wraith

@wraith@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon notices⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  My first rec would be Rod Bennett’s The Early Church in Her Own Words. It’s a good starting point that grounds you in what the early authors of Christianity were thinking and discussing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon notices⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, more or less. Spitballing, butit’s probably still more related to the Sun. The 25th would’ve been on of the first days studious Romans could tell the daytime was growing longer.

  This whole period in Roman History is extremely cool. Maybe not to live in though lol.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon notices⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m sorry, but your first claim, that Christmas is a co-opting of a pagan holiday (Sol Invictus) is just plain wrong. It predates Sol Invictus. Emperor Aurelian established Sol Invictus as a holiday in 274 AD.

  Hippolytus of Rome (d. 235 AD) claimed Jesus was born 8 days before the Kalends of January, which corresponds to Dec. 25. It is vastly more likely, and much more widely accepted at this point, that Dec. 25 was chosen because Africanus (author of Chronographiae, an early attempt at a Christian timeline) and other early Christians believed the Annunciation was March 25. They just added 9 months to that and bam, December 25.

  If anything was intentional about the 25th in particular, it would’ve been due to contemporary Jewish beliefs that Prohpets died on the same day they are born or conceived. Believing that Jesus was conceived on the 25th of March, the parallel 25th of December would not only have been chronologically accurate, but spiritually significant.

  These early Christians existed well before the establishment of Christianity as the Roman state religion. There was a substantial desire to distance themselves from Pagan practice at the time. Virtually all sources that it relates to Saturnalia and Sol Invictus, outside of a single margin note in the 12th century, are post-enlightenment.