Holidays Are Not Pagan — Read Jeremiah 10 to Verse 5

The pagan-origin polemic is the single most common doorstep move a JW makes against a Protestant, and it is built on four weak foundations: a discredited source chain (Hislop), a scholarly reversal on Sol Invictus, a misreading of Jeremiah 10, and a genetic fallacy the Watchtower itself abandons whenever it is convenient (wedding rings, Wednesdays, the calendar). Your goal at the door is to read Jeremiah 10 to verse five and let the JW see that the book is describing a Babylonian idol, not a Christmas tree.

1. Start with Jeremiah 10. Read verses 3-4 — the rs proof-text — and then keep reading to verse 5. Verse 5 says the object is "like a scarecrow in a cucumber field." In the NWT: "they cannot speak; they have to be carried, for they cannot take a single step. Do not be afraid of them, for they can do no harm." Then verse 9: the silver comes from Tarshish, the gold from Uphaz, the craftsman is a metalworker, the object is clothed in blue and purple textile thread. Then verses 14-15: Jeremiah calls it "a metal image," "a delusion," "a work of mockery." The object Jeremiah is describing has feet (that cannot walk), a mouth (that cannot speak), metal plating, textile clothing, and worshippers who consult it for guidance. Does any of this describe a Christmas tree? No — it describes a sixth-century-BC Babylonian cult statue of the kind Isaiah 44:9–20 mocks in more detail. Jeremiah is warning against idolatry, not evergreen trees. Lit indoor Christmas trees did not even exist until the sixteenth century AD, more than two thousand years after Jeremiah. No Old Testament prophet delivers a rule whose referent is a Protestant-German-Lutheran custom their audience has no conceivable way of recognising.
2. Move to the Sol Invictus reversal. Reasoning From the Scriptures teaches that Christmas was borrowed from the December 25 feast of Sol Invictus, established by the Emperor Aurelian in AD 274. The scholarly ground on this has moved decisively since the mid-twentieth century. Steven Hijmans, a University of Groningen classicist, published the definitive academic article in Mouseion in 2003 showing that there is no solid attestation of a Sol Invictus festival on December 25 before the Philocalian Calendar of AD 354 — which is the same document that first lists the Christian Nativity on December 25. You cannot assign historical priority from a document that lists both for the first time. Susan Roll's book Toward the Origins of Christmas (Kok Pharos 1995) is the standard Catholic-liturgical treatment and defends the Integration Hypothesis: the early church calculated December 25 from the symbolic principle that the most holy figures died on the day of their conception (integral age). Calculating from the traditional crucifixion date of March 25 — which Tertullian defends in Against the Jews 8.18 — conception was placed on the same day, and birth nine months later on December 25. Hippolytus of Rome, in his Commentary on Daniel 4.23 around AD 203, already wrote that "the first advent of our Lord in the flesh, when he was born in Bethlehem, was December 25th" — seventy years before Aurelian's temple dedication. The Protestant liturgist Thomas Talley argued that Aurelian likely placed Sol on December 25 in competition with the already-growing Christian observance, not the other way around. The rs story runs the genealogy backwards.
3. Pull the Hislop-Woodrow card. Almost every rs pagan-origin citation on holidays traces back through Alexander Hislop's 1853 book The Two Babylons. Hislop's main Evangelical populariser was Ralph Woodrow, whose 1966 Babylon Mystery Religion sold over 250,000 copies in Pentecostal and Adventist circles. In 1997 Woodrow pulled his own book from print and published The Babylon Connection? — a formal retraction documenting Hislop's fabricated Assyrian citations, his conflation of Nimrod and Semiramis across a fifteen-hundred-year gap, and his invented etymologies. Woodrow's own words: "One can go to any library, check any history book about ancient Babylon — none of these things will be found." The Watchtower is still citing the case its own Evangelical champion publicly recanted nearly three decades ago.
4. Take out Easter. The Ishtar-Easter connection is a phonetic coincidence in modern English — "Ishtar" is pronounced "ish-tar," not "easter," and the two words come from different language families entirely. The Christian celebration is called Pascha in every other language — Spanish Pascua, Italian Pasqua, Portuguese Páscoa, French Pâques, Greek Πάσχα, Russian Пасха, Ethiopian Fasika — all from the Hebrew Pesach, "Passover." In English and German alone it picked up a month-name. And the month-name itself — Eosturmonath — according to the only ancient source (Bede's De Temporum Ratione, around AD 725) just means "the month of dawn" or "the month of the east," when the sun rises noticeably north of east in northern Europe. Philip Shaw's monograph Pagan Goddesses in the Early Germanic World (Bristol Classical Press 2011) concludes that if Eostre existed at all, she was a local Kentish matron-goddess — not a pan-Germanic fertility deity, and certainly not the Babylonian Ishtar. The elaborate rabbits-and- eggs fertility narrative comes from Jacob Grimm's 1835 Deutsche Mythologie, a Romantic-era speculative reconstruction that modern scholarship has set aside. The Easter bunny is first documented in a 1572 German medical tract (Georg Franck von Franckenau's De ovis paschalibus) — fifteen hundred years after paganism had stopped being a functioning religion in Europe. And Easter eggs are simpler still: Lenten fasting rules forbade eating eggs for forty days, chickens kept laying, so eggs were hard-boiled and accumulated by Easter Sunday — when the fast broke and the eggs became the obvious feast food. That is food economy, not fertility cult.
5. Pivot to Romans 14:5–6 in the NWT. This is the move Paul himself makes, and the text is devastating because it is Paul's own verdict in the JW's own translation: "One man judges one day as above another; another judges one day the same as all others; let each one be fully convinced in his own mind. The one who observes the day observes it to Jehovah." Paul is arbitrating a real first- century dispute — Jewish Christians still observing Mosaic feast days versus Gentile Christians who did not — and his ruling is liberty, with faith-motive as the test. Then Colossians 2:16–17 in the NWT: "do not let anyone judge you about what you eat and drink or about the observance of a festival or of the new moon or of a sabbath. Those things are a shadow of the things to come, but the reality belongs to the Christ." Paul explicitly forbids Christians from letting anyone judge them on festival observance — which is exactly what the Watchtower does. One of them is wrong, and it is not Paul.
6. Close with the genetic-fallacy reductio and the Hanukkah point. The rs rule — "anything with pagan origins is forbidden" — destroys every day of the week (all seven are named after pagan gods), every month (January, March, May, June are named for Janus, Mars, Maia, Juno), every wedding ring (Egyptian and Roman pre-Christian origin), the entire calendar (Julius Caesar was Pontifex Maximus of Roman state religion). The Watchtower exempts all of these from its own rule — the Awake! magazine in the year 2000 explicitly defended JW wedding rings on the grounds that "although the wedding ring may have originated in pagan lands ... the custom has become so widespread that it is no longer associated with pagan worship." The genetic fallacy answered by the Watchtower itself. And finally — Jesus himself attended the Feast of Dedication in John 10:22–23. Hanukkah is not in the Mosaic Law. It commemorates the Maccabean rededication of the temple in 165 BC — an extra-biblical festival, established after the Old Testament canon closed, in memory of a historical event in God's dealings with his people. Jesus observed it. If Jesus could honour an extra-biblical commemoration of a redemptive work of God, on what principle is it forbidden to commemorate the greatest redemptive work — the Incarnation itself?

Read to verse five. In your own New World Translation: "they are like a scarecrow in a cucumber field. They cannot speak; they have to be carried, for they cannot take a single step. Do not be afraid of them, for they can do no harm — nor can they do any good." The object in Jeremiah 10 has feet (that cannot walk), a mouth (that cannot speak), is carried in procession, and is called a scarecrow — a human-shaped effigy. Verse 9 adds that the silver comes from Tarshish, the gold from Uphaz, the craftsman is a metalworker, and the object is clothed in blue and purple textile. Do you plate your Christmas tree in Tarshish silver and dress it in purple textile? Does your tree walk? Does it speak? Jeremiah is describing a Babylonian cult statue of the kind you also see in Isaiah 44:9–20 — a wooden core, metal plating, textile garments, carried in procession, consulted for guidance. Verses 14-15 explicitly call it "a metal image," "a delusion." Jeremiah's contrast throughout the chapter is wooden idol versus living God (verse 10: "Jehovah is truly God"), not "decorated vegetation versus un-decorated vegetation." And the decisive historical point: lit indoor Christmas trees did not exist until around AD 1539 in Strasbourg and the Luther-adjacent Lutheran households of later sixteenth-century Germany. Jeremiah would have to be prophesying about a custom that would appear twenty-one centuries after his death, in a culture that did not yet exist. No Old Testament prophet delivers warnings whose referents are invisible to their audience. Jeremiah 10 is about idol-making. Applying it to Christmas trees is textbook eisegesis.

Hippolytus of Rome, writing in his Commentary on Daniel around AD 203, said: "the first advent of our Lord in the flesh, when he was born in Bethlehem, was December 25th." That is nearly seventy years before Emperor Aurelian's Sol Invictus temple dedication in AD 274 — so the Christian identification of December 25 with Christ's nativity predates the alleged pagan template. Sextus Julius Africanus made the same calculation around AD 221. The Philocalian Calendar of AD 354 — the first Roman civic calendar to list a Sol Invictus festival on December 25 — is also the first to list the Christian Nativity on December 25. Neither date takes priority from that calendar alone, because it lists both for the first time. And Steven Hijmans, a University of Groningen classicist, published the definitive academic article in Mouseion in 2003 arguing that Aurelian probably placed Sol on December 25 in competition with the already-growing Christian observance, not the other way around. The liturgist Susan Roll's Toward the Origins of Christmas (Kok Pharos 1995) defends the Integration Hypothesis: the early church calculated December 25 from a symbolic principle — conception equals death date, so March 25 (traditional crucifixion date) plus nine months equals December 25. Either way, the "Constantine stole Christmas from the pagans" story is overturned by twenty-first century scholarship. And even if one insists on the fourth-century dating, Jesus himself attended the Feast of Dedication (Hanukkah) in John 10:22–23 — an extra-biblical festival established in 165 BC in memory of the Maccabean rededication of the temple. Jesus honoured an extra-biblical commemoration of God's redemptive work. On what principle is commemorating his own Incarnation forbidden?

Read verses 8-11 in context. Paul is writing to Gentile Galatians who were being pressured by Judaisers to revert to Mosaic Torah observance — Sabbaths, new moons, feast weeks, Sabbath-years. The "days and months and seasons and years" list is the covenantal cycle of Leviticus 23, which the Judaising faction was trying to make necessary for justification. Paul's concern is legalism: day-keeping as required for salvation. The same festival list appears in Colossians 2:16, where Paul tells Christians not to let anyone judge them over festival observance — which is the exact opposite of forbidding festival observance. Paul's concern cuts both ways: do not require day-keeping (Galatians 4), and do not judge day-keeping (Colossians 2). And then Romans 14:5–6 settles it: "let each one be fully convinced in his own mind. The one who observes the day observes it to Jehovah." A Christian who celebrates Christ's birth in gratitude is not under obligation, and a Christian who refuses to celebrate is not under obligation either. But a Christian who judges other Christians for celebrating is doing exactly what Colossians 2:16 forbids.

The rs quotation is from the 1908 Catholic Encyclopedia, and it is not saying what rs wants it to say. The 1908 article reports the nineteenth-century Usener hypothesis of Sol Invictus borrowing as one view among several that were being debated in the early twentieth century. Since 1995-2011, that view has been substantially overturned — by Susan Roll (herself a Catholic liturgist, Kok Pharos 1995), by Steven Hijmans (a secular classicist, Mouseion 2003), by Thomas Talley, and by the secular historian Tim O'Neill (History for Atheists). JWs are citing a 1908 encyclopaedia snapshot as settled scholarship while ignoring that the academic field moved on decades ago. And notice the inconsistency: rs cites Catholic sources as authoritative when they appear to support the pagan-origin argument, while elsewhere calling Catholicism "Babylon the Great." You cannot have it both ways — either the Catholic Encyclopedia is a reliable historical source, in which case you have to read the updated scholarship too, or it is not, in which case its 1908 concession carries no weight.

The principle is right — 2 Corinthians 6:17, Paul quoting Isaiah 52:11. But applied consistently, that principle would require you to give up every day of the week (Sunday is the sun-god's day, Wednesday is Woden's day, Thursday is Thor's day, Friday is Frigg's day), every month (January is Janus, March is Mars, June is Juno), the entire Gregorian calendar (Julius Caesar was Pontifex Maximus of Roman state religion), wedding rings (Egyptian and Roman pre-Christian origin), and neckties (Roman military origin). The Awake! magazine in the year 2000 explicitly defended JW wedding rings on the grounds that "although the wedding ring may have originated in pagan lands ... the custom has become so widespread that it is no longer associated with pagan worship." That is the genetic fallacy answered by the Watchtower itself — and once the rule is exempted for wedding rings, it has been exempted. The remaining question is which things get exempted and on whose authority. 1 Corinthians 8:4 says "we know that an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is no God but one" — Paul teaches that pagan association does not transfer spiritual power. The determinative test is the faith-motive of the believer (Romans 14:23), not the etymology of the custom. A Christian who remembers the Incarnation on December 25 is not worshipping Sol Invictus — especially since Sol Invictus has had no worshippers for sixteen centuries.

Neither was Purim — yet God's own people instituted it. Esther 9:27–28 records that the Jews "bound themselves" to celebrate their deliverance "by every generation, family, province, and city" so that "the memory of them" would not fade. Jesus himself kept the uncommanded Feast of Dedication, Hanukkah (John 10:22). Scripture plainly permits God's people to establish days that commemorate his saving works. If an uncommanded festival of remembrance was acceptable for Israel and observed by Jesus, then commemorating the Incarnation sits well within Christian freedom (Romans 14:5–6) — the question is not whether it was commanded, but whether it honours God.

Christians celebrate the reality of Christ's birth, not the timestamp on a birth certificate. Consider how heaven itself marked the event: a "great multitude of the heavenly host" praised God (Luke 2:13–14), Simeon took the child and blessed God for seeing "Your salvation" (Luke 2:28–32), and the Magi "fell down and worshiped Him" and opened their treasures (Matthew 2:10–11). If the angels, the shepherds, Simeon, Anna and the Magi all rejoiced at the birth of Christ, the uncertainty of the calendar date is no reason for his people to stay silent. We honour the event, not the coordinate on which we mark it.

Read Jeremiah 10 in your own New World Translation, all the way to verse fifteen. List everything Jeremiah says about the object he is describing — feet, mouth, metal plating, textile clothing. Then look up when lit indoor Christmas trees first appear in history. Then read Romans 14:5–6 and Colossians 2:16 in the NWT and ask yourself whether Paul is forbidding festival observance or forbidding the judgment of festival-observance. Then look up John 10:22–23 — Jesus attending the Feast of Dedication, which is not in the Mosaic Law and was established in 165 BC. Ask yourself whether Jesus is for or against commemorating God's redemptive work on a day not commanded in Scripture.