Look at your source — hardly authoritative! And the so-called evidence... Thin, entirely circumstantial, and in places actually wrong.
For example, Saturnalia went — at its longest - until the 23rd, not the 25th. Moreover, Christians likely got the 25th date based on religious calculation[1], not with reference to the one of the ancient festivals Victorian "historians" liked to speculate about.
The article attempts to link gifting verses to writing Christmas cards — a Christmas tradition not popularised until the 19th C and no older than the 17th.
Feasting and exchanging of gifts, much less the greeting "lo saturnalia" — literally the only other "evidence" presented here — need hardly be addressed, given how ubiquitous such things are with regard to festival, and how thin the apparent connection.
There is no positive evidence for this link, hence it not being taken seriously by any modern historian. It is no more than outdated speculation.
Still better than the source you originally gave, which was non-existent, or the one you've given now, which is Catholic propaganda.
It might be true that Christmas was not a direct rip-off of Saturnalia per se (though we will probably never know for sure because the Church surely did not go out of its way to record this) but there can be no doubt that both Christmas and Saturnalia are solstice festivals, so at the very least they share a common motivational root. The exact provenance of the details doesn't really matter. What matters is that Jesus was almost certainly not born on December 25, and so whatever the motivation for that date was, Jesus's birth wasn't it.
No, it isn’t:
https://www.academuseducation.co.uk/post/how-saturnalia-beca...
Yes, it is.
Look at your source — hardly authoritative! And the so-called evidence... Thin, entirely circumstantial, and in places actually wrong.
For example, Saturnalia went — at its longest - until the 23rd, not the 25th. Moreover, Christians likely got the 25th date based on religious calculation[1], not with reference to the one of the ancient festivals Victorian "historians" liked to speculate about.
The article attempts to link gifting verses to writing Christmas cards — a Christmas tradition not popularised until the 19th C and no older than the 17th.
Feasting and exchanging of gifts, much less the greeting "lo saturnalia" — literally the only other "evidence" presented here — need hardly be addressed, given how ubiquitous such things are with regard to festival, and how thin the apparent connection.
There is no positive evidence for this link, hence it not being taken seriously by any modern historian. It is no more than outdated speculation.
[1] https://poj.peeters-leuven.be/content.php?id=3007366&url=art...
> Look at your source — hardly authoritative!
Still better than the source you originally gave, which was non-existent, or the one you've given now, which is Catholic propaganda.
It might be true that Christmas was not a direct rip-off of Saturnalia per se (though we will probably never know for sure because the Church surely did not go out of its way to record this) but there can be no doubt that both Christmas and Saturnalia are solstice festivals, so at the very least they share a common motivational root. The exact provenance of the details doesn't really matter. What matters is that Jesus was almost certainly not born on December 25, and so whatever the motivation for that date was, Jesus's birth wasn't it.
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