This time around the world multitudes of people are very busy preparing to celebrate Christmas. According to popular belief, our Lord Jesus Christ was born on December 25. But is this true?

December 25
According to history, December 25 actually has Babylonian roots. It is the celebration of the birth or “rebirth” of the sun god. In ancient times, December 25 was the day each year when the day started to become noticeably longer after the winter solstice.  Thus the early pagans designated December 25 as the date of the birth or the “rebirth” of the sun.

The origin of Christmas

If you will read the Bible from the first page up to the last page, you won’t be able to find the word “Christmas”. The term Christmas was not used until about a thousand years after our Lord Jesus Christ died. According to The Catholic Encyclopedia:

“The word for Christmas in late Old English is Cristes Maesse, the Mass of Christ, first found in 1038.” 

With this, we now know that Christmas is not biblical and was, in truth, just invented by early Catholics.

December 25 declared as birthday of Jesus
According to The New international Dictionary of the Christian Church by JD Douglas in page 223:

“There is no authoritative historical evidence as to the day or month of Christ’s birth in Jerusalem. 25 December was a date of a Roman pagan festival inaugurated in 274 as the birthday of the unconquered sun which at the winter solstice begins again to show an increase in light. Sometime before 336 the Church in Rome, unable to stamp out this pagan festival, spiritualized it as the Feast of Nativity of the Sun of Righteousness.”

Western Catholics first celebrated Christmas on December 25 in 336, after Emperor Constantine had declared Christianity the empire’s favored religion. The truth is that December 25 was celebrated as the birthday of scores of pagan gods long before it was ever associated with our Lord Jesus Christ. This was only done so that pagan Romans will be convinced to convert to Catholicism. When the Roman Catholics decided to make December 25 a “Christian holiday” in the fourth century, they simply adopted a long standing pagan holiday and kept most of the same pagan traditions.

What does the Bible say
We cannot find anything in the Bible that instructs us to celebrate the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ. What’s in the Bible is a very important instruction written in Deuteronomy 12:32 New King James Version:

“Whatever I command you, be careful to observe it; you shall not add to it nor take away from it.”

There is no command in the Bible to observe Christmas or to observe the birthday of  our Lord Jesus Christ, thus it should not be done.  Doing so is an “addition” to what our Lord God has commanded us to do and this will violate God’s will as mentioned above.

So what would happen if we would “add” something on top of what God has commanded? In Revelation 22:18 New King James Version, this is what  is written:

“For I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds to these things, God will add to him the plagues that are written in this book;”

If we “add” something to what God has commanded to us and worse observe it, God will then add to to us plagues. We certainly don’t want this to happen.

This is the very reason why we members of the Iglesia ni Cristo don’t observe or celebrate Christmas. This is just an added and invented teaching in the Catholic Church that cannot be found in the Bible.