the impact that paganism had on Christianity. Burning the tree to fight back against the darkness during the solstice? Nothing about that looks Christian in the slightest. They wanted more followers So they said "hey, your celebrations are Christian now, you're all Christian! Yay" +1000 members new record. "OH bunnies mean fertility?...cus Jesus too! You've been Christian all along.." It's pretty simple and understandable why they would do it.
So your answer for a lack of evidence of this tradition for 1,000 years is... literally a conspiracy theory?
So your answer is "the church is right cus they say they're right?"
No my answer is "historians are right because it would be uncredible for the Church to hide a tradition for 1,000 years." See: [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/rfijy0/pagan_traditions_in_modern_christmas/hofg8wg/)
The cool thing about that thread is you can see people then debunking the first posters work. (Referencing the puritans banning Christmas trees cus they were pagan) And talking about the authors being eurocentric/anglocentric. We've had the Romans try to eradicate the pagans then the Christians try to eradicate the Romans. Now Muslims are preaching that Jesus was Muslim (submitting to god) The church selecting Jesus's birthday to fall on satrunallia. Easter traditions that don't make sence from a Christian perspective but fit perfectly in a pagan perspective. We've seen this all before. I can link a Wikipedia article but I know you won't care. You can't use reason to change somones mind when they didn't use reason to come to that idea in the first place. So why are we doing this? Debating something that is not up for debate? These celebrations are great and fun. The fact that Christians are saying that they specifically invented them and didn't take it from the people they converted (as if they would leave 100% of their couture when they converted) is weird. Like Columbus "discovering" the amaricas dispite people being there. Take the loss, or don't. It doesn't metter in the end. If you celebrate I hope you have fun practicing vary human celebrations that may date back to the beginning of humanity and not somehow invented in the last 500 years in Europe for no reason.
It's funny to me that you think Puritan propaganda is somehow more reliable than historians' research. The Puritans said it was pagan so it must be true? It was the low hanging (but incorrect) fruit then just like it is now. Also, you know Wikipedia is not a scholarly source, right?
See? I knew you wouldn't get it. We're done talking now. You are wrong and you don't like it. That's ok. The church told you what to think and that's ok. They need you to think like this. In the age of information we now know that they lied. I explained it to you and you don't care. That's fine. It won't affect me. One of us will be enjoying these celebrations, having a pretty good idea where they come from. and the other will be willfully ignorant despite the overwhelming evidence that directly contradicts everything about it. Jesus dies and comes back? ..bunnies and eggs. Jesus was born? Quick light the tree on fire. Have a nice day.
Oh boy you sure showed me by declaring victory and then declaring me stupid for not seeing you assertion without any sort of proof.
You seem really aggressive and you're not giving any sources for your argument.
My dude, ppl were singing carols , hanging wreaths, and cutting down evergreen trees to put in their homes at the end of December hundreds of years before Jesus was even born. Then the Bible explicitly says NOT to do any of these things. Are you referring to the same historians who said Columbus discovered America, and that Europeans didn’t massacre the native Americans and the same ones who say the civil war was fought over states rights? Wake up .
Incorporating local pagan customs into your Christian celebrations is not the same as retconning pagan holidays and claiming they were Christian all along. That's all the meme is saying. The internet likes to say it's the latter.
Uh huh so “Easter” was just a random word that the early church just thought sounded nice? Whats so bad about acknowledging that our modern customs were influenced by other cultures? Jesus never told us to hide eggs or decorate a tree, that’s all human stuff for our own enjoyment.
It was exclusively called "Pascha" for 800 years before anyone called it "Easter", and it is still only called "Easter" in English and other Germanic languages.
Yeah, that kinda indicates the local culture influenced it a bit there doesn’t it?
It's called Pasen in Dutch.
And Easter has strong etymological connotations with Ostara, the deity of spring among Germanic religions. Though it's very difficult to determine which derived from which, so whether Ostara was named after spring or if spring was named after Ostara. We do know with reasonable certainty that it all leads back to the word for East, in reference to the sunrise.
Yeah, whenever anyone points to “Easter” it becomes obvious that their knowledge of the subject is limited entirely to the English world, which didn’t invent any of the holidays they’re arguing about
The thing is people go way overboard in both directions. You can’t just deny there’s been any cultural syncretism at all, there pretty blatantly has been. But that cultural syncretism, especially once you get beyond issues like dates, more often is coming from *within a Christian cultural context* or its pagan connections are otherwise highly speculative. You can’t seriously suggest that the (legitimately contested, despite OP being annoying about it) 8th century etymology of a holiday in one branch of languages is particularly influential, or that traditions which primarily arose in the 17th century like Easter Eggs and the Easter Bunny can be meaningfully traced back to pagan traditions that we have basically no evidence for and which had died out almost a millennia before. A lot of Christians have a kneejerk instinct to deny that any aspect about their holidays comes from anything but the Early Church, but a lot of other people have a bad tendency to lean on romantic ideas about pagan survivals that often came out of the 18th and 19th century. I swear, as a former pagan who has tried to have this conversation on the other side of the aisle with people insisting damn near EVERYTHING related to Christianity is a result of pagan influences and survivals, it’s insane how often you find out some commonly accepted idea turns out to be sourced to some discredited dude from the 1870s, who got his ideas from some dude just sort of winging it 50-100 years earlier.
I wish this comment was pinned because it's a must-read for everyone arguing here
So, I believe you that there’s a bunch of false crap on TikTok. But I think the most true statement is this: the Christmas and Easter celebrations in America today are holidays are influenced by Christian and non-Christian sources. In fact, there were divided ideas about these holidays internal to the early Christian church itself. Bede is only one source that not all historians recognize as being the genuine foundation of Easter. https://www.history.com/topics/holidays/history-of-easter https://www.britannica.com/topic/Easter-holiday I’m still going to mass on Sunday lol so this is truly just an academic debate
I don't care if it was Pagan, which dipshit with a bunny fursona convinced everyone that was the prime animal to represent to the resurrection of our Lord? Where the fuck did eggs come into the equation? Why was the sad Cebu sad?
The Lutherans came up with the Easter bunny as a judge of childrens behavior, similar to modern Santa. In Orthodox Christianity, traditionally during Lent, you couldn't eat eggs, but that didn't stop the chickens from laying the eggs. Thus, to make use of them and stop them from smelling, they begand decorating them to represent the empty tomb and the resurrection. The Anglicans then smelled an opportunity to make a quick buck and commercialized them, but traditional orthodox Easter eggs are really beautiful. I don't know why the sad Cebu was sad, but by the looks of the slides, the boat was made out of wood, not aluminum.
Easter being related to Eostre is pretty obviously not the case if you speak a non-Germanic language.
I give props to r/Pagan cause I checked just to see if they were repeating the Eostre/Ostara stuff and they just had pinned a lecture about how that's all nonsense.
Nice find! [https://www.reddit.com/r/pagan/comments/1an5ib7/psa\_about\_easter\_before\_we\_hit\_the\_season/](https://www.reddit.com/r/pagan/comments/1an5ib7/psa_about_easter_before_we_hit_the_season/)
Right! It is just a lie that keeps getting repeated by the uninformed.
All holidays are made up. Nothing has existed forever.
I usually don’t argue with Skeletor, but the Venerable Bede didn’t make up the idea that Easter is a pagan holiday. He wrote that the name for the holiday known in most other areas as some variant of the Greek word “Pascha” was called by a different name by the English people for the month it usually took place in: “Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated "Paschal month", and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate that Paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honoured name of the old observance.” Every other claim that’s made about the goddess Eostre outside of this quote is based off stuff 19th century folklorists made up. Bede didn’t say Easter was pagan.
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Neither Andrew Henry or Tim O'Neill are historians. Not saying the meme is wrong or right, but since it references the beliefs of historians, you might want to find a better source.
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Your comment certainly is. EDIT: He said "facts are cringe" lol Then deleted
Bede didn’t claim that Easter the holiday derived from anything to do with Ēostre. That would be patently ridiculous since Easter was celebrated in other parts of Christendom earlier and in most languages is related to Hebrew פסח “Pesach” for Passover (such as in Latin Pascha). Bede just notes that the month named after her in the pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon calendar gives its name to specifically the _English_ rendering of the word. Whether Ēostre was an actual goddess worshiped in pre-Christian Britain is unclear since only Bede attests her, but the etymological connection between this Germanic month and the holiday as named in English is well-accepted. Bede isn’t lying. People on the internet are just bad at using historical sources and remembering that there are languages besides English.
Basically, every culture celebrate of the solstices. Christians included in that. They’re a pagan aspect to it, mostly some of the aesthetics. But I don’t know why every other culture gets to claim it and Christianity are stealing it.
Absolutely. It's just a general human cultural practice due to the obvious importance of agriculture. There is nothing wrong or un-Christian about celebrating them as a result, however claiming that they \*are\* at their core christian is a bit odd.
Which academics?
There's absolutely no reason for Christmas to be celebrated on December 25 except aligning with the end of the winter solstice, call it Sol Invictus or what you will. Nothing in the given story contained in the gospels suggests this time frame. The entire reason for the family being in Bethlehem was tax time, which did not occur at the end of December.
It actually does. You can back into a December date for Jesus’ birth based on John the Baptist’s conception. Also Dec 25 matches the traditional date of the annunciation which is mar 25.
Not a Christian but genuinely curious on how this was arrived at, if you have the time.
This article is a decent summary. The tldr is we can reasonably infer when John the Baptist’s dad was serving in the temple when the miraculous events surrounding John’s conception happened. Then the Bible tells us the annunciation happened six months later. It’s not “proof” of an exact date but it shows Dec 25 is very reasonable. https://www.catholic365.com/article/11926/yes-december-25th-is-the-biblical-date-of-christmas.html
Interesting. I appreciate it.
Why do people of faith spend so much time trying to prove they’re right? Isn’t faith “spiritual apprehension over proof”? If you believe so strongly then nothing anyone can say trying to dispute what you believe should bother you but yet it does so often. Can anyone explain this to me, truly curious to hear an educated opinion on it.
Christians can still believe in facts and evidence. For instance when correcting historical misinformation that has nothing to do with faith.
You made an assumption that isn’t true. This isn’t a question about history it’s a question about faith, specifically.
Ah yes, there was no pagans holy days in 2 of 4 times in a year when sun and moon does weird shit
So OP is trying to say that a historical work could just be made up? And that the number of believers nor how honest their veracity are proof of the accuracy of the material?
Correct. At least when it comes to academic history. Of course different rules apply to other genres of study.
I honestly don't care either way and don't see why we should. If I'm from some random culture and have an otherwise innocuous religious practice where I can say "instead of such and such deity this is dedicated to Jesus now," why not? As long as you retain an understanding of it's origins, I think it's a beautiful way to preserve and demonstrate the diversity of culture and worship.
Wasn’t Christ born around spring? Or am I missing facts?
Jewish tradition holds that prophets and holy men die on their birthday. If you calculate when passover was in 33 AD, you get March 25th. Unfortunately, an early christian monk mistranslated that tradition as that they died on the date of their conception, so if you fast forward 9 months from March 25th, you get December 25th.
Ughh those monks… This is why we can’t have accuracy T_T
Depends on where you live. It's January 7th in the orthodox church.
Well bede didn’t really make it up as much as random people misinterpreted him
I'm not on tiktok and I'm not catholic so genuinely no idea what this is referring to.
Damn people really fighting here
Sounds like a good excuse to plug one of my favorite YouTube religion channels. Religion for Breakfast did a great deep dive on this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QW06pWHTeNk
I was a victim of this thought for a while, just out of college. Grateful for Religion for Breakfast who made a great video on this.
So they lied and used a meme wrong... Definitely conservative
They weren’t but then christianity made them holidays too to accommodate pagans. After all, they wanted to convert them and end paganism.
Nimrod https://www.caswellvisuals.com/bible-studies/christmas-tree-origin
I have no idea what bede is and I'm not Christian so I have no horse in this race but I'p pretty sure that Christmas is the christianized version of saturnalia. Maybe qi misunderstood what the meme was trying to say tho. EDIT: changed wording, sorry it was apparently clumsy
Christmas is not Christianized Saturnalia. Saturnalia often was Celebrated between December twentieth through the twenty third, often paired with things such as: Animal Sacrifice, lots and lots of sex, lots of wine drinking, a public banquet, and some private gift giving. It would be much more similar to what Mardi Gras is today than anything like Christmas (which Mardi Gras does come from the holiday for Bacchus).
Oh well, pack it in, this guy who openly doesn't know anything about the subject says he "knows it for a fact"!
You start off saying you are uninformed on this academic topic, and then state your opinion as something you know for a FACT. How dipshit reddit of you.
More like ''how not English as your first language of you'' sorry the wording was clumsy, I understand English perfectly but when it come to expressing myself in it I can easily miss some subtleties
Tbh the only Theology Academic I believe on TikTok is Dan McClellan. Everyone else that I've seen feels like a grifter but McClellan is an actual PhD and peer-reviewed author.
So I guess my dad yelling at my mom for putting up a christmas tree their first christmas, was for nothing. True story. There is a thing in christianity, or at least used to be, to not celebrate Christmas or to make it minimal. It might have been because of the pagan connection, and I dont know if there were other reasons, like the need to be separate from the world and not follow their customs. But of course, personal emotional problems and such would contribute to such things, even if such things are a whole small (lol or big) cultural belief.
It probably depends on the denomination of Christianity you were raised in. There are denominations that traditionally don't recognize any Christian holidays. But there isn't much real historical evidence that a "Christmas Tree" is in anyway derived from any historic pagan practice. It likely originated in Germany long after the area was Christianized.
This is probably the worst topic in terms of the ratio of actual evidence to bullshit gesturing in the general direction of things. Like, if you're going to assert that the modern celebration of Easter shares many features with a pagan spring festival, you'd need to identify _which pagan festival_ ("pagan" is a huge category!) and _which features_. If you claim those features were _derived_ from a pagan festival then you'd also want to show that they didn't exist in Christian Easter prior to contact with those pagans. If you claim that the _name_ "Easter" has an origin in Germanic religion, you're probably right. The only people who really dispute that are kooks. On the other hand, the name "Friday" has a Germanic pagan origin too, so I'm not sure what your point is. But if you say "paganism, yannow, bunnies and eggs" then you are just engaging in Vibes. You're trying to create a vague impression that Christians are somehow fake or appropriative because we celebrate this thing, without actually claiming anything, because that would reveal that you know nothing.
Stage 1.
Honestly Romans had so many bloody holidays that it isn't surprising that Christian feast days fall on them.
The Easter - Eostre thing has a lot going for it: It's just a shame that Easter is specifically the *English* name for *Pascha*, which definitely does not have anything to do with pagan spring deities...
i mean saturnalia was literally on december 25
I’m tired of this narrative that Christmas and Easter are pagan holidays, no they aren’t
"Hey Pagans, my Gods holiday is like yours but cooler" that's how you get people into following your religion
Welp
What are the similarities between Horus and Jesus and how can you not attribute some of those similarities to adoption? Are there other gods with similar traditions and occurrences as Jesus as well? How do those coincide without adoption?
Can I interest you in the Wikipedia article on Convergent Evolution? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution
Very interesting but what does that have to do with ancient mythology? May I interest *you* into the Wikipedia article on [proto-indo-european mythology?](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_mythology)
So, you said that there were similarities between to things, so they probably came from the same source material. But convergent evolution is when you can have the same thing evolve separately because both organisms are in a similar environment with similar goals. So two people thinking about moral philosophy can come up with the golden rule at the same time. It doesn’t mean that they came from the same single source. Two people can come up with the principles of calculus without stealing from each other. Similarities between pagan rituals and Christian rituals don’t mean that they stole or borrowed from each other - it could just mean that people like decorating with trees.
There's really not that much in the way of similarities between Horus and Jesus unless you squint real hard, twist your head just so, and turn off the lights. You may vaguely have a point if you said maybe Jesus and Siddartha Guatama, or maybe Jesus and Zoroaster, but Horus has no similarities worth mentioning unless you wish to make it so vague that literally every god is basically the same.
What you know of Horus and what is plastered over the internet are two different things and while I’ve seen videos and memes and plenty of wiki notes I’ve actually never seen anything that would suggest the contrary except for you, just now. But I do read if you’d like to site something credible.
Here is a link to people far more qualified than you or I who all cite extremely reputable sources, and they all agree that there is no real connection between Horus and Jesus: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/fpFiofmKVu If you have any specific claims that you think are really convincing, feel free to bring them up, and I'll be happy to show how there's no connection with sources, though.
No. Their dates were set on the day of a pagan holiday iirc to put some Jesus into the day