Sunday, December 25, 2011

Merry Christmas!

MERRY CHRISTMAS to all those celebrating!

Posts of Christmas past are collected here.

Some recent Christmas posts and links:

Alin Suciu is Putting Together the Puzzle of a Christmas Story: A Coptic Document in Princeton and Its Related Fragments.

Likewise, I have noted recent coverage of the Syriac Revelation of the Magi here and here.

Over at the Bible Places blog, Todd Bolin collects Christmas-Related Posts.

The notion that the Christians pilfered the date of the pagan celebration of the birth of the Sun and assigned it to Jesus has been challenged in a recent dissertation by Steven Hijmans at the University of Groningen. Judith Weingarten summarizes the discussion at the Zenobia blog: Whose Christmas Is It Anyway? (Updated). And Dr. Hijmans summarizes his own case in an Academic.edu reprint of a 2003 article: "Sol Invictus, the Winter Solstice, and the Origins of Christmas", Mouseion, Number 47/3 (2003), 277-298 (via Rogue Classicism).

Finally, a little light relief for fans of Christmas and of Queen:



Via James McGrath and Mark Goodacre.

Oh, and also, this year's Hanukkah post collects a lot of historical links.

UPDATE: And here's a Christmas/Hanukkah present from the Israel Antiquities Authority: Temple-related epigraphic find (next post).