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Since tomorrow is the popular Christian celebrated holiday called Christmas I decided that it would be a good time to talk about the word “Christ” and perhaps take “Christ” out of Christmas. The word “Christ” is similar to “Baptize,” in the sense that the word is found in our English translations because it is a transliteration of a Greek word. In this case, Christ is a transliteration of “Χριστος.” In my opinion this is not as damaging as transliterating a word like Baptize because there is no real debate as to what “Christ” means. But still, I have the same complaint, how does anyone know what “Christ” means?

I wonder how many untrained newcomers to follow Jesus believe that Christ was his last name. Before I was a follower, I always treated it as his last name and did not think about it. For those of you who do not know, “Christ” or “Χριστος” translates to “the Anointed One or the Messiah.” Some translations switch between Messiah and Christ as translations, most of them stick with Christ.

The Facts

1. The NASB translates Χριστος as “the Messiah” 4 times. (Matthew 1:1,16,17; 2:4)
2. The NASB translates Χριστος as “Christ” 528 times in the New Testament.
3. Χριστιανος occurs 3 times in the New Testament and the NASB translates  as “Christian” each time.
4. Χριστος occurs 529 times in the New Testament (an additional 11 times in the Septuagint — Greek translation of the Old Testament).
5. There is a discrepancy 3 times where the word Christ appears in the NASB but Χριστος is not found in the Greek manuscripts for those verses (Acts 8:37, 20:21; Romans 16:24). NOTE: In Romans 16:24 Χριστος appears in the Byzantine manuscripts, which are not generally used by the NASB.
6. There is also a Greek word Μεσσιας which is a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew word for Messiah. It occurs twice in the New Testament. (John 1:41, 4:25)

Conclusion

As I already said, this transliteration really does not lead to any major conflicts. Although some people probably do not know what “Christ” means, it is fairly easy to find out. Generally when someone is talking about Jesus Christ we know who they are referring to and what people believe he is. However, I would still like to see the word translated properly, to something like “the Messiah” or “the anointed One”. But even those translations could be confusing. Also, in the spirit of Christmas, we should take Christ out and replace it with Messiah.

So, Happy Messiahmas everyone!

I use Google analytics to track what is happening on my blog. I get to see which pages are most popular, how long people spend at my blog, and also what people search for to end up on my blog. Here are the top 11 funniest searches I’ve had in the past 30 days (in no particular order).

01. “what’s a handbasket and why do we got to hell in one?” – Isn’t it obvious?

02. should christians believe in santa claus – Yes.

03. muslim vs. baptist – The fight of the century!

04. i need molds of the ten commandments – Don’t we all.

05. how to have church without programs book – I recommend the Bible.

06. help, i don’t want to go to church – Help?

07. thigs to be thankful to god for – Google, peanut butter, and two-ply toliet paper.

08. notes on how to have to be a good pastor wife – Amen.

09. is it biblical to pay church volunteers? – Volunteer?

10. god bless me just a little – Me too.

11. churches say they will forgive if you pay us money – Me too!

Yesterday I talked about two posts concerning Christmas. In the second post, Mrs. Black’s post, something caught my eye that made me think about Santa Claus. She wrote:

In many homes, the first act of parental betrayal is the lie of Santa Claus…many children go thru a deep depression & anger when they first realize that everyone in the world know he wasn’t real except them…and their own parents betrayed them.

As I said in my first post, this is not really what happened to me. Because of this, I tend to think that this position is a little more extreme. In fact, of all the people I know, I had never knew anyone who felt this way about finding out Santa wasn’t real. I also sensed that if this was the case there would be more and more people refusing to teach Santa Claus to their children because of the emotional damage done to them. At the same time I do understand that a lot of times our traditions (good or bad) tend to take over any emotional trauma that we may have endured.

As I was thinking through this I went to a very close friend of mine and asked him about his Santa experiences. I trust this friend probably more than any other friend, he is not a believer, but we have spent many hours talking philosophy with one another and I think we are very similar in many of our beliefs… the biggest difference being that I am a follower of Christ, while he is not.

This is a copy of the conversation that I had with Dan:

lew: when you were little, were you encouraged to believe in Santa? and did you?
dan: I did believe in santa. I can only assume my parents told me about it. They certain perpetuated it
lew: when you found out that he was not real… did you think they had lied to you? where you angry or did you feel tricked?
dan: I was upset about it, yeah. And it played a part in my early teen-age years when it caused me to doubt all “knowledge” handed down as truth, including religion
dan: Santa pretty much destroyed faith for me, honestly

To be perfectly honest, I did not expect this reaction from Dan. In fact, I expected one quite the opposite. I asked him if I could use this conversation in this blog, because I sensed that it was extremely important to this conversation. It has really made me think more deeply about teaching Santa as Truth.

What do you all think?

Yesterday I wrote a testimony about my history and experiences with Santa Claus. Today I would like to talk about two posts I have read concerning Santa Claus and the celebration of Christmas.

The first post is by Lindsey over at Enjoy the Journey. The post is called For those of you who don’t “do” Santa Claus. This short post basically explained that we should not judge those who do (or don’t do) Santa Claus. And that we should respect each other and make sure our Children know to respect others beliefs about Santa. There were 32 comments, some agreed and some disagreed. Some comments even got to the point of saying that Lindsey (and others who “do” Santa) are bad parents. I think sometimes, we as Christians, take things way too far.

The second post is by Mrs. Black over at Dave Black Online. The post is called Why We No Longer Celebrate Christmas. In this post, Mrs. Black writes about some of the research Dr. Black did a few years ago concerning Christmas and how its history has convinced them to not celebrate the holiday. Some of the reasons for not celebrating was because of the materialistic attitude during the season, but also because of some scriptural mandates that seem to go against celebrating such holidays. Mrs. Black does a very good job explaining her position, but at the same time I never once thought she was attacking people who celebrate it with or without Santa. What is sad is that I am sure there are Christians out there who will persecute the Black family for not celebrating Christmas as there are who choose to celebrate it with Santa Claus.

These two post have revealed a lot to me this season. A lot of Christians believe that you have to celebrate a holiday that is not mandated by God exactly the way they do or they will break fellowship with you. I wonder if this is not a sign of the state of the church in America. Why are we so worried about these things? Doesn’t Paul tell us to hold to our own convictions and not to judge those who are weaker or stronger than us?