Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Sopater, Son of Pyrrhus of Berea, Was a Companion of Paul

By Akin Ojumu

A few days ago, on a flight back home from a visit to the Northeast, a friend and I were engaged in a heated dialogue – well actually I was the one on heat – about Christian beliefs and doctrines. After much huffing and puffing, in an effort to diffuse the heat, my friend concluded with the following words…well nearly exact words:

“…..I take everything by faith and don’t question the origin of my beliefs….”

Those are very disarming words aren’t they? They kind of cut to the chase and put everything in perspective. Isn’t Christianity all about faith? So why question why we do what we do and how we do it. Simply have faith and that’s it.

Right?

Well not so for me. I’ve come to a point in my Christian journey where it’s not just enough to simply take everything and anything we do – hook line and sinker – in the name of faith.

“The Pastor said it, so it must be so” just won’t cut it for me…not anymore. I do not find satisfaction in simply gulping down every word that is dished out by our men of God. There’s restlessness within me, a hunger for the truth, and a thirst to test every word I hear that it conforms to scriptures.

I’m in a place I hate to be in and it scares the living daylight out of me at times. I get scared that I do not become a peddler of false doctrine. Understanding that these are perilous times and knowing the whole shebang that comes with these times of peril:

“..Forever learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth...”

You’ll understand my trepidation as I traverse this middle earth phase of my spiritual journey.

But before you begin to question whether or not I’ve gone over the deep edge already let me remind you that,

Sopater, son of Pyrrhus of Berea, was a companion of Paul.

You’re probably thinking, non sequitor. Relax okay! I’ve not at all gone meshugaas and I still do have all my faculties intact.

The Bereans were good people. Paul even described them in such glowing terms in Acts 17:11, as being

…more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so…

According to Strong’s concordance, the word “searched” in Greek is “Anakrino”. Here’s the entry:

Anakrino

1) Examine or judge

a) To investigate, examine, enquire into, scrutinize, sift, question

1) Specifically in a forensic sense of a judge to hold an investigation

2) To interrogate, examine the accused or witnesses

b) To judge of, estimate, determine (the excellence or defects of any person or thing

These guys respectfully listened to all Paul had to say, and with an open mind, engaged him in heated discussions. They questioned this “new and strange doctrine” he was preaching – which was contrary to what they’d always known, believed and practiced. They challenged Paul forcefully and sincerely, but they heard him out all the same and did not run him out of town – or label him as these that have turned the world upside down.

Afterwards the people of Berea went home, searched the scriptures, to verify the veracity of all that Paul told them. Unlike the folks in Thessalonica, who ranted and raged against Paul, the Bereans were polite. Those of them that were not convinced – after due and diligent search of the scriptures – chose to disagree without being disagreeable. Sopater was one of the Bereans who believed. He not only believed, he went on to join Paul in his itinerary – traveling with him, from city to city, to spread the Gospel to all men. This was a guy, Sopater, who challenged and questioned Paul – a man of God – yet Paul saw him as a man of integrity who would not be easily swayed by every wind of doctrine or sleight of man.

We fail as Christians if all we do is soak in whatever is told us. It’s hard to imagine how we’ll ever live up to our God-given potentials if we don’t challenge our own beliefs, customs, and traditions. As long as we remain of lazy of minds and profoundly incurious – the earnest expectation of the creature will have to wait a long while yet for the manifestation of the sons of God.

The near total spiritual incuriosity I see in many believers scares me. It’s even more frightening in that it’s all covered up in a cloak of “walking by faith”. Brothers and Sisters it’s not a sin to think. God wants us to use our minds – that’s why He gave us our brains. If it were not so Paul wouldn’t have challenged Timothy to:

Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.

So go on, don’t be scared, think for a change.

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

The True Origin of Christmas

By David C. Pack

Where did Christmas originate? From the Bible or paganism? What is the real origin of Santa Claus—mistletoe—Christmas trees—holly wreaths—and the custom of exchanging gifts? Many are concerned about putting “Christ back into Christmas.” Was He ever there? Here are the stunning answers!

Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, holly wreaths, decorated trees, mistletoe, season’s greetings, seasonal music, “chestnuts roasting on an open fire” and Santa Claus are all associated with this holiday. These all bring warm feelings to those who celebrate it.

I grew up in a family that kept Christmas, and it was a very big event in our household every year. We left out none of the usual trimmings of this occasion. On December 24th, excitement grew with every passing minute. My parents even brewed black coffee for Santa just before sending us off to bed. I always wondered how they knew Santa liked his coffee black—just like my parents liked theirs. After going to bed on Christmas Eve, I could neither sleep nor wait to get up in the morning to see all that “Santa” had brought me.


Every year after Thanksgiving, most people’s thoughts turn to Christmas. It is the time when professing Christians are supposed to focus on Jesus Christ. After all, it is the “Christ-mass” season!

Let’s carefully examine the roots of Christmas. Let’s look at why people follow the customs associated with it. Why is it kept on December 25th? Did the early New Testament Church keep it? This booklet is filled with facts from history that, when placed together, paint a complete picture. Let’s avoid all assumptions and only accept what can be proven!

Pagan Origin
In 1990, the Solon, Ohio (a Cleveland suburb) school board banned all nativity and other Christmas scenes on any school property because they felt it violated the separation of church and state. They were challenged in court when outraged parents opposed them, feeling that Christmas was being stolen from their children and the community. The board lost the case! The citizenry had contended that Christmas was a worldwide tradition that was not part of, and transcended, religion. It was deemed to be secular—a part of virtually all cultures worldwide.

The court decision affirmed that Christmas has no Christian roots! However, the court’s opinion also noted that Bible reading and prayer obviously are associated with Christianity—a remarkable admission! The court concluded that Christmas-keeping and manger scenes could remain because they are not really part of either Christianity or religion—but prayer and Bible reading, which are, must remain excluded from schools!

Nearly all aspects of Christmas observance have their roots in Roman custom and religion. Consider the following admission from a large American newspaper (The Buffalo News, Nov. 22, 1984): “The earliest reference to Christmas being marked on Dec. 25 comes from the second century after Jesus’ birth. It is considered likely the first Christmas celebrations were in reaction to the Roman Saturnalia, a harvest festival that marked the winter solstice—the return of the sun—and honored Saturn, the god of sowing. Saturnalia was a rowdy time, much opposed by the more austere leaders among the still-minority Christian sect. Christmas developed, one scholar says, as a means of replacing worship of the sun with worship of the Son. By 529 A.D., after Christianity had become the official state religion of the Roman Empire, Emperor Justinian made Christmas a civic holiday. The celebration of Christmas reached its peak—some would say its worst moments—in the medieval period when it became a time for conspicuous consumption and unequaled revelry.”

Consider these quotes from the Catholic Encyclopedia, 1911 edition, under “Christmas”: “Christmas was not among the earliest festivals of the Church…The first evidence of the feast is from Egypt.” Further, “Pagan customs centring round the January calends gravitated to Christmas.” Under “Natal Day,” Origen, an early Catholic writer, admitted, “…In the Scriptures, no one is recorded to have kept a feast or held a great banquet on his birthday. It is only sinners (like Pharaoh and Herod) who make great rejoicings over the day on which they were born into this world” (emphasis mine).

The Encyclopedia Americana, 1956 edition, adds, “Christmas…was not observed in the first centuries of the Christian church, since the Christian usage in general was to celebrate the death of remarkable persons rather than their birth…a feast was established in memory of this event [Christ’s birth] in the 4th century. In the 5th century the Western church ordered the feast to be celebrated on the day of the Mithraic rites of the birth of the sun and at the close of the Saturnalia, as no certain knowledge of the day of Christ’s birth existed.”

There is no mistaking the origin of the modern Christmas celebration. Many additional sources could be cited and we will return to this later. Let’s begin to tie some other facts together.

It was 300 years after Christ before the Roman church kept Christmas, and not until the fifth century that it was mandated to be kept throughout the empire as an official festival honoring “Christ.”

Can Christ be Honored by Christmas?
The most common justification that one will hear regarding Christmas is that people have replaced old pagan customs and intents by asserting that they are now “focusing on Christ.” I have heard many say that they are “honoring Christ” in their Christmas-keeping. The problem is that God does not say this is acceptable to Him! Actually, He plainly commands against it! Keeping Christmas dishonors Christ! He considers everything about it to be an abomination! We will soon see why.

Christ said, “But in vain they do worship Me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men” (Matt. 15:9). Christmas is not a command of God—it is a tradition of men. Christ continued, “Full well you reject the commandment of God, that you may keep your own tradition” (Mark 7:9). Every year, throughout the world, on December 25th, hundreds of millions do just that!

We will see that God plainly commands, “Follow not the way of the heathen.” But most people do not fear God, and He allows them to make their own decisions. Human beings are free moral agents—free to obey or disobey God! But woe to those who ignore the plain Word of God!

Was Christ Born on December 25th?
Christ was born in the fall of the year. Many have mistakenly believed He was born around the beginning of winter—December 25th! They are wrong! Notice the Adam Clarke Commentary, volume 5, page 370, New York edition: “It was custom among Jews to send out their sheep to the deserts about the Passover [early spring], and bring them home at the commencement of the first rain.” The first rains began in early-to-mid fall. Continuing with this same quote: “During the time they were out, the shepherds watched them night and day. As…the first rain began early in the month of March-esvan, which answers to part of our October and November [begins sometime in October], we find that the sheep were kept out in the open country during the whole summer. And as these shepherds had not yet brought home their flocks, it is a presumptive argument that October had not yet commenced, and that, consequently, our Lord was not born on the 25th of December, when no flocks were out in the fields; nor could He have been born later than September, as the flocks were still in the fields by night. On this very ground, the nativity in December should be given up. The feeding of the flocks by night in the fields is a chronological fact…See the quotations from the Talmudists in Lightfoot.”

Luke 2:8 explains that when Christ was born, “And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.” Note that they were “abiding” in the field. This never happened in December. Both Ezra 10:9-13 and the Song of Solomon 2:11 show that winter was the rainy season and shepherds could not stay on cold, open fields at night.
Numerous encyclopedias plainly state that Christ was not born on December 25th! The Catholic Encyclopedia directly confirms this. In all likelihood, Christ was born in the fall! A lengthy technical explanation would prove this point.

Since we now know that December 25th was nowhere near Christ’s actual birthdate, where did the festival associated with this date come from?

Now read this quote under “Christmas”: “In the Roman world the Saturnalia (December 17) was a time of merrymaking and exchanging of gifts. December 25 was also regarded as the birth date of the Iranian mystery god Mithra, the Sun of Righteousness. On the Roman New Year (January 1), houses were decorated with greenery and lights, and gifts were given to children and the poor. To these observances were added the German and Celtic Yule rites when the Teutonic tribes penetrated into Gaul, Britain, and central Europe. Food and good fellowship, the Yule log and Yule cakes, greenery and fir trees, gifts and greetings all commemorated different aspects of this festive season. Fires and lights, symbols of warmth and lasting life, have always been associated with the winter festival, both pagan and Christian” (Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th Edit. Vol. II, p. 903).

A final quote about the selection of December 25th as the birthdate of Christ is necessary. Note an article in The Toronto Star, December 1984, by Alan Edmonds, entitled, “We owe a lot to Druids, Dutch”: “The Reformation cast a blight on Christmas. By then, of course, clever ecclesiastical politicians had adopted the Pagan mid-winter festival as the alleged birthdate of Jesus, of Nazareth, and thrown in a few other Pagan goodies to make their takeover more palatable.”

December 25th was not selected because it was the birth of Christ or because it was even near it. It was selected because it coincided with the idolatrous pagan festival Saturnalia—and this celebration must be carefully examined. In any event, we do not know the exact date of Christ’s birth. While God certainly could have made it known, He chose to hide it from the world’s eyes!

Who Was Saturn?
Previous quotes introduced the subject of the Saturnalia. Let’s carefully study just exactly who Saturn was. Consider the following quote from another large American newspaper, The Democrat and Chronicle, Rochester, New York, December 1984: “The Roman festival of Saturnalia, Dec. 17-24, moved citizens to decorate their homes with greens and lights and give gifts to children and the poor. The Dec. 25 festival of natalis solis invicti, the birth of the unconquered sun, was decreed by the emperor Aurelian in A.D. 274 as a Winter Solstice celebration, and sometime (later)…was Christianized as a date to celebrate the birth of the Son of Light.”

Dr. William Gutsch, chairman of the American Museum of Natural History—Hayden Planetarium, further confirmed the original name of Christmas with this quote on December 18, 1989, in a Westchester, New York, newspaper, The Reporter Dispatch:

“The early Romans were not celebrating Christmas but rather a pagan feast called the Saturnalia. It occurred each year around the beginning of winter, or the winter solstice. This was the time when the sun had taken its lowest path across the sky and the days were beginning to lengthen, thus assuring another season of growth.

“If many of the trappings of the Saturnalia, however, seem to parallel what so many of us do today, we can see where we borrowed…our holiday traditions. And indeed, it has been suggested that while Christ was most likely not born in late December, the early Christians—then still an outlawed sect—moved Christmas to the time of the Saturnalia to draw as little attention as possible to themselves while they celebrated their own holiday.”

The Saturnalia, of course, celebrated Saturn—the fire god. Saturn was the god of sowing (planting) because heat from the sun was required to allow for planting and growth of crops. He was also worshipped in this dead-of-winter festival so that he would come back (he was the “sun”) and warm the earth again so that spring planting could occur. The planet Saturn was later named after him because, among all of the planets, with its rings and bright red color, it best represented the god of fire!

Virtually every civilization has a fire/sun god. The Egyptians (and sometimes Romans) called him Vulcan. The Greeks named him Kronos, as did the Phoenicians—but they also called him Saturn. The Babylonians called him Tammuz (as Nimrod, resurrected in the person of his son), Molech or Baal (as did the Druids). These were all simply the various names for Nimrod. Nimrod was considered the father of all the Babylonian gods.

Child Sacrifice
Notice this horrible practice associated with the worship of the fire god (Nimrod, Saturn, Kronos, Molech and Baal) in the following quote from The Two Babylons, Alexander Hislop, page 231:

“Now, this is in exact accordance with the character of the Great Head of the system of fire-worship. Nimrod, as the representative of the devouring fire to which human victims, and especially children, were offered in sacrifice, was regarded as the great child-devourer…he was, of course, the actual father of all the Babylonian gods; and, therefore, in that character he was afterwards universally regarded. As the Father of the gods, he was, as we have seen, called Kronos; and every one knows that the classical story of Kronos was just this, that, ‘he devoured his sons as soon as they were born.’ (Lempriere Classical Dictionary, ‘Saturn.’)…This legend has a further and deeper meaning; but, as applied to Nimrod, or ‘The Horned One,’ it just refers to the fact, that, as the representative of Moloch or Baal, infants were the most acceptable offerings at his altar. We have ample and melancholy evidence on this subject from the records of antiquity. ‘The Phoenicians,’ says Eusebius, ‘every year sacrificed their beloved and only-begotten children to Kronos or Saturn.’”

But why was human sacrifice such a key to the worship of this terrible god? What possible good could human beings think they saw in slaughtering their own children? Continuing: “…he who approached the fire would receive a light from divinity” and “through divine fire all the stains produced by generations could be purged away.” Therefore, “children were made to pass through the fire unto Molech” (Jer. 32:35).

As incredible as it seems, deceived human beings actually believed they were pleasing their “god” by sacrificing their own innocent little children to him. They believed fire purified them from original sin. The pagan doctrine of spending time in purgatory to purge the soul from all sin derives from this belief!

Who Was Nimrod?
We must now look more closely at who this biblical figure, Nimrod, was. We have already seen him as one of history’s original false gods, but what else can be learned?

Genesis 10:9 says of Nimrod, “He was a mighty hunter before [in place of] the Lord.” He actually tried to replace God.

The famous Jewish historian, Josephus, records in Josephus Antiquities important evidence of Nimrod’s role in the post-flood world. Notice: “He also gradually changed the government into tyranny…He [Nimrod] also said he would be revenged on God, if He should have a mind to drown the world again; for that he would build a tower too high for the waters to be able to reach…Now the multitude were very ready to follow the determination of Nimrod, and to esteem it a piece of cowardice to submit to God” (Bk. I, Ch. IV, sec. 2, 3).

Under many names, mankind’s earliest and perhaps greatest rebel has been worshipped throughout false religion. Ancient Israel kept falling into serving the many false gods that Nimrod represented.

Ezekiel 8:13-14 records a picture of the women of Israel “weeping for Tammuz.” This Tammuz (the god of fire) was considered to be Nimrod and the etymology of the word itself is fascinating. Tam means “to make perfect” and muz “fire.” The meaning is clear in light of what we have already learned. Incidentally, in the Iraqi-Kuwaiti Desert Storm War, Saddam Hussein even named one of his missiles the “Tammuz.” He certainly understood that its meaning included fire.
Burned to Molech
Let’s see how God’s people, Israel, worshipped Baal/Molech once they had departed from the true God: “And they built the high places of Baal, which are in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to cause their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire unto Molech; which I commanded them not, neither came it into My mind, that they should do this abomination…” (Jer. 32:35).

Notice that God Himself says that such horrible abominations never even entered His mind: “They have built also the high places of Baal, to burn their sons with fire for burnt offerings unto Baal, which I commanded not, nor spoke it, neither came it into My mind: Therefore, behold, the days come, says the Lord, that this place shall no more be called Tophet, nor The valley of the son of Hinnom, but the valley of slaughter” (Jer. 19:5). Verse 6 ties the valley of Tophet or Hinnom to this practice. Jeremiah 7:31 connects Tophet and Hinnom to child sacrifice. Tophet means “the drum.” Drums were played to drown the screams of victims in the flames.

Notice this quote from Paradise Lost, by John Milton, about the terrible god Molech: “First Moloch, horrid king besmear’d with blood Of human sacrifice, and parents tears, Though, for the noyse of Drums and Timbrels loud Their children’s cries unheard, that passed through fire To his grim Idol.” Of course, everyone will say that they do not sacrifice their children to Molech today, but read on.

In the New Testament, the martyr Stephen was stoned to death, at least partly, because he indicted his listeners for the worship of this evil idol (Acts 7:43).

When righteous King Josiah came to the throne, as king of Judah, he destroyed the altars in the Valley of Tophet (or Hinnom—the very same valley Christ likened to “gehenna” fire in Mark 9:43-49) soon after coming to power. He realized the great evil of the practices taking place there.

The Druids and Human Sacrifice
Many people have heard of the Druids. Few know who and what they were. We will refer to them later and tie them to other well-known Christmas practices. We must first establish their historic role in human sacrifice.

Julius Caesar is the best-known source of information about the Druids. This comes from the Encyclopedia Britannica. This quote, under “Druids,” clearly explains who they were: “Druids, the learned class among the ancient Celts, whose name means Knowing (or Finding) the Oak Tree. They seem to have frequented Oak forests and acted as priests, teachers and judges. The earliest known records of the Druids come from the 3rd century [B.C.]…Druids took charge of public and private sacrifices, and many young men went to them for instruction. They judged all public and private quarrels and decreed the penalty…The Druids principle doctrine was that the soul was immortal…(they) offered human victims for those who were gravely sick or in danger of death in battle. Huge wickerwork images were filled with living men and then burned; although the Druids chose criminals by preference, they sacrificed innocent victims if necessary.”
The Old Testament is filled with God’s condemnation of Israel for practicing the customs of the nations around them—and we are gathering important facts revealing a shocking picture.

The Role of Cannibalism
Another truth about the origin of Christmas springs from the modern word cannibal. This practice has its roots in a prime function of all priests of Baal. Keep in mind that the Hebrew word for priest is Cahn. Consider the following quote from The Two Babylons, by Alexander Hislop, page 232: “And it was a principle of the Mosaic law, a principle no doubt derived from the patriarchal faith, that the priest must partake of whatever was offered as a sin-offering (Numbers xviii. 9, 10). Hence, the priests of Nimrod or Baal were necessarily required to eat of the human sacrifices; and thus it has come to pass that ‘Cahna-Bal,’ the ‘Priest of Baal,’ is the established word in our own tongue for a devourer of human flesh.”

The reality of this can be lost on no one! It is also true that most civilizations have a tradition that has involved cannibalism. Notice this statement from The New York Times, “What Is the Meaning of Cannibalism?” by Erik Eckholm: “Cannibalism has once fascinated and repelled virtually every known society, including those said to have practiced it.”

This same article went on to show that most civilizations also attached divine significance to its practice.

What About the Santa Myth?
Have you considered that you could also be burning, even sacrificing, your children today (though in a different way) in your practice of Christmas, while you may be trying to sincerely “focus on Christ”? Parents reason that they owe the whole Christmas myth to their children! Christmas traditions are focused primarily on kids, and they are certainly the center of most of what happens. I know because I kept seventeen Christmases. My older sister and younger brother and I were the recipients of much and the givers of very little on that day—and it all started with the Santa Claus lie.

Some years ago, a priest in New Jersey told his Sunday school class that Santa was a myth. The outrage from parents and his supervisors was swift. He had “killed Santa!” He had “destroyed family tradition!” He had “usurped family authority,” the article continued. He was officially censored by his superiors for being “overzealous and insensitive.”

His crime? He told the truth!

According to Langer’s Encyclopedia of World History, (article “Santa”), “Santa” was a common name for Nimrod throughout Asia Minor. This was also the same fire god who came down the chimneys of the ancient pagans and the same fire god to whom infants were burned and eaten in human sacrifice among those who were once God’s people.

Today Santa Claus comes from “Saint Nicholas.” Washington Irving, in 1809, is responsible for remaking the original old, stern bishop of this same name into the new “jolly St. Nick” in his Knickerbocker History of New York. (Most of the rest of America’s Christmas traditions are even more recent than this.) “Old Nick” has long been recognized as a term for the devil.

In Revelation 2:6 and 15, we read about a “doctrine of the Nicolaitanes,” which Christ twice tells His Church “[He] hates.” Let’s analyze the word Nicolaitane. It means “follower of Nicholas.” Nikos means “conqueror, destroyer.” Laos means, “people.” Nicolaitanes, then, are people who follow the conqueror or destroyer—Nimrod. If you have believed that following Christmas is an innocent Christian custom, let this truth sink in!

Is It Scriptural to Exchange Gifts?
Merchants regularly report that over 60% of their annual retail sales occur during the Christmas shopping season. This represents a tremendous amount of gift buying. Most today believe that gift-giving comes from the Bible example of the “three wise men” (the Bible gives no number) presenting gifts to Christ. Is this true? Where did exchanging gifts come from, and what does God’s Word say about it? The Bibliotheca Sacra states, “The interchange of presents between friends is a like characteristic of Christmas and the Saturnalia, and must have been adopted by Christians from the pagans, as the admonition of Tertullian plainly shows” (Vol. 12, pp. 153-155).
Like every other aspect of Christmas, the shocking truth is that even this supposed Christian custom does not come from the Bible. It is an irony that people love to believe they are following the custom of the wise men giving to Christ, when actually they are giving almost exclusively to each other! What hypocrisy! Christ is completely forgotten.

The Bible actually teaches that Christians should not keep birthdays. Numerous scriptures make this principle clear. (Read our article “Are Birthday Celebrations Christian?”) However, what if you went to a birthday party that had been prepared for you and everybody gave gifts to each other and you were left out? The idea is ridiculous! If this happened, you would say that people were being selfish and forgetting you. In fact, most people give to others on Christmas merely because they expect to receive gifts themselves!

Let’s briefly return to the “wise men” who gave gifts to Christ. The scripture describing this is Matthew 2:1-11: “Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem, saying, Where is He that is born King of the Jews?…And when they were come into the house, they saw the young Child with Mary His mother, and fell down, and worshipped Him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto Him gifts; gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.”

It is commonly supposed that these were birthday presents for “baby Jesus.” But is this what the Bible actually says? Absolutely not! First, it is important to note that they did give the gifts to Jesus. They did not stand in His presence and exchange gifts among themselves or give them to others. The gifts were “presented unto Him.” Also, they arrived well after His “birthday.” This is another reason these could not have been “birthday presents.”

A long-standing, ancient custom of the East was to present gifts when coming before a king. These men understood they were in the presence of the “King of the Jews.” The Bible carries many examples of people sending gifts to kings or presenting them upon arrival into their presence. This custom is common today when ambassadors or others come into the presence of a world leader.

Finally, notice what the Adam Clarke Commentary, volume 5, page 46, states about what really happened on this occasion: “Verse 11. They presented unto him gifts. The people of the east never approach the presence of kings and great personages, without a present in their hands. This custom is often noticed in the Old Testament, and still prevails in the east, and in some of the newly discovered South Seas Islands.” Gifts were customarily presented to kings. What could be more plain?

The Origin of the Christmas Tree
No booklet about Christmas is complete without some explanation of the “Christmas tree.” We have touched on it without directly focusing on it. The modern Christmas tree originated in Germany. But the Germans got it from the Romans, who got it from the Babylonians and the Egyptians.

The following demonstrates what the Babylonians believe about the origin of the Christmas tree: “An old Babylonish fable told of an evergreen tree which sprang out of a dead tree stump. The old stump symbolized the dead Nimrod, the new evergreen tree symbolized that Nimrod had come to life again in Tammuz! Among the Druids the oak was sacred, among the Egyptians it was the palm, and in Rome it was the fir, which was decorated with red berries during the Saturnalia!” (Walsh, Curiosities of Popular Customs, p. 242).

Frederick J. Haskin’s Answers to Questions states, “The Christmas tree is from Egypt, and its origin dates from a period long anterior to the Christian Era.” Did you know this—that the Christmas tree long preceded Christianity?

Most aspects of Christmas are not referred to in the Bible. Of course, the reason is that they are not from God—they are not part of the way He wants people to worship Him. The Christmas tree, however, is directly mentioned in the Bible! Turn to Jeremiah 10:2-5, “Thus says the Lord, Learn not the way of the heathen…For the customs of the people are vain: for one cuts a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe. They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not. They are upright as the palm tree, but speak not: they must needs be borne, because they cannot go. Be not afraid of them; for they cannot do evil, neither also is it in them to do good.”

This plain description of the modern Christmas tree is clear. God directly refers to it as “the way of the heathen.” Just as directly, He commands His people to “learn not the way of the heathen,” calling these customs “vain.” Verse 23 adds a remarkable and powerful statement: “O Lord, I know that the way of man is not in himself: it is not in man that walks to direct his [own] steps.” God must teach people how to live. Man simply cannot figure out God’s ways for himself.

There is no room in Jeremiah 10 to believe, as some have tried to suggest, that because these trees are powerless of themselves, it is not really forbidden to have a Christmas tree. God condemns the putting up of pagan (Christmas) trees with this plain Bible command!

The Source of Holly Wreaths, Yule Logs and Mistletoe
The Encyclopedia Americana states, “The holly, the mistletoe, the Yule log…are relics of pre-Christian times.” In other words, paganism! The Yule log was commonly used in a rite of Teutonic nature worship. Frederick Haskin further states, “The use of the Christmas wreath is believed by authorities to be traceable to the pagan custom of decorating buildings and places of worship at the feast which took place at the same time as our Christmas.”

The Encyclopedia Britannica, under “Celastrales,” exposes the origin of the holly wreath: “European pagans brought holly sprays into their homes, offering them to the fairy people of the forests as refuges from the harsh winter weather. During the Saturnalia, the Roman winter festival, branches of holly were exchanged as tokens of friendship. The earliest Roman Christians apparently used holly as a decoration at the Christmas season.”

There are dozens of different types of holly. Virtually all of them come in male and female varieties—such as “Blue Prince and Blue Princess” or “Blue Boy and Blue Girl” or “China Boy and China Girl.” Female holly plants cannot have berries unless a nearby male plant pollinates them. It is easy to see why the holly wreath found its way into pagan rituals as a token of friendship and fertility!

Christmas is incomplete to many unless it involves “kissing under the mistletoe.” This pagan custom was natural on a night that involved much revelry done in the spirit of drunken orgies. Just like today, this “kissing” usually occurred at the beginning of the Saturnalia/Christmas celebration. I will never forget having to always kiss my friends’ mothers upon entering each of their houses every Christmas. It was the first thing that we did. I hated it—but it was something I “had to do”! Mistletoe was considered to have special powers of healing for those who “reveled” under it.

The Encyclopedia Britannica, under “Santalales,” states, “The European mistletoe is thought to have had special ritual significance in Druidical ceremonies and lives in folklore today, its special status as the Christmas mistletoe having come from Anglo-Saxon times.” Mistletoe is a parasite that lives on oak trees. (Recall that the Druids worshipped in oak tree groves.) The ancient Celtics (associated with the Druids) used to give mistletoe as an herbal remedy to barren animals to make them fertile. It is still referred to as “all healer” in Celtic.

Like mistletoe, holly berries were also thought to be sacred to the sun god. The original “sun log” came to be called the yule log. “Yule” simply means “wheel,” which has long been a pagan representation of the sun. No wonder people today commonly speak of the “sacred yule-tide season.”

Worship of the True God Mixed with False Practices
The modern term for merging false pagan customs with the worship of the true God is called syncretism. Anyone who did this in ancient Israel was put to death (Lev. 18:21, 29)! It was that serious!

A fascinating look into how Israel thought and believed, in their own minds, that they were worshipping God as an entire nation, comes from II Kings 17:33: “They feared the Lord, and served their own gods, after the manner of the nations whom they carried away from there.”

Did you grasp this? Yes, they feared the true God while serving other gods. No wonder the very next verse (34) states that they really “fear NOT the Lord” according to the way God commanded. This is how God views what people are doing today—no matter what these people copying ancient pagan practices might think of their own actions! Verse 30 says that all this had been learned from contact with “the men of Babylon” (among others), whose chief god, we will recall, was Nimrod (Baal or Molech)—who we now know were one and the same. Notice how specific was God’s warning to Israel in Deuteronomy 12:29-31, and why He warned them! “When the Lord your God shall cut off the nations from before you…and you succeed them, and dwell in their land; Take heed to yourself that you be not snared by following them, after that they be destroyed from before you; and that you enquire not after their gods, saying, How did these nations serve their gods? Even so will I do likewise. You shall not do so unto the Lord your God: for every abomination to the Lord, which He hates, have they done unto their gods; for even their sons and their daughters have they burnt in the fire to their gods.”

Many verses, similar to Deuteronomy 12, should be carefully studied. (See Exodus 34:10-17; 23:23-33; Leviticus 20:22-26; Deuteronomy 20:13-18, etc.) The true God knew that serving other gods always led to sacrificing children to them! Deuteronomy 12:32 made clear that God does not want us to mix His ways with any false ways: “What thing soever I command you, observe to do it: you shall not add thereto, nor diminish from it.” These are God’s plain words to all who say that they can mix the horrible customs of outright paganism with a supposed “focus on Christ.”

Ancient Israel’s Pagan Practices in Modern Customs
Deuteronomy 12:2-4 establishes an important context. God plainly says, “You shall utterly destroy all the places, wherein the nations which you shall possess served their gods, upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree: And you shall overthrow their altars…and burn their groves with fire…you shall not do so unto the Lord your God.”

Notice God’s references to “every green tree” and “their groves.” There are at least ten similar verses throughout the Old Testament referring to “green trees” and their association with idolatry. Historians hold that the reference to the term “green” refers to green year-round—evergreen trees!

Once again, let’s more closely examine the actual history and origins of some of the Saturnalia customs still practiced today. Notice the following chilling quote from the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, “Oscilla” 3rd edition, volume II: “…all ranks devoted themselves to feasting and mirth, presents were exchanged among friends, and crowds thronged the streets, shouting ‘Lo Saturnalia.’ An offering was made beneath a decorated evergreen tree, according to the pagan poet, Virgil. Figurines and masks—called ‘oscilla’—were hung on the tree, as are Christmas decorations today. History admits…there can be no doubt that we have in these ‘oscilla’ a relic of human sacrifice…”

Doesn’t all of this sound familiar? Presents, singing in the streets, evergreen trees, decorations, offerings under the tree, merrymaking, feasting? They may sound wonderful, but they represent things that are truly abominable.

Modern oscilla look like chubby little “angels” when hanging on a tree. I placed these little “angel babies” on our tree, myself, as a small child. At least I thought they were angel babies. How wrong I was! Do you think any of your friends realize what they really represent? Of course not—but that does not make it any less serious or less wrong in God’s eyes!

Outright Paganism Blended into the Church
One additional source demonstrates how this all came to be a heritage practiced so “innocently” by millions—yet far from innocent in God’s sight. Now read the following quote from Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th edition, volume 10, pages 1062-3: “Christianity…by a complex and gradual process…became the official religion of the [Roman] empire. “For a time, coins and other monuments continued to link Christian doctrines with worship of the sun, to which Constantine had been addicted previously. But even when this phase came to an end, Roman paganism continued to exert other, permanent influences, great and small…The ecclesiastical calendar retains numerous remnants of pre-Christian festivals, notably Christmas, which blends elements including both the feast of the Saturnalia and the birthday of Mithra. But, most of all, the mainstream of Western Christianity owed ancient Rome the firm discipline that gave it stability and shape.”

An authority as reputable as the Encyclopedia Britannica actually acknowledges, for any willing to see, that the Saturnalia and ancient Rome are what defined the “discipline…stability and shape” of Western Christianity!

This is a truly stunning admission!

The next powerful quote reveals how this idolatrous, pagan festival slipped into the “Christian” world. It is from the New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, under “Christmas”:

“How much the date of the festival depended upon the pagan Brumalia (December 25) following the Saturnalia (Dec. 17-24), and celebrating the shortest day of the year and the ‘new sun’…cannot be accurately determined. The pagan Saturnalia and Brumalia were too deeply entrenched in popular custom to be set aside by Christian influence…The pagan festival with its riot and merry-making was so popular that Christians were glad of an excuse to continue its celebration with little change in spirit and in manner. Christian preachers of the West and the Near East protested against the unseemly frivolity with which Christ’s birthday was celebrated, while Christians of Mesopotamia accused their Western brethren of idolatry and sun worship for adopting as Christian this pagan festival.”

One additional source reveals how the Roman church absorbed Christmas into an official celebration. The Encyclopedia Britannica, 1946 edition, states, “Christmas was not among the earliest festivals of the church…Certain Latins, as early as 354, may have transferred the birthday from January 6th to December 25, which was then a Mithraic feast…or birthday of the unconquered SUN…The Syrians and Armenians, who clung to January 6th, accused the Romans of sun worship and idolatry, contending…that the feast of December 25th, had been invented by disciples of Cerinthus…”

Thus, a pagan festival, celebrated long before Christ’s birth, found its way into recognized Christianity.

Did you know that even the seventeenth century Puritans of New England understood how wrong Christmas was? They actually banned its observance by law, in 1659, throughout the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Fines and imprisonment could result from being found keeping it. It was almost 200 years (1856) before people stopped working on Christmas in Boston. The Puritans knew its roots and labeled it “heathen, papist idolatry.”

Those Who “Change Times and Laws”
The prophet Daniel (7:8) speaks of a “little horn,” which (7:25) “shall speak great words against the Most High…and think to change times and laws.” This little horn is a great religious authority that attempts to superimpose its own view of dates and celebrations, on an unsuspecting world, in place of God’s plain instruction.

The Hebrew word translated “change” means to “transform, alter or set.” The word translated “times” means “appointed occasions, seasons or times.” The Hebrew word translated “laws” means “decrees or laws of God.” When put together, this phrase refers to an authority that attempts to “transform appointed occasions and seasons within the Law of God.” Certainly, Christmas is a great example of how this has been done. God’s instructions have been replaced with religious traditions of men.

The following quote reveals how this has happened. It also comes from the Encyclopedia Britannica, under “Christianity”: “Thus, the Easter liturgy has been developed more highly in the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Christmas liturgy more highly in the Roman Catholic Church…The Christian calendar is the most widely disseminated Christian institution. The seven-day week and the rhythm of the Christian festivals have been accepted even by most of the non-Christian countries. Despite energetic attempts at the introduction of a sliding work week, the seven-day week with work-free Sunday could not be eliminated even in Communist states with an Atheist world view. Even in Atheistic circles and organizations throughout the world, Christian holidays enjoy an undisputed popularity as work-free days…especially Christmas.”

Truly, it has been the “ecclesiastical politicians,” referred to earlier, who have sought to impose the modern “Christian” calendar on an unknowing world. It is these leaders who have “thought to change times and laws.”

The Dangerous Power of Lies
One of Satan’s names is Destroyer (Rev. 9:11).

Nimrod/Saturn/Molech/Baal, like Satan, is the fire god who destroys and devours little children.
The real Jesus Christ was never in and never will be in Christmas! He cannot be put back into where He has never been. But the “god of this world,” Satan (II Cor. 4:4), has always been in Christmas. He is its author!

The true God commands that we “must worship Him in spirit and in truth” (John 4:23-24). This does not mesh with the great Christmas and Santa Claus lies that all children so willingly believe.
I Timothy 4:2 warns of those “speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron.” Parents can “burn” their own children, to the point of searing them, with the Christmas deception and lie!

There is no “safety in numbers” in this world for those who keep Christmas, because Satan, who is called “the father of lies” and “a murderer from the beginning” (John 8:44), has “deceived the whole world” (Rev. 12:9)! Turn to this verse and read it. Then recognize that Christmas is certainly a testimony to that great deception.

But Christ refers to His Church as a “little flock” (Luke 12:32). Many other verses show this. This Church does not have the large numbers of the respected, established brands of the Christianity of this world.

“Another ­ Jesus”
There is another problem with the idea of “putting Christ back in Christmas”—and it is big! The “Jesus” that is the focus of this season is not the true Jesus Christ of the Bible!

Most have been taught that there is only one Jesus Christ. But God’s Word speaks of a counterfeit, and this substitute Christ is identifiable in history. The proof? The apostle Paul warned of “another Jesus.” Grasp what is at stake ­ here!

First, consider Paul’s entire introduction as he sets the stage for the warning that follows: “But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent [Satan] beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ” (II Cor. 11:3).

Now for the actual warning in the next verse: “For if he that comes preaches another Jesus, whom we have not preached, or if you receive another spirit, which you have not received, or another gospel, which you have not accepted, you might well bear with him” (II Cor. 11:4). The Corinthians seemed to “bear with this” without much ­ resistance. Paul, under inspiration of the true Jesus Christ of the Bible, was moved to record the peril of unwittingly following “another Jesus.” Consider. Most have probably never remotely considered the idea of a false Jesus for even a ­ moment—that ­ there is such a thing as a wrong, different and “false ­ Christ” (Matt. 24:23-24)—­ called “another Jesus.” In the past, this “Jesus” has even corrupted the thinking of true Christians. This much is plain. But the “subtilty” of how this can happen, and how it has occurred in history, is so ­ deceptive—­ so ­ seductive—­ that even true Christians can unknowingly slip into worshipping this ­ so-­ called Jesus. This is what was happening to the ­ Corinthians.

People can worship in ways that represent things that are far different than what they sincerely believe or intend. Bible “believers” today can think that they are worshipping the true Savior when they are really worshipping a false ­savior—­another Jesus! The entirety of traditional Christianity is actually worshipping Nimrod/Saturn/Molech/Baal. The modern mother/child “Mary/Jesus” emphasis, including the worshipful adoration of Mary by millions, is a parallel with Nimrod and his mother, Semiramis, that cannot be ­ missed.

Here is the point of what is being explained. Many speak of “putting Christ back into Christmas.” This is heard every year from thousands of pulpits and elsewhere. But the true Christ was never there! Just as a person cannot go back into a room that he had never entered, Jesus Christ cannot be “put back” into an event that He has never been in, and that He in fact hates! (Again, see Mark 7:7.) The Jesus that these preachers and religionists have in mind is another Christ, one with another gospel, another spirit—the Christmas spirit!—bringing totally different doctrines and teachings.

Can you see the connection?

What Should You Do?
Finally, let’s examine what God told His people they should do and the way they ought to teach their children.

Recall Jeremiah 7:31, where God condemned Israel for burning their children in the Valley of Tophet. Eight verses earlier (vs. 23-24), God had made plain what He requires: “But this thing commanded I them, saying, Obey My voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be My people: and walk you in all the ways that I have commanded you, that it may be well unto you. But they hearkened not…but walked…in the imagination of their evil heart…”

Human beings do not want to obey God (Rom. 8:7). They would rather follow their own “imagination.” They do not understand that God wants their lives to go “well.” He wants happiness, joy and blessings to flow into people’s lives. All these are the results of obeying Him.

God inspired Moses to warn parents of the grave responsibility that they have in what and how they teach their children. Notice His instruction in Deuteronomy 6:1, 6-7, 20-21, 25: “Now these are the commandments…which the Lord your God commanded to teach you, that you might do them in the land where you go to possess it…And these words, which I command you this day, shall be in your heart: And you shall teach them diligently unto your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up…And when your son asks you in time to come, saying, What mean the testimonies, and the statutes, and the judgments, which the Lord our God has commanded you? Then you shall say unto your son, We were Pharaoh’s bondmen in Egypt; and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand…And it shall be our righteousness, if we observe to do all these commandments before the Lord our God, as He has commanded us.”
God took Israel out of Egypt—from slavery—out of the customs of the world around them and revealed His Law to them. He does not want His people going back to the traditions, customs and ways from which He has called them.

When all of the interconnected traditions, filled with the symbolism of worshipping an ancient pagan, humanly devised god, are taught, this is not worshipping the true Creator.

We Have not Known that Christmas is of Babylon
Jesus said twice, in Matthew 7:16 and 20, that “you shall know them by their fruits.” Everything that people say or do, good or bad, has fruits. The fruits of Christmas are terrible. This season leads the entire year in adultery, loneliness, jealousy, drunkenness and drunk driving, family arguments (and worse), and accumulation of debt that often lasts until March. This problem is so significant that almost all churches typically report that their incomes—how ironic—drop during this period as people “recover” from all their spending!

The Real “Christmas Spirit”
The prophet Isaiah was inspired to write, “Cry aloud, spare not, lift up your voice like a trumpet, and show My people their transgression” (58:1). I have done this. Now that you have read the plain truth about the true origin of Christmas, what will you do?

The next quote comes from the booklet The Plain Truth About Christmas, by Herbert W. Armstrong. It summarizes the booklet you have just read:

“Christmas has become a commercial season. It’s sponsored, kept alive, by the heaviest retail advertising campaigns of the year. You see a masqueraded ‘Santa Claus’ in many stores. Ads keep us deluded and deceived about the ‘beautiful Christmas spirit.’ The newspapers, who sell the ads, print flowery editorials exalting and eulogizing the pagan season, and its ‘spirit.’ A gullible people has become so inoculated, many take offense when told the truth. But the ‘Christmas spirit’ is created each year, not to honor Christ, but to sell merchandise! Like all Satan’s delusions, it appears as an ‘angel of light,’ is made to appear good. Billions of dollars are spent in this merchandising spree every year, while the cause of Christ must suffer! It’s part of the economic system of Babylon!

“We have professed to be Christian nations, but we’re in Babylon, as Bible prophecy foretold, and we don’t know it! ‘Come out of her, my people, that you be not partakers of her sins, and that you receive not of her plagues’—now soon to fall—is the warning of Revelation 18:4 [emphasis mine].

“This year, instead of gift-trading, why not put that money into God’s Work?”


David C Pack is the Pastor General of the Restored Church of God

URL: http://www.thercg.org/books/ttooc.html

E. A. Adeboye

A Pentecostal preacher from Nigeria has made big plans to save your soul.

By Lisa Miller-------Newsweek

From the Magazine Issue Dated Jan 5, 2009

You may never have heard of E. A. Adeboye, but the pastor of The Redeemed Christian Church of God is one of the most successful preachers in the world. He boasts that his church has outposts in 110 countries. He has 14,000 branches—claiming 5 million members—in his home country of Nigeria alone. There are 360 RCCG churches in Britain, and about the same number in U.S. cities like Chicago, Dallas, and Tallahassee, Fla. Adeboye says he has sent missionaries to China and such Islamic countries as Pakistan and Malaysia. His aspirations are outsize. He wants to save souls, and he wants to do so by planting churches the way Starbucks used to build coffee shops: everywhere.

"In the developing world we say we want churches to be within five minutes' walk of every person," he tells NEWSWEEK. "In the developed world, we say five minutes of driving." Such a goal may seem outlandish, but Adeboye is a Pentecostal preacher: he believes in miracles. And Pentecostalism is the biggest, fastest-growing Christian movement since the Reformation.

One of the strangest images from the 2008 campaign was the YouTube clip of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin in church, head bowed, palms turned up toward heaven, standing silently as Thomas Muthee, a Pentecostal preacher from Kenya, prayed for her freedom from witchcraft. The clip (and a NEWSWEEK article about it) triggered its own little culture skirmish, with secular observers calling Palin a "wack job" and conservative Christians responding "There's nothing wrong with her church!!!" Few commentators on either side noted how normal that scene was to hundreds of millions of Christians around the globe.

The world now has about 600 million Pentecostals, the largest group of Christians after Roman Catholics. In Asia, the number of Pentecostals has grown from about 10 million to 166 million since 1970, according to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. In Latin America, Pentecostals have expanded from 13 million to 151 million; in North America, from 19 million to 77 million; and in Africa, from 18 million to 156 million. By 2050 most of Africa will be Christian, estimates Grant Wacker, professor of Christian history at Duke University—and most of those Christians will be Pentecostals.

Modern Pentecostalism was born in America in the early 20th century, when a former Methodist minister named Charles Parham began teaching that Christians who were filled with the Holy Spirit could, like the disciples of Jesus, speak in tongues. (The sound, for those who have not heard it, is extraordinary: like crooning or keening or jibber jabber.) From the start, the faith appealed across ethnic lines to the poor and the marginalized. Its lack of denominational structure meant "you didn't have to have a highly trained and educated clergy with a long graduate education," says Vinson Synan, dean emeritus of the divinity school at Regent University. "Common people [were] pastoring common people." Televangelist healers like Oral Roberts helped keep the movement growing.

Pentecostals believe that the Holy Spirit is always at work in the world and that certain people possess its gifts: speaking in tongues, the healing touch, the power to cast out demons and witches. An emphasis on prosperity and healing attracts converts without savings accounts or health insurance. The emphasis on Biblical inerrancy and on rigid social rules—no drinking, no smoking, no premarital sex—offers structure for people whose lives have been devastated by addiction or illness. In places like Africa (and indeed, like Palin's Alaska at the turn of the last century), Pentecostalism finds fertile ground among adherents of native religions who already believe the world is alive with spirits.

By Pentecostal standards, Adeboye is mainstream. Formerly a mathematics instructor at the University of Lagos, he began working at RCCG translating the previous pastor's sermons from Yoruba to English. He took over the congregation in 1981. His success, he says, is rooted in his message. "Pentecostals have such an impact because they talk of the here and now, not just the by and by, he says. "We pray for the sick, but we pray for their prosperity, for their overcoming of evil forces and so on. While we have to worry about heaven, there are some things God could do for us in the here and now." At a recent revival meeting in London, Adeboye and his ministers preached 12 hours straight to a crowd of 30,000. At the altar call, hundreds of people rushed toward the stage from every corner of the arena, visibly filled with euphoria. They call their pastor "Daddy."

Behind Adeboye's extraordinary success is his reputation for honesty. While other Pentecostal pastors (including some Nigerians) have been accused of financial misdeeds or faking supernatural powers, Adeboye remains above the fray. Nigerian government leaders seek his input on pressing social issues. He recently made a public-service announcement condemning discrimination against people with HIV. He distributes his message globally through Facebook and MySpace, a self-published magazine called "The Mandate," and a digital-cable channel called Open Heavens TV. His appearance is straitlaced: he always wears a pinstriped suit, a gleaming white shirt and a bow tie.

Adeboye experienced a miracle recently on a long and dangerous stretch of highway near Lagos, he says. His car was out of gas, and the gas stations were empty. Then God spoke to him, clearly, and said to keep driving. Adeboye drove 200 miles on empty. Could his gas gauge have been broken? No, he insists, God intervened "because of the need … in a crisis." Adeboye knows well what some in the West have forgotten: in today's world, everyone needs a Daddy.


With Rod Nordland in London, Anne Underwood in New York and Abbas Poptani in London

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/176333

 

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

It’s a Narnia Christmas

By LAURA MILLER

EVERY Christmas, I re-read C .S. Lewis’s novel “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” The holiday seems like the ideal time for an excursion into my imaginative past, and so I return to the paperback boxed set of “The Chronicles of Narnia” that my parents gave me for Christmas when I was 10. For me, Narnia is intimately linked with the season.

I’m not alone. In Britain, stage productions of “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” are a holiday staple, for good reason. The book rests on a foundation of Christian imagery; its most famous scene is of a little girl standing under a lamppost in a snowy wood; and Father Christmas himself makes an appearance, after the lion god Aslan frees Narnia from an evil witch who decreed that it be “always winter, and never Christmas.”


That I’m not a Christian doesn’t much hinder my enjoyment of either the holiday or the book, but the presence of Father Christmas bothered many of Lewis’s friends, including J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien, whose Middle-earth was free of the legends and religions of our world, objected to Narnia’s hodgepodge of motifs: the fauns and dryads lifted from classic mythology, the Germanic dwarfs and contemporary schoolboy slang lumped in with the obvious Christian symbolism.


But Lewis embraced the Middle Ages’ indiscriminate mixing of stories and motifs from seemingly incompatible sources. The medievals, he once wrote, enthusiastically adopted a habit from late antiquity of “gathering together and harmonizing views of very different origin: building a syncretistic model not only out of Platonic, Aristotelian and Stoical, but out of pagan and Christian elements.”


Christmas as we now know it is much the same sort of conglomeration, and when people call for a return to its pure, authentic roots, they’re missing an essential quality of the holiday. Narnia is a mongrel thing, and so is Christmas. As is often the case, this mongrelizing is the source of its strength.


Complaints about the corruption, dilution or fundamental impiety of Christmas have been made for centuries. The Puritans so mistrusted the holiday that its celebration was outlawed in 17th-century Boston. Around the same time, the German theologian Paul Ernst Jablonski asserted that Christmas amounted to a paganization of the authentic faith because the date, Dec. 25, had been appropriated from a festival for a Roman solar god.


(Some Christian scholars, including the current pope, have actually argued that the appropriation went the other way around, and the solar festival was in fact a heathen bid to co-opt the feast day of an increasingly popular monotheistic cult.)


On the other side, non-Christians who relish the holiday like to point out that many Christmas icons — the decorated tree, the Yule log, mistletoe — were originally sacred to Celtic and Northern European pagans.


Yet even the Yuletide customs that are supposedly pagan holdovers must be taken with a grain of salt. We have no written records of the cultures from which they supposedly derive; everything we know about them comes second- and thirdhand from Roman or Christian writers pursuing their own agendas and relying, for the most part, on oral sources.


For decades, historians and folklorists have understood that oral traditions are not very reliable when they refer to anything reputed to have happened more than 100 years ago. What’s presented as hoary legend is in fact more likely a justification of present conditions than an accurate account of the past.


Druids, for example, have over the years been refashioned as the descendants of Noah, as bardic romantics, even as sexual egalitarians; in fact, much of what people think they know about the ancient beliefs and rites of Northern Europeans was concocted by early 20th-century occultist outfits like the Ancient Druid Order and Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.


The British historian Ronald Hutton describes this sort of thing as indicative of “the power of literary fiction over fact.” We believe what we choose to believe, and Christmas is no exception.


In recent years, popular histories like “The Battle for Christmas” and “Inventing Christmas,” have shown that many of the holiday’s most hallowed rites, traditions we think of as extending back at least as far as C. S. Lewis’s beloved Middle Ages, were invented less than 200 years ago by such 19th-century literary figures as Washington Irving, Clement Clarke Moore and, of course, Charles Dickens. More than Christian or pagan, Christmas is a Victorian fabrication.


Is this, though, such a bad thing? The unifying principle of Narnia, unlike the vast complex of invented history behind Middle-earth, isn’t an illusion of authenticity or purity. Rather, what binds all the elements of Lewis’s fantasy together is something more like love. Narnia consists of every story, legend, myth or image — pagan or Christian — that moved the author over the course of his life.


Our contemporary, semi-secular Christmas is similarly a collection of everything yearned for: warmth, plenty, peace, family, conviviality. Like Narnia, the holiday is a fantasy, but there are times when a fantasy is exactly what you need.



Laura Miller, a staff writer at Salon, is the author of “The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia.”



Url: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/18/opinion/18miller.html


Monday, December 15, 2008

Obama Will Not Take Office, Says Prophet

'He will not be the next president,' Leland Freeborn warns those who will listen. He and his followers expect nuclear explosions this Christmas season.

By PETER H. KING

December 13, 2008

Reporting from Parowan, Utah — Our trip to the Parowan Prophet began with a letter to the St. George Spectrum. It was set among missives proposing that oil companies bail out Detroit automakers, that county inmates be forced to winter in tents, that lawyers be barred from public office. A rough crowd.

This particular letter to the editor in the St. George, Utah, newspaper carried the headline " 'Prophet' shares grim forecast," and it was signed by one Leland Freeborn of Parowan, who wrote that he was known to many as the Parowan Prophet.

After establishing his bona fides as an international talk radio guest and proprietor of a survivalist website that has "passed more than 100,000 hits," Freeborn wrote:

"I think that you should hear what my opinion about the Obama election is: that he will not be the next president. I said on my home page in August that if he lost to expect to see the 'riots' that 2 Peter 2:13 tells us about. He didn't lose. But the story is not finished yet. I still think they may begin the riots before Christmas 2008, as I said."

These riots, according to his prophecy, will encourage the "old, hard-line Soviet guard" to seize the moment and rain down nukes on the United States, killing at least 100 million of us.

"Prepare now," Freeborn's letter concluded. "We are downwind from Las Vegas. I hope you can survive."

It took an hour to reach the prophet, a high-country drive through stunning red-rock formations, the color of which matches the politics in this corner of southern Utah. A freeway billboard, depicting a nuclear mushroom cloud, provided directions to the prophet's two-story house.

The frontyard seemed a staging ground for rapid flight -- two or three motor boats, a raft, a canoe, a recreational vehicle and an old sedan, parked with its engine running.

The man who answered our unexpected knock wore a cowboy hat with a big feather stuck in the band, and a beard suggestive of St. Nick. We asked to see the prophet. He said we had the right guy.

Freeborn hobbled out the door on crutches and eased into a wheelchair on the porch. As it turned out, he was heating the car not for rapid escape from a nuclear cloud, but to take a neighbor to the doctor.

"I only have nine minutes," he said.

It was enough time to sketch out his history -- a Mormon of substance, a father of 12, he had crashed his airplane in 1975 and fallen into a three-week coma, during which he went through "to the other side" and emerged a prophet.

Freeborn, now 66, took "a plural wife," as he put it, and parted ways with the church. He forfeited his wealth, spreading word of his prophecies. He appears to live now mainly on sales of newsletters and survival information packets advertised on his website.

Asked for examples of successful prophecies, he offered O.J. Simpson's murder acquittal and Al Gore's winning of the popular vote in 2000. But his core insight has been a repeated dream of seeing nuclear flashes to the west while shopping at a Wal-Mart during Christmas season.

And this, he warned, appears to be the year.

As Freeborn rose to leave, he said he would be hosting a weekly religious meeting that night. He urged us to come.

"If you can write a story," Freeborn said, "you can save a lot of lives in L.A."

There were about a dozen believers in the two front rooms, men and women of all ages, squeezed together on couches and dining room chairs.

All of them had broken with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints over polygamy and other departures from what they believe was the original vision of the church founder Joseph Smith. And all said they regarded Freeborn a prophet.

The cluttered room was filled with Bibles and religious tracts, government maps depicting potential nuclear targets, and framed photographs of mushroom clouds.

For 90 minutes -- while two boys played on the carpet with a calculator and a marked-up Book of Mormon -- the adults read aloud selected biblical verses, passages from Smith's biography and text pulled from an unidentified website.

After each reading, they discussed how these fragments all pointed to a singular end: nuclear destruction brought on by the Lord's wrath.

Freeborn sprawled in a stuffed chair, directing the discussion and sometimes correcting his acolytes. It was a congenial group, but not much given to small talk. As the night wound down, Freeborn returned to his core prophecy.

"I really believe we are out of time," he said. "I really do."

Freeborn conceded that he'd issued similar warnings many times before, and still the world kept spinning. Prophecy, he said, is not an exact science.

"I've been at it for 30 years, and I have always really believed it," he said. "Now, if we go on, that's great. Maybe we can get some more people to repent."

He seemed weary, referring to himself as a "gimpy old crippled guy from Parowan." He described going on radio and, mocked by the host, receiving not a single request from the audience for survival information. He said he has been shunned in town, his property vandalized. He recited from memory a scriptural passage about "scoffers."

The prophet's eyes reddened and I could sense his frustration as he sized us up as two more likely nonsubscribers. As he dropped his head in contemplation, it occurred to me: How terrible it must be to believe what this man truly appears to believe, and yet have so few willing to listen.

Perhaps for our benefit, the group volunteered some secular support for Freeborn's prophecy. Perhaps economic meltdown would trigger the riots. Maybe there would be an uprising over an automaker bailout.

"One thought you might have," came a voice from somewhere behind me, "is that we don't have any leadership now until January. See what I am saying? We are in limbo. If they do something tomorrow, who is going to decide?"

The night's last word belonged to the prophet.

"Everything is coming together," Freeborn said, "and it fits right now."

He presented us with brown medicine bottles filled with iodide crystals -- to ward off the effects of radiation.

"I don't think you are going to finish your trip back East," the Parowan Prophet said, urging us to reconsider our journey to the inauguration.

Nonetheless, with our little brown bottles of iodide, we will press on. The rest of you are warned.



King is a Times staff writer: peter.king@latimes.com

URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-moment13-2008dec13,0,2231803.story

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Our Mutual Joy

Opponents of gay marriage often cite Scripture. But what the Bible teaches about love argues for the other side.

By Lisa Miller

NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Dec 15, 2008

Let's try for a minute to take the religious conservatives at their word and define marriage as the Bible does. Shall we look to Abraham, the great patriarch, who slept with his servant when he discovered his beloved wife Sarah was infertile? Or to Jacob, who fathered children with four different women (two sisters and their servants)? Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon and the kings of Judah and Israel—all these fathers and heroes were polygamists. The New Testament model of marriage is hardly better. Jesus himself was single and preached an indifference to earthly attachments—especially family. The apostle Paul (also single) regarded marriage as an act of last resort for those unable to contain their animal lust. "It is better to marry than to burn with passion," says the apostle, in one of the most lukewarm endorsements of a treasured institution ever uttered. Would any contemporary heterosexual married couple—who likely woke up on their wedding day harboring some optimistic and newfangled ideas about gender equality and romantic love—turn to the Bible as a how-to script?

Of course not, yet the religious opponents of gay marriage would have it be so.

The battle over gay marriage has been waged for more than a decade, but within the last six months—since California legalized gay marriage and then, with a ballot initiative in November, amended its Constitution to prohibit it—the debate has grown into a full-scale war, with religious-rhetoric slinging to match. Not since 1860, when the country's pulpits were full of preachers pronouncing on slavery, pro and con, has one of our basic social (and economic) institutions been so subject to biblical scrutiny. But whereas in the Civil War the traditionalists had their James Henley Thornwell—and the advocates for change, their Henry Ward Beecher—this time the sides are unevenly matched. All the religious rhetoric, it seems, has been on the side of the gay-marriage opponents, who use Scripture as the foundation for their objections.

The argument goes something like this statement, which the Rev. Richard A. Hunter, a United Methodist minister, gave to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in June: "The Bible and Jesus define marriage as between one man and one woman. The church cannot condone or bless same-sex marriages because this stands in opposition to Scripture and our tradition."

To which there are two obvious responses: First, while the Bible and Jesus say many important things about love and family, neither explicitly defines marriage as between one man and one woman. And second, as the examples above illustrate, no sensible modern person wants marriage—theirs or anyone else's —to look in its particulars anything like what the Bible describes. "Marriage" in America refers to two separate things, a religious institution and a civil one, though it is most often enacted as a messy conflation of the two. As a civil institution, marriage offers practical benefits to both partners: contractual rights having to do with taxes; insurance; the care and custody of children; visitation rights; and inheritance. As a religious institution, marriage offers something else: a commitment of both partners before God to love, honor and cherish each other—in sickness and in health, for richer and poorer—in accordance with God's will. In a religious marriage, two people promise to take care of each other, profoundly, the way they believe God cares for them. Biblical literalists will disagree, but the Bible is a living document, powerful for more than 2,000 years because its truths speak to us even as we change through history. In that light, Scripture gives us no good reason why gays and lesbians should not be (civilly and religiously) married—and a number of excellent reasons why they should.

In the Old Testament, the concept of family is fundamental, but examples of what social conservatives would call "the traditional family" are scarcely to be found. Marriage was critical to the passing along of tradition and history, as well as to maintaining the Jews' precious and fragile monotheism. But as the Barnard University Bible scholar Alan Segal puts it, the arrangement was between "one man and as many women as he could pay for." Social conservatives point to Adam and Eve as evidence for their one man, one woman argument—in particular, this verse from Genesis: "Therefore shall a man leave his mother and father, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh." But as Segal says, if you believe that the Bible was written by men and not handed down in its leather bindings by God, then that verse was written by people for whom polygamy was the way of the world. (The fact that homosexual couples cannot procreate has also been raised as a biblical objection, for didn't God say, "Be fruitful and multiply"? But the Bible authors could never have imagined the brave new world of international adoption and assisted reproductive technology—and besides, heterosexuals who are infertile or past the age of reproducing get married all the time.)

Ozzie and Harriet are nowhere in the New Testament either. The biblical Jesus was—in spite of recent efforts of novelists to paint him otherwise—emphatically unmarried. He preached a radical kind of family, a caring community of believers, whose bond in God superseded all blood ties. Leave your families and follow me, Jesus says in the gospels. There will be no marriage in heaven, he says in Matthew. Jesus never mentions homosexuality, but he roundly condemns divorce (leaving a loophole in some cases for the husbands of unfaithful women).

The apostle Paul echoed the Christian Lord's lack of interest in matters of the flesh. For him, celibacy was the Christian ideal, but family stability was the best alternative. Marry if you must, he told his audiences, but do not get divorced. "To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord): a wife must not separate from her husband." It probably goes without saying that the phrase "gay marriage" does not appear in the Bible at all.

If the bible doesn't give abundant examples of traditional marriage, then what are the gay-marriage opponents really exercised about? Well, homosexuality, of course—specifically sex between men. Sex between women has never, even in biblical times, raised as much ire. In its entry on "Homosexual Practices," the Anchor Bible Dictionary notes that nowhere in the Bible do its authors refer to sex between women, "possibly because it did not result in true physical 'union' (by male entry)." The Bible does condemn gay male sex in a handful of passages. Twice Leviticus refers to sex between men as "an abomination" (King James version), but these are throwaway lines in a peculiar text given over to codes for living in the ancient Jewish world, a text that devotes verse after verse to treatments for leprosy, cleanliness rituals for menstruating women and the correct way to sacrifice a goat—or a lamb or a turtle dove. Most of us no longer heed Leviticus on haircuts or blood sacrifices; our modern understanding of the world has surpassed its prescriptions. Why would we regard its condemnation of homosexuality with more seriousness than we regard its advice, which is far lengthier, on the best price to pay for a slave?

Paul was tough on homosexuality, though recently progressive scholars have argued that his condemnation of men who "were inflamed with lust for one another" (which he calls "a perversion") is really a critique of the worst kind of wickedness: self-delusion, violence, promiscuity and debauchery. In his book "The Arrogance of Nations," the scholar Neil Elliott argues that Paul is referring in this famous passage to the depravity of the Roman emperors, the craven habits of Nero and Caligula, a reference his audience would have grasped instantly. "Paul is not talking about what we call homosexuality at all," Elliott says. "He's talking about a certain group of people who have done everything in this list. We're not dealing with anything like gay love or gay marriage. We're talking about really, really violent people who meet their end and are judged by God." In any case, one might add, Paul argued more strenuously against divorce—and at least half of the Christians in America disregard that teaching.

Religious objections to gay marriage are rooted not in the Bible at all, then, but in custom and tradition (and, to talk turkey for a minute, a personal discomfort with gay sex that transcends theological argument). Common prayers and rituals reflect our common practice: the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer describes the participants in a marriage as "the man and the woman." But common practice changes—and for the better, as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice." The Bible endorses slavery, a practice that Americans now universally consider shameful and barbaric. It recommends the death penalty for adulterers (and in Leviticus, for men who have sex with men, for that matter). It provides conceptual shelter for anti-Semites. A mature view of scriptural authority requires us, as we have in the past, to move beyond literalism. The Bible was written for a world so unlike our own, it's impossible to apply its rules, at face value, to ours.

Marriage, specifically, has evolved so as to be unrecognizable to the wives of Abraham and Jacob. Monogamy became the norm in the Christian world in the sixth century; husbands' frequent enjoyment of mistresses and prostitutes became taboo by the beginning of the 20th. (In the NEWSWEEK POLL, 55 percent of respondents said that married heterosexuals who have sex with someone other than their spouses are more morally objectionable than a gay couple in a committed sexual relationship.) By the mid-19th century, U.S. courts were siding with wives who were the victims of domestic violence, and by the 1970s most states had gotten rid of their "head and master" laws, which gave husbands the right to decide where a family would live and whether a wife would be able to take a job. Today's vision of marriage as a union of equal partners, joined in a relationship both romantic and pragmatic, is, by very recent standards, radical, says Stephanie Coontz, author of "Marriage, a History."

Religious wedding ceremonies have already changed to reflect new conceptions of marriage. Remember when we used to say "man and wife" instead of "husband and wife"? Remember when we stopped using the word "obey"? Even Miss Manners, the voice of tradition and reason, approved in 1997 of that change. "It seems," she wrote, "that dropping 'obey' was a sensible editing of a service that made assumptions about marriage that the society no longer holds."

We cannot look to the Bible as a marriage manual, but we can read it for universal truths as we struggle toward a more just future. The Bible offers inspiration and warning on the subjects of love, marriage, family and community. It speaks eloquently of the crucial role of families in a fair society and the risks we incur to ourselves and our children should we cease trying to bind ourselves together in loving pairs. Gay men like to point to the story of passionate King David and his friend Jonathan, with whom he was "one spirit" and whom he "loved as he loved himself." Conservatives say this is a story about a platonic friendship, but it is also a story about two men who stand up for each other in turbulent times, through violent war and the disapproval of a powerful parent. David rends his clothes at Jonathan's death and, in grieving, writes a song:

I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother;
You were very dear to me.
Your love for me was wonderful,
More wonderful than that of women.

Here, the Bible praises enduring love between men. What Jonathan and David did or did not do in privacy is perhaps best left to history and our own imaginations.

In addition to its praise of friendship and its condemnation of divorce, the Bible gives many examples of marriages that defy convention yet benefit the greater community. The Torah discouraged the ancient Hebrews from marrying outside the tribe, yet Moses himself is married to a foreigner, Zipporah. Queen Esther is married to a non-Jew and, according to legend, saves the Jewish people. Rabbi Arthur Waskow, of the Shalom Center in Philadelphia, believes that Judaism thrives through diversity and inclusion. "I don't think Judaism should or ought to want to leave any portion of the human population outside the religious process," he says. "We should not want to leave [homosexuals] outside the sacred tent." The marriage of Joseph and Mary is also unorthodox (to say the least), a case of an unconventional arrangement accepted by society for the common good. The boy needed two human parents, after all.

In the Christian story, the message of acceptance for all is codified. Jesus reaches out to everyone, especially those on the margins, and brings the whole Christian community into his embrace. The Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and author, cites the story of Jesus revealing himself to the woman at the well— no matter that she had five former husbands and a current boyfriend—as evidence of Christ's all-encompassing love. The great Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann, emeritus professor at Columbia Theological Seminary, quotes the apostle Paul when he looks for biblical support of gay marriage: "There is neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Jesus Christ." The religious argument for gay marriage, he adds, "is not generally made with reference to particular texts, but with the general conviction that the Bible is bent toward inclusiveness."

The practice of inclusion, even in defiance of social convention, the reaching out to outcasts, the emphasis on togetherness and community over and against chaos, depravity, indifference—all these biblical values argue for gay marriage. If one is for racial equality and the common nature of humanity, then the values of stability, monogamy and family necessarily follow. Terry Davis is the pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Hartford, Conn., and has been presiding over "holy unions" since 1992. "I'm against promiscuity—love ought to be expressed in committed relationships, not through casual sex, and I think the church should recognize the validity of committed same-sex relationships," he says.

Still, very few Jewish or Christian denominations do officially endorse gay marriage, even in the states where it is legal. The practice varies by region, by church or synagogue, even by cleric. More progressive denominations—the United Church of Christ, for example—have agreed to support gay marriage. Other denominations and dioceses will do "holy union" or "blessing" ceremonies, but shy away from the word "marriage" because it is politically explosive. So the frustrating, semantic question remains: should gay people be married in the same, sacramental sense that straight people are? I would argue that they should. If we are all God's children, made in his likeness and image, then to deny access to any sacrament based on sexuality is exactly the same thing as denying it based on skin color—and no serious (or even semiserious) person would argue that. People get married "for their mutual joy," explains the Rev. Chloe Breyer, executive director of the Interfaith Center in New York, quoting the Episcopal marriage ceremony. That's what religious people do: care for each other in spite of difficulty, she adds. In marriage, couples grow closer to God: "Being with one another in community is how you love God. That's what marriage is about."

More basic than theology, though, is human need. We want, as Abraham did, to grow old surrounded by friends and family and to be buried at last peacefully among them. We want, as Jesus taught, to love one another for our own good—and, not to be too grandiose about it, for the good of the world. We want our children to grow up in stable homes. What happens in the bedroom, really, has nothing to do with any of this. My friend the priest James Martin says his favorite Scripture relating to the question of homosexuality is Psalm 139, a song that praises the beauty and imperfection in all of us and that glorifies God's knowledge of our most secret selves: "I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made." And then he adds that in his heart he believes that if Jesus were alive today, he would reach out especially to the gays and lesbians among us, for "Jesus does not want people to be lonely and sad." Let the priest's prayer be our own.

With Sarah Ball and Anne Underwood

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/172653