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WHEN WAS JESUS BORN?: M. M. NINAN<br />
From<br />
http://www.eastcarib.org/index.php?mact=News,cntnt01,print,0&cntnt<br />
01articleid=60&cntnt01showtemplate=false&cntnt01returnid=29<br />
Andrew Willis is a course tutor at the Adventist Discovery Centre, the<br />
Voice of Prophecy in the United Kingdom says:<br />
“Saturnalia festival, actually runs from December 17 to 23 and has<br />
nothing to do with December 25. Others associate it with sun<br />
worship, because Emperor Aurelian instituted the festival of "Sol<br />
Invictus" (Unconquered Sun) on December 25 in AD 274. However,<br />
upon closer examination, this <strong>was</strong> not a traditional day of sun worship.<br />
The two sun temples in Rome celebrated their feasts on August 9 and<br />
28, and even that had fallen into neglect by the time of Aurelian. By<br />
then, the new sun god Mithras <strong>was</strong> growing popular.<br />
Although long thought of as a development of eastern sun worship,<br />
historians now believe Mithras worship to be a Roman invention -- a<br />
cult created by and for the imperial bureaucracy. But even Mithras did<br />
not have any feasts associated with solstices or equinoxes until a<br />
hundred years later.<br />
The Roman gens Aurelia <strong>was</strong> associated with the cult of Sol.<br />
After his victories in the East, the emperor Aurelian thoroughly<br />
reformed the Roman cult of Sol, elevating the sun-god as the<br />
supreme divinity of the empire. The priests of Sol were honoured<br />
110
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