HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR
The Common Roots of Hanukkah and Christmas
(Originally published December 2003)
Religious people frequently assert that they have received their truth by divine revelation. It is a strange assertion, leading almost inevitably to the power claim that there is a single “true church” or religious system that alone offers salvation. It also produces such irrational doctrines as papal infallibility and scriptural inerrancy. A study of religious history, however, reveals the irrationality behind such claims.
Religion is always a very human creation. Every religious tradition participates in and is shaped by cultural factors, time-bound understandings of the world of nature, and prevailing tribal prejudices. Nothing illustrates this better than a look into the origins of both Hanukkah and Christmas and especially at how these celebrations were placed into the calendars of the western world when daylight was in short supply. Both holidays play on the theme of the restoration of light in a darkened world. Both reveal in these realities that they are the product of people living in the northern hemisphere.
Hanukkah was not a Torah festival. It rather developed late in Jewish history, coming into the cycle of liturgical observances no earlier than the second century B.C.E. It was designed to celebrate the time when a military leader named Judas, nicknamed “The Hammer” [or Maccabeas in Hebrew], routed the Syrian king Antiochus Epiphanes, driving his army out of their land. In that process the Jews reclaimed their sacred Temple in Jerusalem and restored to it the “true worship of Yahweh.”
The Syrians, showing utter contempt for this conquered nation, had desecrated the Temple in Jerusalem by replacing the sacred symbols of the Jews with pagan ones. In the Holy of Holies, regarded by the Jews as the very dwelling place of God, the Syrians had placed the head of an unclean pig that the Jews referred to as “the Abomination of Desolation.”
When Judas Maccabeas and his victorious rag-tag army of guerilla fighters entered the city in triumph, they went immediately to the Temple. Stripping away the offending images, they restored the Star of David, cleansed the ‘holy of holies’ and rededicated their Temple to its sacred purposes. Then, the tradition states, Judas lit the eight-branched candelabra called the Menorah to initiate a time of great celebration and enjoined upon the Jews in every succeeding generation a proper remembrance of this moment. These candles, the story suggests, burned miraculously for eight days. In the minds of the Jewish faithful this act not only restored light to a dark time in their history, but it also replaced idolatry with true faith. That was what Hanukkah celebrated.
For Christians, the great festival that interrupts the darkness of human history is called Christmas, that in the old tradition lasted from December 25th to January 6th. This 12-day celebration was designed to recall the birth of Jesus who, the Christian faith system asserted, came to be called “the light of the world.” These nativity narratives, created by second-generation Christians, provided the content for this observance.
In the earliest birth story of Jesus, written by Matthew (1 and 2) somewhere between the years 80-85, the primary symbol of light was a star–bright, radiant and beautiful– that illumined the darkness of the night. This star was said to have had the power to guide Magi through that darkness to the birthplace of this newborn savior in Bethlehem.
In Luke’s account of Jesus’ birth (1 and 2), written sometime between the years 88-92, the light symbol was not a star but a resplendent angel accompanied by a heavenly host, who cracked the midnight sky with heavenly brightness. To shepherds recoiling before this unearthly light, the tradition said that the angels announced the birth of Jesus, the “true light,” who “came down from heaven.”
Historical records from that period of time are scant, and no one today can date with precision either the date of the defeat of Antiochus by Judas Maccabeas or the actual time of the birth of Jesus. That did not stop either tradition, however, from locating their celebrations in the dead of winter. That choice was not designed to coincide with literal history, but to meet a deep and ancient human yearning that antedates by thousands of years both Judaism and Christianity.
As far back as human records go, it is clear that people in the northern hemisphere have observed with acts of worship that moment when the daylight stopped its relentless retreat into darkness and began its march back into the world. That human yearning for light to come to a dark world shaped both Hanukkah and Christmas. Indeed it captured them. That is why both celebrations are located in the darkest month of the year, Kislev in the Jewish calendar and December in the Western calendar.
Modern people have difficulty imagining the fears of our primitive human ancestors. We live today in an artificially lighted world. We can hurl back the darkness of night with the flip of a switch. We can travel in darkness far from home by turning on the headlights of our automobiles, or by utilizing the lights marking the landing fields of our airports. We live in cities with electrified streets and neon signboards.
For our ancestors, however, the only light of night was provided by the moon and the stars. When the moon faded each month into a total blackout the darkness of night was illumined only by the distant twinkling stars. When clouds made the stars invisible, the darkness was total. With darkness came danger and fear. The darkness was inhabited, it was suggested, by “ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night.”
The relatively recent human ability first to capture fire and later actually to ignite it, was a gigantic step in the quest to defeat the always-threatening darkness. The vast majority of the human beings who have inhabited this earth lived with the presence of an unconquered and unrelieved darkness.
When one further embraces the fact that people in the ancient world did not understand the relationship between the heavenly bodies and the earth, it is easy to understand why mythology and ritualistic acts were wrapped around these mysterious natural wonders. Modern men and women deal with these realities in a quite secular manner. We manipulate our clocks with various time zones and with something we call ‘daylight savings time.’ We anticipate and name the shortest day of the year as the winter solstice. We understand that the earth rotates on its axis as it journeys around the sun every 365 1/4 days. We know the months when we are closer to the sun and the months when we are farther away. None of this, however, was known by our forebears. They only knew that the sun seemed to retreat into darkness as the winter came. They wondered why, and they speculated about this observable phenomenon using a wide variety of religious explanations. They lived with a chronic fear that one year the enveloping darkness that came each winter might finally capture the light of the sun forever and thus doom their lives to be lived without any light at all.
For this reason in almost every human culture there was a great religious celebration when the sun stopped its relentless retreat into an ever enveloping-darkness and began its slow but steady return. Both Hanukkah and Christmas became later historical expressions of this ancient celebration. They thus reveal their northern hemisphere, and obviously human origins.
It is time to recognize that religious truth, like all truth, can only emerge out of human experience. Once that is understood, then religious people will recognize that their exclusive claims to possess some external, divine revelation is nothing but a part of our human security system. These claims also create the mentality that fuels that religious imperialism that, even in the 21st century, underlies human conflict.
The only way for the Christmas yearning for peace on earth to be achieved is for every religious system to face its human origins, and to recognize that all worshipers are nothing but human seekers walking into the mystery and wonder of the God, who is beyond anything that human minds can finally imagine. That would represent a gigantic step both into a new sensitivity and away from the negativity that religion perpetually pumps into the human bloodstream. In our observances of Hanukkah and Christmas this year, that could well be our most important learning.
~ John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
Kenneth from Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, writes:
Question:
Are the creeds, the doctrines and the dogmas of the church, an expression of the way people thought 2000 years ago?
Answer:
Dear Kenneth,
All creeds, doctrines and dogmas will reflect the worldview of those who framed them. No creed drops out of heaven, fully written, complete with paragraphing and punctuation. All creeds are shaped in debate and represent the winning formula, some times having been forced to consensus by something as human as political compromise.
The first creed of the Christian Church was just three words: Jesus is Messiah. In time Messiah was translated Lord. When Constantine became Emperor after the Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312 C.E. he sought to unify his country under the Christian banner. This was why he called the Council of Nicea in 325 C.E. to force the Christians to form a creed that would be the basis of that unity. That is the Council that produced the Apostles' Creed.
But unity did not result and the Church discovered that Christians could say the creeds verbatim while meaning very different things. The creed had too much interpretive room in it to be the basis for unity. So another Council was called to close out the loopholes. That is when the Nicene Creed was created with all of its loophole closing clauses. Who is Jesus? "God of Gods, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father." Each phrase was designed to diminish wiggle room and thus create unity and conformity.
Even that did not work so, much later, an even more convoluted faith statement was adopted called the Athanasian Creed. The primary purpose of each creed was to define who is part of the true faith and who were outside the true faith. So every creed is a boundary maker.
I do not regard any creed, doctrine or dogma as eternal. I am not sure that in the light of modern biblical scholarship we would have or could have come to the same creedal conclusions and I wish we would go back and reargue the issues of Nicea, Ephesus and Chalcedon.
I say the creeds regularly. I do not think of them as strait jackets to be worn whether they fit or not. I view them rather as love songs that our ancestors in faith sang to their God. Love songs like the creeds always use language that cannot be literalized.
Try to view the creeds this way and see what a difference it makes.
~ John Shelby Spong
Read and Share Online Here
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The Fourth Gospel was designed first to place Jesus into the context of the Jewish scriptures, then to place him into the worship patterns of the synagogue and finally to allow him to be viewed through the lens of a popular form of first-century Jewish mysticism.
The result of this intriguing study is not only to recapture the original message of this gospel, but also to provide us today with a radical new dimension to the claim that in the humanity of Jesus the reality of God has been met and engaged.
“No one has done more to articulate a vibrant, post-mythic vision of Christianity than John Shelby Spong. Bishop Spong’s masterful interpretation is destined to become a classic.” — Michael Dowd, Author of Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World
