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In the December, 1939 issue of Atlantic Monthly, Miss Winifred Kirkland of
Nashville, Tenn. attempted to present Luke to her readers as "The Man Who Gave Us
Christmas." She wrote beautifully, but failed utterly!
She failed because she ignored both divine and human history by taking it for granted that Christmas is a Christian festival. To her mind, the word "Christmas" is a synopsis of the birth of Christ. But there is not a word in sacred history which indicates that Christians in the first century celebrated the birth of Christ. The day of Christ's birth is unknown. Most scholars are agreed that Dec. 25 is not the day. The account of Christ's nativity is not placed in Holy Writ for the purpose of causing us to set apart a day for special celebration, but to produce faith in Jesus Christ. Miss Kirkland says that the account of Christ's birth seems to have been unknown to the earliest Christians. She thinks this was due to their concentration on Christ's death and resurrection. Shall we accept her views and logic? The earliest church was in Jerusalem. Among the charter members of that church were Mary, the mother of Jesus, the brethren of the Lord, the apostles, and many of His close friends and disciples. Can you imagine the members of the Jerusalem church being so dull and disinterested as not to know about Christ's birth when they had such an opportunity to learn? Mary, the Lord's mother, was one of them. Can you possibly suppose that Mary was not a person of great interest to the Jerusalem church? Surely they must have known about the birth of Christ. How could they have failed to know about it? Yet those early Christians, under the direction of the Holy Spirit-guided apostles, did not worship Mary, nor celebrate Christ's birthday. But from the beginning they ate the Lord's Supper, which commemorates Christ's suffering and death. They also had one special day to meet for worship — the first day of the week, the day Christ rose from the dead and the only special day Christians are commanded to remember. In view of these facts, can we conclude with Miss Kirkland that the story of Christ's birth was unknown to members of the early church? The only safe conclusion is that the present Christmas celebration was not part of the worship of the New Testament church. As a matter of fact, Christmas originated with an apostate church. In giving a history between the years of 100 and 313 A.D., George Fisher says, "About the end of this period two new festivals came in. One was Epiphany, originating in the East, not improbably with Jewish Christians, and commemorating the baptism of Christ. The other was Christmas, a festival of Roman origin, taking the place of the heathen festival in honor of the sun, or the deity bearing that name, which was celebrated at the winter solstice, or on the 25th of December, the time erroneously assigned for the solstice in the Julian calendar." If you will read the history of the celebration of the heathen festival which Christmas supplanted, you will notice that the present Christmas celebration closely resembles it in many ways. So if we give gifts and exchange greetings around the 25th of December, let us be fully aware of the fact that we are not commanded to do this as Christian worship. Nor does the celebration of Christmas take a place in Christian worship alongside the Lord's Supper or any other item plainly authorized. Luke gives us a beautiful account of Christ's birth, but not of Christmas. |