In part 3, we looked at the fact that paganism is the very opposite of belief in a supreme Creator God and is inextricably linked with occult practices. We looked at a small selection of verses from the Bible to show its consistency in condemning such practices.
In the last part of this four-part series, we will look at a number of well-researched sources that show that paganism has been a part of mainstream Christianity for a very long time. This practice is called syncretism—the mixture of godly and ungodly practices (is this meant to be repeated or is a word missing?). Syncretism was extant in Old Testament times. Let us look at just one section of Scripture outlining this in Deuteronomy 12:29-32:
“When the LORD your God cuts off from before you the nations which you go to dispossess, and you displace them and dwell in their land, take heed to yourself that you are not ensnared to follow them, after they are destroyed from before you, and that you do not inquire after their gods, saying, ‘How did these nations serve their gods? I also will do likewise.’ You shall not worship the LORD your God in that way; for every abomination to the LORD which He hates they have done to their gods; for they burn even their sons and daughters in the fire to their gods.Whatever I command you, be careful to observe it; you shall not add to it nor take away from it.”
God gave the ancient Israelites clear instructions about not following what surrounding nations did, but they didn’t listen to and heed the warnings. Elements of pagan worship were incorporated against the clear instructions from God not to do so – for their own benefit.
Moving on to the New Testament, we read in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1959, vol. 5, p. 642 the following about “Christmas”: “Christmas was not among the earliest festivals of the church…. Christmas customs are an evolution from the times that long antedated the Christian period—a descent from seasonal, pagan, religious and national practices, hedged about with legend and tradition.”
In an article, “Catholicism Confronts New Age Syncretism” by Bernard D. Green, we read the following interesting information:
“They recently ran a story about the possibility that the Catholic feminist movement known as Women-Church was losing all connection with Catholic tradition. The report said that an upcoming Women-Church conference would have, in addition to rituals by witches, rituals led by ‘Buddhists, American Indians, Quakers and Jewish leaders–as well as by Catholic nuns.’
“This syncretistic mentality is widespread in the Church today. Witness the following description of the program of a respected Midwestern Catholic center for spirituality: ‘Readings are selected every day from the sacred texts of Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, and Islam, as well as Christianity. On occasion, ancient festivals of the Celts or Saxons are remembered, and members dance around a maypole or fire-pit in the fields or forest…. The Chapel is visually stimulating and instructive…. Icons of Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Risen Christ are placed side by side with statues of Buddha, Lord Vishnu and Moses.’”
The above details are quite shocking but hardly unexpected in today’s religious supermarket. We know that modern Christianity has much syncretism within its structure; for example, Christmas and Easter and other worldly and non-biblical saints days are all derived from paganism.
Will Durant and his wife wrote the following in Volume III, titled “Caesar and Christ” (1944, p. 595: “Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it…. [T]he Greek mysteries passed down into the impressive mystery of the Mass. Other pagan cultures contributed to the syncretist result. From Egypt came the ideas of a divine trinity, the Last Judgment, and a personal immortality of reward and punishment; from Egypt the adoration of the Mother and Child…. From Phrygia came the worship of the Great Mother; from Syria the resurrection drama of Adonis…. The Mithraic ritual so closely resembled the eucharistic sacrifice of the mass that Christian fathers charged the Devil with inventing these similarities to mislead frail minds. [Nicaean] Christianity was the last great creation of the ancient pagan world.”
On another website, the question is asked “what do these two – Christianity and paganism” have in common? The answer is given as follows: “The roots of Christianity are interlaced with ancient pagan traditions and elements, mainly because the Church gained power through conversion. In order to convert the people of Europe (and the world) from their pagan beliefs, the Church felt they had to turn them against their beliefs by fear or adopt the pagan beliefs into the Christian religion.”
We can see this in mainstream Christianity where the Roman Catholic Church has so much of this embedded in their “belief” system. The true Church of God, down through the ages, has stayed with the Truth as outlined in the Word of God. This approach which we read in the New Testament is very different from that which is practiced by the mainstream today where syncretism in the true Church of God has not been accepted, nor is it practiced.
When congregations of the true Church of God began, however, to engage in pagan practices, then they ceased very soon to be part of the true Church of God.
There are other books that have been written showing how apostolic Christianity survived but other forces were accepted into the apostate church from early on. In the book “A History of the True Church,” the writers, Dugger and Dodd, make these comments on page 57 which discuss the period 100 AD to 200 AD. They quote Hurlbutt in his “Story of the Christian Church” on page 41, as follows: “For 50 years after St Paul’s life, a curtain hangs over the church, through which we vainly strive to look; and when it at last rises, about 129 AD with the writings of the earliest church-fathers, we find a church in many aspects very different from that in the days of St Peter and St Paul.”
“The Two Babylons” by Alexander Hislop is an interesting and well researched book quoting from hundreds of sources with 621 illustrations, showing the connections between the Roman Catholic Church and ancient paganism, and in his conclusion the writer states: “I have now finished the task that I proposed to myself. Even yet the evidence is not nearly exhausted; but on the evidence which has been adduced, I appeal to the reader if I have not proved every point which I engaged to demonstrate. Is there one, who has candidly considered the proof which has been led, that now doubts that Rome is the Apocalyptic Babylon? Is there one who will venture to deny that, from the foundation of the topmost stone, it is essentially a system of paganism?”
In August 2017, a columnist in the Guardian newspaper wrote the following: “‘Five centuries after the Reformation triggered a series of long and bloody religious wars across Europe; modern-day Protestants and Catholics believe they have more in common theologically than they do differences, and most would be willing to accept each other as neighbours and family members. Theological differences that split western Christianity in the 1500s have diminished to a degree that might have shocked Christians in past centuries,’ says a report by the Washington-based Pew Research Center.”
This commonality can be seen in the keeping of Christmas, Easter celebrations, belief in a trinity, Sunday keeping (not the true Sabbath from Friday sunset to Saturday sunset), the keeping of saints days and the ignoring of God’s commanded annual Feast Days, pouring or sprinkling in infant baptisms and other areas. Both Roman Catholics and Protestants have accepted syncretism in their churches which is roundly condemned by God, and paganism concepts have been part of their journey.
In the book “The Golden Bough” by Sir James Frazer, a thick tome of over 750 pages, he writes the following: “Thus it appears that the Christian Church chose to celebrate the birthday of its Founder on the 25th December in order to transfer the devotion of the heathen from the Sun to him who was called the Sun of Righteousness. If that was so, there can be no intrinsic improbability in the conjecture that motives of the same sort may have led the ecclesiastical authorities to assimilate the Easter festival of the death of their Lord to the festival of the death and resurrection of another Asiatic god which fell at the same season. Now the Easter rites still observed in Greece, Sicily and southern Italy bear in some respects a striking resemblance to the rites of Adonis, and I have suggested that the Church may have consciously adapted the new festival to its heathen predecessor for the sake of winning souls for Christ” (page 359).
“Taken altogether, the coincidences of the Christian with the heathen festivals are too close and too numerous to be accidental. They marked the compromise which the Church in the hour of its triumph was compelled to make with its vanquished yet still dangerous rivals” (ibid, page 361).
Please see our booklet “Don’t Keep Christmas” for a very thorough explanation on this subject.
In the book “Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries,” historian Ramsay MacMullen writes, “The triumph of the church was one not of obliteration [of non-Christian beliefs] but of widening embrace and assimilation” (1997, p. 159).
In his book, “A Concise History of the Early Church,” author Norbert Brox wrote on page 14, after discussing the Roman Empire: “… emperor worship belongs with different degrees of emphasis to the official religion of the state, which mainly consisted in the divine cults of ancient religion. Christianity was confronted with a paganism with religious vitality, not with morbid, played out religion. Religion dominated private and public life. People lived by the rhythm of religious festivals, and in a world full of divine and demonic powers. Here the state looked after its sacral institutions, temples, priests and cults. For as duty towards the gods, on whom the empire was dependent for its prosperity (salus publica) religion was primarily a state matter, on which the state could enforce. This description of the pagan world has already indicated the problems which arose for Christianity and influenced its development.”
On page 15 of the same book is an admission that “Christianity had contacts with all these forms of alien religion: with the classic religion of antiquity, the cult of emperor and state, the mysteries or oriental religion. This left deep traces of syncretism (= a fusion of different religious phenomena) in the theology, structures and self-understanding of the early church.”
One writer opined that “Syncretism continues to be a powerful tool to separate God from His people.”
The question was asked “What is Truth?” by Pontius Pilate, the fifth prefect of the Roman province of Judaea, during the illegal trial of Jesus, and he asked this question as recorded in John 18:37-38:
“Pilate therefore said to Him, ‘Are You a king then?’ Jesus answered, ‘You say rightly that I am a king. For this cause I was born, and for this cause I have come into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice.’ Pilate said to Him, ‘What is truth?’ And when he had said this, he went out again to the Jews, and said to them, ‘I find no fault in Him at all.’”
In the previous chapter, in John 17:17, when Jesus was praying for His disciples, He said: “Sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is truth.”
We have only scratched the surface of how much mainstream Christianity has accepted pagan influences in its practices—practices that God clearly condemns in His Word. The true Church of God has down through the ages stuck with their understanding of apostolic Christianity which is a far cry from what mainstream has practiced for a very long time.
And that is where we finish up. The Word of God is our guide to life and syncretism must be dismissed. Paganism must not be part of our Way of Life as we follow the Ways of God as clearly expressed in the Bible.
No other way is acceptable to God!
Lead Writer: Brian Gale (United Kingdom)
