New Warrior Ministries!: What is Time? part 1

What is Time? Part 1

Greetings in Christ Jesus,

What is Time?

Sunday November 27, 2016

The article this morning is specifically geared toward those who claim to be a part of the Body of Christ and yet choose to argue over days and times which cause splits and divisions in the body. This article may ultimately span two or three articles in order to say what I want to say and yet keep each article cut to a decent reading time and still convey the full issue.

So on this day; Sunday November 27, 2016 according to my original tradition it is the 3rd Sunday of Advent. On the western calendar (i.e. Roman) this day is the 28th Sunday of Pentecost.

On the Eastern Orthodox New Calendar today is the 23rd Sunday after Pentecost, but according to the Eastern Orthodox Old Calendar the 23rd Sunday after Pentecost was Sunday November 14, 2016 and this Sunday in November on this same Old Calendar the date is Sunday the 28th. The actual Sunday November 28, 2016 according to the Old Calendar will be the 25th Sunday after Pentecost. On a timeline of days and years, what day is it really? According to the Hebrew Calendar Sunday, 27 November 2016 is 26th of Cheshvan, 5777.

Time; Centuries, years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds. We think that we have it all figured out don’t we? So why are there contradictions in the church calendar? Why does this day; today November 27, 2016 have so many different times if you will attached to it? These different concepts of time have actually caused splits within the Body of Christ with cries of heresy at one another, others crying out with accusation of certain holy days actually being pagan dates of celebration. Many who say that they are in the body refuse to celebrate the Resurrection or Easter, there are those who celebrate it on different days using different calendars and then there are those who call the celebration a pagan holiday and some even call it a pagan holy day and therefore refuse to celebrate the most holy day in all of Christendom without which there is no such thing as Christian except for a scam being perpetrated on humanity.

This same concept goes for the celebration of the birth of our Lord; Christmas. Some have no celebration at all accusing it of being a pagan holiday or a pagan holy day and some celebrate it on different days using different calendars. So the next Christian holy day will be the celebration of the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ so I will begin this article with that day; Christmas.

So many people who call themselves Christian claim that the date chosen to celebrate Christmas (December 25 on the western calendar) was originally a pagan celebration. There was the Roman mid-winter Saturnalia festival in late December; and in 274 A.D., the Roman emperor Aurelian established a feast of the birth of Sol Invictus (the Unconquered Sun), on December 25. Christmas, as the argument goes, is nothing more than a pagan solar festival. According to this theory, early Christians deliberately chose these dates to encourage the spread of Christmas and Christianity throughout the Roman world: If Christmas looked like a pagan holiday; more pagans would be open to both the holiday and the God whose birth it celebrated.

As popular as this theory is and believe me I have heard it a lot, this idea of the origin of Christmas has some problems. It cannot be found in any ancient Christian writings. Christian authors of the time do note a connection between the solstice and Jesus’ birth: The church father Ambrose (c. 339–397), for example, described Christ as the true sun, who outshone the fallen gods of the old order. But early Christian writers never hint at any recent calendrical engineering; they clearly don’t think the date was chosen by the church. Rather they see the coincidence as a providential sign, as natural proof that God had selected Jesus over the false pagan gods.

It was not until the 12th century that we find the first suggestion that Jesus’ birth celebration was deliberately set at the time of pagan feasts. At first Christians were not concerned with birth dates but regarding Jesus the Christ His death and resurrection was everything. Then some began to speculate on the date of our Lord’s birth. Without going into a long drawn out detail of all of the dates and times I will simply give you the final analysis from the webpage of Biblical Archaeology; “Around 200 C.E. Tertullian of Carthage reported the calculation that the 14th of Nisan (the day of the crucifixion according to the Gospel of John) in the year Jesus died was equivalent to March 25 in the Roman (solar) calendar. March 25 is, of course, nine months before December 25; it was later recognized as the Feast of the Annunciation—the commemoration of Jesus’ conception. Thus, Jesus was believed to have been conceived and crucified on the same day of the year. Exactly nine months later, Jesus was born, on December 25.”

“In the East, too, the dates of Jesus’ conception and death were linked. But instead of working from the 14th of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar, the easterners used the 14th of the first spring month (Artemisios) in their local Greek calendar—April 6 to us. April 6 is, of course, exactly nine months before January 6—the eastern date for Christmas. In the East, too, we have evidence that April was associated with Jesus’ conception and crucifixion. Bishop Epiphanius of Salamis writes that on April 6, “The lamb was shut up in the spotless womb of the holy virgin, he who took away and takes away in perpetual sacrifice the sins of the world.” Even today, the Armenian Church celebrates the Annunciation in early April (on the 7th, not the 6th) and Christmas on January 6.

Thus, we have Christians in two parts of the world calculating Jesus’ birth on the basis that his death and conception took place on the same day (March 25 or April 6) and coming up with two close but different results (December 25 and January 6).”

Time, dates, calendars. We can see in the above that there was actually much thought put into the dating of the birth of our Lord. I have only put a small amount of the information here. But it can be seen that picking a date was not simply using some pagan festival to attract people. This is nothing more than a smear attack on the church. So now we are out of time at the moment.

This article will continue next time.