Why is Good Friday called Good Friday?
historyextra.com
historyextra.com
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06643a.htm
Good Friday, called Feria VI in Parasceve in the Roman Missal, he hagia kai megale paraskeue (the Holy and Great Friday) in the Greek Liturgy, Holy Friday in Romance Languages, Charfreitag (Sorrowful Friday) in German, is the English designation of Friday in Holy Week — that is, the Friday on which the Church keeps the anniversary of the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
The origin of the term Good is not clear. Some say it is from "God's Friday" (Gottes Freitag); others maintain that it is from the German Gute Freitag, and not specially English. Sometimes, too, the day was called Long Friday by the Anglo-Saxons; so today in Denmark.
I should also add that Friday retains its pagan vestiges, named after Frigg in the German pantheon, or Venus, the Roman deity of erotic love, beauty and fertility, better known to some as Aphrodite. And likewise, April is a month that was long known as sacred to Aphrodite/Venus in the Roman Calendar, and many feasts such as the Veneralia were celebrated during April.
It is no coincidence that on Good Friday, Christ redeemed the world; since He is the Bridegroom and the Church is his holy, unblemished bride, it is the day of consummation: the consummation of His sacrifice on the Cross, the day He poured out His Precious Blood for us, and many theologians mark this event also as the seeds or birth of the Church, along with Pentecost.
So I'd say that Good Friday is best Friday. And the fact that it's in April is really cool. And once I heard the university shooting up fireworks on the evening of Good Friday. I'll be planning on the Stations of the Cross at 3pm. Seeya there!
After Holy Week has ended on Saturday, The Resurrection (i.e. Pascha), occurs on the first day of the week - Sunday. :)
So sundown is 00:00 and so on.
This is SEO slop.
I wonder what Dang or Tomhow think about submissions like this
The discrepancy between "Holy Week" and "Good Friday" always irked me when I learned these terms in English.
Like many folk etymologies, it sounds like it's not quite right, but it was intuitive at the time...
For "the Christian message" the death of Christ is the ultimate good thing. According to Christianity his death brings everyone's salvation, not the resurrection. This is my body which is given for you.
Sad so many Catholic churches fail at actually sharing that message.
> Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life! [1]
It’s sung about a hundred times in Pascha (Easter) liturgy, so _very_ well emphasized in the eastern traditions.
Though in eastern churches the emphasis was less on a juridical understanding of the passion wherein Christ fulfilled a legal requirement. Rather it’s more emphasized that Christ’s very nature destroys death by taking on death. That mental framework always appealed to me more. The early Egyptian (Coptic) church father Athanasius [2] was pivotal in refining the philosophical concept [3]. Athanasius was also the first recorded to record the full list of the 27 books of the New Testament.
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paschal_troparion 2: https://www.copticchurch.net/pdf/theology/incarnation_st_ath... 3: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athanasius_of_Alexandria
Your comments mirror a lot from my Egyptian friends. Thanks for sharing.
Alexandria was also very influential in early church theology and one of the primary bishopric “sees”. Interestingly they call their head bishop “pope”.
Also Coptic and Ethiopian iconography are gorgeous. They’re simplistic, almost cartoonish, but very artistic and emotional [1, 2, 3].
1: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5537d482e4b0cd... 2: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/848717492273364910/ 3: https://www.axiawomen.org/wow/holy-week-and-easter-icons
The fact there's a lot of people in this thread with this understanding should point to a lot of people not getting it though. I mean this is a whole thread of people not getting why it's "Good Friday" yet the Catholic Church has supposedly been preaching this point for over a thousand years.
I'm truly not anti-Catholic. I do think Catholics are unfairly painted by a lot of Protestants. As someone who walks between both worlds on a daily basis there's a lot of untruths and misunderstandings about Catholics out there.
It's cool, I'm just saying: Catholics definitely believe this; it's "Good Friday" because "Good" was synonymous with "Holy", so there's not much debate around that. All the denominations agree about the holiness of the event!
Im german it is Karfreitag (Karfriday) btw. and the whole week, Karwoche (Kar week). And that means sadness. Lamenting.
Looking at just that suffering on that one day is missing the context for everything else after, at least according to Christian ideology.
Also, an important part of the completion of previous prophecies for those looking at the older books. Jesus wouldn't have been the savior if those things didn't happen to him, according to the texts.
Still, the main visible symbol, is rather one of death and suffering to me.
Jesus does not look happy on those crosses, where he also has a face.
Some article ascribed it to superstition about a previous crash that had happened on some previous Good Friday, but debunked there being any connection.
This is a weird article. If you bail early, at least now you know the answer to the question.
In Germany its known as "brücketag" because Thursday was a public holiday and people take a "bridge-day" on Friday to extend the weekend.
Good Friday is also still very significant in its religious purpose here, so calling it "bridge day", even if it applied, would be disrespectful.
(Which doesn't keep the racing/modding community from having their own "Car Freitag" on that day...)
Although Thursday was a regional commemoration day (Gründonnerstag), it wasn't a public holiday, so most people still worked.
Still great to have a short break from work! Not arguing against it at all, it just seems a bit bizarre to me overall.
There's no serious academic support for a connection between the Christian holiday of Easter and the Mesopotamian goddess Inanna/Ishtar. The religious practices, beliefs, and festivals associated with Inanna bear no resemblance superficial or otherwise to Easter. They differ entirely in form, function, and meaning.
The only myth from that tradition that bears a remote resemblance is Inanna’s descent into the underworld: she's stripped of her powers, confronts her sister Ereshkigal, is executed, and later resurrected. It’s a compelling narrative, and yes, there's a resurrection motif but it serves a totally different purpose. It was a cosmological myth, tied to the movement of Venus in the night sky, not a theological cornerstone or community wide festival.
Inanna's rituals were centered on themes like war, sexuality, and divine kingship. Easter, by contrast, is about death and rebirth in a very different theological context. The comparison isn’t apples to oranges, it’s apples to machine learning models.
Also worth noting that the whole "Easter sounds like Ishtar" thing is shaky at best. The similarity is phonetically weak, especially when you consider historical pronunciations. Plus, "Ishtar" isn't even the most common or original name for the goddess Inanna (Sumerian) and Astarte (Phoenician/Canaanite) were more widespread depending on the period and region.
The connection between Easter and Ishtar is a modern myth. It s based more on a coincidence in English phonetics than on anything rooted in actual history or comparative religion.
In every European language I checked except German, Easter is named something completely different. Either something that sounds like it is inspired by Pesach (the Jewish passover) like our Norwegian or Danish Påske, Swedish Påsk, Dutch Pasen or something completely different.
Won't blame you, there is a lot of channels pushing nonsense about Christianity. That said, I recommend everyone who initially believed this to take a step back and reconsider sources that pushes ideas that falls flat the moment one looks at them :-)
We were talking specifically about Easter, which is related to but also different from other Paschal traditions. For example, Finnish pääsiäinen was not a traditional spring festival, because it's too early for that. Our ancestors had their spring festivals in May, and the traditions now continue in other May festivals, such as May Day and Ascension Day.
Here is from the top level comment in this thread:
> I find it odd how Easter, a pre-Christian Pagan festival (worshipping goddess of fertility: Eostre) has become seemingly-arbitrarily connected to the purported events at the end of Jesus' life..
They are clearly thinking about påske and (it seems to me) confusing the 2000 year old celebration (with even older Jewish roots) with this goddess that is only mentioned some 800 years after Christians started celebrating påske.
> Old English Easterdæg, "Easter day," from Eastre (Northumbrian Eostre), from Proto-Germanic austron-, "dawn," also possibly the name of a goddess whose feast was celebrated in Eastermonað (the Anglo-Saxon month corresponding with April), from aust- "east, toward the sunrise" (compare east), from PIE root *aus- (1) "to shine," especially of the dawn.
However it’d be inaccurate to infer that Easter is a pagan holiday or something. Rather the medieval Christian missionaries were very adept at building on concepts and repurposing traditions from cultures to help relate the Gospel.
> Today, the problem of pagan parallels does not concern me at all. Here is why: First, even if parallels do exist between the myths of the gods and the resurrection of Jesus, that does not require us to reduce the resurrection to fiction. Such parallels might be—as [C. S.] Lewis observed decades ago—expressions of innate human longings for atonement and new life.
Assume for the sake of argument that Jesus was the incarnation of the immortal creator of the universe, then it would be natural that said creation would have echoes of this event and people would relate to them . It’d actually be a bit incoherent to not relate concepts of spring, renewal, sunrise, as very physical aspects of our human being to such a theology.
1: https://worldviewbulletin.substack.com/p/the-resurrection-an...
The English word "east", and the equivalent words in most European languages, ultimately mean something related to the dawn or sunrise. There is plenty of evidence for various Indo-European dawn goddesses with names linguists generally consider related to Eostre.
Dawn goddesses were generally part of an older layer of mythology that became less relevant over time. They were often replaced with other deities that inherited some of their aspects, or they gained new aspects while keeping the name.
We know that both Old English and Old High German had one of the spring months named after something related to the east and/or dawn. We know that European agricultural societies tended to have spring festivals. We know that as Christinanity spread, it absorbed pagan festivals and pagan traditions, and sometimes even kept the names. Such as something similar to "Yule" instead of "Christmas" or "Navidad".
Maybe Anglo-Saxons never had a goddess specifically called Eostre, and maybe their spring festivals were not specifically about worshipping a particular god. But some European languages chose to use a Germanic name for the Paschal season, and that name seems to be connected to some pagan spring festivals. Whose names are ultimately related to a dawn goddess their distant ancestors worshipped.
Esther should have been contemporarily famous and renowned, several millennia B.C.; let's just ignore and forget Esther???
And thus, Ishtar Ruins Easter: https://youtu.be/Qd-wvVNEfNk?si=oJqkKALfn4xBX-zb
By the time of the first Nicea ecumenical council, Christians argued against using the Jewish calendar as by the 300s, it dated Passover before the spring equinox. The early church was now the official religion of the Roman Empire who followed the solar calendar.
In other words Easter and Passover has always been associated with Spring.
The Eostre connection is unconvincing. Eostre is a Saxon goddess with earliest sources about her cult from 8th century and:
- Easter has been celebrated before 8th century.
- And it has been celebrated by people that have never heard of Saxons or their gods.
> There are several reasons why the worship of Baal and Asherah was such a problem for Israel. First, the worship of Baal and Asherah held the allure of illicit sex, since the religion involved ritual prostitution. [...]
The Asherahs/Ashtoreths probably needed better branding.
Ritual prostitution was common in many ancient religions, and Baal and Asherah were commonly worshipped at the time. It only seems aberrant in hindsight because we live in a world formed from the strict patriarchy and sexual taboos of one specific Semitic religion, and a narrative of history written by its adherents.
That said as far as I know the whole Easter/Eostre connection has been discredited by the actual evidence. Which is unfortunate because it would be such an enjoyable thing to annoy Christians with if it were true.
This is an oft-repeated canard for which there is basically no evidence. In particular, there's no evidence for "easter bunnies" prior to 17th century protestant Germany, who then brought it to the US, when they migrated to Pennsylvania (ie: The Pennsylvania Dutch). Those aspects of the celebration aren't Christian or pagan, they're secular things that people do because it's fun for the kids, and that has always been the case.
When it comes to the name, the name isn't anything similar in for example Nordic languages:
Påske (Norwegian, Danish) or påsk (Swedish). Finnish seems to have a similar sounding name. Same with Dutch.
German has Ostern, but I the few others I checked were completely different.
That means even the name similarity only exist in a few languages.
And at the time the Christian celebration of Easter started these languages didn't even exist. The closest language I could find to early Christian history on DeepL was Greek and in Greek the name of Easter seems to be Πάσχ.
With that, this idea should be debunked sufficiently I think.
I guess the bunny still got something similar to the Coke-branding that Santa got to help product sales, but for chocolate sales instead!?
I retract the 'rabbits' part of what I said, but I still think it's ultimately a fairly weird taken-over/hybrid-mythology festival! I'm only able to talk about Easter as I know it in Aus though!.. I totally acknowledge festivals and their timing/meaning are very different in other places.
What it does state is in agreement with the wikipedia article on the connection between Ēostre and rabbits, namely:
The earliest evidence for the Easter Hare (Osterhase) was recorded in south-west Germany in 1678 by the professor of medicine Georg Franck von Franckenau
This is the earliest still extant written account of folk practices that had been occurring for some indeterminant time.
We are aware that the brewing of beer predates by many centuries, millenia even, the earliest still extant written account of the practice of brewing beer.
We have actual remains of rabbits from long long ago.
The point being much human activity leaves little trace, we'd be wise to not assume the only human activity was activity that left a pyramid or giant stautue in its wake.
That being said, the actual etymology for Easter is from the month of April in the anglo-saxon calendar: Ēosturmōnaþ. Easter of course is a name for the entire season of Easter (up until Pentecost), which lasts a bit over a month and usually coincides with Ēosturmōnaþ.
But fittingly, Easter etymologically comes from the Proto-Indo-European word for 'Dawn', symbolizing literally the East, from which the sun rises. The Indian name Usha literally comes from the same word, and would directly translate into Easter.
The first mention of Eostre as a goddess is post-Christianity, by Bede. He writes:
> Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated "Paschal month", and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate that Paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honoured name of the old observance
Edit - also Passover is Pesach in Hebrew. So Pesach -> Pascha in Greek, then onwards to other languages. Or just "Great Day" (which finishes off Great and Holy week which is what the week leading up to Easter is in most languages).
Christmas is the most obvious one (what does a bearded dude on the north pole have to do with the birth of Jesus? For Germans specifically: The "Christkind" is Baby Jesus, but its also a kind of spirit of its own who brings presents, and for some reason usually depicted as a girl?)
But you also have a similar thing for Carnival: Traditionally, it's the last feast before Lent (where Lent is also an expanded narrative of Easter!). But there are also all kinds of local narratives layered on top of it, like the Rhineland "Session", which begins in November, is somewhat awkwardly interrupted by Christmas and ends with Carnival as its sort of "grand finale".
And then Easter has the triple narrative as the death and ascension of Jesus, the feast after the end of Lent (so a bit like Islam's Eid al Fitr) and the beginning of spring.
In some way, it reminds me of the sprawling lore and extended universes/fan canons around Star Wars or other Scifi or Fantasy franchises, except on a much, much larger scale. I think it's all pretty fun.
So Lent is not an "expanded narrative of Easter"; it's a period of preparation, prayer, self-denial and almsgiving; it represents the 40 years' wandering in the wilderness that the Jews endured, and the 40 days in the desert when Christ was tempted by Satan. So it's distinct from the Easter celebrations.
Carnival is not a "Christian feast". Carnival is an umbrella term for various secular celebrations. But indeed, this has roots in Jewish traditions.
What the Jews will typically do in preparation for Pesach is to cleanse the home of all forbidden leavening and unkosher food: chametz. And this is sometimes done in a quite ritualistic fashion, and the children are involved, and it's like a scavenger hunt (and may have some cultural exchange with Easter Egg hunts) where the adults may challenge the kids to find every crumb of chametz and collect it and present it to the head of household. Then the chametz is destroyed, or sold or traded to a Gentile.
And so Carnival (folk etymology may consist of "farewell to meat [carne, vale]") is a festival where people are eating up the leftover meat that they've stored up. "Mardi Gras", "Fat Tuesday", and "Pancake Tuesday" is where they're using up the remaining fat to make pancakes. The Byzantines have elaborate fasting/abstinence rules which preclude the use of oils and butter and many things for certain periods. And this reflects prior Western traditions. Abstinence from meat used to stretch for all of Lent, not just Fridays. And so, Carnival was one of those cycles where you prepared for Lent (itself a preparation) because Lent was going to be the "lean months" before the springtime feasting.
And of course Carnival also took on the carousing and drinking and licentiousness of fertility rites; why not all that. If you were eating meat then you probably had some good wines or booze to go with it?
But Carnival has never been a Christian sort of religious or liturgical feast or season. Carnival coincides with Ordinary Time these days, or "Sundays after Epiphany" in the old General Roman Calendar of 1960. But Church authorities and Canon Law did not specify any particular methods for eating up our stores of flesh meat, or getting it on and flashing boobs on Bourbon Street.
Well, that is a good example to see how those things develop. Martin Luther didn't like how saints were praised and tried to convince people to pray to Christ instead of Saint Nicolas. Which then Catholic reaches formed to the Christkind.
(And then later Coca Cola took over spreading Santa Clause in their style)
#maliciouscompliance
But really, that's interesting! I didn't know Luther was the origin of this. Even more, it's almost a Christmas ritual of its own to discuss whether the presents are brought by Santa or the Christkind, etc. Wasn't aware that those tongue-in-cheek discussions have traces of the actual Catholic/Protestant conflict in them.
> (And then later Coca Cola took over spreading Santa Clause in their style)
Oh yeah, forgot the Nikolaus/Weihnachtsmann duality, which I think was an attempt by the church to get their saint back from the clutches of Coca Cola/pop culture. I guess they succeeded partially, because now we have both of them as separate characters.
While the Saint Nicholas celebration with Krampus etc. also integrated pre-Christian traditions.
Wait, tell me more about this? I've never heard of it but this sounds much more similar to what is practiced by eastern christians. Where there is also a 40 day fast before christmas, then the twelve day feast ending with epiphany/theophany. And in those branches lent itself is preceded by a 3-week period of increasingly strict fast. So in some years depending on when easter lands you can start fasting again very shortly after christmas ends but is still understood as a completely separate thing.
I don't know anything about the rhineland one but I could see how this could eventually mutate into one super long fast with a break for christmas, but also maybe isn't seen that way by the people doing it.
According to that timeline, carnival "really" begins on November 11 (11/11) with a one-day celebration, then goes on in a low intensity sort of way all throughout winter, to end with the celebrations of the traditional festival.
It seems to have been a 19th century invention and in effect decouples the celebration from its religious role.
You might find it odd that Christians think they came up with Easter (or Christmas, or the Epiphany...) though.
The way this is determined is that in Luke 1:5 it says John the Baptist's father was a priest in the Abijah division. Further in Luke it says that an angel came to John's father while he was serving in the temple that his wife will get pregnant.
Also in Luke, it says in the 6th month of John's mother's pregnancy Mary conceived.
When you look into when the Abijah priests served (in Chronicles) and convert it to our calendar instead of the Hebrew calendar you can calculate and end up at the end of December.
I don't have all the math, but you can calculate it if you want to, but there is a decent reason to think it was the 25th or thereabouts.
EDIT - sorry, I see this is discussed below...
The link between the names only exist in English and German.
In other European languages it is typically called either something that sounds like Pesach or it is called something related to the story of Christ.
Nobody would say "The Jews have Easter" because we have no holiday commemerating the ressurection of a messiah. We beleive the messiah has yet to come.
Well, if the holidays had nothing to do with each other, then the Early Christians reading the Gospels were all severely misled by the quite obvious references to Jesus as the Paschal Lamb, such as the Last Supper with no mention of a lamb on the table [because it was Jesus, the Lamb Himself, living among them]
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/exodus/12?3
and the very specific mention of Nisan and the 10th day, upon which to "take an unblemished lamb from teh flock"
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/mark/14?12
https://sjvlaydivision.org/new-paschal-lamb/#:~:text=Jesus%2...
was the day Pilate said "I find no fault [blemish] in this man [Jesus]"
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/john/18?38
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/luke/23?4
And scholars for the last 2,000 years have colossally wasted their time, right up to and including Dr. Scott Hahn, who has staked his entire career on Jesus as the Paschal Lamb,
https://paschallamb.com/products/the-fourth-cup?pr_prod_stra...
And priests and bishops and cardinals and popes have been super-wrong about relating the Passion, Death, and Resurrection to the Passover feast, or the little bit about Egypt and the first-born sons and the blood on the lintels of their doors, or the incident with Moses and the Hebrews escaping Pharaoh during the Parting of the Red Sea (which is sung liturgically with psalms for the Easter Vigil as folks are being literally baptized)
Man we've been wrong about all this stuff. Thank you, Horus, and thank you, Ishtar, for dispelling those silly myths about Oestre which is a pagan festival that also has nothing to do with Jews or Hebrew religion.
But the name is striking to Santa Claus which is just a Anglo version of that name. Interesting is also that half of Germany the Christ baby brings the presents or the Weihnachtsmann. The Weihnachtsmann is what we would refer as Santa. But Santa and Nikolaus are depicted the same. There some other festivals like Jule from Scandinavia etc. But compared to Christmas we at least know that the end of Jesus (or whoever it was) happened at that time due to too many religions and groups in the city. When he was born and how old he even was…
Edit: Also the fact that the holiday follows the moon calendar because it was the Sunday after the Paschal full moon. Which is celebrated by the Jewish as Passover.
For most of history, Christianity is a mediterranean religion. There would be no reason to choose to put it at a time for Northern Europeans.
For example, I am the descendants of the indigenous Christians of India. The historical celebration of Christmas is called Denha, which is the native name for Epiphany, for which there is widespread textual evidence (corroborated by similar celebrations elsewhere), and which was celebrated at the usual time (Jan 6). There are numerous councils of the Church of the east that confirm this as well. Why would they possibly care what Scandinavia did. The simple truth is that this is a really old time to celebrate the birth of Christ, for reasons lost to history. Unlikely that the Northern Europeans, who were catechized many centuries after Christ played a large role in it. We have records of the date in Asian church councils well before the Northern Europeans were even contacted people.
The reason why Northern European traditions (trees, santa claus, snow, etc) became popular is due to the migration of Northern Europeans to America which is today synonymous with 'Christian' nations. even in Europe, the indigenous Catholics of South Europe don't always celebrate in this way.
But there are universals: sweets, gift-giving, celebration, stars, these are all common.
Who did? When?
https://www.history.com/articles/history-of-christmas
>In the fourth century, church officials decided to institute the birth of Jesus as a holiday. Unfortunately, the Bible does not mention date for his birth (a fact Puritans later pointed out in order to deny the legitimacy of the celebration).
>Although some evidence suggests that Jesus' birth may have occurred in the spring (why would shepherds be herding in the middle of winter?), Pope Julius I chose December 25. It is commonly believed that the church chose this date in an effort to adopt and absorb the traditions of the pagan Saturnalia festival
https://www.bartehrman.com/why-is-christmas-on-december-25th...
> However, upon closer examination, this theory encounters several historical and contextual challenges. One of the key issues is the lack of any contemporary evidence from the early Christian period directly linking the choice of December 25th for Christmas to pagan festivals.
> But several decades earlier (c. 203 C.E.), a bishop from Rome, Hippolytus, wrote: “For the first advent of our Lord in the flesh, when he was born in Bethlehem, was December 25th, Wednesday, while Augustus was in his forty-second year, but from Adam, five thousand and five hundred years.” (Comm. on Dan. 23.3.) [...]
> Tertullian, for example, calculated that Jesus was killed on March 25th. If Jesus had also been conceived on March 25th and you count exactly nine months later from that date, you then have Jesus’ birth on December 25th. I think this is the way early Christians came to believe that Jesus’ birth happened on December 25th.
> Moreover, unlike the previous and still most popular theory, this one is mentioned in the early sources!
> A treatise titled On Solstices and Equinoxes, which comes from the 4th century states: “Therefore, our Lord was conceived on the eighth of the kalends of April in March, which is the day of the passion of the Lord and his conception. For on that day, he was conceived on the same he suffered.”
Note that regardless, December 25th was regarded as the date by at least some Christians long before the fourth century. As for the mention of shepherds in the article, we have independent attestations of shepherding in winter in the area, so the question of "why would they be there in winter" is "because that's normal".
We have historical figures where we don‘t know exactly when their born. But we don‘t just write a data down.
Here is a link going in more detail and actually contradicts what I wrote. But points about the Santa Claus etc still stand. And I see no real hard evidence to the contrary either.
https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/why-decembe...
Are you perhaps confusing writing with the process of canonization? Common estimates would place the writing of the youngest book of the Bible at 95-120 AD.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dating_the_Bible#Table_IV:_New...
I think it's important to note the primary argument for even that "later" dating of the end of the first/beginning of the second century is that the gospels predict the destruction of Jerusalem. There is no "hard" argument on the lower bound, only the upper bound (earliest known physical evidence.) I don't think it's particularly wild to suggest, even for a secular historiographer, that the vague, flowery language taken to prophesy the destruction of Jerusalem could have been written without any supernatural influence. It had happened before, and tensions were high.
Luke-Acts claims to be written by an eyewitness (the latter part of the narrative of Acts shifts to first person as he describes events he allegedly participated in versus just heard and read about) and John also claims to have been written by an eyewitness. I don't think there's any particularly strong argument against that, but the scholarly consensus goes back and forth over time.
This is a tactic of zero sum conquering ideologies:
- you take the symbolism of the oppressed and make it evil in your ideology, ie. the pentagram as a symbol of health and women turned into a christian satanic symbol
- you take the oppressed culture's holidays and make them your own, easing the usurping, I know secularists and people of other religions who celebrate xmas "just because"
At this point I consider "Christmas" a global secular holiday.
I put the people who whine about the religious aspect of Christmas into two boxes: Either they're playing power / politics games, or they're like the people who think that Betamax / CCS / ect were better.