Why do Christians celebrate Christmas*?

Great Debates
101

Which is impossible. Stars don’t stop dead when you are walking in their direction. They don’t remain stationary over one spot at any time (unless you are standing at the north pole, and even then it’s only approximately stationary), and even if they did, it would be impossible to determine a specific house being pointed out.

Besides, that’s not “all the text describes.” An integral part of the story is an angel of God warning Joseph to flee because the magi blabbed about his kid to Herod, and God himself warning the magi to take a different route home. Find me a natural phenomenon that explains God and angels taking direct parts in human affairs.

Heh, I see that your autocorrect converted “chance” to “intention.”

I made no such claim. I have no idea what is astrologically possible or impossible. However, I claim it is astronomically impossible.

But I admit it’s not physically impossible. There are many kinds of aircraft I can think of, and many more conceivably available to an advanced alien civilization, that could behave exactly as the Star allegedly did. A lighted aircraft flying, say, 1000 feet above the ground could indicate an exact house by hovering over it. And I think that aliens visiting ancient Israel, as documented in the Life of Brian, are far more likely than God impregnating Mary.

But it’s far, far, far more likely that Matthew just made the whole thing up. IMO.

If you don’t want to take the story literally, then you’re wasting your time arguing it happened as described. And I don’t say it’s all true or all false. I think it’s not only possible, but likely, that there were astrologers who predicted the birth of the Messiah around that time, just there have been all kinds of prophets in our own time who predict the Second Coming every few years.

But if the Star acted the way Matthew said it did, the only possible explanation is that it was a miracle. If it didn’t, there are many possible explanations of why Matthew said it did, e.g. he could be repeating a legend he heard, he could be embellishing an event he had actual knowledge of, or he could have made the whole thing up. Since he seems to have a habit of asserting preposterous things that no other historian or even gospel writer mentions, I think he made it up.

But I’m not a hard atheist. I concede it’s possible that Yahweh did everything in the Bible, exactly as it’s recorded. I think that chances of that are way, way less than one in a billion, but not zero.

Again, God and angels are an integral part of the story, so if you CAN’T see people reading it as one, then you’re pretty hopeless.

102

On the contrary, “it’s not impossible that…” (or rather, “it’s not implausible that…” is actually a very good counterargument against criticisms of Luke’s reliability. You made an argument against the reliability of the Gospels, and I did my best to show why the purported contradiction might not be a real one.

I would go further though and say that I think the ‘aborted census theory’ is also more plausible than your claim that Luke simply made an error. We know that Luke was aware that Jesus was born in the reign of Herod, and we also know he was aware of the date of the census of Quirinius, since he makes reference to it in Acts 5. I think it’s implausible he accidentally conflated these two events. The aborted census theory fits very nicely with several other things we know about the period (Herod’s falling out of grace in around 8 BC, Augustus demanding a loyalty oath around this period, the fact that Judaea was ‘due’ for a round of taxation around 8-9 BC), whereas your argument that Luke simply made a mistake really doesn’t.

I’m not sure how you know that “no one is going to be convinced” by my argument. I wasn’t particularly optimistic about convicning you, but I’m writing for the benefit of anyone else who may be reading this thread. People are convinced by arguments for Christianity all the time: this is part of why people convert.

103

Gee, people still have dreams and visions even today.:rolleyes:

104

There are Santa haters out there; I am one of them. Every time I happen to see a TV special called “So-and-So Saves Christmas” I want to retch because I know that “saving Christmas” means “making sure everybody gets their loot,” and there will probably be a line like “Don’t do any critical thinking - just believe!” And I think “Ugh!! No wonder atheists think believers are a bunch of weak-minded fools.”

However, it’s not entirely true that Santa isn’t real. Saint Nicholas lived in Asia Minor in the 4th century, and his remains (most of them anyway) are in Bari, Italy. When little kids ask me if Santa is real, I usually say, “Well, Saint Nicholas is real, but some of the stories about him are just for fun.”

105

Yes, and bushes burn even today. Is it your position that every time the Bible says God or an angel did something, it is lying?

106

No, I dont think that all UFO spotters or Virgin Mary visionaries are lying. I think many honestly believe what they saw. Note that many pass Lie detector tests easily.

I dont entirely rule out a Supreme Being or a Alien visitor either, altho I have doubts.

American Indians wander in the desert and have visions, do you think they are “lying”?

Skeptic say “Hmm, I am having a vision, must be exhaustion, hunger and the heat”. But others, more credulous think it’s from a Higher Plane. They are *still visions. *

107

You haven’t shown that we know any of the things you claim above. Rather than confirming that Luke knew the date of the census, Acts 5 not only doesn’t mention a date (for anything), but it shows that Luke was wildly off in his chronology, since the only “date” he gives is that it was after the revolt of Theudas.

“The difficulty is that Gamaliel, speaking before the year 37, is described as referring to the rising of Theudas, linking it to the revolt of Judas of Galilee at the time of the Census of Quirinius decades before, in CE 6. However, Josephus makes clear that the revolt of Theudas took place in around 45, which is after Gamaliel is said to have spoken, and long after the time of Judas the Galilean.[4][5]”

It’s hardly surprising that Luke (if that’s who wrote the gospel bearing his name; we don’t know even that) would be very vague about events that happened some 80 years before he was writing. He was probably in Antioch or Asia Minor, with no access to Roman or Jewish records (indeed, the Temple had been destroyed), and certainly no google. IIRC, even you have conceded that Luke misunderestimated Jesus’ age by several years. If he can’t even get that right, how can you say he is accurate about tangential dates?

Similarly, your “fact” that Judea was due for a census has no support I can find, other than a brief reference to 14-year intervals in the second century CE, long after it had been a Roman province. This is a common trait in apologetic literature, by the way. It will find some barely relevant item that shows that “it’s not impossible” that X occurred, and in the next paragraph, hey presto, X is now a “fact” that is used as the basis for further speculation, which in turn becomes a fact in the paragraph after that.

I’m certainly open to whatever evidence you can provide, though. Find me concrete examples, not “it’s not impossible,” of a king of a non-province losing the power to tax his people, or Roman censuses of Judea immediately before 6BCE that show that one was due, and I will read them with interest.

108

“Jesus, when he began his ministry, was *about *thirty years of age,”

109

Here’s evidence of a general census by Augustus in 8 BC:

And here’s evidence for the fourteen-year cycle post-19 AD, which may have been a seven-year cycle as far back as 19 BC:

None of this involves Judaea directly, necessarily, but it does render it plausible that Augustus might have ordered a census in 8 BC to coincide with the census in other parts of the Roman world, especially since at that time Judaea had temporarily demoted from client state to subject state status.

110

This glosses over the fact that Passover’s (and Easter’s) “wandering” from the vernal equinox by up to a few weeks is just a side-effect of trying to reconcile a seasonal festival with a synodic (lunar) calendar.

Passover and Easter are, incontrovertibly, historically rooted in ancient seasonal festivals of spring. The season of spring has for many millennia been associated with the vernal equinox. Neither Passover nor Easter “wanders all over the calendar”, as you somewhat hyperbolically put it: both of them “wander” only within a few weeks of the vernal equinox.

This is an unavoidable artifact of dealing with a luni-solar calendar where months are determined by actual phases of the moon (i.e., synodic), but the annual sequence of 12 months is supposed to stay mostly in sync with the seasons. The 12-month sequence, being shorter by about 11 days than the solar year, constantly drifts away from alignment with solar/seasonal phenomena such as equinoxes and solstices. This requires, as you noted, sticking in occasional intercalary (or leap) months for drift correction.
In short, the ancient association of Passover (and consequently Easter) with spring and the vernal equinox is fundamental. The fact that neither of them can reliably land on the vernal equinox except with a few weeks’ worth of error bar is just a historical artifact of the inconvenient math of synodic months.

111

He knows that, but as you saw, he would rather say that a holiday whose date fundamentally depends on the vernal equinox is in no way tied to it, than admit he’s wrong. One of several reasons why debating him is a waste of time.

112

Thank you for the cites. Unfortunately, there is no indication that the censuses listed included anything but Roman provinces, and they contradict your claim that there was a 14-year cycle, e.g. the intervals in your first source of the last five censuses, beginning in 70 BCE, are 42 years, 20 years, 21 years, and 33 years.

That source deals only with Egypt, which as noted in an earlier post was a special case (its tax revenues went directly to the emperor, rather than the Senate), and could not be applied to other provinces. It also says that the 14 year cycle could not have begun before 19 CE. It says that although it cannot be demonstrated, there is evidence for seven-year cycles beginning in 10 BCE, which would mean 10 BCE, 3 BCE, and 5CE, and 12 CE, which doesn’t help your date of 8 BCE, but does show that an Egyptian census would be unconnected to a general census of 6 CE.

Whoa, you made a leap there. It is a fact that Josephus says that Herod briefly fell out of favor with Augustus, but it is mere apologetic speculation by McGrew and other inerrantists, with no credible evidence I’ve seen, that the result was a direct Roman taxation. And not even they have said that the status of Judea itself changed.

Josephus goes into some detail about the interaction between Augustus and Herod at that time, but does not mention anything about taxes. And although Augustus’ disfavor could be considered a demotion in a figurative sense, he had all kinds of ways to make it official, and did not avail himself of them. Herod remained King, even though Augustus had the power to give him a true demotion to ethnarch, tetrarch, or toparch, as shown by him actually doing so to Herod’s children and sister.

And besides all that, once again, Joseph didn’t live in Judea, he lived in Galilee, which remained non-provincial even after 6 CE.

113

It glosses over nothing. The original statement by Quartz was that Easter was a hijack of the equinox, (not Spring). It is not.
TonySinclair took a side reference to that and, ignoring the original context, decided to get bent out of shape over a statement that used the phrase “tied to.”

114

Since I never made any such statement, I am not sure what you are on about, here.

You challenged a statement that wonder and fantasy were good things.
You made no effort to distinguish between wonder and fantasy.
I noted that “If you are saying that wonder is not a good thing, I simply feel sorry for you–even as an adult.”
I then separately addressed the issue of fantasy while noting that a number of psychologists have described the role that it plays in child development, after noting that I recognized that it was a touchier subject.

At no time did I “literally” say that I “pitied” you for questioning the idea of fooling kids into believing in Santa. This is particularly an odd takeaway from my remarks, given that I have noted that I, myself, never tried to fool my kids into believing in Santa.

115

Well, given that spring and the vernal equinox have always been very closely associated, Quartz’s remark STM quite a bit less misleading than what you said in response to it:

Passover and Easter, as I noted, do not actually “wander all over the calendar”: in fact, they never get any farther away from the equinox than the unavoidable separation caused by the awkward machinery of the luni-solar calendar system.

The notion that the seasonal concept of “spring” and its association with the vernal equinox didn’t “make sense” in the ancient Near East is just flat-out fallacious. The Babylonian “New Year” vernal equinox festival was explicitly associated with barley-sowing, unquestionably a seasonal agrarian reference. Hell, in the Bible itself the seasonal concept of springtime as a period of sowing and new growth is clearly marked, e.g., “For behold, the winter is past; the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come…”.

ISTM absurd to argue that the festivals of Passover and Easter are essentially separate commemorations of particular events whose seasonal nature is secondary or even irrelevant. Rather, AFAICT it’s far more likely that both emerged as a sort of “historicization” (to pick a less loaded term than “hijack”) of much older spring festivals that were already firmly associated with the equinox and the beginning of the season of spring.

The fact that the Passover and Easter festivals generally didn’t exactly coincide with the actual equinox testifies not to the primacy of their “historical” nature, but simply to the clumsiness of the luni-solar calendar. You can’t reliably sync up a solar event to a lunar date with higher precision than a whole synodic month.

116

TonySinclair yes I did ‘make a leap’. The fragmentary nature of the sources pretty much requires us to make leaps from the information we have. Until I find direct evidence of a census around 8 BC, or you find direct evidence against it, both of us are going to have to rely on speculating about what most plausibly might have happened. Nevertheless I think the circumstantial evidence (a 14- or 7-year tax cycle in Egypt, a census of Roman citizens in 8 BC, and the temporarily falling of Herod into disfavor) make it plausible that Augustus ordered a census within Herod’s dominions in 8 BC, to coincide with the Roman census, which was then aborted and picked up again under Quirinius. (Other proponents of the aborted census theory, besides those I mentioned, appear to include
Johannes Heinrich August Ebrard - Wikipedia and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darrell_L._Bock: this guy Frédéric Louis Godet - Wikipedia was a proponent of reading “the census itself” instead of “this census”, but appears to think there were two separate completed censuses).

Until further evidence comes to light on either of our parts we’ll probably just have to leave it here, since at this point we’re debating the plausibility of our differing hypotheses in light of the evidence. I would add though that I disagree with your claim about the dating of Luke, I’d date Luke’s Gospel and Acts to the early 60s AD rather than post-80 (mostly since they don’t mention any events subsequent to the house-arrest of Paul in Rome), which would mean the records were still available at Jerusalem and possibly Rome.

117

Interestingly, there is no direct association between Akitu and the Equinox, just as we have not yet seen any direct association between Sham el nessim and the equinox.

Which would have been fine and would not have caught my attention. However, the actual claim was that Easter was a hijack of the equinox.

118

You must not have looked very hard; as I said, all you have to do is google it.

Can you connect the dot?

119

Heh former Catholic here. My fellow Caths really, really, really believed in the power of the confessional. Do whatever you want and confess on Saturday and you’re good to go for the next week. I knew a girl in college who thought birth control pills were the devils work. She had three abortions while i knew her all paid for by daddy. Having an abortion a year was better than taking the pill cause you know one big sin to confess vs a sin a day with the pill.

120

All you had to do was provide that link, initially rather than suggesting that Google would provide the answer that it was 4500 years old–a point I had not challenged. When I dropped it into Google, neither of my first two hits turned up a mention of the equinox. :::shrug:::