I have
addressed various aspects of the problem of Hyper-Protestantism in several essays
over the last few years. I distinguish Hyper-Protestantism
from ordinary Protestantism as being that which goes beyond rejecting and
opposing errors that are distinctly Roman
and rejects things that are genuinely Catholic
as well. That which is distinctly Roman is taught, practiced, or otherwise
held only by the Roman Church, that is to say, the communion under the
jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Rome who is more commonly called the
Pope. That is genuinely Catholic which is the common heritage of
all Churches that descended from the Apostolic Church in Jerusalem. In the fifth century, St. Vincent of Lérins identified three tests
of Catholicity that have been widely accepted ever since – Antiquity,
Universality, and Consent. The test of
Antiquity means that to be considered truly Catholic something must have
demonstrably been part of Christian faith and practice, at least implicitly,
since the earliest centuries. The test of
Universality means that something that only ever caught on in one region of the
Church or something that became dominant throughout the Church for a limited
period before being finally rejected cannot be considered Catholic, but only
that which can be found throughout all the ancient Churches in all places and
times. The word consent does not today
ordinarily mean what it does in St. Vincent’s test. The test of Consent is the official
approbation of legitimate Church authority.
If something is taught throughout the writings of the Church Fathers,
was defined and defended against error by the Church in council, especially an
ecumenical council (at the time St. Vincent wrote the Council of Ephesus had
just brought the number of these to three, the first two having been Nicaea I
and Constantinople I in the previous century, by the end of the fifth century Chalcedon became the
fourth ecumenical council, and three others Constantinople II, Constantinople
III, and Nicaea II were generally recognized before the Great Schism at the end
of the first millennium), or can otherwise be shown to be “official” Church
teaching or practice it passes the test
of Consent.
To give a specific example of the difference between that
which is Roman and that which is Catholic look at the doctrine of Purgatory and
the practice of praying for the faithful departed.
Purgatory is a Roman
doctrine not a Catholic
doctrine. The Church of Rome teaches it
dogmatically, but the other ancient Churches do not. Since neither the Oriental Orthodox Churches
(Coptic Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, etc.) which rejected the Definition of
Chalcedon of 451 and so broke with the rest of the Church nor the Assyrian
Church of the East which rejected the condemnation of Nestorius in 431 teach
Purgatory, this demonstrates that it was not received doctrine prior to the
fifth century. Some specific Eastern
Orthodox leaders have taught it, but the Eastern Orthodox Church as a whole has
rejected it, and it was a bone of contention during the reunification talks at
both the Second Council of Lyon (1274) and the Council of Florence
(1438-1445). Clearly, therefore,
Purgatory was not accepted as doctrine by the Catholic Church prior to the
Great Schism (1054). In the Church Fathers, the closest thing to
it is found in the writings of Origen and St. Gregory of Nyssa. These, however, were talking about hell,
which their doctrine of Apokatastasis
(final universal reconciliation for all) required that they interpret as
something similar to what Rome would later call Purgatory. Apokatastasis was
formally rejected by the Church in the fifth ecumenical council in the sixth
century. The doctrine of Purgatory,
therefore, is distinctly Roman and not genuinely Catholic.
This is not the case with the practice of praying for the
faithful departed, however. It is
attested to since the earliest centuries, and an example of it may very well be
found in the New Testament itself in II Tim. 1:18. It is practiced not only by the Church of
Rome but by the ancient pre-Reformation Churches that reject Purgatory, the
Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox Churches, and the Assyrian
Church of the East. The sixteenth
century Reformers who thought it to stand or fall with the doctrine of
Purgatory were clearly mistaken. It passes at least the tests of Antiquity and
Universality.
This brings us to the question of whether there are any
tests that we can apply to Protestant doctrines, positions, customs and
assertions to determine whether they are Hyper or not. The answer is yes. Since St. Vincent offered three tests of
Catholicity, I shall identity and discuss three tests of Hyper-Protestantism
although more could be listed. The
rejection of things that are Catholic by St. Vincent’s definition as well as
those that are distinctly Roman is the definition of Hyper-Protestantism and
not one of the tests.
The first test of Hyper-Protestantism is the test of Catachresis. Catachresis means the misuse of terms. The specific example that is involved in this
test is the pejorative use of the word Catholic. Or, to approach it from another angle, the
use of the word Catholic to mean that
which is Roman. This second wording is, perhaps, the better
of the two because it reveals how Hyper-Protestantism actually betrays a
principle of the Reformation. The Roman
Church claims that St. Peter was given jurisdiction over the Apostles and
therefore over the whole Apostolic Church and that this jurisdiction was passed
on to his successors in the bishopric of Rome, making the bishop of Rome the
universal Patriarch, and the Catholic or whole Church co-extensive with his jurisdiction. In other words, the Roman Church claims
herself to be the Catholic (whole) Church.
The Reformers disputed this claim in the sixteenth century, as did the
other four of the ancient patriarchates when the East and West mutually
excommunicated each other in 1054. Since
one of those patriarchates is that of Jerusalem, which clearly has the better
right to be considered the Mother Church than Rome, and another of those
patriarchates is Antioch, which St. Peter also held before that of Rome, and
yet a third is Constantinople which itself had claimed universal jurisdiction
in the sixth century to have its claims – and all claims of universal
jurisdiction – rebutted by Gregory I of Rome, using the same arguments that
would later be used against his successors – Rome’s position is built on a
foundation of quicksand.
Hyper-Protestantism’s use of the word Catholic, however, conforms to
Rome’s position, not that of the Reformers
The second test of Hyper-Protestantism is the test of
Misprioritization. This is the elevating
of Protestant doctrines to a level of importance higher than the faith common
to all Christians as confessed in the ancient Creeds. There is a secondary type of misprioritization
in which even lesser doctrines (eschatological schemes, specific understandings
of predestination, and the sort) are elevated above the core truths of the
Reformation. It is the first type that
we will focus on here.
There are various ways in which this done. A common one is to threat the doctrines of
the Reformation as if they were incapable of being distorted through
exaggeration into heresy. By contrast,
the defenders of orthodoxy in the early Church recognized that any truth could
be distorted into heresy by exaggeration and that the path of orthodoxy was the
path of balancing and harmonizing different truths. In those days, the main contested truths had
to do with theology proper, the doctrine of God, especially the doctrine of the
Trinity, and Christology, the Person of Jesus Christ. The true and living God is One. He is also, in a way different from the way
in which He is One, Three. If the
Oneness of God is exaggerated, you get Judaism, Islam, and Unitarianism. If the Threeness of God is exaggerated, you
get polytheism. The orthodox truth lies
in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, which harmonized and balances the Oneness
and Threeness of God. If you exaggerate
the deity of Jesus Christ, you get such things as Docetism, the idea that
Jesus’ humanity was just an appearance and had no material substance, or
Apollinarianism, the idea that the divine Logos took the place that is filled
by the human mind in other men, making His humanity incomplete. Conversely, Jesus’ humanity can be
exaggerated to as to deny or diminish His deity in ways such as Adoptionism
(the idea that He was a man who became God at some point such as His baptism)
or Ebionism (the idea that He was merely the greatest of all prophets rather
than God Incarnate). The orthodox truth
is that He is fully God and fully Man.
The fifth century demonstrated that this was susceptible of further
distortions by exaggerating either His two natures (so as to make Him two
Persons occupying the same body, the Son of God and the Son of Man, which is
the heresy called Nestorianism) or the unity of His Person so as to deny His
two natures (such as in Eutychianism in which Jesus’ humanity is swallowed up
into His deity so that only the latter remains) requiring the clarification of
the orthodox doctrine of the Hypostatic Union in the Definition of Chalcedon.
Now think about that.
If such truths as the Oneness of God, the Threeness of God, the deity of
Jesus Christ and His humanity, the Unity of His Person and His two natures can
and have been each distorted by exaggeration into heresy, would it not be
elevating the doctrines of the Reformation far above these truths to pretend
that they cannot be similarly distorted?
Furthermore, would it not be precisely this sort of distortion to say,
for example, that Churches which confess the orthodox truths of the ancient
Creeds are not expressions of Biblical Christianity because they do not affirm
the Reformation doctrine of justification?
Especially if in making such a statement all the ancient Churches are
lumped in with Rome even though the worst errors that the Reformers opposed
with regards to justification (that the works of sinful human beings have merit
in God’s eyes, that they can have merit above and beyond what is required by
God, that the keys involve the right to distribute or even sell for a profit
this supererogatory merit, etc.) are ones that Rome alone among the ancient
Churches fell into.
The answer to both of these questions is yes. Moreover, it needs to be recognized that the
Reformation doctrines are particularly susceptible of being exaggerated and
distorted into heresies because of the way they are formulated. Keep in mind here that the Five Solae are not
a sixteenth century formulation but a twentieth century formulation read back
onto the sixteenth century. It was first
formulated by German Roman Catholic liberation theologian Johann Baptiste Metz
in 1965 but caught on especially among Calvinists who found a five point summary
of the Reformation appealing because it made Calvinism (famously summarized in
five points, those articulated in the canons of the Synod of Dort in the second
decade of the seventeenth century which responded to the five points of the
Arminian Remonstrance) seem more normative of Protestantism in general. It
should also be noted that one of the Five Solae, Sola Gratia, is not a
Reformation distinctive but is a Catholic doctrine recognized as such universally
since the (regional) Council of Carthage’s condemnation of Pelagianism was
confirmed the third ecumenical council and that the Five Solae do not include
the doctrine of assurance which was at least as important to the sixteenth
century Reformation, especially the Lutheran side, as any of the Solae. Nevertheless, Sola Scriptura and Sola Fide
were both indisputably central to the Reformation. Both doctrines, defined properly, are
sound. The Latin word Sola, however, and
its English equivalent “alone” is not a word that usually marks a doctrine as
having been carefully formulated with an eye to the balanced truth of
orthodoxy.
Consider Sola Scriptura.
The expression was first used by Dr. Luther just prior to the Diet of
Worms (1521) where he famously took his stand on the doctrine. As Dr. Luther
used it, however, it did not mean anything remotely close to what later
Protestants, especially the Hypers, have taken it to mean. Dr. Luther taught the Sufficiency, Primacy
and Supremacy of the Scriptures, not the idea that each Christian should get
his faith and practice directly from the Bible and only from the Bible with no
regards whatsoever to what previous Christians have said, thought, and done
individually or as the Church. The
expression “Sola Scriptura”, however, especially when not used in a full
sentence such as “The Scriptures alone are infallible”, easily suggests this
idea of the go-it-alone Christian. Ironically,
it contradicts the very authority it is intended to uphold for Scriptures
themselves, St. Paul’s second epistle to the Thessalonians specifically,
contain the instruction “Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the
traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle” (2
Thess. 2:15). The traditions, i.e., that
which has been passed on or handed down, which they have been taught, are what
Christians are instructed here to stand fast and hold, whether the transmission
is oral (“by word”) or written (“our epistle”) which latter category is the
Scripture, the very designation of which means that which is written. Note that the Scripture in this verse of the
Scriptures is very much not “alone.” Far
better than this expression for explaining the Reformation teaching would be to
employ the expressions the Sufficiency, Primacy, and Supremacy of the
Scriptures. Either Primacy or
Sufficiency would be a better summary of all that Dr. Luther and the Reformers
intended than that most insufficient word “Alone”. Article VI of our reformed Anglican Church
is not entitled “The Scriptures Alone” but “Of the Sufficiency of the Holy
Scriptures for Salvation.” It asserts “Holy Scripture containeth all things
necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be
proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as
an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.”
(1)
Sola Fide, understood correctly, is merely the doctrine St.
Paul taught in the fourth chapter of Romans, that being righteous in the eyes
of God is a gift God gives by His grace and that for it to be such it has to be
by faith and not by works. St. Paul did
not contradict St. James who says that justification is by works but he
explained St. James, who does not use the word “grace” in the relevant portion
of his epistle, to not be talking about justification before God (Rom. 4:2). The Reformers were right to re-emphasize St.
Paul’s doctrine to correct the heavy over-emphasis on works in late Medieval
Roman theology. Note, however, that St.
Paul was able to articulate this doctrine without using the word “alone”. Note also, that when St. Paul identified the
Gospel that he preached, he did not say that it was the doctrine of
justification but that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures,
and that He was buried and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures
and the testimony of eyewitnesses enumerated by the Apostle (1 Cor.
15:3ff). Since this is included in the
Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, confessed by all the ancient Churches, and is
indeed, central to it, it cannot be legitimately said that the Church ever
“lost” the Gospel as is claimed by the idea of restorationism which is common
to all the heretical sects that evangelicals grew accustomed to calling cults
towards the end of the last century.
Neither Dr. Luther and his associates nor the English Reformers (or the
more responsible among the Swiss Reformers) were restorationists but the door
which let restorationism and Hyper-Protestantism in was opened by referring to
St. Paul’s doctrine of justification, re-articulated with the word alone, as being
itself the Gospel. (2)
The third test of Hyper-Protestantism is the test of
Mendacity. Hyper-Protestantism is
willing to sacrifice truthfulness to the cause of opposing Rome. While some of
the better known examples of this predate the internet, the internet meme has
greatly exacerbated this tendency of Hyper-Protestantism. In the last couple of months I have seen
Hyper-Protestant memes attacking the Roman Church posted to social media on a
daily basis. I don’t remember a single
one of them that did not make some irresponsible and easily rebuttable claim or
another.
One of these, from a Baptist source, made the claim that the
Scriptures do not teach that Mary is the New Eve, that this claim comes from
late Medieval Scholasticism, and was invented for the purpose of supporting
Rome’s doctrine about Mary being the Co-Redemptrix. This was a particularly remarkable example
because rather than mixing one or two errors into what was otherwise correct
this meme did not get a single thing right.
Mary is contrasted with Eve in this way by St. Justin Martyr
in Dialogue With Trypho 100 and by
St. Irenaeus of Lyon in Against Heresies
3.22.4. These are both second century
sources, written in approximately 150 and 180 respectively. This identification of Mary with Eve was raised
again by Tertullian, the first major theologian to write in Latin, in a
treatise written against the Docetic arguments of the Marcionites and
Valentinians in the first decade of the third century, On the Flesh of Christ, 17.
It was also one of several Marian themes that appear in the writings of
Origen, the most important theologian of the early Alexandrian Church, who was
about thirty years younger than Tertullian.
Origen, in whose writings the first extent use of the word Theotokos can
be found, wrote about the Perpetual Virginity of Mary and explored the
parallels between her and Eve in the commentaries and expository homilies he
wrote and gave after his relocation to Caesarea Maritima in 231. The theme of Mary as the New Eve is also
prominent in the homilies of Origen’s most celebrated student, St. Gregory
Thaumaturgos, who was born a couple of years after Tertullian wrote the work
mentioned above and became Bishop of his native Neocaesarea later that century. See, for example, the first three of the
homilies in the collection Four Homilies,
which three have the common topic of the Annunciation and the homily on “The
Holy Mother of God, Ever Virgin” which is extent only in Armenian rather than
Greek and in which the comparison/contrast between Eve and Mary opens the
homily. In the centuries that follow this theme can be found in the extend
works of St. Cyril of Jerusalem, St. Jerome, St. Augustine, and basically all
the major Church Fathers. It was a
common Patristic idea long before there was any such thing as Scholasticism.
Moreover, the idea is derived directly from the
Scriptures. In Genesis 3:15, the first
promise of the Messiah in the Old Testament, the expression “the woman”
appears. In the context of Genesis 3,
“the woman” has to be Eve. The Seed of
the woman, Who is prophesied to crush the head of the serpent, however, is
Christ, so “the woman” of this verse also has to be Mary. This one expression “the woman” has,
therefore, double reference to Eve and to Mary.
We find this again in the twelfth chapter of Revelation. The woman there is identified as Mary by the
fact that she gives birth to Christ (vv. 4-5).
The chapter also, however, stresses the enmity between her and the
dragon (vv. 4, 6, 13-17) and when it identifies the dragon the wording points
directly back to Genesis 3 “that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan” (v.
9). Revelation 12, therefore, places this woman who gave birth to Christ, Mary,
in the role of Eve, whose enemy is the serpent.
The identification of Mary with Eve is also the significance of Jesus’
addressing His mother as “Woman” in John 2:4 and 19:26. (3) In Genesis, this is what Adam calls Eve when
God first makes her (Gen. 2:24) and what she is called throughout the
Creation/Fall narrative until after the curse, when her name Eve is used for
the first time (Gen. 3:20).
Note that the New Testament basis for identifying Mary as
the New Eve comes from the writings of St. John the Apostle. This is itself significant because St.
Irenaeus grew up under the teaching of St. Polycarp of Smyrna, himself a direct
disciple of St. John. St. Justin Martyr,
while not among the direct disciples of St. John in this same way, incorporated
Johannine themes into all his writings, wrote and set Dialogue with Trypho in Ephesus, the city where St. John had spent
most of the latter part of his life, and is the earliest witness to the
Johannine authorship of Revelation. The
earliest Church Fathers to speak of Mary as the New Eve were directly
influenced by the Apostle whose New Testament writings provide the Scriptural
basis for this idea.
Not only does this meme illustrate the lackadaisical
attitude towards the truth, at least where Rome is concerned, on the part of
Hyper-Protestants, (Luke Skywalker’s line from The Last Jedi, “Amazing, every word of what you just said was
wrong” could have been addressed to it), it also illustrates the fittingness of
the expression “Hyper-Protestant.” By
accusing an idea, which the slightest amount of real research would have
revealed to date to the earliest centuries of Christianity, to have been
ubiquitous among the Church Fathers, and to be based in Scripture itself, of
having been developed late in Church history to support the least defensible of
Rome’s Marian terminology, one never formally dogmatized and which Rome has
recently taken steps to walk back, Hyper-Protestants go well beyond what the
sixteenth century Reformers themselves had to say against Rome with regards to
Mary, which really wasn’t all that much.
Indeed, most of the Reformers, certainly the Lutheran and English
Reformers, but even the fathers of the Reformed tradition including Calvin
himself, would have to be classified as rank Mariolators if we were to go by
the standards of Hyper-Protestantism.
As noted earlier, this characteristic of Hyper-Protestantism
predates the internet meme. The late
Jack T. Chick, the fundamentalist Baptist publisher from Los Angeles famous for
his cartoon tracts – small, rectangular booklets, which tell a story in
comic-book style that leads up to an evangelistic appeal – saw his credibility
take several blows in the last decades of the twentieth century when he
repeatedly published or distributed testimonies/exposes that proved incapable
of withstanding serious scrutiny as to their truthfulness. While not all of these pertained to the Roman
Church, the
most notorious example was his publication of the testimony of Alberto Rivera,
who claimed to be an ex-Jesuit and on the basis of whose testimony, he accused
the Roman Church of being behind everything from the creation of Islam to Nazi
Germany to the decay of morals in the late twentieth century United
States.
Evangelist
Ralph Woodrow wrote “It puzzles me how some can be so fanatical
against one set of errors—or what they perceive to be errors—only to develop
greater errors: becoming judgmental, hateful, and dishonest”. Woodrow wrote this in the context of explaining
why he had withdrawn his best-seller, Babylon
Mystery Religion, widely distributed by Chick, from circulation. His book had drawn its inspiration from The Two Babylons by Alexander Hislop, a
nineteenth century minister of the Scottish Free Church (Presbyterian) that
tried to trace everything in Roman Catholicism that could not be found in the
pages of Scripture (and much that could) back to Nimrod (who built the Tower of
Babel/Babylon, the cult of whom Hislop claimed to be the original template of all
paganism). Woodrow, after prayerfully
re-examining Hislop’s book and checking its sources, withdrew his own book and
wrote The Babylon Connection? a book
length rebuttal of his own previous book and his primary source. A shorter version of his
critique of Hislop’s methodology appeared in the Christian Research Journal.
With the Vincentian tests of antiquity, universality, and
consent, something has to pass all three to be genuinely Catholic. With these tests of Hyper-Protestantism,
Catachresis, Misprioritization and Mendacity, passing any one of them indicates
an infection. Passing all three
indicates that the theological disease has reached an advanced stage.
This, however, illustrates the third test
of Hyper-Protestantism, the devaluing of truth.
It is common today for Roman Catholic apologists to accuse Protestants
of taking books out of the Bible, and of Protestant apologists to accuse the
Roman Catholic Church of adding them.
Neither of these is entirely right, although the Roman Catholic
accusation is closer to the truth. The deutero-canonical
books are, for the most part, (2 Esdras, called “The Fourth Book of Esdras” in
Article VI, is the exception) books found in the Septuagint, the Greek
translation that the Church received as her Old Testament from the first
century but which were never included in the canon recognized by rabbinic
Judaism. If the Roman Catholic Church
had “added” them in the sixteenth century, we could expect that Churches that
broke fellowship with Rome earlier wold not include them in their Bibles. This is not the case. Generally, the further back the schism, the
more the deuterocanonical books you find in the Bibles of the other Churches. The Eastern Orthodox Church which broke with
the Roman Catholic in 1054 has 3 and 4 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh, and
Psalm 151 in its Bible. The Oriental
Orthodox Churches which broke with the Chalcedonian Churches in the fifth
century has these and, in the case of those which use the Tewahedo Bible
(Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Churches), Enoch and Jubilees. The Assyrian Church of the East which uses
the Syriac Peshitta as its Bible includes most of the same deutero-canon as the
Roman Catholic Church plus Psalm 151 and the Prayer of Manasseh.
What happened in the sixteenth century was
that both the Roman Catholic Church and the early Reformers, shifted books from
category to category in the Bible. Dr.
Luther left the deuterocanonical books in the Bible but shifted them out of the
Old Testament and into a section unfortunately labelled “Apocrypha”, inaccurately
using a term that the Church Fathers applied to a different set of writings
altogether. The same was done in the
Authorized Bible in 1611 and Article VI reflects the thinking behind this. The deuterocanonical books are not
“canonical” in the sense of being the “canon” or “rule” by which doctrine is
proved, but they are not “non-canonical” in the sense of not being included in
the Bible altogether. What the Roman
Catholic Church did at Trent was to shift these books into the “canon” in the
sense of doctrine-proving books. The
other ancient Churches, while regarding these books as part of the Old
Testament, had never regarded them as being equally canonical in this sense.
(2) Once something other than the Gospel preached by St. Paul, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures and was buried and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures is identified as the Gospel, even if it be St. Paul’s own doctrine of justification, so as to make the claim that all the Churches that confess that Christ, the second person of the Trinity, incarnate as the God-Man, died for our sins, and was buried, and rose again don’t have the Gospel if they don’t have that doctrine in its Reformation reformulation, the door is opened to making this same claim about another doctrine so as to exclude others who do also confess the doctrine of justification in its Reformation formulation.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the Calvinist
Baptist preacher of the nineteenth century, is frequently quoted as having said
“Calvinism is the Gospel, and nothing else.”
Other Calvinists have identified the “doctrines of grace” as the
Gospel. These, however, are doctrines
pertaining to predestination, a matter about which God keeps His own counsel
and which is hardly of the essence of the kerygma His Church is charged with
proclaiming to the world.
Recently a Calvinist Baptist friend posted
to social media an excerpt from John Wesley’s writings in which he referred to
himself as “almost a Christian”. My
friend used to this to try and argue that Wesley was never a Christian and that
the Gospel he preached – Wesley was an Arminian – was not the real Gospel. I had to rebuke him and point out that it was
quite clear, even from the excerpt from Wesley that he had included in his
post, that the revivalist was talking about his life prior to Aldersgate
(where, at a meeting of the Moravians in which Dr. Luther’s preface to Romans
was being read, he testified “I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did
trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me
that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and
death.”)
(3) Jesus also addresses the Samaritan woman, the woman caught in adultery, and Mary Magdalen as “woman” but there was nothing unusual about these instances. This was not rude in first century Palestine the way it is in the English-speaking world of our day, it was closer to addressing a woman as “ma’am” in our culture. Jesus’ addressing His mother this way was unusual, however. St. John records Jesus doing so twice, at the very beginning of His ministry and the very end. The first of these is at the wedding of Cana, where Jesus performed His first miracle. St. John tells us that this occurred on “the third day” which was to the last of the four days in the previous chapter as the Sunday on which Jesus rose was “the third day” to the Friday on which He was crucified, making this the sixth day. This, coming as it does at the start of a Gospel which begins by pointing back to Genesis and Creation, is evocative of the sixth day of Creation, the day in which God created man “male and female” and Adam named Eve “woman”. At the end of His earthly ministry, Jesus’ addresses Mary as “woman” again and tells her to “behold thy son” as He instructs St. John to “behold thy mother”. Here too is an allusion to the first woman who at the end of the Creation/Fall account in Genesis is given the name Eve because she is the “mother of all living.”
