Did Jesus celebrate Hanukkah?

BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE

The short answer is yes. The long answer, ah! That is a story rich in incident, with enticing side journeys into such areas as hermeneutics, historiography and linguistics, part of a wider question about the history of these celebrations, one Christian and one Jewish, and how they were entwined in a dialogue throughout history, along with national identity and political agendae. How did we get to today, with the often problematic manger scenes, the Hanukkah bush, and of course, the war on Christmas? Red paper cups will not be mentioned, except this once.
“Because identity is never clean, no matter who you are. We are all dorky people slurping food at holiday parties; we are all symbols of centuries-old religious tension.” (“Hanukkah with the Jews for Jesus,” Emma Green, The Atlantic, 12/23/2014)
In the course of researching this article, it was almost impossible to avoid the Jews for Jesus. I’m not a fan of theirs, by a long shot, but I’m glad I stumbled upon the above short article, because it made me feel better about this whole project, especially when I read the wry and forgiving quote. It was in a different Jews for Jesus article that I discovered Jesus in the actual act of observing Hanukkah! More on that later …
First, for those who don’t know, a quick synopsis of Hanukkah, Hebrew for Dedication. The temple being rededicated was the Second Temple, built after the return from exile, which occurred in about 164 BCE. To back up a bit: In what we Christians call the intertestamental years (between the end of the “Old” one and the birth of Jesus), Judea was invaded many times by Persians, Greeks and Romans. The degrees of oppression of the people varied, but one of the worst was the Seleucid king, Antiochus IV, who invaded Jerusalem in 175 BCE and outlawed Judaism. He turned the Second Temple over to worshipping Zeus and worst of all, from a purity viewpoint, he sacrificed pigs on the altar. The Jewish High Priest, Mattathias the Hasmonean, despite being very old, stood up to this and refused to sacrifice to Zeus, and instead took his five sons and many followers into the wilderness to try to keep Judaism alive.
But a small band of his followers was gruesomely slaughtered after refusing to profane the Sabbath by fighting back, so the Hasmonean band decided to declare all-out war on the Seleucids and retake Jerusalem. Mattathias died of old age, and the new leader was Judah, his eldest son, called Yehudah ha-Makabi (Makabi = Hammer) because of his fierceness. Although Judah died in the fighting, the Maccabeans ultimately won and thus liberated the defiled temple. The rededication followed a cleansing and rebuilding, but the altar itself was a puzzle; how could they cleanse the porous stone of the un-kosher blood of swine? But on the other hand, the altar was once so sacred that they dared not destroy it. So they built a new altar of unhewn stones, and stored the stones from the old altar outside on Solomon’s porch, to await a future prophet who could tell them what to do with them. (Remember that!)
The story of the rededication of the Second Temple was part of the scriptures in Jesus’ time, which he and his followers were, to various degrees, educated in, and which they used to promulgate their new sect of Judaism. That “bible” was called the Septuagint. It has moved through Jewish history from a canonical and reliable scripture, to a highly suspect one that was more the property of enemy Christians. The story of the Septuagint itself contains a wonderful miracle legend. The word Septuagint means “the 70” (in Latin, not Greek). The Septuagint is a translation of the Jewish holy books into Koine Greek from Hebrew (really Aramaic, of which the language we now call Hebrew was a dialect) by 70 Greek-educated Jewish scholars in the Egyptian city of Alexandria. The miracle was that these men were summoned to Alexandria, and without even meeting each other, were put in separate rooms and told to write out the text and that all 70 Greek translations matched up word for word. Still, we are fairly certain that the Septuagint was the scripture Jews of Jesus’s own time used, because of a later confirmation—the Qumran gospels, or Dead Sea Scrolls. They contain many fragments that are too close to the Septuagint translation to be a coincidence.
Jesus’ own Hanukkah story appears in the gospel of John, where he walks “in Solomon’s porch” during the Festival of Dedication and Jewish scholars interrogate him. When he makes the statement “I and the Father are one!” they decide he must   be stoned for blasphemy. Fortunately, right there on Solomon’s porch were some big ugly stones, which legend says were waiting for the Messiah to tell them how to use them.
“A great miracle happened there.” The four first Hebrew letters of this statement are inscribed on the four sides of the dreidl, a rectangular spinning top that is a part of the tradition of Hanukkah. For certain, the toddler Jesus would not have had a dreidl, nor would he have heard at any time the story of the miracle of single day’s supply of oil that burned for eight days. This miracle story did not appear in any literature until centuries later. The more official explanation for the eight days of the celebration, hinted at in the I Maccabees verses, is that the rededication was a sort of second Sukkot, or Festival of Booths, because the original dedication of the Second Temple had happened at the actual time of Sukkot.
Gradually, as Christianity grew from a sect of Palestinian Judaism, to a Greco-Roman cult, to a world movement threatening the already dying empire, to the state-sanctioned official religion of the Byzantine version of that empire, Judaism struggled all the more for survival and sought to distance itself from its one-time sect, now becoming an implacable enemy. A new holy book was in the works, which would eventually be the Talmud, and Judaism disowned the Septuagint, which was incorporated into the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Bibles as the Old Testament. Protestant Bibles don’t include the deuterocanonical books like Maccabees, however.
We rather childishly call Christmas “Jesus’s birthday” but we know that Jesus would not have celebrated or even thought much about his own birthday. Indeed, for many centuries, celebrating any birth had a whiff of paganism to it.Take, for instance, saint’s days. Few realize that these are almost invariably the date of the saint’s martyrdom, which is more likely to be known than the date of their birth. There are many theories as to why Dec. 25 was chosen as Jesus’ birth date, the date for Christ’s Mass. A common one is about the competition in the first three centuries CE between Christianity and Mithraism, given that the Sun God also had a virgin mother and was born on Dec. 25. (Mithra, however, has even less claim to the possibility of being a real, historical human being than Jesus does.) Mithraism was the most popular cult among slaves and Roman foot soldiers, so many customs of the early church that are suspiciously Mithraic were thought to be recruiting points. A more believable scenario is that the method to determine the birth date was by reckoning from the likely conception date. Both Luke and Matthew have stories about the Annunciation (taken as the conception date) and by the two main candidates for that date, the birth is either around Sukkot time (late September) or Hanukkah time (25 Kislev or sometime in December.) Unlike the date of Easter, which caused major schisms and even battles, no one was that fussed, and Dec. 25 was gradually to become the consensus.
For celebrations of Hanukkah, the roadmap is pretty clear, diverging only along Ashkenazy vs. Sephardic lines as to whether to eat latkes or jelly doughnuts. But Christmas celebrations really have no authoritative tradition, and indeed, our “founding fathers,” the English Puritans, absolutely forbade any Christmas celebrations at all.
Everybody knows … that no worldwide tax census was conducted in that period of the rule of Augustus, and that no “stable” is mentioned even in any of the mutually contradictory books of the New Testament. So, to put a star on top of a pine tree or to arrange various farm animals around a crib is to be as accurate and inventive as that Japanese department store that, as urban legend has it, did its best to emulate the Christmas spirit by displaying a red-and-white bearded Santa snugly nailed to a crucifix.
“Bah, Hanukkah,” Christopher Hitchins, Slate, 12/03/2007
Just as there are no oil miracles, dreidls or gift-giving in Maccabees, the four Gospels don’t mention birthday celebrations, Mass, pine trees, elves, stables full of beasts, or anything that is being “attacked” in the “war on Christmas.” From its beginnings, Hanukkah was more of a celebration of religious freedom and national identity than a religious holiday in itself. And so Christmas, in all its myriad celebrations, is more a folk festival than a solemn day for Christian piety. Ironically, throughout the Medieval and Tudor times, the main dish the English ate for Christmas was the object that defiled the temple—roast pig!