In general, they won’t have anything–and I don’t say this to be unkind, it hasn’t honestly occurred to them that they should have proof, or that proof is anything other than “it looks legit to me” or “it’s obvious” or “my teacher says it is true.” But 21st-century monotheists without a shared cultural worldview will never be able to correctly judge or understand anything ancient based on our modern context. The only thing you can do is refuse to pass along anything that does not pass archaeological muster, and to learn to ask polite questions about people’s sources. In actuality, anyone can publish a book that says anything these days–and you can call anything a fact.
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In general, people often just honestly don’t know how to discern a good from a bad source and so books with titles like, “101 Facts About Christmas” are mistaken for actual researched and verified works of scholarship. I have ministered to people who have ruined their families over this, and even their marriages. This is too emotional a subject, and it is needlessly divisive for all the wrong reasons. I will not argue with opinions when we have actual facts available.
But I will ask if the material has been read so that we are sure to be on equal footing. I absolutely will discuss this stuff with anyone else who has read the source material I cite. In fact, I recently discovered that there were no claims whatsoever that Christmas had pagan roots until the 12th century.
When I moved on into Gero-Roman times, I also came up empty on the Mithraic and Saturnalian claims. As I studied Babylonian, Assyrian, Hittite, Egyptian and Canaanite mythologies, I stumbled across the startling fact that I couldn’t substantiate a single thing I had ever heard. I stumbled across this information accidentally while researching the defiling of the Temple back in early 2015. Please don’t believe the lie circulating out there that I ever did this to “get in good with my Christian friends and family” because they really have never seemed to care whether I celebrate or not and I move so often that I never have any friends to speak of who would care either. You all probably know I don’t celebrate Christmas or Easter but do celebrate and teach the Feasts. These claims are dying because they are being exposed to the truth. I have never forced this information on people but over the past six years, I have seen some amazing progress in this area. It almost always backfires so let’s be gentle, wise and kind. Share to your own social media platforms, if you so desire, but in my experience–jumping onto someone’s meme with a thousand likes where they are feeling really knowledgable and like they are doing a service to God and publicly humiliating them just doesn’t work. I don’t work that way and so I pray you won’t use my (or anyone else’s) research that way either. This is provided for informational purposes, and I hope no one will force this stuff onto other people’s private walls and embarrass them. I decided in 2019 to just go ahead and make a big note of it so people could access it whenever they wanted to but then Facebook discontinued notes in October so I had to put this all here instead. So, twice a year, a month before Christmas and a month before Easter, I have posted a list of the research from myself and some others addressing a lot of the Easter/Ishtar accusations and the Tammuz/Lent misunderstanding, where we actually probably got colored eggs (from the Jews and fron fasting, not the pagans), etc. And people are willing to pour huge amounts of money into ministries that support and promote this, so it will never go away entirely. People lifted them long before the ministries retracted them. However, the memes and googled pages that lack, and sometimes falsify, any sort of substantiation for their supposed archaeological claims are probably never going away. An increasing number of Hebrew Roots ministries are backing down from, and retracting, the once very common teachings about the hypothetical ancient pagan origins of Christmas and Easter.
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