Two things must be shown for the charge to hold: that the customs
came from paganism, and that coming from paganism would settle
what they mean now. The first is doubtful history. The second is
answered in the New Testament, and not in the Watchtower’s
favor. One concession first, because it costs nothing: Scripture
does not command Christmas, gives no date for the Nativity, and
records no apostolic celebration of it. All true, and beside the
point — Scripture does not command the Memorial be held
once a year after sundown on Nisan 14 either. The question
is not whether a practice is commanded but whether it is
forbidden.
Where the Charge Comes From
Most of the particulars trace to one book: Alexander
Hislop’s The Two Babylons (1858), which claimed
the Catholic Church is Babylonian religion in disguise —
Nimrod, his wife Semiramis, and their son surviving as a
counterfeit trinity, with Mary as Semiramis. The book has a
defect no detail can repair: Semiramis is a real Assyrian queen
of about 811 B.C., Nimrod belongs to the early chapters of
Genesis, and no ancient source anywhere marries them. The central
couple were never a couple. Scholars of every stripe reject the
book, and its most successful popularizer, the evangelist Ralph
Woodrow, went back to the sources, withdrew his own quarter-million-copy
bestseller at his own cost, and published its refutation
(The Babylon Connection?, 1997). The Society promoted
Hislop for decades; his arguments now circulate at the door with
the author’s name removed.
The Date Came From a Calculation, Not a Festival
December 25 has a documented derivation that owes nothing
to the sun — scholars debate it against the
festival-competition theory, but it rests on the Church’s
own arithmetic. Ancient Jewish tradition held that a prophet died
on the day he was conceived. Early Christians, calculating the
date of the Crucifixion, settled on March 25 — which
became the date of Christ’s conception, the Annunciation.
Nine months later is December 25. The arithmetic is still
visible in the calendar: the Church keeps the Annunciation on
March 25 to this day. The chronology also runs the wrong way
for the accusation: December 25 had no religious meaning in
the Roman calendar before the emperor Aurelian’s sun feast
of 274, when the Christian reckoning was already in circulation.
And no ancient Christian source says the Church timed the
Nativity against a pagan rite. Augustine and Leo rebuke Christians
who honored the sun on the day, which shows the rivalry, not the
origin; the first writer to suggest that the timing was deliberate
is a twelfth-century Syrian, Dionysius bar-Salibi, and the modern
theory dates from an eighteenth-century scholar, Paul Ernst
Jablonski.
Fairness requires saying that the older view — that the
Church adopted the date to baptize a pagan feast — still has
serious defenders, and that the calculation theory, though it has
gained ground, has not closed the question. This page follows the
calculation; a reader may weigh the two. And if the Church did in
fact baptize a pagan date, that is inculturation, not idolatry
— the same thing Paul did with the altar to an unknown god
(Acts 17:23), and the Church has always taken what the nations
made and turned it to Christ.
The Shepherds Were Where They Should Be
The argument from Luke 2:8 assumes shepherds would not be in the
fields in December. In the Holy Land that is backwards: sheep
mate as the days shorten in autumn, so lambing falls in December
and January — exactly when shepherds keep watch through the
night. None of this proves Christ was born on December 25;
the Church has never claimed the date as certain. It shows only
that the confident objection is not as strong as it sounds.
“Easter” Is an English Problem
In Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch the feast is
simply Pascha — the Passover. Only English and
German use another name. A feast kept for centuries across the
world under the name of the Passover did not come from a goddess
whose name touched it late, in one corner of Europe, in one
language — a goddess so thinly attested that our only early
source is one sentence in Bede, and some scholars doubt she
existed at all.
What Jeremiah Was Talking About
Here the address is read correctly — a tree, an axe, silver
and gold — and the household goes unvisited. Jeremiah 10
describes a workman carving a felled tree into an idol, plating
it, and fastening it upright; the prophet then says the finished
thing cannot walk or speak or do harm or good (Jer. 10:5). That
is an idol on its plinth, not a fir tree with lights. Nobody
prays to a Christmas tree. The decorated tree is a German custom
of the sixteenth century, two thousand years after Jeremiah
wrote.
Origin Does Not Fix Meaning
Suppose every historical claim were true. The argument would
still fail, because the New Testament faced exactly this question
and answered it. Asked about meat that had actually been
sacrificed in a pagan temple, Paul rules that “an idol has
no real existence” (1 Cor. 8:4) and the meat may be
eaten without scruple, restricted only out of love for a weaker
brother. On holy days he is blunter still: “One man esteems
one day as better than another, while another man esteems all
days alike … He who observes the day, observes it in honor
of the Lord” (Rom. 14:5–6). The one thing forbidden
is judging one another over it: “let no one pass judgment
on you … with regard to a festival” (Col. 2:16). A
rule that divides Christians over days is the thing Paul actually
prohibits.
As for the settled principle — the golden calf, Nadab and
Abihu — it settles a different question. The calf was
worship offered to an image as God, against an explicit
commandment; Nadab and Abihu brought unauthorized fire into a
sanctuary liturgy whose every detail God had prescribed. Both
concern Israel’s regulated sacrificial cult, where God had
commanded exactly how He would be approached. A date on a
calendar or a tree in a parlor is not a sacrifice. The question
such customs raise is not “may we alter God’s
prescribed worship?” but “may a Christian use an
indifferent custom?” — and that is precisely the
question Paul answers about meat and days.
And on that question the Society has already agreed, in print.
Asked about wedding rings, whose pagan ancestry its own
literature acknowledges, it answered: “Really, the question
is not so much whether wedding rings were first used by pagans
but whether they were originally used as part of false religious
practices and still retain such religious significance”
(The Watchtower, January 15, 1972, Questions From
Readers). That is this page’s whole argument, stated by the
Watchtower about a ring: origin does not bar a practice once no
false worship remains attached to it. The principle that clears
the ring clears the calendar.
Three objections remain. Romans 14 and Colossians 2, it is said,
concern Jewish festivals, not pagan ones, so Paul’s liberty
does not reach Christmas. But the principle Paul states is
general: a day is kept or not kept “in honor of the
Lord,” and it is the honor that sanctifies the day,
whichever calendar it came from; were that not so, the wedding
ring would fall with the tree. Second, the Society’s 1972
ruling on rings asked one more question than the tree is usually
allowed: whether the custom still carries a false religious
meaning today. Asked of Christmas, the answer is the one every
Witness already gives about the ring; nobody who puts up a tree is
honoring Saturn, and a rite that means nothing to anyone is not a
rite. Third, birthdays, on the ground that Scripture records only
Pharaoh’s and Herod’s. Scripture also records no
Christian wedding, no funeral, and no anniversary of anything;
what it does record is Job’s sons feasting “each on
his day” (Job 1:4), which many readers have taken for
birthdays, with their father sanctifying them afterward rather
than forbidding the feast.
The Rule Nobody Can Keep
Applied consistently, the principle consumes far more than
Christmas. Sunday is the day of the sun, and Witnesses meet on
it. January belongs to Janus and March to Mars, and the Society
dates its literature by them. The wedding ring has a documented
pagan pedigree and is worn. Even the Memorial falls on a date
reckoned by a calendar whose month-names Israel brought home from
Babylon. The rule is not applied to these because it cannot be.
What remains is a principle invoked where it is wanted and set
aside where it is not — which is not a principle but a
preference.
The Wider Charge
The same method drives the larger accusation against doctrine
itself: observe a resemblance, infer a derivation. Scholarship
has a name for the habit — “parallelomania”
— and a decisive answer: turn the method on the Old
Testament and it destroys the religion God gave Israel. The
Tabernacle’s altar, lampstand, incense, vestments, and
washings all have close pagan parallels, and every one was
commanded by God Himself in detail. If parallels prove paganism,
God gave Israel a pagan religion. The particulars then answer
quickly: pagan triads are three gods, while the
Trinity is one God in
three Persons, a formula no polytheism produced; the Christian
hope is not Plato’s
immortal soul but the
resurrection of the body, the one doctrine Athens laughed at
(Acts 17:32); and the
cross was being traced on Christian foreheads by the early third century, as Tertullian records (De Corona 3).
The charge that presses hardest concerns Mary, since Jeremiah
condemns a “queen of heaven” by name (Jer. 7:18). But
Jeremiah’s goddess received sacrifice — cakes,
incense, libations — and sacrifice to anyone but God is
exactly what the Church calls idolatry. Mary receives no
sacrifice; every petition addressed to her is a request for her
prayers, the same request Christians make of one another (Jas.
5:16). Her royal title comes not from Babylon but from
David’s throne room, where the queen was the king’s
mother: Solomon rises, bows to Bathsheba, and seats her
at his right hand (1 Kings 2:19). To call
Mary queen is to say something
about her Son. And a shared phrase proves nothing by itself:
Baal means “lord,” and Scripture calls God
Lord on every page.
Is Rome “Babylon the Great”?
Behind the whole charge stands Revelation 17 and 18: the harlot on
seven hills, “drunk with the blood of the saints,” and
the command “Come out of her, my people” (Rev. 18:4).
A Witness has been taught from childhood that this is the Catholic
Church, and three things should be noticed. First, that is not
quite the Society’s own reading: Revelation—Its
Grand Climax At Hand! makes Babylon the Great “the
world empire of false religion,” every religion but one,
which is a different claim and a much larger one. Second, John
tells his readers who she was for them: the city that “has
dominion over the kings of the earth” (17:18), seated on
seven hills (17:9), drunk with the blood of the martyrs (17:6).
That is pagan Rome, which was killing Christians as he wrote, and
the earliest readers, Tertullian among them, said so at once. In
the vision the Church of the martyrs is the harlot’s victim,
not the harlot. Third, “come out of her” is addressed
to God’s people inside a persecuting city, and it asks them
to leave her sins, not to leave the Church that was being fed to
her lions. A prophecy fulfilled in the city that martyred Peter
cannot be turned, seventeen centuries later, against the church
that buried him.
The Reply in Brief
The charge needs two things to be true, and it has neither. The
history is not what it assumes: the date descends from a
calculation about the Crucifixion, the sun feast came later, and
much of the rest descends from a Victorian book whose central
couple never existed. And the principle fails even where the
history holds. Paul faced the question in its hardest form and
ruled that the idol is nothing, that the day may be kept to the
Lord, and that no one is to be judged over a festival. Run the
test consistently and it convicts the Tabernacle first —
whose incense, lamps, and vestments God commanded, every one with
a pagan parallel.
The full essay sets out the calculation hypothesis and its
sources at length, Hislop’s method and Woodrow’s
repudiation of it, the evidence for and against the Eostre
goddess, the documented history of the Christmas tree, Paul on
temple meat and the keeping of days, the Fathers on the Christian
use of what the nations made, and the Watchtower’s own
shifting record — Christmas was kept at Bethel until 1926.
It is available as a Word document at the end of this page.
