OK – for all of you who claim the Bible is factual: According to the “evidence” in the gospels (returning to Bethlehem for the census, etc.), if Yehoshua ben Yosef (your guy’s actual name) was, in fact, born (which is by no means a sure thing), it was in June. The December 25 thing was announced to help force Northern Europeans into Catholicism by co-opting their existing Winter Solstice rites – gifts, decorated trees, etc. And I realize that a tendency to believe that poorly-written fiction is history could well correlate with a belief that the stars move around a geocentric sky, but that is just not the case.
You can add to that the fact that there are at least 5 other traditions featuring sun gods born around the Winter Solstice, then killed & resurrected around the Vernal Equinox – and all of them predate Christian mythology. So not only is it bad fiction, it’s plagiarized bad fiction.
OK – for all of you who claim the Bible is factual: According to the “evidence” in the gospels (returning to Bethlehem for the census, etc.), if Yehoshua ben Yosef (your guy’s actual name) was, in fact, born (which is by no means a sure thing), it was in June. The December 25 thing was announced to help force Northern Europeans into Catholicism by co-opting their existing Winter Solstice rites – gifts, decorated trees, etc. And I realize that a tendency to believe that poorly-written fiction is history could well correlate with a belief that the stars move around a geocentric sky, but that is just not the case.
You can add to that the fact that there are at least 5 other traditions featuring sun gods born around the Winter Solstice, then killed & resurrected around the Vernal Equinox – and all of them predate Christian mythology. So not only is it bad fiction, it’s plagiarized bad fiction.