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called Noël or Nowel. As to the derivation of the word Noël, some say it is a contraction of the French nouvelles (tidings), les bonnes nouvelles; that is, “The good news of the Gospel”; others take it as an abbreviation of the Gascon or Provençal nadaü, nadal, which means the same as the Latin natalis; that is, dies natalis, “the birthday.” Others say Noël is a corruption of Yule, Jule, or Ule, meaning, “The festival of the sun.” The name Yule is still applied to the festival in Scotland and some other places. Christmas is represented in Welsh by Nadolig, which signifies “the natal, or birth” and in Italian by Il Natale, which, together with its cognate term in Spanish, is simply a contraction of dies natalis, “the birthday.”)

      In central Italy, St. Francis of Assisi in 1223 held a midnight mass on Christmas Eve with a nativity scene and live animals. The people in the plays sang songs or “canticles” that told the story during the plays. Although generally credited as being the first nativity play, as we have noted above, something similar had occurred in earlier centuries.

      However, where biblical truths from the Apostolic era had been retained, in isolated groups in the region of the Alps such as those who subsequently became known as the Albigenses and Waldenses, Christmas was rejected. This became evident during the Inquisition by Rome, set up by Pope Innocent III around 1200 and initially enforced by Pope Gregory IX in 1233, in order to identify and eradicate “heretics.”

      A Romish Inquisitor, in speaking of the Waldenses, tells us:

      They . . . affirm that the traditions of the church are no better than the traditions of the Pharisees, insisting, moreover, that greater stress is laid on the observance of human tradition than on the keeping of the law of God.

      Seisselius, Archbishop of Turin, states:

      They receive only what is written in the Old and New Testaments.

      Reinerius Saccho, who provided condemning evidence against them to the Inquisition in a 1254 report entitled, “Of the Sects of the Modern Heretics,” reports:

Whatever is preached that is not substantiated by the text of the Bible they esteem fables. They hold that none of the ordinances of the church which have been introduced since Christ’s ascension ought to be observed, as being of no value.25

The French Inquisitor Bernard Gui, writing in 1320, sweepingly describes the Waldenses as having rejected all the traditions of the Roman Catholic Church, namely ecclesiastical authority, especially by their conviction that they were not subject to the pope or his decrees of excommunication. He goes on to complain how all Catholic feast-days, festivals, and prayers were rejected by them as man-made and not based upon the New Testament.26

      King Richard II of England hosted a Christmas feast in 1377, at which twenty-eight oxen and three hundred sheep were eaten. “Misrule,” with drunkenness, promiscuity, and gambling, remained an important aspect of the festival.

      Some of the customs of the Saturnalia carnival appear to have been transferred into Carnival in February, first celebrated in the thirteenth century and commencing after Candlemas is over (although in some countries such as Germany and the Netherlands, it commences at Martinmas in November). It is largely a Roman Catholic or Orthodox festival. The selection of modern Venetian Carnival masks, shows one feature of Carnival which remains to this day with its spread globally, which is that of “masking,” often as part of cross-dressing.

      We noted above how the practice of parading naked in the streets formed a part of Saturnalia, whether the act was voluntary or forced at the behest of the Lord of Misrule. As part of Carnival, the Mardi Gras commences on Epiphany or the Twelfth Night (January 6 when traditionally all Christmas decorations are to be removed). Mardi Gras is French for “Fat Tuesday” and is synonymous for parades, immorality, and excessive partying and feasting immediately before the fasting period of Lent commences. We noted that in the Saturnalia, binge eating, including by force, was also an intrinsic part of the festival. In any event, in Rome in 1466 during Carnival, Pope Paul II forced Jews to run naked along the main street, the Via Lata, for the entertainment of non-Jews. An eyewitness account reports:

Before they were to run, the Jews were richly fed, so as to make the race more difficult for them and at the same time more amusing for spectators. They ran . . . amid Rome’s taunting shrieks and peals of laughter, while the Holy Father stood upon a richly ornamented balcony and laughed heartily.27

(Interestingly, as part of the Carnival throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Jewish rabbis of the ghetto in Rome were forced to wear clownish outfits and march through the city streets to the jeers of the crowd, pelted by a variety of missiles. When the Jewish community of Rome sent a petition in 1836 to Pope Gregory XVI, begging him to stop this annual abuse of the Jewish community, he responded, “It is not opportune to make any innovation.”)28

      By 1500 the festival of Christmas was firmly established wherever the Roman Catholic Church held sway, including in Scotland. The annual indulgence in eating, dancing, singing, sporting, and card playing escalated in England and by the seventeenth century, the Christmas season featured lavish dinners, elaborate masques, and pageants.

      Following his protest in 1517 and with that the initializing of the Reformation, Luther in subsequent years saw little problem with Christmas and very much encouraged the celebration. Luther appeared initially to take a unified stance with Calvinists against holy days, writing in 1520 in his “Address to the Nobility of the German Nation:”

      One should abolish all festivals, retaining only the Lord’s Day.

But if it were desired to keep the festivals of Our Lady and the greater saints, they should all be held on Sundays, or only in the morning with the mass; the rest of the day being a working day. My reason is this: with our present abuses of drinking, gambling, idling, and all manner of sin, we vex God more on holy days than on others. And the matter is just reversed; we have made holy days unholy, and working days holy, and do no service; but great dishonor, to God and his saints will all our holy days. There are some foolish prelates that think they have done a good deed, if they establish a festival to St. Otilia or St. Barbara, and the like, each in his own blind fashion, whilst he would be doing a much better work to turn a saint’s day into a working day in honor of a saint.29

      However, Luther’s reasoning appears to have been motivated by pragmatism in order to counter “the present abuses” he identified.

      Excursus on Lutheranism

Standing on the doctrine of sola Scriptura, Martin Luther (1483–1546) was very successful at eliminating many of the perverse teachings of Romanism (e.g., the Roman Catholic mass, auricular confession, pilgrimages, the saints as mediators, the sacerdotal priesthood, etc.). As Brian Schwertley suggests, unfortunately, perhaps as a result of his conservative personality, or his comfort with medieval style worship, or even a simple error in logic, he never made the connection between Scripture alone and the need of Divine warrant for worship ordinances, in the way that Calvin and others did. Luther held that human traditions in worship are valuable and should be respected as long as they do not contradict the Bible. In other words, only rites and ceremonies that are expressly forbidden by Scripture should be disallowed. As a result of the inconsistent application of sola Scriptura to only some matters relating to worship, the Lutherans retained many ceremonies, rites, and practices that were not derived from the Bible. It is then hardly surprising that a large portion of the ceremonial, ritualistic, and governmental structures of the Roman Catholic Church manifested themselves in Lutheranism. For whatever reason, Luther and his successors seem not to have realized that the very

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