As Lent is about to begin Trent addresses arguments that Catholic rituals, as well as holy days like Ash Wednesday, are actually off shoots of paganism that are corrupting Christ’s church.
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Lent is almost here. Can you believe it? I feel like the year is just going by so fast. Ash Wednesday is tomorrow. It’s going to be Lent then Easter, then Christmas. Then my kids are going to go to college before I know it, even though they’re barely getting into kindergarten right now. Time is just flying, but we can take a minute and slow down and talk about it here on the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host Catholic Answers apologist and speaker Trent Horn, and I thought a great way to kick off Lent … Well, today is fat Tuesday, so instead of gorging on meats and cheeses and eggs and all kinds of delicious things, because in the middle ages, the Lenten fast was actually a lot more than just giving up meat on Fridays. Wasn’t even just giving up meat entirely through Lent. It was giving up nearly all animal products.
So that’s why in many Eastern churches today, there are people who will still follow the traditional fast and they will fast, not just from meat but from any animal product, so no dairy, no cheeses, and so that’s why you would … You’d get through all the cheese and dairy and meat and everything you could today before you entered into lent or the great fast. But instead of gorging on all that, I thought we would gorge on knowledge and how to defend our faith against arguments that are made against it.
But before we get into that, I do say, I really hope that the audio recording is going fine right now. I think it is. I’m sure it’ll be fine. We’ve got Nick Chamberlain, which by the way, you should check out Nick’s work at NCC audio. I think it’s N-C-C audio. Look up Nick Chamberlain audio. If you’re doing your own podcast or you know someone who does podcasts. Nick is super good at this stuff. He makes me sound like golden age radio. He always makes me sound so rich and deep and wonderful when he just does his magic on the soundboard. But I sent my other episode to him not too long ago, the one with the Bible open mail bag and he listened to it and said, “Trent, it sounds kind of off like you’re whispering. I didn’t understand what was going on.”
And he started editing part two and then he went to part one and realized, “Oh you were at home, you didn’t want to wake up the kids.” So right now I have my mobile gear, which I used to record the Bible, open mailbag at home, cause I’m traveling so much. I’m at Dana Point, California right now, a meeting with the members of the founder’s circle. So these are the individuals whose philanthropy makes Catholic Answers possible. And I get the chance to meet with them every 18 months and do apologetic talks and tell them about what we’re doing. So I’m here in Dana Point, California taking a break from the founder’s circle to record an episode to get caught up here on the podcast. I’m here in my hotel room, so I’m hoping the sound quality is good. What’s nice in my office … What’s funny, my office at Catholic Answers is actually one of the best rooms in the entire building to do recordings in.
They’ve actually thought about … At one point they thought about turning my office into a podcast recording studio because it’s in the center of the building, there’s no windows, it’s isolated from everything, so there’s good sound quality. But now that I’m in there, actually all of my bookcases, I’ve got hundreds of books in my office, as you might expect from all the research I have to do. It absorbs the sound really well. So actually the sound is a little bit better in my office than it is in the Catholic Answers studio, so yay for that. I’ve got to love my little tucked away office. If you ever visit Catholic Answers, by the way, at 2020 Gillespie, more than happy. We have a staff members who can give tours and you can come check out my office where I get everything recorded. And then I’ve also got my funny little personal memorabilia on the bookshelves.
What are they? Well, if you come to Catholic Answers office and take a tour anytime you’re down 2020 Gillespie Way in El Cajon, California, we’d love to show you what it is. I cannot say. You’ll have to come to the office to find out, Oh and by the way, speaking of recording episodes here on the podcast, the Bible open mail bag, if you want to be able to submit questions for future open mailbag episodes or if you want a special thank you message from me or a sneak peek of my new book, Can A Catholic Be A socialist like its chapter on what happened in Venezuela or if you want to listen to my interview with Gary Sinise, award winning actor and head of the Gary Sinise foundation, all that’s at Trenthornpodcast.com. For just $5 a month, you get access to that other bonus content.
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Now, onto the idea that Catholicism is pagan because whenever lent shows up, people will look at Ash Wednesday, Easter Sunday and they’ll say, “Oh well that’s a pagan element. Confessing to priests? That’s from paganism. That’s not biblical Christianity.” You’ll see this all the time in like Jack Chick comics, for example, will make the claim that when emperor Constantine and they always get this … They oftentimes they get this wrong. They’ll say, “When Constantine made Christianity the religion of the Roman empire, that it was then that pagans converted out of ease to Christianity and to climb the social ladder and they brought their pagan beliefs with them.”
But that’s easily debunked for two reasons. One, Constantine didn’t make Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire. At the edict of Milan, which actually there was another edict of tolerance given two years earlier in the Eastern part of the empire, Constantine wasn’t the first to do this. At the beginning of the fourth century, the Roman emperors in the West and the East, they released edicts of toleration to stop the persecution of Christians. Christianity didn’t become the religion of the Roman empire until the end of the fourth century under the reign of Emperor Theodosius, that’s not when it became official. Second, the things that people say are pagan in the Catholic faith, like confessing your sins to a priest, celebrating the mass, saying that Eucharist is the body and blood of Christ. You can find that sometimes hundreds of years before Constantine.
So one way to answer the charge that Catholicism is Catholicism pagan, to ask people, “When did the church get paganised?” And if they pick Constantine in the fourth century, you can quickly show, nope, you can find so many of these things. Like people say, “Oh, the pagans worshiped Mary. They worshiped the goddess, the goddess Semiramis or Demeter or whatever, and so Christians turned Mary into a goddess after they all converted in the fourth century.” What do you do then when you have the very first, the oldest liturgical document we can find in church history is a prayer to Mary for her protection? It’s called the [inaudible 00:06:37], under thy protection, and that that dates over 100 years before the time of Constantine. And that’s the oldest one we could find. There could be probably … It’s not like that was invented then. There were probably ones even earlier than that. So you can find … I would definitely recommend two books.
One would be The Fathers Know Best by my friend and colleague Jimmy Akin. It’s a great reference anthology of the sayings of the church fathers. But the next point I would recommend my book, The Case for Catholicism published by Ignatius Press, because I defend church teaching in that book, both from scripture and also from history. Each chapter I usually offer the biblical evidence for Catholic doctrines as well as the historical evidence for them. So definitely be sure to check that out. But where did this idea come from? That Catholicism is just repackaged paganism? So in the 19th century, there’s a guy named Alexander Hislop. He was a Scottish minister and he wrote a book called the … Sorry, The Two Babylons, The Two Babylons, the origins of Romanism. And I think the other subtitle is on the worship of Nimrod and his wife, you’re like, “What in the world is he talking about?”
So Hislop’s thesis, and this is not a one off … This is not something that disappeared in obscurity. You can still find it on fundamentalist websites on the internet. And people who quote Hislop. I saw people defending Hislop in the Amazon comments section of books critical of Hislop. So the followers are still out there. This guy wrote in the middle of the 19th century. And so his thesis was basically that in Babylon, ancient Babylon located in like modern day Iraq, there was the mystery religions there and they worshiped Nimrod of the Bible. Now, we don’t know a lot about Nimrod. We just know he was a mighty hunter of old. He is the son of Cush, C-U-S-H. After that, we don’t know very much about him, but Hislop says that the Babylonians worshiped Nimrod, this mighty hunter who was claimed to have invented all of these things for them.
They worshiped him almost like a God or a deity. And then they had all of these practices and Babylon like a believing that bread could become the body of the Lord or confessing sins to priests in a little box or seeking the intercessions of a goddess. And he said that all of the other pagan religions, pagan Greece, pagan Rome, pagan Egypt, whatever it may be, Egypt, Rome, all these other places, all of their beliefs, they might’ve changed the names, but they all worship still Nimrod. It’s all Nimrod that they’re worshiping, even if it’s by a different name. And eventually this made its way into the Catholic church through paganization in the fourth century. So give an example of how influential this was, in 1921 Arthur Pink AWU Pink is a Calvinist theologian still cited today by Calvinist. And he said in 1921 that Alexander Hislop’s work had, quote, “Proven conclusively that all the idolatrous systems of the nations had their origin in what was founded by that mighty rebel, the beginning of whose kingdom was Babel.”
All right, and so he also says … And it’s really weird stuff too, Hislop says that Nimrod was actually like this … Essentially described as like African American and ugly, but he was supposed to be married to this woman, Semiramis, who was actually like white, like very fair skin, white, blonde haired, blue eyed, and the relation between the two. And there’s just a lot of stuff that has kind of like racist hints and overtures to it as you try to get down into it. And still today, conspiracy theorists will draw on this. Hislop’s claims are included in the conspiracy theorist David Icke, I think it’s David Icke, David Icke or David Icke, I-C-K-E. He’s the guy behind the reptilian conspiracy. And so David Icke, is it David Icke, or Icke? I think it’s David Icke. Whatever. I-C-K David Icke, he has a … I talked about this in the conspiracy theory podcast, I think like, gosh, about a year ago. David Icke has this conspiracy theory that the leaders of the free … Most of the major world leaders like George W. Bush and a lot of other people are actually these reptilian, shape-shifting aliens.
You can sense … What he tries to prove is he’ll take news cast footage of like president Bush giving a speech and he’ll pause it when it looks like the president’s eyes change color, which of course on TV monitors colors will flicker, that’s not unusual to prove that they’re actually these shape-shifting aliens. And so Icke says that Semiramis, the wife of Nimrod was like one of the first people to introduce these shape-shifting aliens into the Babylonian mystery religion. And that was where it came from. So it pops up in a lot of places, but what’s wrong with it? Well, I’ll talk about this on Thursday on the podcast, but the biggest argument, one, I already shared with you that a lot of these things, when you say the church was paganised in the fourth century, you can find these practices hundreds of years earlier. So the timeline doesn’t add up.
They were there from the time shortly after the apostles until today. Second, the other problem with this is that if you are a Protestant fundamentalist who says the Catholic church is actually Babylonian mystery religion repackaged. If you think that, then you can make that … An atheist can make that exact same argument against Christianity as a whole. And in fact, that was the conclusion reached by one of Hislop’s biggest supporters. So in the 20th century and evangelical author, Ralph Woodrow wrote a book called Babylon Mystery Religions, and he tried to basically repackage Hislop’s thesis but make it more accessible to people, because Hislop’s writing is very difficult to trudge through and it’s not sourced well. So Woodrow tried to make his thesis more substantive and easier to read. But then Woodrow encountered a high school history teacher who told him, “Hey, your stuff about Babylonian religions, it’s actually not true. It’s actually bad history.”
So Woodrow to his credit, went back to his sources and he realized he got a lot of it wrong and he wrote a followup book called the Babylon Connection? And in there he shows how Hislop gets all of this wrong when he tries to say that Babylonian religion is based on Nimrod, it’s in all pagan religions and the Catholic church is basically doing the same thing. He shows how first, it doesn’t make sense to say that every other religion is just a worship of Nimrod, that they can’t come up with anything new, because human beings come up with new stuff all the time. We even see this in the Bible. In Deuteronomy 32:17 it says of the Israelites, the bad Israelites, they sacrificed to demons, which were no gods to gods they had never known, to new gods that had come in of late, whom your fathers had never dreaded.
So there’s always something and people try to come up with to ensnare others. It’s not like Babylonian religion is always repackaged and then it’s … That’s the only thing that’s ever worshiped. People come up with new things all the time, but a lot of the things that they do to try to stretch this kind of material to say, “Oh, it’s the same thing.” It’s really, really weak. And here are just some of the big ones that pop up when it comes to saying, “Oh, Catholicism is actually ancient Babylonian religion or paganism that has been repackaged.” First, there’s the one that … In the book of revelation, I think it’s revelation chapter 13 it says that the beast, the one who’s going to persecute Christians, sits on seven hills. There’s clues to who the beast in the book of revelation is, this figure in St. John’s apocalypse that’s going to persecute the church, part of the great tribulation the church will undergo.
The beast of revelation, and there’s different clues as to who the beast is or Babylon, the whore of … There’s the beast and there’s the whore of Babylon who commits fornication with other nations and persecutes God’s holy ones. What are these figures represented in revelation? And so fundamentalist Protestants like Hislop and older Woodrow will say, “Oh, well, it’s clear that what it’s talking about here is the Roman Catholic church.” How do you know that? Well, it says that the whore of Babylon sits on seven hills. Wait a minute, Rome, the city of Rome is on seven hills. The Catholic church is headquartered in Rome. It’s the Roman Catholic church. Roman Catholic church, Roman Catholicism is the whore of Babylon, I figured it out. But that doesn’t work. That doesn’t make sense. First, and sometimes people make this mistake when you say what religion are you, you’ll say, “Well, I’m Roman Catholic.”
And that can be true if you mean you are a member of the Catholic church who belongs to the Latin rite, which is the largest rite of the church, the Western church or the Western Latin rite. And most of you who are my listeners belong … I belong to Latin rite, because I haven’t canonically switched rites yet. I attend a Byzantine church but I belong to the Latin rite canonically, but the title of the church itself is not the Roman Catholic church. It’s just the Catholic church. Most [inaudible 00:15:19] polemicists will put the term Roman in front of it, like Roman Catholicism, try to make it seem like the Catholic church was just invented by some guy in Rome and he just calls the shots for everything. So don’t fall into that trap of reciting that kind of language. We are Catholics, we are members of the universal church that are made up of some self-governing churches, of some, I say [inaudible 00:15:43].
They’re churches that are … They are particular churches that follow traditions and ways of worshiping that might come, maybe not from the Roman rite, maybe from what was practiced in Alexandria or in Constantinople, but they are all unified with the bishops throughout the world and in union with the Bishop of Rome. So of course Rome is important because the Bishop of Rome is the successor of the apostle Peter, but we say that is the Catholic church, the universal worldwide church whose unity is found in the successor of St. Peter, who is the Bishop of Rome. They’ll say, “Oh, Rome, seven hills. Book of revelation says the whore of Babylon sits on seven hills, that’s Rome. Bada bing, bada boom, I got you Catholic.” Here’s the problem with that. Yes, he is the Bishop of Rome, but the Bishop of Rome, the Pope, St. Peter’s Basilica, the Holy Sea is not located in Rome proper.
It’s located at the Vatican and the Vatican is located in that area of Rome on the hill, Vaticanus Hill, the Hill of the Vatican. So there are seven Hills of Rome, like the Palatine hill, Capitoline Hill, and that’s probably how you pronounce it. I’m terrible at pronouncing things. People said, “Trent, why don’t you give Mike Winger a hard time because he mispronounced the word papacies, he says papacy?” Yeah, that’s pretty egregious. But I mispronounce things all the time so I’m not going to throw glass stones at my house. I’m sorry. Don’t throw stones in a glass house. I can’t be doing that to people. So the Vatican city is on Vatican Hill, which is not … It’s across the Tibor. It’s not one of the seven hills of Rome. It’s not one of the original seven hills. Also, Babylon is referred to as the great city, it’s not referring to a church, it’s are referring to the Catholic church whose Bishop of Rome is on Vatican Hill.
The whore of Babylon is referred to as a great city seven times in the book of revelation. Revelation 16 and 17. Odds are the whore of Babylon and we’ll see this with the name of the beast, is referring to the Roman empire, to Rome that is persecuting God’s Holy ones in the first century. That’s just obvious. What John is talking about are things that are coming to pass now at that moment of people being persecuted by the Romans and people being crucified upside down, being thrown to lions. That is what the whore of Babylon refers to. That great city that commits fornication with other … With other nations through illicit economic arrangements or other kinds of illicit slave trafficking arrangements. People will say, “Oh, the whore of Babylon is described as rich and full of jewels.” Yeah, well the Catholic church does have artistic treasures that have been passed onto it, but it’s not like the Catholic church is just rolling with the dough.
In fact, I mean there are a lot of resources at the church’s disposal as you’ve seen with certain financial scandals. But actually when you go to the Vatican, you see like the Pope’s apartment for example, it’s pretty sparse actually when you see what’s going on there. But to get to the larger picture, the whore of Babylon is not the Catholic church, regardless of what Hislop and others try to say in the book of revelation, and neither is the beast. People will say … You remember in the book of revelation talks about how there’s the beast who will also persecute the church. And John says that the name of the beast, he says, “This calls for wisdom,” In the book of revelation, “Let him who has understanding reckon the number of the beast for it is a human number.”
It’s number is 666 so you’ve probably heard 666. Why? Okay, so the name of the beast is … The number of the beast is 666. It corresponds to the name of the beast and the book of revelation. Who is this? Now, of course conspiracy theorists going from Hislop onward, including seventh day Adventists and others have been notorious about this. Andreas Helvig popularized this, that the name of the beast is the Pope. The Pope is the beast because the Latin title for the Pope, Vicarious Filii de vicar of the son of God, Vicarious Filii de. That Latin title, he says that in Latin, Latin numbers have numerical value. So think about when you look at the end of a movie credit, you know when you … At the end of the movie credits usually has Latin letters to signify the copyright date.
Actually there’s a great scene in the Simpsons, I love it, where Bart skips out on school and the teacher is like, “Wait, we’re covering Roman numerals. If you don’t know what Roman numerals mean, you won’t be able to know the copyright date of movies.” So now it’s super easy because we’re in the 2000s. Before, gosh, what was it? It was like M-C, you know M is 1,000, C is 100, L is 50, X is 10. It was like M-C-L-L-C-C-D-X-V-I-I If something was in 1997, then you get to 2000 it’s just MM, 2000 and then you could add the other Roman numerals to it. And then Bart Simpson gets his comeuppance when he tries to figure out which door does not have a lion behind it. It’s door number seven. It does not have a lion behind it and it’s safe to pass through. But the doors are all marked with a Roman numerals and he’s like, “Oh, who could have guessed I would have needed to know this.”
Once again, the pinball brain connects all kinds of things. So people say that the book of revelation, Haslop and others that the mark of the beast, the name of the beast has a number 666. So Andreas Helvig, other seventh day Adventists claimed that the title of the Pope Vicarious Filii de is that those Latin … When you spell it in Latin, it adds up to 666. And they’re like, “See the he’s the beast for the book of revelation.” No, he’s not because here’s the problem with that. Vicarius Filii de is not a title of the Pope. Vicar of Christ. The vicar of Christ is a title that the Pope has used throughout history, but vicar of the son of God is not a title that the Pope uses.
What’s ironic is you can take other names. You can take a ton of names and it can add up to 666. For example, the founder of seven day Adventism, the guys, the people who pushed this conspiracy theory is Alan Gould White. And if you spell Alan Gould’s White name and you make a V for U, and two Vs for W, what number do you get? 666. You can do that with anyone. The most plausible candidate for 666, the name of the beast in book of revelation is emperor Nero. And here’s why. So Emperor Nero’s name can be spelled using Hebrew numerology. So if you’re using the Hebrew or Aramaic alphabet, which also has numbers that add up to a … They add up to … Sorry, letters that have numerical value. So in Matthew’s gospel and the genealogies, you’ll notice in Matthew’s gospel, the genealogies there, they’re different than Luke’s.
And people say that’s a contradiction. It’s not because Matthew is not trying to provide an exhaustive genealogy. He skips generations because he makes it 14 generations from Abraham to David, 14 from David to the Babylonian exile and 14 generations from the exile to the time of Christ in Matthew’s genealogy in Matthew chapter one. Why does Matthew do that? Probably because Matthew is trying to underscore that Jesus is a son of David. Jesus is part of the Davidic line, either through Mary, biologically, or through Joseph legally as his … Joseph is his legal father because Jesus is born of Mary’s wife … I’m sorry, of Joseph’s wife Mary. So he is legally Joseph’s son. Even if you adopted someone in the ancient world, you could confer upon them rights of adoption, hereditary rights and so we know Joseph is a son of David and so Jesus would also be a son of David under that legal description.
And so Matthew is saying, in Matthew chapter one these 14 generations, he’s bracketing Jesus lineage in groups of 14 because the Hebrew name David, David. The Dav and what is the V? I’m so rusty on my Hebrew on that. If you add up David’s name in a Hebrew, then you get 14, when you add that up and so you do the same with Alan Gould White, for the the Pope. You do the same thing with emperor Nero Caesar, and you use the Hebrew alphabet, there would be … Well, I guess you would kind of have a value, you’d have a val mark in there, but it would be NRONQSR is what it would look like in the Hebrew alphabet and when you add that up, it’s 666.
Also, if you add it up with the alphabet spelled a slightly different way, you get 616 and that’s important because some ancient manuscripts of the book of revelation, it’s not the name … The number of the beast is not 666, it’s 616 and so that makes sense. If you can spell Nero Caesar, a slightly different way with Hebrew or Aramaic lettering and you get 616 and that was recorded in other ancient manuscripts of the book of revelation, then you figure it out that it’s not … It’s not. It’s not the Catholic church, not the Pope. It’s not Alan Gould White, the persecutors, the whore of Babylon, the beast in the book of revelation is emperor Nero and the Roman empire. All right, let’s talk about some other Whoppers that you can find in the work of Haslop and other people who claim that Catholicism is pagan. First, I think I covered this in previous episode, but it’s well worth going over again.
On the Eucharist, you’ll notice sometimes on a Eucharistic host, there are three letters. It’s a monogram I-H-S, and so what is that? Well, that’s Jesus. Jesus. Those are the first three letters in Jesus’s name in Greek, Jesus, the Yoted I think it’s a capital Epsilon and the Sigma, or an Epsilon. Epsilon. See, once again, my mind is fleeing from me, I don’t want my Greek lexicon out. But IHS are the first Greek letters in Christ’s name. No, it’s Latin. So, I mean this in Latin, in the Latin Rite of the church. IHS is the monogram. It’s the translation of the Greek letters of Jesus’ name, which is Yoted I, Ada and Sigma. So pretty … It’s something that’s not that controversial and people will say that, “Oh, this is from pagans that came into the church because in the ancient Babylonian religion, they worshiped Isis, Horus, and Seb IHS, and put it on pieces of bread, which is not true.
That’s not from ancient Babylon. That’s from ancient Egypt. And they did not do that or worship these three as some kind of a Trinity and even more importantly, the IHS monogram that represents Jesus’s name, it was not used until the seventh century, but it didn’t become popular until it’s used by St. Bernardino of Sienna in the 15th century as a monogram for Christ. So it’s definitely not something that came from pagan influence because you don’t find it when this paganization allegedly happened in the fourth century, it doesn’t become widespread and popular to put IHS on the Eucharist or use as a monogram to refer to Christ until the 15th century in the Allegory Peers Plowman and in the writings of St. Bernardino of Sienna. Also the Jesus fish, so Haslop will say that the fish that you see, the markings of the fish, you ever look in the back of a car and it shows the Jesus fish?
It’s like, “Why do we use a fish to represent Jesus?” Hislop says that the Catholic church did this to commemorate ancient Babylonian worship of the pagan deity Dagon, D-A-G-O-N, who was also described a with a fish symbol. Nope, that’s not what it is. It’s very simple thing to explain. The Jesus fish refers to a code that Christians would use to identify themselves that the Romans were not hip to understanding. And that was the word fish or a drawing of a fish. Because the letters for a fish in the ancient Greek word for fish, [inaudible 00:27:57] they spell out an acrostic. Each letter, Yota, Chi Theos. I know it’s a Sigma. What is the other one in the middle? The Opsalon, maybe. ICTHUS, I-C-T-H-U-S, you might write it today. The Greek word for fish. Each of those letters spells out Jesus, Cristos, Thesus, Soltaire, which means Jesus Christ, son of God, savior.
So the first Christians would draw a fish or write [inaudible 00:28:26] and they would know who each other were because the Romans were like, “Fish. What the heck does that mean?” And the Greek word fish means Jesus Cristos, Theos, Eyoos, Soter. Jesus Christ, son of God. So Jesus Cristos, Jesus Christ, Theos, God, Eyoos, son. And so tear, S-O-T-Er. Soter means save. So we talk about in theology, soteriology. Soteriology is the study of salvation. There’ve actually been popes named Pope Soter, one of the earliest Pope’s in the church’s history, his name was actually Soter, Pope Soter. I love this one from Hislop. I should maybe … Maybe I’ll put the picture on trenthornpodcast.com so you can see it. You can also find it at the Catholic Encyclopedia page. He says that the miter, a papal miter looks like a fish because in an ancient picture of someone worshiping Dagon, they’re wearing a fish on their head and it looks like a papal miter
Here’s the problem with that. The very first papal miters don’t look like the pointed ones we see today. They look more like they’re like two lumps kind of, or they look like a bowl. So the miter’s actually gone on an evolution of how it looks and didn’t start off the way it does today. And of course it was introduced in the 11th long after this paganism allegedly took place. Let’s talk about one more. You’ve got one more, and that’s for tomorrow and that is dealing with Ash Wednesday. So people will say, I’ve seen this one, that Christians put ashes on their forehead on Ash Wednesday because the followers of Odin did that, and Wednesday in ancient Germanic, among the ancient Germanic peoples, Wednesday comes from Odin’s day. So Wednesday is a celebration of Odin’s day among the dramatic people and with the Gregorian calendar, these names were adopted, but we just don’t worship the pagan deities behind these different names.
Like Saturday is the worship of the Roman gods, Saturn. But that doesn’t mean we actually worship these individuals on these days. It’s just … That’s just a custom that is come down to us over the millennia. But no, we do not put ashes on our forehead because the followers of Odin did that on Odin’s day or Wednesday. So be aware of that. People might say that tomorrow on Ash Wednesday or on social media and just ask them, “Can you please point to a source for this? And not some meme that you’re just spreading around. I want an actual source.” Because that’s not the case. When you look at the book, the Encyclopedia of Wicca and Witchcraft, the only connection Odin has to ashes, the only one is Odin is said to hung … To have hung from an ash tree in order to gain enlightenment.
There’s no record of the followers of Odin putting ashes on their foreheads. There are records of ashes, though, to commemorate wailing and mourning and repentance in the Bible. It’s replete throughout the Bible. Job does that in the book of Job. Mordecai does that in the book of Esther and Tamar, a second Samuel 1319 after Tamar is raped by her brother in the book of Samuel, who then David, David’s got all kinds of problems in his house and with Amnon, I think she’s raped by her brother, Amnon, and then Absalon vows vengeance after this, but there’s just tons of drama in David’s household. And Tamar is raped by her own brother, Tamar, wails about this violation of her. And it says in Second Samuel 13:19, “Tamar put ashes on her head and rent the long robe, which she wore, and she laid her hand on her head and went away crying aloud as she went.”
So to put ashes on one’s head is not a devotion to a pagan deity like Odin. It is a commemoration of the fact that we came from ashes, from ashes to ashes, dust to dust. We are nothing without God, and so we rely on God for everything and it’s a reminder of our own mortality. Jesus says, “Don’t worry about tomorrow. Today has its own evils. We don’t have … Tomorrow’s not a guarantee. All we have is today. And so we should live that day in humility and trusting surrender to God, and to understand that when we die to ourselves through a season like lent, great fast, when we die, the only way we can become closer to is to die to ourselves. John the Baptist put it well, you remember John the Baptist, he said of Jesus, “I must decrease, so He must increase.” So lent is a great time for us to increase, to die to ourselves, and that when we lose ourselves in fasting, asceticism and prayer, when we get rid of us inside, Christ is able to fill that void.
Now, I’m not talking about centering prayer where you go totally Eastern and you’re one with the universe. I’m not talking about that. I’m just saying when we get away from the ego, from just the selfish obsession with self, that allows room for Christ to dwell within us. So I hope that is helpful for you all, but on Thursday, I’m going to continue this discussion because in Ralph Woodrow’s book, The Babylon Connection, he makes … Oh, well, he quotes an author in 1859 so there’s an author who criticized Hislop in 1859 and this is what he said to Hislop’s book when it first came out. He said, “Mr. Hislop’s argument proves too much. He finds not only the corruptions of popery.” So this is a Protestant guy who was on Hislop’s side, but he says, “So Hislop finds not only the corruptions of popery, but the fundamental articles of the Christian faith in his hypothetical Babylonian system.”
So when you try to say that Catholicism shares superficial similarities to ancient pagan religions, and usually those similarities actually don’t even exist at all to refute Catholicism, if you’re a Protestant who does that, atheist do the same thing with Christianity as a whole. So we’re going to talk about that on Thursday, part two of this discussion. Today we talked about is Catholicism pagan? No, it’s not. We can show Christianity is not pagan despite what modern atheists will say in that regard. So I hope that’s helpful for you guys. Thank you so much for stopping by, and I hope that you have a very blessed day and a very blessed Lenten season.
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