или што би рекле, новиот завет е пишуван според еден календар, а го одбележуваме според друг, т.е. трет
Па Црквата поради нив и ради нивно спасение на паганите и заради нивно внимание морла да им прооведа за сонцето со вечна топлина и светлина која никогаш не згаснува Христос.
значи сепак датумот е отпосле одреден. Е сега, за тоа дали апостолите одредиле како што велиш, да видиме што велат податоците и учените по античка историја
It was a
public holiday celebrated around December 25th in the family home. A time for feasting, goodwill, generosity to the poor, the exchange of gifts and the decoration of trees.
But it wasn’t Christmas. This was Saturnalia, the pagan Roman winter solstice festival. But was Christmas, Western Christianity’s most popular festival, derived from the pagan Saturnalia?
The first-century AD poet Gaius Valerius Catullus described Saturnalia as ‘the best of times’: dress codes were relaxed,
small gifts such as dolls, candles and caged birds were exchanged.
The conversion of Emperor
Constantine to Christianity in AD 312 ended Roman persecution of Christians and began imperial patronage of the Christian churches. But Christianity did not become the Roman Empire’s official religion overnight. Dr David Gwynn, lecturer in ancient and late antique history at Royal Holloway, University of London, says that,
alongside Christian and other pagan festivals, ‘the Saturnalia continued to be celebrated in the century afterward’.
The poet Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius wrote another
Saturnalia, describing a banquet of pagan literary celebrities in Rome during the festival. Classicists date the work to between
AD 383 and 430, so it describes a Saturnalia alive and well under Christian emperors. The Christian calendar of Polemius Silvus, written around
AD 449, mentions Saturnalia, recording that ‘it used to honour the god Saturn’. This suggests it had by then become just another popular carnival.
Christmas apparently started – like Saturnalia – in Rome, and spread to the eastern Mediterranean.
The earliest known reference to it commemorating the birth of Christ on December 25th is in the Roman Philocalian calendar of AD 354. Provincial schisms soon resulted in different Christian calendars. The Orthodox Church in the Eastern (Byzantine) half of the Roman Empire fixed the date of Christmas at January 6th, commemorating simultaneously Christ’s birth, baptism and first miracle.
Saturnalia has a rival contender as the forerunner of Christmas:
the festival of dies natalis solis invicti, ‘birthday of the unconquered sun’. The
Philocalian calendar also states that December 25th was a Roman civil holiday honouring the cult of
sol invicta.
With its origins in Syria and the monotheistic cult of Mithras, sol invicta certainly has similarities to the worship of Jesus. The cult was introduced into the empire in
AD 274 by Emperor Aurelian (214-275), who effectively made it a state religion, putting its emblem on Roman coins.
Sol invicta succeeded because of its ability to assimilate aspects of Jupiter and other deities into its figure of the Sun King, reflecting the absolute power of ‘divine’emperors. But despite efforts by later pagan emperors to control Saturnalia and absorb the festival into the official cult, the
sol invicta ended up looking very much like the old Saturnalia.
Constantine, the first Christian emperor, was brought up in the sol invicta cult, in what was by then already a predominantly monotheist empire: ‘It is therefore possible,’ says Dr Gwynn, ‘that
Christmas was intended to replace this festival rather than Saturnalia.’
