https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=9Rj_Gj1p57k
Hello Jonathan, my girlfriend and I had a huge fight this Christmas as she kept claiming that the origins of Christmas were pagan. This led to a bigger discussion overall about the supposed pagan origins of Catholicism. I saw you made a short video in the past about this topic. I was wondering if you could expand on it further. I mean, Christmas is obviously not pagan. It’s the celebration of the birth of Christ. How can it be pagan? It’s a ridiculous statement to say that Christmas is pagan. Because what do we do at Christmas? We celebrate the birth of Christ. I don’t know. It’s just funny. Just funny. It’s like it’s so obvious that it’s not pagan. What do people mean when they say that it’s pagan? So what people mean when they say that it’s pagan is that in the celebration of Christmas, there are aspects of those celebrations which seem to precede the coming of Christianity. So certain traditions that we do like the Christmas tree maybe, like the holly maybe, like reefs maybe, that maybe those traditions come from traditions that existed before these people converted to Christianity. Now first of all, that’s already a very tenuous statement because you know what? People don’t know. They just don’t. They don’t know what the traditions were before because all of the accounts come from Christians. But whatever. Let’s take that. Let’s even take that as a, let’s say that that’s real. That some of the traditions that are celebrated at Christmas come from outside of Christianity. The answer to that is who cares? Who cares really? I know this is going to sound weird to you. This is going to sound very difficult to you. And so let me find an example. Do you think that shaking hands existed before Christianity? Probably. Does it make it pagan? Shaking hands, it’s shaking hands pagan in the sense that it’s like there to worship foreign gods and that when we shake hands, because probably people before the advent of Christianity were shaking hands, that now it means that we are that we are just worshipping foreign gods. It’s ridiculous. It’s like it’s just ridiculous because just because things come from outside of Christianity doesn’t mean that they’re bad. Especially if they can be used and integrated and brought together and then used to worship God. Do you think that the tabernacle and the sacrificial system that was given to Moses, that the tripartite separation of holy space, that the sacrifice of animals, that the way that it was told that the Israelites do, that the kind of sacred box on which the God descends, do you think that that didn’t exist before the revelation to Moses? You think that you’re going to have a bad surprise when you start to realize that the tripartite structure of a temple is a universal structure that exists in every culture. And so is it pagan because of that? Why would why? It’s like because pagans have doors and Christians have doors, it means that if you go through a door, then you’re a pagan. It’s just ridiculous. So that’s one thing. And so the other thing is the idea that the date of Christmas is somehow taken from pagan texts, that happens to be technically false, by the way, and it’s becoming clear and clear. And I think that the voice of people that are explaining where the date of Christmas comes from is louder and louder. And the date of Christmas comes from nine months after the Annunciation. And the early Christians had a tradition which said that Christ died on the day that He was conceived. And that’s why there’s always the Annunciation is very, very close to Easter. And because Easter is a moveable feast, it doesn’t fall on the Annunciation. But the idea would be that in the year one, like let’s say in year 33, I mean, when Christ died, then that year He would have died on the day of His conception. Now, whether you agree with that tradition or not, whether you think that that tradition isn’t relevant to you, it still means that the date of Christmas has nothing to do with the pagan calendar. And it was chosen because of that. It was chosen for those reasons. And so the date of Christmas was there. You find it in the early Church Fathers before the Nicene Creed. You can find people allude to some Christians celebrating the birth of Christ on the 25th of December. And so is it interesting that the birth of Christ happens to be very close to the solstice? Yes, it is. Is it irrelevant to the symbolism? No, it’s very relevant to the symbolism. And so, but is the solstice pagan? Who created the solstice? The solstice is not pagan. Remembering the solstice and the idea that there would be a relationship between the birth of Christ and the solstice, that that would somehow be pagan, is an insane statement. It’s a statement about the idea that the very nature that God created cannot point and serve its Creator. And that anything that has natural patterns like spring or fall or winter, and that the fact that the resurrection happens for us at the spring, that that’s a sign that it’s pagan, right? Because pagans used to celebrate fertility cults and they used to celebrate fertility in the spring, it’s like you’re a gnostic, dude. That’s what’s happening if you think that. You’re a gnostic. You don’t seem to think that God created the world. So anyway, sorry, I’m just getting off here, like getting a little off my kilter there. But it’s just, the idea that Christmas is pagan is ridiculous. Yeah, alright, sorry. I’m sorry because I think that if you wanted to show this to your girlfriend, I probably have alienated her already in the way that I answered that. But it just tires me. So Ben K says, Father De Jong seems to repeatedly point out Christianity is retconning the pagan understanding if I understand him correctly. Yeah, that’s the way to understand it. And so in some ways, the ancient pagan world had intuitions and in some ways you could even say that they are deformations of a deeper truth. So if you’re really a Christian and you believe that monotheism actually precedes paganism, that the belief in the God of heaven, that the belief in the creator God, the origin of all things precedes the paganism, and that paganism is a forgetting of that. It’s like a kind of dimming of that truth. And that Christianity is a restoration of this. And so the fact that it would then take some of the pagan images and reconnect them or retcon them or kind of turn them on their heads using them that way, I think is completely normal. And so one last thing, by the way, let’s just one last thing on the idea that Christmas is pagan. What’s interesting about people who say that, who say something like Christmas and pagan, are often people who will have rock bands on their stage. They’re often people that will like wear business suits or will wear regular like normal clothing on their stages. And it’s like, it just blows the mind, like it just boggles the mind to realize that someone can think that they can use the means of the world to evangelize others and then think it’s weird that Christians would have integrated some of the pagan imagery into Christianity, to transform it, to make it participate in worshiping God. It just boggles the mind when I see something like that. Anyways, all right.