Here’s another example. Communion has at its root the Jewish Seder. Christ and his disciples were eating the Seder when he broke the bread and said “take and eat, this is my body broken for you” and said the cup was his blood, etc.
Does that make communion a Jewish rather than a Christian practice?
The mere question is ludicrous.
Traditions don’t arise in a vacuum, nor are they unchanging. The early Christians continued to celebrate Passover and take communion as part of that celebration. We’ve stopped having it alongside a large kosher meal, we’ve stopped asking the questions and looking for Elijah. Many churches have stopped the practice of even using unleavened bread. But it doesn’t mean that communion is not Christian just because it looks different than it did in Christ’s day and it doesn’t make it Jewish just because Jews were eating the Seder for millennia before Christ was even born.
I’m saying that there are various different ways of answering “why do people give gifts at Christmas?”. You can ask the proximate cause, or the source of the tradition, for instance. The source of the tradition is that people were already giving gifts at Saturnalia (and probably other midwinter festivals) when Christian leaders decided to invent a Christian holiday to compete with those festivals.
So i really think it’s a stretch to say it has “Christian roots”. I’d say, instead, that the custom has been given a Christian spin.
I certainly agree that the custom of gift giving midwinter has acquired a Christian spin, and has Christian meaning to Christians. So maybe we are arguing semantics.
christianity is built on a foundation of judaism plus paganism. if you are a believer, then you think divine inspiration is mixed in too. but historically there is no denying the other parts.
the trinity is based on apologetics for pagans, and uses pagan concepts.
and roman catholic confession of individual sins, with penance, is from the influence of the anglo saxons, who had strict rules of honor (or maybe the irish.)
[/quote]
I know little about these matters, but I don’t find your brief assertions convincing. I’m not opposed to hearing more, if you think it’s worth posting here.
I do accept “Christianity is built on a foundation of Judaism” that is completely clear. How paganism gets mixed in there, I don’t have a clue.
Without hijacking the thread too much, here is a link to the influence of neoplatonism on early christianity:
i probably should have been a little more careful with my wording. in trying to defend the christian religious experience to a pagan audience, christians had to express the novelty of that experience in pagan terms. this exercise in apologetics in turn influenced and changed the experience itself, and embedded (modified) pagan concepts into christianity.
I think so. Tomorrow I’m teaching on 2 Corinthians, where the apostle Paul talks to the church about how all the other false apostles compete for their allegiance. That has always happened, and it always will. In my mind the foundation of Christianity is the New Testament [and the Old]. If some famous philosopher in history took a warped view on those events a few centuries later and managed to perpetuated it to some degree, I don’t know if that any longer qualifies as “foundational Christianity”. I don’t know anything about Augustine - I am a historical ignoramus - but I wouldn’t believe anything just because he did.
I always associated paganism with connection to nature, but I think that’s a recent development.
It was originally just to differentiate christians from other religions, especially polytheistic ones.
Paganism usually refers to the religion and philosophy of rome and greece before christianity. This is zeus/jupiter, hercules, etc. By that time there were also heavy influences from egypt and persia. It can also refer to the religions of the celtic and germanic peoples of europe. That includes odin, thor, etc.
there was a lot more association with nature in paganism. different sacred groves and rivers were worshiped as having their own gods. more generally there was not the same separation of what we now call the secular and the religious, at least in greece and rome.
Historically, “pagan” separates the pre and post christian epochs for the mediterranean and europe.
i have to think that, say, the conquistadors applied similar language to the indigenous americans. but it seems problematic to use that kind of language today.
