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The most wonderful time of year — the tree, the lights, the cider — oh, and don’t forget the stories about how Christmas is a pagan holiday basically stolen by Christians. Jimmy Akin joins us to get to the root of some of the claims made about the hidden paganism of Christmas.
Catholic Answers is proud to present a very Pagan Christmas, with Jimmy Akin.
Cy Kellett:
Hello, and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett, your host and that’s how I feel every Christmas. We’ve got to defend Christmas against the accusation that it was all stolen from paganism. Again, we’ve got to do this? Yes, we do. And we have a lot of fun doing that with Jimmy Akin in this week’s episode. Here’s what Jimmy had to say. Jimmy Akin, senior apologist at Catholic Answers. Thanks for being with us.
Jimmy Akin:
My pleasure, Cy Kellett, host of Catholic Answer’s Live and Catholic Answer’s Focus.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, that’s right. And you, the host of Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Which I hope you will continue to do, because it’s going to be weird if somebody else has to host it.
Jimmy Akin:
I plan to continue.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
With Don, my co-host.
Cy Kellett:
Very good. All right. So one of the things that we run up against at this time of year, is media reports and other places, I mean we had a kid who called the other day, his school teacher brought this up in class, this idea Christians kind of stole a lot of Pagan stuff and assembled it into our Christmas celebrations. Christmas is really a Pagan thing that we’ve adapted.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, makes you want to spit, doesn’t it?
Cy Kellett:
Wait, now why we…
Jimmy Akin:
Like have you heard this saying, I’m so mad I could spit?
Cy Kellett:
Yes.
Jimmy Akin:
Well, I get mad and frustrated when I hear nonsense like this.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, okay. I’m glad to hear you say it’s nonsense, and I’m glad we had this opportunity to talk with you, because I want to do some specific ones.
Jimmy Akin:
Okay.
Cy Kellett:
But also just the general idea here, maybe by the end we’ll just talk about the reasoning that’s being used here. It’s rooted in kind of fallacies itself, this whole approach to Christian holidays. All right, so Christmas.
Jimmy Akin:
I think people like doing it because they feel transgressive.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, you think so? Oh, yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
I mean, I don’t normally psychologize people, but you hear this so much.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
And it’s presented in context as if it subtly undermines Christianity somehow. But I think people repeating these ideas, which they never bother to check out.
Cy Kellett:
Right. That’s the problem.
Jimmy Akin:
You hear people just declare this stuff, and it’s like, what’s your source on that? Oh, I don’t know. I heard it somewhere.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. A guy told me.
Jimmy Akin:
Well, you didn’t really exercise critical thinking before you started adopting and repeating this rumor, did you?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
But I think they say it because, and sometimes there’s a kind of triumphal element with regard to, oh, so you Christians aren’t really so holy, you’ve got this pagan thing.
Cy Kellett:
Right. That’s right. Right. And also, at the root what bothers me about it is it seems to come from a kind of approach to religion that says, well, Jesus is not all that special. He’s just another instance, and you guys all… you cobble these religions together.
Jimmy Akin:
That’s one take on it.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
I get annoyed because it’s almost always… two problems. Number one, the claim is almost always wrong.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
And number two, who cares?
Cy Kellett:
We’ll get to the who cares at the end. Because that’s an important thing, because you could spend your life refuting, and it would be a worthy cause, refuting every accusation against Christmas. But there is a fundamental fallacy that we want to address that gets us to, well, who cares about any of this stuff? But here’s something that’s obvious, I think everybody knows this, Jimmy, that we exchange gifts at Christmas. Christians exchange-
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. It’s pretty common.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. And we all know that that is just a mimicking of the Roman celebration of Saturnalia. Everybody knows this, Jimmy.
Jimmy Akin:
Well, up to a point, word copper.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
So first of all, now people may have heard this, but a lot of people don’t even know what Saturnalia was. Saturnalia is a holiday that Romans celebrated. It did occur in December. It did not occur at Christmas.
Cy Kellett:
No, it’s earlier.
Jimmy Akin:
It’s earlier, and it’s a multi day holiday, but it finishes before December 25th. So right there, why wouldn’t we be giving presence earlier if we were getting this from Saturnalia?
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
Saturnalia also is, it’s a festival of the God Saturn.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
And it’s true, from what I’ve read, and I could do further checking on this, but allegedly Romans would give each other gifts at Saturnalia. Not in the big way that we do.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
Because they were dirt poor, most of them. And so you didn’t have a big present Bonanza the way you can in an economically affluent setting.
Cy Kellett:
No one ever got a Nintendo 64 for Saturnalia.
Jimmy Akin:
No. What I’ve read, and again, I’d have to check more to see if this is actually true, but what I’ve read is they would have one gift, and you’d give it to one person. And so maybe you got one gift from someone for Saturnalia. And it was a small little inexpensive thing, I don’t know, maybe something someone made, because the vast majority of people were dirt poor.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
And okay, so well guess what? Gifts are not unique to Roman culture. Gift giving to foster good relations with people is built into human nature.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
It occurs in every society, including ancient Israel. So for example, at the feast of Purim, or the sometimes called the feast of Lots, but this is the one we read about in the book of Esther, where after God delivers his people they institute this feast, and it talks about how the Israelites gave portions of food to each other as gifts to celebrate.
Cy Kellett:
Right. Right.
Jimmy Akin:
So gift giving is a human universal that occurs in all kinds of cultures, and for reasons that have nothing to do with Saturnalia. It’s a natural thing to do on holidays. I mean, you’re giving gifts of some kinds, it could be food, it could be some kind of other object. But sharing gifts on holidays… I mean, even you think about the 4th of July, well, you go over to someone’s house, they’re having a barbecue and you get a free hot dog.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. And maybe you bring them a bottle of something.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, exactly. And you go to someone’s birthday and you get a party favor. That’s a little gift.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
And so gift giving is just a normal thing humans do when they celebrate, and you don’t need to chalk that up to Saturnalia. And there are no specific connections historically between Saturnalia and Christmas.
Cy Kellett:
All right. Thank you for that one, Jimmy. What about Santa though, and Christmas stockings? This comes from Odin flying over and giving gifts to the children’s home.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. So you’ll hear these claims that Santa Claus is this bearded guy who flies around and puts presents in stockings. And in recent years, you’ll hear that this is based on Odin, the Norse God, the head of the Norse Pantheon. And so he’s got a beard and he flies around on an eight legged horse named Sleipnir, and little Norse children would put their boots by the fireplace, and they would put carrots and hay and sugar in them for Sleipnir to eat, because he’s a horse.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
Even if he’s got eight legs, he’s a horse. And then Odin would put little gifts in the boots.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
Okay, you know when this claim was first made, it’s first in the literary record?
Cy Kellett:
Probably in the 1500s, I’m guessing?
Jimmy Akin:
1994.
Cy Kellett:
That’s what I was thinking. 1994.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, it was popularized in a book by a newspaper worker named Phyllis Siefker, called Santa Claus, Last of the Wild Men, or something like that. And she’s a newspaper worker and not a historian, and her book is poor. She’s passed on now, so I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but her book is very poorly reviewed as a historical resource. So there’s just nothing in the historical record that supports this.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
Also, because of the interaction between Christianity and Norse religion, there is cross fertilization going on, because in Scandinavia, which is where they had this religion, it survived into Christian times, into like the ‘800s and stuff. And the earliest records we have of Norse mythology were written by Christians.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, right. Right, yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
And they had been in contact for several hundred years before the conversions. But I forget if it’s the Poetic or the Prose Edda, but that’s one of the key sources of Norse mythology. They’re the two major sources. But they contain what scholars regard as cross pollination from Christian sources. Like some of the Norse ideas about Ragnarok, which is their version of the end of the world, are thought to have been and ideas that they got from Christian missionaries talking about the second coming and the end of the world and the apocalypse. And so even if you had this Odin, boots, gift thing happening-
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, which you don’t.
Jimmy Akin:
… which I don’t know any record supporting that, it would be dated from Christian times, and could be based on Christian practice.
Cy Kellett:
Right. Right. Yeah, that old arrow of time is one of the things that comes up again and again in this, that-
Jimmy Akin:
[crosstalk 00:10:29] causality.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Yeah. Are those two different things? No, you’ll have to explain that to me another time.
Jimmy Akin:
Okay. They are.
Cy Kellett:
But, yeah. We’re living with so many arrows, Jimmy. I can’t keep them all straight.
Jimmy Akin:
You should get a quiver.
Cy Kellett:
I probably should. This one I think is pretty clear though, about Christmas carols actually… I mean, the word carol, as far as I’ve been told, comes from a Roman word that has to do with dancing around in a circle, clearly a Pagan practice, dancing, and so Christmas caroling is a Pagan thing.
Jimmy Akin:
Well, on this one, even people who will try to make a link here will acknowledge you look at the lyrics in the Christmas carols, they have nothing to do with Paganism. They’re about, like O Little Town of Bethlehem, where’s the Paganism in that?
Cy Kellett:
Okay. That’s a good point.
Jimmy Akin:
It came upon a midnight clear, Silent Night. The lyrics are thoroughly Christian, but some people will try to say… Now, I haven’t looked up the etymology of the word carol.
Cy Kellett:
No, yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
But you will have some people say, well, see, even though the lyrics are Christian, there was this Pagan custom of wassailing.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, yeah. That is what you hear.
Jimmy Akin:
And so you’d have people, at this time of year, going around singing songs as part of their wassailing, which would involve drinking and scaring off evil spirits and trying to promote a good harvest, and things like that. And there is a custom called wassailing. And so the word wassail, now people today will think of it as kind of a beverage.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, yeah. Right. Right. Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
And you even hear that in some of the Christmas-
Cy Kellett:
Lift a glass of wassail, or something like that.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, or to you and your wassail too, in some of the carols and stuff. And it’s like a beverage, it’s typically alcoholic. It comes from two Germanic roots. It’s like [inaudible 00:12:31], something along those lines, is the original etymology of wassail. And hale means health. Like when you hear someone described as hale and hearty?
Cy Kellett:
Oh, yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
They’re healthy and hearty.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
And [Vas 00:12:47], it comes from to be. And so there was this essentially a toast you would give people, it’s like be healthy, when you’re drinking them.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
And that came to be transferred to the name of the beverage that you’re toasting them with.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
And so people would go around and do wassailing. They do in England, not everywhere, but in England and maybe a few Northern countries they would do wassailing, and they would sing songs as part of that. In some places they’d go into apple orchards in England and fire off firearms to ostensibly scare away demons.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, I love the English.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Why can’t we get that in American Christmas.
Jimmy Akin:
Lots of interesting customs. Well, that’s more in January.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, I see. Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
But, you know when wassailing is first entering the historical record?
Cy Kellett:
‘500s, ‘600s?
Jimmy Akin:
1700s.
Cy Kellett:
That’s what I was going to say.
Jimmy Akin:
Mid 1700s.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
So this is way after England was a Christian nation.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
And so this is not the basis of Christmas carols. People sing.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
It’s a human universal. People sing in every culture, and they sing at festivities.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
And so you don’t need to pause at any weird connections, other than we’re Christians, we’re having a celebration, let’s write some songs about it.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, right. Right. This one does seem to have… the pattern seems to be like, people did this before Christians, so Christians stole it. But we didn’t steal singing. We’re just singing.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
It’s not a theft. All right. This one though, I don’t think you can refute this.
Jimmy Akin:
Okay.
Cy Kellett:
The mistletoe one. I mean the whole, this is obvious.
Jimmy Akin:
Kissing under the mistletoe, obvious fertility ritual, right?
Cy Kellett:
That’s what I was thinking, yes.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, okay. So, mistletoe has been used in winter celebrations, in cultures before ours, because it’s an evergreen. If you’re in a Northern latitude, or a very Southern latitude, lots of plants, deciduous ones, lose their foliage at that time of year. It dies in the winter. All the leaves drop off. And there are a few plants that remain green during the winter period. And so if you want to hang up stuff in your house to make it festive, what are you going to hang up? The brown dead leaves that are rotting or the green stuff?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Okay, so mistletoe. Right.
Jimmy Akin:
So mistletoe has been hung up by other cultures, or used as decoration in the winter time, because it’s a plant that stays green in the winter. It’s natural for Christians to do that. That doesn’t mean they’re copying, or even… we’ll get to the who cares bit later, but just because mistletoe has been used as a decoration in different cultures, doesn’t mean it’s a Pagan thing. It’s a plant that stays green in the winter, of course you’re going to use it for decoration. Now, about this fertility thing.
Cy Kellett:
Yes.
Jimmy Akin:
And people could get very lurid about what they imagine involving fertility things. But in terms of the kissing someone under the mistletoe, you know who is the first group of people to be documented doing that?
Cy Kellett:
Ancient Mesopotamians, maybe?
Jimmy Akin:
English household servants in the late 1700s.
Cy Kellett:
And that’s what I was going to say.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. So this is something the servants started doing for fun in the big houses.
Cy Kellett:
And it is a fun tradition. You’ve got to give it to them. Those servants, they came up with something good.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. In the late 1700s, so way after England had been Christian.
Cy Kellett:
But is it a possibility that these servants were secretly Druids or Saturn worshipers?
Jimmy Akin:
Not unless they had access to a TARDIS, because…
Cy Kellett:
It always comes back to the TARDIS, Jimmy. It’s possible then. So you’re saying it’s possible.
Jimmy Akin:
Not saying it’s likely.
Cy Kellett:
All right. But I got another Saturnalia you one for you, because what about decking the halls? Wasn’t Saturnalia something where they decorated things for the Roman gods, or something like that?
Jimmy Akin:
Well, allegedly, I’ve heard reports that they did it with holly. I have not verified that from Roman sources. It may or may not be true. But again, holly is another evergreen plant. It’s one of the few things that stays green during the winter. And so of course, you’re going to use it as a decoration. It’s not uniquely associated with Paganism. The reason that Christians would want to decorate with holly is not because Pagans used it, it’s because it’s pretty at that time of year, and one of the few things that is pretty at that time of year.
Cy Kellett:
It’s kind of like a seasonal thing. Like, well, if you’re going to decorate, there’s only a limited number of plants you can decorate with.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
This is an analogy. I want to see what you think of this analogy.
Jimmy Akin:
Okay.
Cy Kellett:
Like at Christmas time, you often see Christians depicted wearing gloves, and the ancient Pagans used to wear gloves.
Jimmy Akin:
Gloves, that’s totally Pagan.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Well, everybody wears gloves. It’s cold out.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
All right. Okay. Okay. It does seem to me though that the Pagan people, they would worship trees. Trees had this, I don’t know, spooky quality to them.
Jimmy Akin:
Nymphs?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, nymphs and that kind of thing. And that kind of thing, like there’s other things like nymphs and that kind of thing.
Jimmy Akin:
Well, there are other kinds of things, like sylphs and all kinds of mythological creatures.
Cy Kellett:
Fairies. Yeah. All right. So you cut down a tree and you bring it into your house. It seems to me, you’re basically worshiping a tree, right? This is Pagan.
Jimmy Akin:
Well, you’re not worshiping it unless you’re worshiping it.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
But Christmas trees, even though you will sometimes hear they have Pagan origin. They don’t. The first recorded use of Christmas trees… now, there may have been predecessors, but the first recorded use was in 1576, which is not only after the Christianization of Europe, it’s after the Protestant reformation.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Right.
Jimmy Akin:
And in fact, you will often hear Martin Luther as having played a role in the development of the Christmas tree tradition. According to some accounts, it was Luther who first got the idea, who’s first recorded as putting lights in a tree, which back then would’ve been candles and stuff.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Right.
Jimmy Akin:
Which is actually a bit of a fire hazard. But you don’t find records of Christmas trees in earlier centuries, when there were still Pagans around. So there’s a clear gap in the historical record, where after Europe has been Christianized, it’s only hundreds of years later that you get Christmas trees. And so again, there’s just no there there.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. I can see the holly and the mistletoe and all that. Who’s the first person who thinks let’s drag a tree into the house? Like, what?
Jimmy Akin:
They did other things too. I mean, human ingenuity produces lots of stuff. There are lots of Christmas traditions we don’t have anymore, like the Christmas pyramid.
Cy Kellett:
You don’t have the Christmas pyramid? What are you talking about?
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
We go out in the woods and we fire off guns. That’s how we do it.
Jimmy Akin:
We wait until January.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Right.
Jimmy Akin:
And you only do that in the orchards.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. It’s 40 days of guns. A whole season.
Jimmy Akin:
But people would have a little wooden pyramid they would build and they’d have little shelves on it. They could put objects on it to decorate it.
Cy Kellett:
Really?
Jimmy Akin:
There was a Christmas pyramid that was common for a while.
Cy Kellett:
I had no idea. All right.
Jimmy Akin:
So if a couple are building pyramids, I’m not surprised they’re doing stuff with trees.
Cy Kellett:
Right. Well, as you said, we live in a consumerist society that has plenty of things. Maybe they’re like, what can we decorate with? Drag that tree in the house. That’s all they’ve got.
Jimmy Akin:
I don’t think it started in the house.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, you did it outside?
Jimmy Akin:
I think they would do it outside, and then eventually they, Hey, it’s warmer inside. Maybe we could do that in here.
Cy Kellett:
Right. Grandma does not want to come outside this year, bring the tree in for her. Okay, but the problem with all of this debunking that you’re doing is that Christmas itself is just the adoption of a Pagan holiday.
Jimmy Akin:
And that’s not true. So what you find, now you hear people claiming that Christmas was the church decided to put Christmas on December 25th in order to co-opt a Pagan holiday that occurred on that day, known as the celebration or the birth of Sol Invictus, which is the unconquerable son.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
Okay, we’ll get to the who cares bit, but just once again, sticking with that claim as a matter of history, it is not supported by the historical evidence. And there’s a channel I’ll recommend on YouTube, by a young… he’s a young scholar of Christianity, he’s like a new PhD, but he has a very good video. He doesn’t cover everything I wish he would cover, but he does cover the idea that Christians stole Christmas from Sol Invictus.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
The channel you want to look at is called Religion for Breakfast.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
And so if you look up Religion for Breakfast, he’s got a video, it’s almost an hour long, it’s like 51 minutes long, where he goes into all the history about this. He shows his work, he gives you the sources and everything. But basically we just don’t have evidence for this. Number one, if you think about, well, why would Christians want to co-opt this holiday? Well, there are other holidays in the world. I mean, for example, there is St. Swithin’s day, let’s say. That’s actually a Christian one. Okay, let’s talk about the Jewish celebration Purim.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
Okay? So we have Christians, we have Jews, Jews are celebrating Purim at a certain time of the year. Are Christians anxious to create a Christian version of that?
Cy Kellett:
I haven’t noticed that.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. Exactly.
Cy Kellett:
I don’t actually even know when Purim is celebrated. I apologize to all the listeners.
Jimmy Akin:
Well, it’s a fairly minor Jewish holiday.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
And on the other hand, we have here in America, an inflation of the Jewish holiday Hanukah.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, right.
Jimmy Akin:
Because it occurs at the same time as Christmas.
Cy Kellett:
Yes.
Jimmy Akin:
So why would Jewish people want to create a Jewish alternative to Christmas, but Christians would not want to create a Christian alternative to Purim?
Cy Kellett:
Can I take a guess at it?
Jimmy Akin:
Take a guess.
Cy Kellett:
Because if you’re in a minority status, where you’re trying to kind of defend the identity of the community, you need something for your people to do while the wider community is doing something else. Does that…
Jimmy Akin:
Well, that’s part of it, but also it’s a big holiday. It doesn’t so much matter if I’m a minority or not, but Christmas is this huge cultural thing.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
And Purim is not.
Cy Kellett:
Right. Like the people who invented Kwanzaa, they didn’t put it at Purim. They didn’t go, we need something to compete with Purim.
Jimmy Akin:
No, they put it at Christmas to try to attract more attention to it, and make it part of that complex. So people might have a motivation to try to create an alternative celebration for a big holiday. Was December 25th a big holiday in Roman culture, that Christians would want to imitate? Go ahead.
Cy Kellett:
No, I was just thinking, what you said before about Saturnalia would suggest no. Like the big holiday in December is Saturnalia.
Jimmy Akin:
Correct.
Cy Kellett:
You’re not going to have two huge holidays in the same month.
Jimmy Akin:
Right. No, Saturnalia is the big one. It was a multi day. It was like from the 17th to the 23rd, so it’s basically a week. And then a couple of days later you got this little other day, which is only one of three festivals devoted to the sun on the Roman calendar. There was another one in August. There was a bigger one in October. And then there’s this little dinky one that happens to be in December, because December 25th was the day the Roman celebrated the winter solstice.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Which is a sun event.
Jimmy Akin:
Which is a sun related event. So this is a minor holiday, and Christians wouldn’t have any motivation to copy it. And the earliest records of Romans celebrating it are after Christians have already been celebrating December 25th.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, so again we’re the arrow of causality here.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, and the probable solution is… now, there are arguments you can make for December 25th being the actual date of Christ’s birth. I’m open to those arguments, but there is a very good case to be made that the reason December 25th was picked is because it is the winter solstice in the old Roman reckoning, and it’s nine months after March 25th, which was the spring Equinox in the March reckoning, and that was used as the enunciation and the conception of Christ. So you had, in the 300s and 400s, you had Christians trying to… they didn’t have good records, but they were trying to use the evidence they had to back calculate when things in Christ’s life would’ve happened.
Jimmy Akin:
And there are various things you could use, like we know he died at Passover and that’s associated with the spring Equinox. And one way or another, there came to be a tradition that he was also conceived at the spring Equinox. Nine months after that, you’ve got the winter solstice. And so even though human gestation is not literally nine months, it’s actually between nine and 10 months, which is why in the old Testament they think of babies being in the womb for 10 months instead of nine, because they count inconclusively. But we tend to think of pregnancies as being nine months. And so okay, if he’s conceived here in the spring, he’s going to be born in the winter, and these are big, important dates. He’s a big, important guy. Let’s use those.
Cy Kellett:
Right, right. Yes. And then it does have a symbolic quality to put the birth of Christ on a-
Jimmy Akin:
So you have this great spiritual light coming into the world when the light starts getting longer and the darkness starts diminishing.
Cy Kellett:
Right, right.
Jimmy Akin:
But that’s not because anybody was worshiping the sun, it’s just the natural logic based on these calculations they were doing, and based on the geophysical facts regarding the earth and it’s axial tilt.
Cy Kellett:
All right. Well, I appreciate that you have given us an assistance on all of these, but there is another way of looking at that, which is you could concede all of these. Every single one of them, you could concede.
Jimmy Akin:
You would be wrong, but you could concede.
Cy Kellett:
But yeah, just as a hypothetical. In another world, all of these things are true. Would that matter? As far as our Christian faith?
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, no. Who cares? This is an example of what’s called the genetic fallacy, where instead of judging something based on its merits, you judge it based on where it came from. And it’s a logical fallacy, because what determines the quality of a thing is the qualities the thing has, not its history. Now, the situation can be more complex than that, but that’s the essence of the thing. You can’t simply say, oh, well something was Pagan, therefore it must be bad or somehow wrong. You know who invented Greek?
Cy Kellett:
I don’t know who invented.
Jimmy Akin:
This is an easy one.
Cy Kellett:
Wait, who invented?
Jimmy Akin:
Who would invent Greek, the Greek language?
Cy Kellett:
The Greeks.
Jimmy Akin:
The Greeks.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, I thought you were talking about a person. I was like, is he saying Homer?
Jimmy Akin:
Were the Greeks Pagan when they invented the language?
Cy Kellett:
They were in fact.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
I had forgotten that about that.
Jimmy Akin:
So Greek is a Pagan thing, and then these Christians come along and start using Greek to spread their Christian message. But they’re using this Pagan language.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
And so yeah, duh, who cares? There’s nothing wrong with the Greek language just because it was invented by Pagans. There would be nothing wrong with you decorating your house with mistletoe or holly, or singing a song, or sharing food or gifts, or anything like that.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Jimmy Akin:
There’s nothing wrong with any of those things, so who cares if Pagans were doing them first, and who cares if even Christians got the idea from there? If it’s a good idea, you can use it.
Cy Kellett:
Thanks, Jimmy. I really, really appreciate that. We’re going to do another one of these next week, where we’re going to talk about with the star.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. The star of Bethlehem.
Cy Kellett:
So we’ll do that. So I actually have to go right now. I’ve got to go clean my guns and get them ready, and work on my Christmas pyramid.
Jimmy Akin:
Okay.
Cy Kellett:
So I’ll be doing that. Thanks, Jimmy Akin.
Jimmy Akin:
My pleasure.
Cy Kellett:
Getting ready for this episode, one of the nice things that I noticed is more and more secular people, more and more secular media outlets are catching on that this story of Pagan Christmas is nonsense. It’s been a staple of American journalism for, I don’t know, a hundred years or something, but it’s not true. And most of the things that are alleged about Christmas being stolen or hijacked or appropriated from Paganism, just not true. So we’re glad to have Jimmy come in here and explain some of that to us.
Cy Kellett:
And we’re always glad that you join us. We’re approaching the end of the year here, so I want to wish you a Merry Christmas and a happy new year. We’ll see you one more time before the end of the year, but certainly a Merry Christmas to you and all of yours. If you got anything you want to write to us about, maybe this episode, maybe you got an idea for a future episode, just send it to focus@catholic.com. That’s our email, focus@catholic.com. As you make your end of the year giving decisions, maybe you could include us in your plans. You can do so at givecatholic.com, give catholic.com.
Cy Kellett:
And don’t forget, we’re trying to grow on YouTube, because we’ve moved the show over to its own YouTube channel. If you would do all the subscribing and the hitting the bell and all the other things you can do at YouTube, you probably know more of them than I do, do them. That’ll help us grow. And if you’re listening on one of the podcast services, don’t forget to like and subscribe. And if you’d be kind enough, give us that five star rating and a nice review, that too will help grow the podcast. We’ll see you one more time. This year on Catholic Answer’s Focus, next week.