No, that's alright, I don't need to contact him because I wouldn't use his material for a source; he needs to do better work, and I'll get to that in a moment because I used to do stuff like this, and I ended up stating a lot of false things because of it. In general, throughout the latter part of his video, he's saying the same things that I wrote about in my teaching on Christmas, but the problem with the "ancient" Christmas tree example is that he's saying it's "likely," when in fact, he doesn't know at all. (i.e. If he were fully honest, he could say, "maybe" or "perhaps," but "likely" indicates strong evidence in favor, and there wasn't much strong evidence from what I saw.)
Before I get into details, I'm not saying that it is not possible for that to have happened long ago in the past; perhaps it did, and that's something I'll keep an eye out for in the future. However, whether or not it's true, people still won't listen; I gave an entire history on the concept, and most churchgoers still won't listen. They'll make the same excuse (i.e. "
it doesn't mean that to us") and
that's why I wrote about idolatry in the heart, because until they're willing to listen to Scripture, nothing we show them will be convincing. (e.g. Abraham told the rich man in hell that even sending back Lazarus as a ghost wouldn't convince them; they had to hear the law and prophets.) Adding in Egyptian hieroglyphs isn't going to convince people like the Holy Spirit of God will convince them.
I did a bit of digging based on what I saw in the video, and it wasn't hard to find some of these images. One of the blogs that had these images claimed that even the Tower of Babel was also a "Christmas tree," which is not what the Bible tells us. (By the way, that same author wrote a book called "Extraterrestrial Sands" because he believes he has enough evidence to argue that sand was made by aliens--I'm not kidding.)
Your friend in the video did not really make a complete argument. He showed some Egyptian images, and didn't at all list out where he got them from, and we need to consider some of them may not be real because sometimes people create fakes--it is very easy to create fakes when it comes to Egyptian hieroglyphs, which means he likely just did a Google search and didn't bother to investigate it much further because he saw the image, thought it was convincing, and decided to put out a video on it. In fact, the only reference he gave on those images was to the one that we didn't need a reference for (i.e. the Christmas/Yule tree in the middle). This is how false information ends up getting spread among church buildings so quickly, and we need to be more watchful and thorough on these matters, or we end up embarrassing ourselves.
One could argue that when I showed the Ica Stones, I didn't necessarily list out where I got them from because, and I didn't do that because I personally held them in my hand, so I am the eye-witness source for it, but when it comes to other such images, I list out my sources so others can go and look at it to get all the information and verify if I'm telling the truth. (Not to say he's lying, don't misunderstand, but due to lack of time or a lack of know-how or a laziness [I don't know which] he may have gotten the information from others who are spreading false information.)
I tried searching through some reverse image engines, locating specific images in all places they appear on the internet, and after going through a lot of websites, I'm still unable to find the sources for these pictures, or any information that connects them to the concepts that are being talked about. For example, there's a popular book among conspiracy ministries called "Behold a White Horse," in which the author says that Egyptians used palm trees as Christmas trees in ancient times, and that the palm leaves represent Baal, but not only does he not give
ANY references where he found that information, nor does he back it up with anything at all, he quickly forgets that Christ allowed Himself to be worshiped with palm leaves.
Putting that aside, I would say the major point of error for his video is that he took the Scripture in 1Chron 14 and claimed that they were burning Christmas trees. He absolutely does not know that; the Bible just says that David burned their images. By the way, the word 'images' include idols; perhaps he didn't know that? Images includes paintings, carvings, sculptures, and statues, which is why God said not to make "grave images." To say "images" and assert that the Bible is referring to ancient Egyptian Christmas tree hieroglyphs is an absurd leap of logic.
On top of that, the Philistines were not Egyptians; this is not to say that they didn't have Egyptian propaganda on them, perhaps they did, or even similar things, but again, it is not my job to prove or disprove that because the guy in the video is the person making these statements, not me, so he needs to provide the evidence of what he's saying, and he's not doing it. I took an hour this morning looking up information on this, and I'm not finding much of anything; most of it is bloggers and book authors who are not backing up anything they're saying.
In summary, he states: "
These are actually predecessors of Christmas trees." That is a statement of fact, but I didn't hear anything in his video that backed up that definite statement of how he knew this. The only truly convincing image is the one he has in the bottom right, which was obviously an incredibly small image that he stretched out to fit in the slot; I was unable to find that anywhere, and you'll notice it is someone's sketch, not an actual photograph, which makes it a bit suspicious.
Perhaps this wasn't the response everyone was expecting me to give, but I want the guy in the video to do better work as a representative of the Lord Jesus Christ; that we would do work worthy of Him. It is not only so that we would not shame Christ's name and stand in good confidence with Him (remembering that "God sees it" too), but also that the man in the video would not have his good Christian credibility diminished by publishing information that is not accurate.
