CHRISTIAN OR PAGAN? by L. Ervin Wright

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Dec 11, 1928

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 55, No. 49.

Read the full edition

CHRISTIAN OR PAGAN?

By L. Ervin Wright

Christmas

CHRISTIAN OR PAGAN?

L. ERVIN WRIGHT

Nearly every month in the year has been assigned as the probable month in which Jesus Christ was born; for, so far as the Bible is concerned, it is silent concerning the date of Christ’s birth. That it was not on the twenty-fifth of December, or even in December, is generally agreed by the best authorities.

On the night of the nativity “there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.” Luke 2:8.

Gill, in his commentary on Luke 2:8, says: “There are two sorts of cattle with the Jews . . . there are the cattle of the house that lie in the city: the cattle of the wilderness are they that lie in the pastures. On which one of their commentators (Maimonides, . . .) observes, ‘These lie in the pastures, which are in the villages, all the days of the cold and heat, and do not go into the cities until the rains descend.’ The first rain falls in the month Marheshvan, which answers to the latter part of our October and the former part of November. . . . From whence it appears that Christ must be born before the middle of October, since the first rain was not yet come.”

Since it was not the custom for the shepherds of Judea to watch their flocks in the open fields later than about the end of October, it is evident that there were no shepherds abiding in the fields in December.

Then how came the twenty-fifth of December to be thought of as the birthday of Jesus Christ?

In short, this particular day was the birthday of the pagan sun god, which day apostate Christianity adopted as the birthday of Christ. There are several interesting points of specious similitude between the pagan god and the Christian God, which made it very easy for this to be done.

The worship of the sun by the ancient pagans was not an accident. It did not come about by man’s forgetting about the true God. It was begun in defiance to Jehovah under the high-sounding terms of superior intelligence and wisdom. In the early apostasy at Babel “the world by wisdom knew not God.” 1 Corinthians 1:21. And to ancient Babylon, God said, “Thy wisdom and

thy knowledge, it hath perverted thee.” Isaiah 47:10.

In another place Paul says of this apostasy that “when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, . . . who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.” Romans 1:21-25, margin.

The ancients were well acquainted with the promise that a Saviour should be born into the world. (Genesis 3:15.) The hope of the antediluvian patriarchs was in the birth of the Seed; it was the hope of the postdiluvian patriarchs. From antiquity, man, groaning under sin, looked for the Desire of Ages.

Every patriarch was a priest-king, and was a type of the coming Seed as priest-king. But some patriarchs were particular types of the Messiah. The patriarch Noah was one of the greatest types of Christ. In the events of the Flood, various particulars were enacted by Noah, which prefigured certain particulars in the life of Christ. Peculiarly did Noah shadow out the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ.

But paganism mistook the figure, or type, for the reality, and pronounced Noah to be an appearance of the Seed. In fact, paganism alleged that every extraordinary personage, whose office it was to reclaim or punish mankind, was an avatar, or descent, of the Seed. Buddha was an alleged avatar. The grand lama of Tibet claims to be an avatar in this age.

The good patriarch Noah was deified by the early apostates’ thinking that in him had been fulfilled the promise of the coming of the Seed.

In one sense, the egress of Noah from the ark was symbolical of the birth of the Christ. The ark was the allegorical mother of Noah, and was also regarded as a virgin.

The ark was the great mother, or goddess, in the pagan theology. One of the names of the great mother in Egypt was Hathor, which, according to Bunsen, means “the habitation of god.”—“Egypt,” Vol. 1, page 401. And, according to Plutarch, the Egyptians esteemed Isis the mundane house, or habitation, of Horus, the seat of generation, the nurse of the world, and the universal recipient. This idea sprang into being because the ark had housed Noah during the Flood.

The Egyptian sun god Ra, who was not engendered, according to James Bonwick, was born from the side of his mother. (“Egyptian Belief and Modern Thought,” page 406.) The church father Jerome relates a belief current in his day that Buddha was born from a virgin’s side. (“Contra Jovinianum,” Book 1, sec. 22.) This peculiar circumstance instantly identifies the origin of these stories. The ark, according to Moses in Genesis 6:16, was constructed with a door in its side. Out of that door in the side of the ark, so they taught, Noah experienced his mystical or allegorical birth.

The door always played a prominent part in the pagan theology. In fact, temple doors, opening as caves, cells, or passageways, were made symbols of the great mother. Janus, the famous two-faced god, was also called Patulcius and Clusius, or the god of opening and shutting.

Macrobius observes that his altars were placed before the doors of his temples, to show that he presided over entrance and exit.

In the aboriginal chapel of the god Janus was an ancient ark, or ship, according to Septimus Serenus. On some of his coins may be seen on one side the impress of the double-faced Janus; on the reverse, a ship or the stern or prow of a vessel. On other of his medals may be seen not only his ship, or ark, but the imprint of a dove. Still other coins show on their reverse the same bird holding a branch in its beak, or surrounded with a chaplet of olive leaves. Needless to say, the ark, the dove, the olive, are all Deluge emblems.

THE TWOFOLD HERO DEITY

This twofold character of the hero deity was assumed when the ancients looked on the patriarch as an aged man at the beginning of the Deluge, but as a babe or youth or boy after that event. Being born from the ark, he became a youth again, and was represented in Egypt, in India, in Cyprus, in Assyria, in China, and in Mexico as a babe at the breast or in the arms of the great pagan mother goddess.

The death of the Seed, or Christ, was also prefigured by Noah’s stay in the ark during the term of the Deluge. Jonah, in the belly of the fish for three days and nights, was a type of the death, burial, and resurrection of the Christ. (Compare Jonah 1:17 with Matthew 12:39, 40.) In the case of Noah, who was in the ark, which was sometimes symbolized by the ancients as a great fish, it was three years according to the Oriental mode of computing similar periods. The entrance into the ark at the close of one year, the stay in the ark for a year, and the egress at the beginning of another year was counted as three years by the Oriental mind.

This is also seen in the computation of Christ’s entombment, which is also counted as three days and three nights, although Christ was in the grave only one complete day and the beginning and ending of two other days. The three-year period of Noah’s confinement was a prophecy of the three-day period of Christ’s entombment.

THE PAGANS AND THE ARK

The pagans not only regarded the ark as a symbol of the great mother, but the earth was her symbol also; hence the interior of the ark and a grave in the earth were interchangeably regarded as the womb of the great mother. This idea was borrowed from the patriarchal church. Job says: “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither.” Job 1:21. George Stanley Faber says: “The womb, from which Job came at birth, was the womb of his literal mother: but did he return thither, when he died? Assuredly not: he then entered into the womb of a figurative mother; from which, in God’s own good time, he hoped to experience a second birth, as he had already experienced one birth into a world of much trouble and affliction.”—“The Origin of Pagan Idolatry,” Vol. 3, page 624.

In the Scriptures a resurrection from the grave is spoken of as a birth. The great apostle Paul assures us that when God raised Jesus Christ from the grave, the prophecy in the second psalm, “Thou art My Son; this day have I begotten Thee,” received its fulfillment. (Acts 13:33; Psalm 2:7.) It is evident that the two expressions, “This day have I begotten Thee” and, This day have I raised Thee from the dead, are mystically of the same import. Paul also styles Christ “the first-born from the dead.” Colossians 1:18. And he also states that Christ “constituted the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead.” Romans 1:4, Greek.

Just as the interior of the belly of the fish was a symbolical hell, or grave, to Jonah in prefiguring the death and burial of Christ, just so the interior of the ark was the tomb, or grave, of Noah, who similarly prefigured Christ. The egress of Jonah from the whale and the exit of Noah from the ark alike typified the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The ancient pagans believed in the immortality of the soul; hence we find them believing that the hero gods and great men were translated to the celestial bodies or were emanations from them. Thus the idea prevailed that the sun, the moon, and the stars were not inert matter; but, on the contrary, were wise and intelligent beings. The Stoics supposed each star to be the body of a deity; and Augustine informs us that they maintained that the stars were parts of Jupiter or the sun, and that they were all living creatures, and that they had rational souls. The sun, being the brightest of the visible heavenly bodies, was the residence, or body, of the hero god Noah. The many remarkable

opinions that the pagans entertained of the sun are by no means applicable to the literal sun, but rather to the career of Noah, as “the spirit of the sun.”

EGYPTIAN SUN GOD

For instance the Egyptian sun god Ra is said to have sprung forth from an egg. Again he is said to have been evolved from the primeval abyss of water. At other times, the sun god rises from the lotus flower floating on the water. And the heaven above was said to be a great ocean or watery abyss upon which the sun god embarked daily in his divine boat or ship. Now the egg and the lotus flower were both hieroglyphics of the ark of Noah. The ship, or boat, of Ra is a literal figure of the ark given an astronomical setting. And Ra being evolved from the primeval abyss of water is plainly a reference to the great father’s “birth” at the Deluge. And there was much even in the physical character of the sun, which led the pagans to adopt it as the astronomical representative of their hero deity.

The daily descent below the horizon and his daily rising above it exhibited to the devout pagan the disappearance and reappearance of their chief god, that is, the entrance and exit of Noah from the ark. And this was variously described as a death and a revival, or a deep sleep and an expergefaction, or an entrance into the womb and a new birth. And, accordingly, we are told that while the sun was invisible beneath the horizon he shadowed out the great father in a state of temporary death within his coffin, the ark, and that while he was visible above the horizon he represented the same great father as emerging from Hades and restored to life and liberty. Each day, at his rising and setting, the sun displayed or enacted the image of his human associate, Noah, by seeming to float on the surface of the heavenly ocean.

And each year, by his departure into the southern tropic and his return with new life and vigor into the northern, the sun again exhibited the allegorical death and revival of his mortal antitype.

THE SIGNIFICANT DECEMBER TWENTY-FIVE

The day of the winter solstice was the day regarded as the day of the periodic death of the sun, and was followed by his resurrection, when the sun began his ascendant course.

“This explains,” says Lenormant, “in the Dionysiac worship of Phocis, the simultaneous occurrence of the nocturnal ceremony performed by the Hosioi at the tomb of the god in the temple of Delphi, and the orgiastic festival when the women on the mountains awakened with their cries Licnites, or the new-born Dionysos, asleep in the mystic winnowing fan, which serves him for cradle. The symbolical Acadian name of the month which immediately follows the winter solstice, . . . ‘the month of the cave (or adyton) of the (sun) rising,’ undoubtedly contained an allusion to this. To understand the meaning of it, it is enough for all intents and purposes to recall the rites of the fes-

tival in honor of the new birth of the young sun, as celebrated by the Sarraceni, . . . when at midnight they entered the subterranean sanctuary, whence the priest presently came forth crying: ‘The virgin hath brought forth; the light is about to grow again.’ This ceremony took place each year on the 25th December, the day of the Natalis Solis Invicti, in the Oriental worship of the sun. . . . The day likewise for celebrating the great Persian festival of Mithras, when he was born of a stone in the depths of a dark grotto. We know that it was felt to be expedient to uproot these essentially popular festivals by substituting for them a festival applicable to the new religion, and therefore the heads of the church in the west fixed upon the 25th day of December, in the beginning of the fourth century, for the celebration of the birth of Christ, the exact anniversary being unknown. The Christ was to them, in a spiritual sense, the new sun, Sol novus, whose material birth the pagans celebrated on the day when its orb recommenced its heavenly ascension.”—“The Beginnings of History,” footnotes on pages 263, 264.

The tomb of the pagan god, his cradle, the mystic cave, and the dark grotto are all alike hieroglyphics of the ark.

SANTA CLAUS AND THE EVERGREEN

The idea of Santa Claus seems plainly to be derived from the fact that Noah was an old man at the beginning of the Deluge; and particularly in ancient Babylonia the sun god was pictured on the monuments as an old man with a long, flowing beard. The appearance of St. Nicholas at the winter solstice, when the sun is in the act of dying or is aged, seems more than a coincidence. And St. Nicholas is certainly none other than the pagan deity Nix or Nick revamped. And Lenormant says that the fundamental root in the name of Noah is to be found in the name Nix or Nick!

One of the most eminent emblems of the pagan sun god was a tree. In pagan Egypt it was the palm tree; in pagan Rome it was the fir. The pagans symbolized the sun god in his death as a huge tree cut down almost to the ground. The birth or resurrection of the sun god was symbolized by a youthful tree springing up by the old stump. A young tree, a living tree, an evergreen, was an appropriate emblem of the sun god as he was about to begin his new life cycle. This explains the use of fir or evergreen trees at the winter solstice.

THE HEART LONGING

Although Christmas is of pagan origin, underneath it all is the heart longing of men, groaning under sin, for better things, for a Saviour who can save men from sin. And while the mind of the world is at this season centered on Christmas, would it not be profitable to make up an inventory for 1928, and bury all that is out of harmony with Jesus Christ, and start the new year right by living a new life, a resurrected life, the new-birth life in Christ?