No, December 25th was actually a pagan holiday Christians stole from Satan. Have you ever heard of the abomination of desolation? That was on December 25, 168 BC. (There were other abomination of desolation, like 70 AD which the Jews revolted against Rome, from 66 AD to 73 AD (7 years!/one prophetic week)
One of the emperors after Constantine, I believe the second one, made paganism illegal, and everyone had to be a Christian as the state religion. To make the transition easier for the people, their festivals and holidays were Christianized. Also their pagan temples of the gods and goddesses, were turned into church buildings (the first churches) and the pagan priests were turned into Catholic priests. Easter had been a celebration for Tammuz.
Even so, it is not a sin to honor Christ on these dates. In doing so, no one even remembers the original reasons for the holidays.
None of that is historically accurate. There is no historical record of any pagan religion celebrating anything on December 25. When the Christians adopted a fixed calendar based on the Metonic cycle in the 4th century, a scribe drew up a calendar for a wealthy Roman Christian on which he notated both the Christian and the Roman festivals. The only notation of a holiday on December 25 was the birth of Jesus. There was no Roman holiday on that date.
The myth that Rome had to make the transition from paganism to Christianity easier by adopting pagan holidays and temples and priests, as you stated without any historical evidence whatsoever, is not true. In fact, the actual historical records prove the very opposite. In a letter written by the pagan Emperor Julian (the Apostate) in A.D. 362 (Letter #22) to his pagan High Priest Arsacius, Emperor Julian congratulates himself on having spent a fortune to restore the pagan temples that had fallen to ruin and the sacrifices and worship which had been neglected because so many of the Roman people had converted to Christianity. But he laments that it was not enough. That the Christians' "
benevolence to strangers, their care for the graves of the dead and the 'pretended' holiness of their lives" was the reason that Christianity had succeeded in winning the hearts of the Roman masses. Then Emperor Julian instructed Arsacius to order "all the [pagan] priests" without exception
to begin to practice every one of the Christian virtues which had been so successful in converting the people to the Christian religion, and Arsacius was to "either shame them or persuade them into righteousness
or else remove them from their priestly office, if they do not, together with their wives, children and servants, attend the worship of the [pagan] gods ... [and to] admonish them that no priest may enter a theater or drink in a tavern or control any craft or trade that is base and not respectable. Honor those who obey you, and those who disobey, expel them from office. In every city establish frequent hostels in order that strangers may profit by our benevolence; I do not mean for our own people only, but for others also who are in need of money ... for it is disgraceful that, when no Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Galileans support not only their own poor but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us. Teach those of the Hellenic faith [pagans] to contribute to public service of this sort ... and accustom those who love the Hellenic religion to these good works
by teaching them that this was our practice of old."
This is an actual historical document written by no less than a Roman Emperor and it states the exact opposite of what you and so many others are claiming. The Roman state did not "order" everyone to become Christians, and the Christians did not "adopt" paganism to make the transition easier. The Roman masses converted to Christ because of the pious lives the Christians lived and their benevolence shown to the poor, even poor pagans. And that is the actual, written testimony of the Roman Emperor who was raised by a Christian mother but who hated Christ and everything Christian and tried to turn the Romans back to paganism. That is why he has become known historically as "Julian
the Apostate."
And it was not the Christians who "adopted paganism." It was in fact the pagan Emperor Julian who "commanded" the pagan priests to
adopt Christian virtues in order to try to win back the hearts of the Roman people to the pagan gods of their fathers, and to even lie and say this was the pagan practice of old!
Nor did the Christians "turn" pagan temples into church buildings. The only record in history of such occurrences is when Constantine tore down pagan temples in Jerusalem that had been built over Christian sites by previous pagan Roman Emperors in their attempts to suppress Christian veneration of those sites, such as Golgatha, the place of Jesus' crucifixion. In the past persecutions of Christians, the sites venerated by Christians, where so many events in the life of Jesus recorded in the Gospels took place, were desecrated by orders from Roman Emperors to defile the sites by making pagan sacrifices and building pagan temples in attempts to stamp out the new and emerging Christian religion. Constantine gets a bad rap from ill-informed Christians, but he is to be commended, or rather his mother Helena, who traveled throughout Palestine locating these sites and tearing down these pagan temples and constructing Christian churches to mark and venerate these holy sites. But throughout the Roman Empire, the pagan temples were not touched by Christians, but were abandoned and fell into disrepair when the masses of Romans converted to Christ, and Julian had to spend a fortune to try to restore them. In fact, in the 650 Mithraeum (underground caves where worshippers of Mithra gathered) so far discovered, archaeological excavations have found that when the Christians destroyed these places of worship in the 3rd and 4th centuries, they left the many votive coins strewn about, considering these places and even the money offered to the pagan gods and goddesses to be polluted and left them lying where they had fallen. The notion that Christians would adopt a place they considered so polluted to be used as places of Christian worship is utterly false and only shows just how not only ill-informed but misinformed the people are who are making such claims about these early years of the Christian faith.
So that is just a bit of actual historical and even archaeological records, and the evidence is exactly the opposite of the popular anti-Christian theories that burst on the scene in the 1800's when a rabidly anti-Catholic Scottish minister set out to "prove" that the Roman Catholic Church was "pagan" by fabricating lies and supposed connections with ancient Babylonian gods and goddesses. His anti-Catholic misinformation, which is now being aimed at Protestant Christianity as well (gleefully it seems by those who are in fact anti-Christian) has been thoroughly refuted by historians, and in the past century and a half since the publication of his book, by archaeological discoveries that have proven how shamefully he created out of whole cloth all kinds of lies and distortions about the old Babylonian religions, fueled by an unholy hatred of anything Catholic. And full disclosure, I am Evangelical Protestant and believe the Roman Catholic Church has a whole host of doctrinal views I take issue with, but even so, that does not make a lie acceptable. But those old lies and distortions are still being paraded across social media as if they represent factual historical information but without any actual historical evidence and in fact,
contrary to the actual historical evidence.
In Christ,
Deborah