Christmas Myths (Pt 1)

Well, it's here. Christmas. The word has different meaning to everyone, based on their religion, race, culture. To some it means skiing, to others it brings memories of jam-packed malls and outrageous sales, and to others, it evokes images of Church Christmas play or Church potlucks. And to some, it brings memories of the Birth of Jesus.

Lately, there has been a huge backlash against Christmas, from both the conservative Christians and from the atheists. It's interesting how two polar opposites can agree on one thing about Christmas, they both don't like what it represents today.

Now, take your kids out of the room, because this blog is for mature readers only. Most of the Christmas story is a myth. Now, there are many attacks on the Nativity story, but I'm only going to deal with the ones that can be supported solely from the Bible.

Genealogy of Jesus
The two major Birth stories occur in Matthew (1:1-16) and in Luke (3:23-37). And both of them thoughtfully include the genealogy of Jesus. If you're at all like me, once I see a huge list of names, my eyes kinda glaze over, and I drift through each line and verse until I see a normal paragraph again. And if you are like me, you would not have noticed that the two genealogies are vastly different. First, Matthew traces Jesus to Abraham, while Luke traces it further back to Adam. Scholars believe this is because the author was writing to different audiences. The branch or split occurs after the David. Matthew traces Jesus' lineage along the bloodline of Solomon, while Luke traces it along the bloodline of Nathan. No one knows for sure which is correct.

Three Kings of Orient
This is taken from Matthew. First of all, they weren't kings. Matthew called them Magi, or wise men (Mat 2:1). Most likely they were astrologers, people who divined events of importance from looking at the stars. Second of all, there weren't three of them. Or maybe there were. But we don't know for sure. Matthew just mentions them in the plural sense throughout the passage. Now, I'm guessing that whoever wrote that song thought it would be fitting for there to be three because Matthew mentioned three gifts that they brought (Mat 2:11). So wouldn't it be cool for a song for each king to bring one gift?

King Herod and the Execution order
Because the Three Kings were long associated with Jesus' birth, it was only natural to include Herod as the bad guy in this story. After all, he was the one who pointed them to Bethlehem.(Mat 2:8) However, his inclusion in the Nativity story should be minimal at best. When the magi finally came to Israel, Jesus was already a boy. And based on Herod's execution order, we can deduce that he was around two. That's why Herod ordered all children under 2 (Mat 2:16). If Jesus was still a baby, when Herod found out about this new King of the Jews, he would most likely have ordered the deaths of all babies or persons under the age of 1. It might have been a safety move on his part to have the 2 year olds killed too, but what's the chances of someone mistaking a 2 year old with a baby boy?

Jesus was born December 25th
First of all, no one knows the exact date of Jesus birth. The Hebrew calendar is a lunar calendar. And if you are Chinese, Vietnamese or Persian, you know what that means. It's hard to convert a lunar calendar to the Gregorian Calendar. There's always a floating month every couple of years. So it's hard to pinpoint exactly when Jesus was born in the Hebrew Calendar, and even then you have to convert it to Gregorian system, which will totally be off. But, even though we don't know the exact date, the Bible gives us a time-frame, or season-frame as the case may be. Luke writes about a bunch of shepherds living out in the fields, tending their flocks at night (Luke 2:8). Do you think this would happen during the winter, which is where December would fall? It's highly unlikely. The most plausible explanation is either spring or summer, when it is still warm enough outside for shepherds to live in the open.

So, why December 25th then? As is the reason behind Halloween, we must look at the early century Church. Going along with the program of adopting pagan rituals and "Christianizing" them, they incorporated all the winter festivals and feasts and changed them to Christmas, the birthday of Jesus. There were three major pagan festivals around December, Saturnalia, Natalis Solis Invicti, and one that should sound very familiar, Yule.