"The History of the Birth of Christmas"
And it came to pass that a young virgin conceived (the one within her conceived of God himself) and when she was great with child and her time due, did, in a lowly place of the earth, give birth to a wondrous babe, it is said on December 25th.
A few shepherds came from the neighboring mountain to marvel at the divine birth presently coming nearer to offer the child the firstlings of their flock and fields.
This child, son of God, to be called God incarnate, ushered into the world a distinctly moral power, untainted by the license which had made other worships schools of cruelty and lust.
He offered moral and later sacramental support to the people, and he offered the promise of immortality. He was to be mediator between God and man, one who appealed first to the poor and downtrodden and afterwards to all manner of men of high station as well as low.
His worship was tender and tolerant, creating an all-embracing system which rose above all national barriers, satisfied the thought of his age in its mysticism, and gave comfort and hope of blessedness and life eternal.
This god-become-man initiated a sacred meal with the Eternal God, the Father, in earth. He called twelve disciples and taught them. And when he was to die he called them to him for the sacred meal of bread and wine, telling them he would come back again.
He died and was resurrected and ascended into heaven to be with God.
At his second coming, the belief was, the dead would arise from their tombs to meet him. The just would receive eternal life, and pure souls would rise to heaven. Unclean souls would be handed over to the Evil one and his angels to be consigned to torture or to sink into endless debasement. Hell, some said, was lined with asbestos.
In the name of the divine one’s new religion, believers were initiated by baptism. They were redeemed by blood. They and their religion were to oppose idolatry.
In its history the religion was to be served by celibate priests and a high pontiff.
The first day of the week, Sunday, was the special day of worship. The birthday of the miraculous babe, December 25th, was the day of elaborate services. Libations were poured, bells rung, hymns chanted, and many candles burnt … holy sacraments were administered to the believers.
So, it is written, a little child was born at this season, to become god himself, founder of a great religion, mediator for good, champion of truth and purity, protector of the weak, foe of evil, conqueror of death, god of light and hope in this world and in the next.
And the name of this god-man, born early in the second millennium BC was Mithra, the mythical god of light.
In every respect I have mentioned so far, Mithra and his worship were like those of Jesus, the Christ, born nearly two thousand years later on a date unknown. December 25th being set as his birth date, as the newer religion of Christianity succumbed to the popular festival date.
Mithra was son of the Sun God and god of light himself. The religion of Mithraism, the by the time of the Roman Empire, was a popular faith, a great rival to Christianity.
Some scholars, Rena, for example, believed that: “If Christianity had been checked in its growth by some deadly disease, the world would have become Mithraic.”
The winter solstice birth and worship of the earlier mythical child and god was an embarrassment to the early church. Christianity, as a newer and rival cult, had to explain why its worship and so much about its central figure were so similar to pagan religion.
The early church fathers said this was THE WORK OF THE DEVIL.
That the devil knew the true faith was to come, so he invented these early and phony faiths and worships to confuse the true believers in Christ when he appeared.
Because other faiths had the rite of baptism, the Christian, Tertullian, wrote: “We recognize here also the zeal of the devil rivaling the things of God, while we find him too practicing baptism in his subjects. What similarity is there? The unclean cleanses! The ruiner sets free! The damned absolves! He will, forsooth, destroy his own work, by washing away the sins which he himself inspires!”
And we find the Christian sacred meal, the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist, being defended against what was called copying by Justin Martyr. In his words:
“Which the wicked demons have imitated in the mysteries of Mithra, commanding the same things be done. For, that bread and a cup of water are placed with certain incantations in the mystic rites of one who is being initiated, you either know or can learn.”
I speak of these things today not to diminish our pleasure in the spirit of Christmas, which reaches back far before Christianity into the dim mists of antiquity, but to enlarge our understanding of it, the ancient and continuing need for and the power of folk festivals that transcend the facts of history in our poetic and emotional expressions of meaning, comfort and hope.
It is true that many other mystery religions before Christianity and Judaism held certain similarities to Jewish and Christian worship (or the latter to them). There were marvelous birth stories and stars and threats to the babe and resurrections of mythical figures and, it was believed, of historical figures, before and after the Christian beginnings.
This should not be surprising when we think of centuries of human living and groping for meanings larger than life, and slow but sure intercultural communication.
It is written that Mithra was born in a cave.
And the Christian Apocryphal writings have it that Jesus was born in a cave. Bethlehem was a little village about eight miles from Jerusalem. Etymologically, its name means “the house of bread,” probably, however, a popular corruption of Beth-Lahamu – which means “the house of the God Lah,” a Babylonian deity also worshiped for a time by the Canaanites.
Near this village named for the god Lah, Bethlehem pilgrims are shown, to this day, a cave in which, according to the tradition, Jesus was born.
St. Jerome complained that, in his day, this cave of Jesus’ birth was used by pagans to celebrate the worship of Adonis.
Religious stories and practices have competed or continue to compete. The story of Jesus, though largely mythical and legendary, is not exactly the same as other god-man stories. We would be mistaken to believe that it was all lifted straight out of some other tradition.
There are differences as well as similarities, even between the Jesus myth and that which was its greatest rival, the story of Mithra, a rivalry ended by Emperor Constantine. The Emperor chose Christianity: whole armies would be marched under wet trees, the trees shaken above them, the water sprinkling down from the leaves, baptizing them Christians. They went under the trees Mithraics and came out on the other side Christians.
Similarities between the two religions helped the newly persuaded converts from Mithraism to accept their new Christian religion. They did not have to give up certain beliefs and practices, rites, and holidays. They had only to change names.
But there were differences aplenty in detail if one bothered about them. Mithra was born of a virgin, but another story tells of his being born of “mother rock.” He, like the church, was the rock. In youthful form his head was crowned with a Phrygian cap. A dagger in one hand and torch in the other, he is pictured emerging from a cave, or an opening rock around which sometimes a serpent is coiled.
As a naked boy, he is depicted screening himself from the violence of wind in the shelter of a fig tree. He eats the figs and makes himself a garment from the leaves, like Adam.
Later he shoots an arrow against a rock from which gushes forth water. Remember the story about Moses in the book of Numbers, how he “lifted up his hand, and with his rod he smote the rock twice and the water came out abundantly, and the congregation drank and their beasts also?”
And Mithra is noted as well for killing a mystic bull. He slays the bull, out of whose blood new life springs despite the forces of evil represented by serpent and scorpion.
Perhaps some have wondered, whence comes the idea of being washed in the blood of Jesus Christ. Today’s explanations would be bound up with the doctrine of atonement, that Jesus died for men, shed his blood for our sins and so on, and one may believe either symbolically or actually that he drinks the blood of Christ when he celebrates the Eucharist.
But the drinking the blood of the god to gain his power and eternal life is more ancient than Christianity.
It was part of the religion of Mithraism too. The mystic bull was one of the representations of the god or the power of God. The initiates practiced the taurobolium, or baptism in the blood of God by digging a pit, putting the initiate in it, and laying a grating over it.
Then they would slay the bull on the grating and let the blood drip down through the grating into the pit and over the new convert. He would literally bathe in the blood and drink the blood of the bull, which was, he believed, mystically, the blood of the God. In some faiths the lamb was substituted for the bull, thus the blood of the lamb.
Mithra's first sacred meal, the one he initiated with god, was, of course, with the Sun … God the S-U-N. The two are pictured “reclining on a couch at a solemn agape, with a table before them bearing the sacred bread, which is marked with a cross, precursor of our sacred and then just ordinary hot-cross buns, and both God and Mithra in the act of raising the cup in their right hands.” Be baptized, believe in Mithra, partake of the Lord’s Supper, and you go to heaven.
Mithraism had a lot going for it. Again it offered hope and comfort and immorality. It was highly ethical. It won converts not only among the weak and the poor but among those in high places and throughout the Roman army before and during the time of the early Christian Church.
Probably it was political power and the power of emperors that made Christianity the winner. But by our standards today we would say Mithraism had a more fundamental weakness which would have brought about its downfall unless it had made a radical change in its practices.
There were no women in the Mithraic religion. Women were not allowed to participate, worship, join, or become converts. Though highly ethical in other respects by our standards, Mithraism was strictly for men.
Constantine and the power of the state supporting Jesus over Mithra aside, I should think the religion about Jesus, in which there was not only no Gentiles or Jews but no male or female – rather all being one in Christ, was bound to come out on top in the long run, as far as the rivalry was concerned.
Anyway the mood of Christmas is a mixture of many another cultural influence from the past. For example, The Roman Saturnalia, festival of the agricultural god, Saturn, was more like some of the spirit of Christmas today than any existing worship form.
It was a joyous holiday with emphasis on calling on one’s friends and neighbors, wishing them well and exchanging gifts. Seneca reported that all Rome seemed to go mad on this day. Schools were closed, punishment was not inflicted, and distinctions of rank were forgotten for a time. Gifts and dolls were given to children, and sweets and feasting for all.
The early church fought the practices of the Saturnalia as it did the story of Mithra, but, as is easy to see, while the church won the war, Mithra and Saturn won the peace. They influenced the practice of faith, life, and worship.
After all of this, one might say, “What difference does it make?” If Christmas is the child of myth and mistake, that finishes Christmas! That is just about what happened, I remember quite vividly, as I sat in a New Testament class at Colgate-Rochester Divinity School more than two decades ago.
The New Testament professor, a good and liberal Baptist, had been telling us some of the historical facts behind the Jesus story, including, no doubt, some of those I have repeated today.
When he finished, a young graduate of Yale, a fine young man named Ted who had come to Colgate Rochester to study for the Christian ministry stood up, his face red and his voice shaking, and said, “Well, that finished Jesus!”
To which the professor replied, “Ted, if that is all you have gotten from these lectures, you have missed the point entirely.”
What is my point today? Not to finish Jesus, even if I wanted to and were foolish enough to think I could. It is to say to free-thinking religious people that, in religion, as in life, ignorance of facts important to the cultural life about us and in us is dangerous; ignorance cannot save us.
But it is also to say that myths are mediums of cultural exchange that should make humanity’s common brotherhood more obvious to all of us. That myths and the folkways surrounding them have had a validity of their own. They continue to color (and much of the coloring is compelling and beautiful) our present day needs and celebrations.
Christmas was not simply made up, invented de novo – out of nothing. It was in the air – the cultural air the ancients breathed, and in the need that ran like blood through their veins.
And Christmas is not preserved by ministers and priests and churches and protectors of the faith. It is preserved because we want it – because people want it, or some variation of it, even if it's by another name and in a tradition other than the Judeo-Christian one.
It is to speak to our joy and our hope and our feelings of compassion and friendship and love. And we will never kill it with talk of Mithra, but we can enjoy him too, as part of man’s cultural experience that has helped us say good and great sayings on a good and great day.
Take Christmas not literally but happily, with good spirit, and with too great a feeling of good will to be saturated with an old againstness.
When we hear the words: “And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger …”
Yes, and when we hear the words from the King James: “And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, good will toward men.’”
Let it not be for our dry literal-mindedness … we know better.
Let it be for that part of us which is so deep – so profoundly at one within the inner core of our being which has been covered up with years of adult incrustation and strangulation of the child-like part of our own yearning.
Let Christmas speak to that in us which still wants to and still can reach for the sacred… for the holy which we cannot name because the holy is always nameless. Yet it is that which we love and cannot do without unless we do violence to our own deeper needs.
Let us know something about the history of the birth of Christmas … but more than that, worship in the spirit that lies behind man’s more powerful religion myths.
We do so today, as, in the spirit of Christmas, we stand to sing, O Come All Ye Faithful … Number 288.
jake wrote
I added a bunch of references in here. Is that useful? Should I continue? Or does it distract?
Posted on Wed, Apr 23, 2008