@RJMCorbet: Thank you, sincerely, for the clarification. I hadn't considered the comment as an intentional slur.
@Thomas, my good friend, with whom I have had many spirited conversations through the years.
History is no theory...it happened, or it did not.
What religion does with history, for political expedience (remember, the two are one and the same in this period of time, politics *does* influence religion and religion *does* influence politics) is quite a different matter. Does life imitate art? Or does art imitate life? Is it live, or is it Memorex? The Romans developed "political spin" to an art even before the Christian Messiah was born.
The "weight" of your evidence is about as ponderous as a feather.
I had conceded the position regarding Mithraism, yet that still bears on the discussion? I had the misfortune of reading some ill informed or ill intended scholar, but I am equally capable of setting such aside as it is not the crux of my position at all...indeed, it is you attempting at cost to defend the date of December 25 (and I noted your aversion to Jan 6...quite comical actually, considering both are actually the same date whether according the Julian or Gregorian calendar...which I already understood but you included in your own defense earlier yet seem to have so quickly forgotten). I have yet to see your claims of December celebration earlier than Nicea shown, I must as usual take your claim at face value or trundle through ancient tomes of sometimes spurious authorship, and even those that are granted a position just short of canon seem to be picked over at convenience...where this agrees, good, where this doesn't agree, bad. But that's the nature of Apocryphal documents, no?
Even Constantine's biographers have to be taken with a grain of salt, their language is far too flowery and congratulatory to be taken simply at face value, yet they are about all we have. With the biographers we know to read between the lines, that the story didn't happen exactly as stated, but pretty close once you unravel all the layers of pomp. Politics, nevermind the point Eusebius was a priest.
I *could* get all conspiratorial and note the vast underground library the Vatican keeps, of records no doubt dating back to the time of Constantine, records no mere mortals shall ever see, and no mere mortal has been allowed to see for over 1500 years. That aside...
What I see, clearly, in what "evidence" you have provided, is a politically driven attempt to validate the established norm, established not in BC3 +/-, but closer to AD350. First, by Messiah's own words, since we are waxing philosophical and using religion to "trump" reality, "the birth is not important, the death is important." Since the date of Messiah's birth is not recorded in the text, we really don't know. For emphasis, we *don't* know.
That the Roman Church, indeed Roman religion in the broad sense of the word, as a matter of pragmatism, were and still are in the case of the Catholic Church *very* syncretic in their approach particularly when it came to proselytizing and expansion is not a point of contention. Evidence exists all around the world and throughout the period of time we are discussing. I've shown but a few, I have read of *many* more and will be happy to share should the need arise.
The Church *beginning* at Nicea made it a political matter of course to distance themselves from Judaism, by whatever means necessary. Seriously, washing? Ablution was ritual washing, and why even now the Catholic Church "sprinkles" baptism. Ablution was discarded at Nicea, for no other reason than that it was a Jewish custom.
If, as you said, Messiah was the Pascal Lamb, a point I do not contend with...why did the Catholic Church then distance itself from the High Holy Day of Passover, and attach that significant point of our Faith to a longstanding pagan holiday? Syncretism at its finest. No doubt we will yet hear multiple syncretic arguments in defense of this, but the reality is it was solidified and institutionalized at Nicea...again, the bid to distance from Judaism.
The Messiah, a Jew, was executed by the Romans on charges brought by the Sanhedrin who were in collusion with the Romans governing over them, who brought plausible deniability by offering the power of clemency to the people. Messiah was then executed in a Roman fashion reserved for criminals.
Years later, a new Emperor with some tolerance for Christianity, who abolished the persecutions of Diocletian and others, who served as benefactor financing the construction and repair of Christian places of worship, whose mother was sainted for her contributions finding so many of the important places to Christianity and having edifices built around them to accommodate pilgrims, and which Emperor was baptized on his deathbed as an Aryan Christian in accord with tradition as he then understood it, and in turn who was sainted for his efforts to validate the Christian faith...was a known and oft quoted anti-Semite. I agree, there is no direct "fact" to point to Constantine calling certain church leaders into a little office and telling them how it was going to be. However, Constantine called to order the Council at Nicea, and presided over it.
And the fact remains, that a Jewish Rabbi was elevated in Roman fashion to Messiahship. That the process was well underway is not in question, but Nicea made it a point of political necessity, first to convert this Jewish Messiah into someone more palatable to a pagan audience, and second to exonerate and expunge any culpability of Rome directly. Can't have the Emperor by extension being culpable of the murder of a Messiah, soon to be *the* Messiah. A tangent, but not wholly unrelated, is that by Roman convention Constantine essentially was a god himself at this time, though he was the first Emperor to seriously downplay this role and appears to have never been comfortable with that aspect of his leadership.
Constantine, to whom all of these Church fathers in attendance owed a debt of gratitude not only financially, but politically, was an avowed anti-Semite. And the conclusions of the Council were for the newly formed and officially sanctioned Church to distance itself from Judaism at cost! I think the connection is more than mere inference, and far too convenient to be coincidence.
What they did was no less than convert an executed Jewish Rabbi into a resurrected pagan Messiah. Regardless of whether the Rabbi was Divine in nature or not which is a point irrelevant to this discussion, the newly formed Church made the Rabbi un-Jewish. *ALL* connections to Judaism were severed during that period or shortly after, well within Constantine's long lifetime.
With all of these facts I don't see where it is in any way unreasonable to believe Christmas is a syncretic conversion, "baptism" as you said, of the pagan winter solstice holiday.
(And to preclude the Aryan-Athanasian controversy...the matter was not fully settled, the Aryans went on for some time after, and Constantine himself was baptized by an Aryan priest named Eusebius. So it would seem this "controversy" that gets all the hype from this Council is smokescreen to hide all of the other points about severing any connection to Judaism. Aryanism continued well into the 7th century before being put down by force of arms)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arianism
That you can produce scholars (with no references) that can condense points of history to validate a December date is inconsequential. I've learned long ago that if I look hard enough I can find scholars who support anything, particularly in a soft science such as history which is written by the victors telling half of the story, and even that is often embellished and not to be taken at face value without validation. What you, or your chosen scholars (I'm not certain which), failed to note is that while so much effort was put into condensing history in an effort to validate one specific date, there was no effort to point out a sooner date, that is, a range of possible dates...which clearly shows me an open bias...which itself is unscholarly. Scholarship, in the truest sense that I was taught, does not begin with the conclusion and fit the evidence to validate the point. True scholarship begins at the beginning and chases the evidence to where it leads...even if that lead goes in a direction completely contrary to established normative tradition. What you are doing is attempting to mold history to conform to religion...religion trumps history. What I am doing is chasing the history to understand the religion...history trumps religion. If G-d is real, then He doesn't mind someone pursuing that reality. It is only men, consumed with their ponderous edifice that must be politically defended, that circumvent reality and bend it to their needs.
