Hanukkah has nothing to do with Bible

John 10 reads: [22] And it was at Jerusalem the feast of the dedication, and it was winter.

[23] And Jesus walked in the temple in Solomon's porch.
[24] Then came the Jews round about him, and said unto him, How long dost thou make us to doubt? If thou be the Christ, tell us plainly.
[25] Jesus answered them, I told you, and ye believed not: the works that I do in my Father's name, they bear witness of me.
[26] But ye believe not, because ye are not of my sheep, as I said unto you.
[27] My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me:
[28] And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand.

"The feast of the dedication is at Jerusalem and it’s the only time that feast is mentioned in the Bible.  The dedication is the purification of the temple. When it says it was winter, that tells you what dedication it was. It’s not the dedication of the temple under Solomon because that took place at harvest time (I Kings 8). The dedication of Nehemiah’s temple took place in the springtime (Ezra 6).

"This winter dedication is what is called in our day Hanukkah. You read about it in I Maccabees 4.  Antiochus Epiphanes, the Roman general, came in and sacked Jerusalem and polluted the temple. He’s said to have sacrificed a swine on the altar.

"Judas Maccabees was the leader of Israel at the time and they withstood Antiochus. You know, they’re in the temple and there’s only oil to light the light of the temple for one day and the oil miraculously lasted for eight days, as the story goes, and there’s the festival of light and all that stuff.

"That all has got nothing to do with the Bible; none of that’s in Scripture. None of that is in a Jewish Bible. It’s a story found in I Maccabees, which is part of the Apocrypha and not part of Scripture.

"When they dedicated the temple after Antiochus defiled it, it became know as the feast of dedication, something Israel had been doing almost 200 years by the time of Christ because of the Maccabean Revolt and so forth."

(new post tomorrow)