Christ and Christmas

We've been hearing quite a bit about this Jesus Christ dude, but what do we know about him? We know that he was a man and that he redeemed us from the god of this world, but now it's time to take a closer look at his life. However, before we do that, let's dispel a few myths about him. For example, was he really born on december 25th? Before we delve into this, let's first look at some of the history behind christmas.

A good place to begin a meaningful search is with the Romans. Within their empire they observed the yearly holiday of Saturnalia, a week long period of lawlessness culminating on december 25th. During this festival the civil courts were not only closed, but the law dictated that no one could be prosecuted for damaging property or injuring people during this time. Ancient writers among them noted that daylight began to increase after december 22nd. Thus they assumed and believed that the sun god had died and risen from the dead three days later, which they concluded to be the reason for increasing daylight. This was cause for wild celebration, drunkenness, feasting, and giving of gifts. One ancient Greek historian mentioned that there was much drunkenness, going from house to house singing while naked, widespread rape, and eating human-shaped biscuits. The celebration also involved selecting one person from each community, force feeding them royal dainties, subjecting them to sexual rituals, and finally murdering them as sacrifices on december 25th to signify destroying the forces of darkness.

Going back even further to the druids of prehistoric times, this yearly practice of the worship of the sun god takes on even darker tones, where human sacrifice, the hanging of human body parts on evergreen trees, and cannibalism was part of their rituals. Just as it was a principle in the Mosaic law that the priests ate of whatever was offered as a sin-offering, so it was with the heathen priests of Nimrod and Baal, who were required to eat of their human sacrifices. Thus it has come to pass that cahna-Bal, the Priest of Baal, is the established word in our own tongue for someone who eats human flesh. Here then, we glimpse our first clues that human sacrifice and the eating of human flesh were behind the ancient origins of our modern christmas.

The evergreen tree has since time immemorial been seen as a symbol of life and worshipped as a phallic fertility symbol. Witches and other pagans regarded the red holly as a symbol of the menstrual blood of the queen of heaven, also known as Diana, while the white mistletoe berries were believed to be droplets of semen from the sun god. Both holly and mistletoe were hung in doorways of temples and homes to invoke powers of fertility in those who kissed beneath them by inviting the spirits of the gods and goddesses to enter them.

In Norse mythology, the god Balder was killed using a mistletoe arrow by his rival god Hoder while fighting for the female Nanna. Druid rituals used mistletoe to poison their human sacrificial victims. The christian custom of kissing under the mistletoe is an evolvement from the sexual license of Saturnalia with the Druidic sacrificial rituals. Holly wood is used by witches and sorcerers to make magic wands. Makes you wonder where our present day Hollywood, the centre of the world's movie industry derived its name.

Without labouring the point, the roots of our modern christmas celebration has its roots in witchcraft, human ritualistic murder, and the eating of human flesh. Think on that the next time you're tempted to eat one of those cute little chocolate body parts hanging on a tree.

As to santa claus, Saint Nicholas was born in Parara, Turkey in 270 AD and was only named a saint in the 19th century. Nicholas was one of the bishops at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, where the teaching of the trinity was formally established as the cornerstone of vatican doctrine. In 1087 AD a group of sailors moved his bones from Turkey to a sanctuary in Italy, where he supplanted a female deity who filled children's stockings with gifts. This goddess was ousted from her shrine and it became the centre of the Nicholas cult.

The cult spread until it was adopted by German and Celtic pagans who worshipped many gods led by Woden, who was depicted as having a long white beard, and who rode a horse through the heavens one night each year. In its bid for pagan adherents in Europe, the vatican adopted the Nicholas cult along with all their traditions.

In 1809, the novelist Washington Irving wrote a Dutch satire entitled Knickerbocker History, which refers several times to a white bearded Santa Claus (Saint Nicholas' Dutch name) riding a flying horse. Dr. Clement Moore, a professor at Union Seminary, read Knickerbocker History and in 1822 published a poem portraying a santa who descended chimneys and rode a sleigh across the sky pulled by eight reindeer.

From 1862 to 1886, the Bavarian illustrator Thomas Nast drew more than 2,200 cartoon images of santa for Harper's Weekly, portraying him in green clothing, with a home at the North Pole which had a workshop filled with elves, and who had a list of all the good and bad children in the world. In 1931, Coca Cola contracted the Swedish commercial artist Haddon Sundblom and commissioned him to create a new Santa, insisting he wear a fur-trimmed suit of bright red rather than green, and that he should be portrayed drinking a bottle of coke. That's the basic history of santa claus.

What has any of this to do with Jesus Christ or the bible? Obviously, absolutely nothing. The Reverend Increase Mather of Boston observed in 1687 that:

The early Christians who first observed the Nativity on December 25 did not do so thinking that Christ was born in that Month, but because the Heathens' Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian ones.

Many of the most popular christmas customs - christmas trees, mistletoe, gifts, drunkenness, and santa claus - are modern incarnations of the most depraved witchcraft rituals ever practiced on earth.

The word christmas itself reveals who introduced this witchcraft into christianity. It is a derivative of the words Christ and mass. The word mass means death and the ritual of the mass involves the death of Christ and the distribution of the host, a word taken from the Latin word hostiall meaning victim. The vatican simply welcomed the pagan beliefs and customs surrounding the festival of Saturnalia into their doctrines, changed the focus from the birth of the sun god to the birth of the son of god and blithely handed us christmas.

Jesus Christ was not born on december 25th, in fact he was not even born in december. Regardless of the controversy and debate this stirs up, everyone knows Jesus Christ was not born in december. So why do churches all over the world knowingly and willingly contradict the bible in their teachings? Who is this sun god, and why do churches all over the world celebrate his birthday on December 25th? Before going deeper into this, let's first consider the biblical account of the events surrounding the birth of Jesus Christ.

Chapter 31 - The Wise men and the Star