Hello and welcome to the part of two of the Christmas analysis.
In part one, we focused on the controversy surrounding, Jesus' birthday.
And you can read it here: @maxjoy/is-christmas-a-pagan-celebration
The next major “argument” for the pagan thing is the Roman “saturnalia” thing. And it goes something like this: The Roman empire had a celebration called saturnalia and since the Church was merged with the Empire and they created a mix of Christian and pagan believe, Christmas is actually a sun worship that comes from saturnalia.
(By the way, the sunday being the worship of the Sun on the sun-day… only applies in english… pretty easy to crack, that one)
But was paganism and Christianity merged under Constantine's reign as it’s communally accepted as a fact? And the consul of Nicea created everything for power and control?
The consul of Nicea took place in 325AD. For the previous 300 years, Christians had been persecuted. On and off, but more on than off. And we are talking about the most savage types of persecution. Such as being fed to the lions or being burned alive and being used as city light in the evening.
Despite this, the greatest empire the world has ever seen did not managed to get rid of them. Think about that. For 300 years, the biggest power that ever existed, used the most brutal techniques on record and they did not managed to end the practise of a few people with little or no influence in society. But then, like out of magic… they all accepted a pagan version of their fate… no problem.. no questions asked. Left no record of people who kept “the original” practise while it was being corrupted for power and control. Yeah… that makes a lot of sense Da Vinci Code, thank you.
A huge and obvious red flag for this narrative (and there are many) is that Constantine did not, made the Catholic Church, the oficial churn of the empire. He simply ended the centuries long prosecutions. Most of Roman’s elite where pagans and this did not sit well, with them or at least there was no power to be gained from allowing the church to exist, as it is commonly believed. What power? We tend to repeat stuff and have the image we have of the Church being so powerful that we just accept this.
Constantine even financed the construction of pagan temples (where human sacrifice is believed to have happened)
But if one, actually studies (and one need to look deep into it, since all the modern books are based not his false assumption) one can see, that is far from being even a bit true. Both the pagan merge and the Constantine politics gain from it. All the record of the time and serious scholars throughout the ages, show other wise. As common sense does.
Next time we will continue with the Roman connection and the famous Saturnalia. Can’t wait to get into it.
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