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).
