From Pagans

The various comments about pagan origins of the virgin birth, Christmas, etc., are examples of the fallacy of formal logic called post hoc, ergo propter hoc. “After which, hence by which.” The Christian event occurred after the pagan event, therefore it must have copied the pagan event.

By that standard, the Torah was copied and adapted from the Code of Hammurabi. Hammurabi wrote his Code in Babylon about 1780 BC. It addresses many of the same issues as the Torah, which was written about 1200 BC. The Code of Hammurabi, like the Torah’s 613 mitzvot, deals with theft, agriculture (or shepherding), property damage, women's rights, marriage rights, children's rights, slave rights, murder, death, and injury. The Code of Hammurabi was displayed for all to see, and Moses read the Law to all of the people Israel. Lev 24:3 “Moses came and told the people all the words of the Lord and all the ordinances; and all the people answered with one voice, and said, ‘All the words which the Lord has spoken we will do.’ And Moses wrote all the words of the Lord.”

The Code of Hammurabi was written in stone, so it would be unchangeable. The laws (numbered from 1 to 282, but numbers 13, and 66-99 are missing) are inscribed in Old Babylonian on an eight foot tall stela of black basalt currently on display at the Louvre Museum in Paris, France. The Ten Commandments, too, were written in stone. Ex 24:12 “The Lord said to Moses, ‘Come up to me on the mountain, and wait there; and I will give you the tables of stone, with the law and the commandment, which I have written for their instruction.’”

Some Jews use evidence no better than that to declare that some Christian event is of pagan origin. Yet both Jews and Catholics know that the Torah was not an adaptation of the Code of Hammurabi. If the God of Abraham did not exist, the whole history of the people Israel would be false. We have abundant evidence from the experience of our people that it is true.

In the same way, it has been widely observed that Jesus of Nazareth was born in an obscure village and grew up in another obscure village. He was a carpenter until He was thirty and then for three years an itinerant preacher. He never owned a home, raised a family, set foot in a big city, or traveled as much as two hundred miles from where He was born. He never held an office or wrote a book. His friends ran away. His enemies tried Him and had Him nailed to a cross between two thieves. After He died, He was taken down and placed in a borrowed tomb. If ever an ancient man was destined for obscurity, this was the man. Yet twenty centuries have passed since that time. One hundred generations. And nearly two billion people in every country on earth revere Him as the living Christ. From an airplane flying over North America, South America, Europe, Africa and Australia, we can see church steeples holding high the cross of Christ in every city and town and village. No one else’s name is on so many buildings. No one else’s birthday is so widely or joyfully celebrated. The power of Christ’s divinity split not only the Temple curtain but history itself: Every event in the world is dated so many years before His coming, or so many years after His coming.

So let us respect one another’s Scriptures as authentic history.

B. Christmas. December 25 is the Christianization of a Roman feast, Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (Nativity of the Invincible Sun).

A less well known but related fallacy is similis hoc ergo propter hoc, “similar to, hence by.” Sometimes the similar pagan tradition had more recent origins than the Christian event. We often hear that December 25 is the Christianization of a Roman feast, Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (Nativity of the Invincible Sun). However, that feast was instituted by Emperor Aurelian in 274 AD. The earliest evidence we have that Christians celebrated Rabbi Yeshua’s birth on December 25 appears in 336 AD. But that does not tell us when the celebrations began.

The Dead Sea Scrolls provide a wealth of information about religious practices in the Qumran community near the Dead Sea in Jesus’ era. The scrolls are very much concerned with calendar dates, essential for knowing exactly when the Torah feasts should be celebrated, according to Qumran’s solar calendar.

Shemaryahu Talmon, Professor Emeritus in the Bible Department at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a top Scroll scholar, in 1958 published an in-depth study of the Temple’s rotating assignment of priests 1 Chr 24:7 and the Qumran scrolls to see the assignment during New Testament times. It shows definitively that Zachariah served as a Temple priest Lk 1:8 in September. His wife, St. Elizabeth, conceived late in September, as the archangel Gabriel said, Lk 1:24 and she remained in seclusion for five months. Church tradition is that her son John the Baptizer was conceived on September 23.

During the sixth month Lk 1:26 of Elizabeth’s pregnancy the archangel Gabriel announced to the Blessed Virgin that she had been chosen to bear the Son of God. Holy Mother Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Annunciation on March 25, right on time. Three months after the Annunciation, John the Baptizer was born. The Church celebrates the Feast of St. John the Baptizer on June 24, right after the summer solstice when the days were becoming shorter. The Child Jesus was born on December 25, exactly nine months after the Annunciation and six months after John the Baptizer, right after the winter solstice when the days were becoming longer. Jn 3:30 “He must increase, but I must decrease.” It all fits together.

Let’s look at a modern case to see how older metaphors can be used to explain things or events that are authentically new.

During the mid-twentieth century most people stored information in metal file cabinets. Each individual document was called a file. Related groups of documents were stored in folders. Then computer companies introduced the radically different paradigm of digital information storage using streams of 0’s and 1’s. They could have called each single document a digital stream and groups of them digital stream aggregations. But they called individual documents files, and related groups of documents folders. The computer files were not groups of papers stapled together, and the folders were not folded as paper folders were, but these familiar metaphors helped people understand the new paradigm. No one says computers are not really digital because they use paper metaphors.

Holy Mother Church exists to make us saints. Sometimes she uses pagan metaphors to teach pagans the Gospel in ways that they understand. Sometimes she uses metaphors that the pagans used for very different purposes. Sometimes she uses metaphors that pagans later adopted. And sometimes she uses metaphors that had no pagan origins but that someone later claimed as pagan. She stands on the solid historical evidence of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, and on the continuous teaching of her core doctrines over two thousand years, not on whether some pagan once used or did not use a similar metaphor.