BLESSED Lord, who hast
caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant that we may in
such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by
patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed
hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.
– Collect for the Second Sunday in Advent
ALMIGHTY God, give us
grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour
of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ
came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come
again in his glorious Majesty, to judge both the quick and the dead, we may
rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and
the Holy Ghost, now and ever. Amen. – Collect for the First Sunday in Advent
We are once again at that time of the year when the
Christmas haters come crawling out of the woodworks. I don’t mean the sort of people who object
to Christmas as being Christian and wish to replace it with a generic “season”
or “holiday”. Nor am I referring to
those who have problems with the commercialized version that has for many
replaced the solemn and joyous Feast of the Nativity of Our Lord. I am talking instead about the sort of
people that we might call hyper-Protestants.
Ordinary Protestants “protest” the errors that are particular to the
Patriarch of Rome and the Churches in his Communion. Hyper-Protestants oppose what is Catholic – belonging
to the entire pre-Reformation Christian tradition as a whole. Hyper-Protestantism is inescapably sectarian
and in its extreme form rejects even the Trinitarian faith of the ancient
Creeds. Hyper-Protestantism regards Catholicism as a
synthesis between Christianity and paganism, in which the Christianity is the
outward veneer and the paganism is the dominant, inner, reality. It
usually dates the origin of this synthesis to the fourth century, the
legalization of Christianity, the reign of Constantine the Great, and
Christianity’s becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire.
Hyper-Protestants maintain that Christmas and Easter are pagan
festivals that were given a superficial Christian makeover as part of this
process.
Some hyper-Protestant ideas have become so widespread that
they are now commonly accepted assumptions even among regular Protestants and
non-Protestant Christians. The pagan
origin of Christmas is one such idea. Indeed,
until quite recently my answer to this argument would not have been to
challenge the assumption but the spin placed on it. I would have said something along the lines
of “Okay, so the ancient pagans had a holiday around the winter solstice, and
the Church took the day over and made it Christmas, big deal, it is far better
that we honour Christ than some pagan idol in December, and anyway, the Jews
did exactly the same thing, they set their ‘festival of lights’ to occur around
the winter solstice, in commemoration of an event that isn’t even recorded in
books they regard as canonical, yet Jesus is described as participating in that
celebration in the tenth chapter of the Gospel according to St. John and I
don’t see you complaining about that!”
While I would still regard that reasoning as valid, I would no longer
concede to the hyper-Protestants the idea that Christianity borrowed the
holiday from paganism.
What initially led me to reconsider this concession was the
article “Calculating
Christmas” by William J. Tighe, Associate Professor of History at
Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, which appeared in the December
2003 issue of Touchstone Magazine. In this article, Tighe argued that the pagan
festival of Dies Natalis Sol Invictus (“the day of the Birth of the Unconquered
Sun”) was actually more recent than Christmas.
It was the emperor Aurelian who established the cult of Sol Invictus in
274 AD, towards the end of his brief reign.
This, Tighe argued, “was almost certainly an attempt to create a pagan
alternative to a date that was already of some significance to Roman
Christians”. He explains that long
before this Christians had attempted to determine the calendar date of Christ’s
death, which was important to the debate over when to celebrate Pascha/Easter,
and that Christians in the Greek-speaking East had determined in to be the
sixth of April, while Latin-speaking Christians in the West had calculated it
to be the twenty-fifth of March. Both
were wrong in these calculations, Tighe argued, but influenced by the then
extent Jewish idea of “integral age”, that a prophet of Israel would live a
whole life and die either on the day he was conceived or born, concluded that
these were also the dates of either Christ’s birth or conception, eventually
settling upon the latter and declaring the twenty-fifth of March to be the
Feast of the Annunciation, which, of course, is exactly nine months prior to
the twenty-fifth of December.
Was Tighe correct?
He was certainly right that Christians had concluded that
Christ was born on the twenty-fifth of December long before Aurelian
established the cult of Sol Invictus on that day. St. Hippolytus of Rome had written in his Commentary on Daniel (IV.23) that the
birth of Christ in Bethlehem had taken place eight days prior to the Kalends of
January, on a Wednesday, in the forty-second year of Augustus (he was obviously
counting from the rise to power of the Second Triumvirate, not from either
Octavian’s birth or his becoming emperor) and five thousand, five hundredth
after Adam. St. Hippolytus died in 235
AD, almost forty years prior to the establishment of the cult of Sol Invictus,
and his Commentary on Daniel was written about thirty years before
that. The Kalends of January is, of
course, the first of January, New Year’s Day, and eight days prior to that is
the twenty-fifth of December. In his
very next sentence he went on to say that the Lord died in his thirty-third
year, eight days before the Kalends of April, which is, of course, the
twenty-fifth of March. Tertullian also testified to the twenty-fifth
of March as the date of the Passion in a work, Adversus Judaeos, (VIII.17) that came out around the same time as
St. Hippolytus’ Commentary, possibly
a few years earlier. That the date of
Christ’s birth was calculated from the date of the Annunciation, considered to
be identical to the date of the Passion, is indirectly testified to by another
work of St. Hippolytus, his Chronicon,
written shortly before his death, which makes the twenty-fifth of March not
only the date of the events mentioned, but of the Creation of the world. He was not the only one to make these
connections. Sextus Julius Africanus in
his Chronographiai, also maintained that
the twenty-fifth of March was the date of Creation and that the Incarnation
took place five thousand, five hundred years to the day later. This five-volume work, no longer extent
except in fragments and insomuch as it is quoted at length by later writers
such as Eusebius of Caeserea, was completed in 221 AD. While there were some who followed Julius
Africanus and St. Hippolytus in seeing the twenty-fifth of March as the date of
Creation who did not join them in identifying it as the anniversary of the
Incarnation and Passion – the author who wrote De Pascha Computus (243 AD), falsely attributed to St. Cyprian of
Carthage is one example – even this testimony supports the point that great
significance was attached to the twenty-fifth of March first, and that the date
of Christmas was calculated from this rather than the other way around.
The weakest part of Tighe’s argument is the explanation of
the dates by means of the Jewish tradition of integral age. The Patristic writers referred to do not use
this explanation in their own writings and, indeed, it would have been strange
if they had for two reasons. The first
is that they were writing in a period in which the Jewish and Christian
traditions were distancing themselves from each other – note the title of the
Tertullian work mentioned above. The
second is that the Jewish tradition in question is about men who died on their
birthdays. Moses is the primary example
of this, and the only one of whom Old Testament support for the idea can be
found (Deuteronomy 31:2 can be interpreted as saying that it was Moses’ one
hundred and twentieth birthday when he gave his final address to Israel). The Babylonian
Talmud also says of the patriarchs in the Rosh Hashanah tractate that they
died in the same month that they were born, which might suggest that they died
on their birthdays. That Moses died on
his birthday is asserted several times in the Babylonian Talmud. In one
place (Kiddusin 38a)
this is discussed at length and explained it as a fulfilment of Exodus 23:26’s
“the number of thy days I will fulfill”.
The Patristic writers, however,
assigned Jesus’ day of conception rather than His day of birth to the same day
He died. This does not necessarily
mean that the integral age tradition did not influence their calculations. It is possible that they chose date of
conception rather than date of birth to distinguish a Christian version of the
concept from the Jewish one. A
theological case for doing this can even be made. The moment Jesus was conceived in the womb
of the Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit was the moment God became
Man. This was not true of the
conception of Moses or of anyone else other than Jesus. Therefore in His case the fullness of the
number of His days was counted from the moment of Incarnation rather than the
moment of birth. If this sort of
thinking figured into the calculations of the Patristic writers, however, they
neglected to inform their readers of it.
The important point, of course, is not whether the Church
Fathers were influenced by this Jewish tradition in their calculations of the
date of the birth of Christ, but that they calculated that date as having been
the twenty-fifth of December for reasons that have nothing to do with paganism,
idolatry, or the festivals associated with the same. While this does not necessarily mean that
their calculations were correct, a strong case can be made from the New Testament
that both the Western calculation of the twenty-fifth of December and the
Eastern calculation of the sixth of January, fall within the span of time in
which the birth of Christ had to have occurred.
Consider the part of the calculation that dates the birth of
Christ to exactly nine months after the Annunciation. Some might quibble over whether the nine
months had to be exact to the day or not, but that the birth took place nine
months after the Annunciation, whether approximately or to the exact day, we
can take from the Gospel according to St. Luke, the sixth chapter of the second
verse which states “And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were
accomplished that she should be delivered”.
So does St. Luke tell us anything about when the
Annunciation took place?
Yes, he does. The
first chapter of his Gospel begins the account of the Annunciation by saying
“And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of
Galilee, named Nazareth, To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph,
of the House of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary.” (Lk. 1:26-27)
What is meant by “in the sixth month”?
The verses immediately preceding the account state that St.
Elizabeth, the wife of St. Zechariah, “conceived, and hid herself five months,
saying, Thus hath the Lord dealt with me in the days wherein he looked on me,
to take away my reproach among men.” (vv.24-25)
So the Annunciation took place in the sixth month of St.
Elizabeth’s pregnancy. Well, does St.
Luke tell us when St. Elizabeth conceived John the Baptist?
Again, the answer is yes.
The twenty-third verse and the first part of the twenty-fourth read:
“And it came to pass, that, as soon as the days of his ministration were
accomplished, he departed to his own house.
And after those days his wife Elisabeth conceived” which brings us back
to the start of the previous quotation.
So the conception of John the Baptist took place immediately after the
days of St. Zechariah’s ministration in which the same angel Gabriel had been
sent to him to tell him of the upcoming birth of John the Baptist.
So do we know when the time in which St. Zechariah was
ministering in the Temple actually was?
To answer this, I will first point out that there is a very
early tradition in the Church that would pinpoint the exact day on which
Gabriel came to St. Zechariah. This
tradition states that St. Zechariah was acting in the capacity of High Priest
that year and that this was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. A very early attestation to this is found in
the pseudepigraphal Protoevangelium of
James which dates to the second century and it seems to have been commonly
held by many, probably most of the Church Fathers. While the Gospel of St. Luke does not state
this explicitly, I will show a bit later that it does not actually contradict
it either, and drops a few hints in support of the idea.
Before doing so, however, I will point out the interesting
fact that even if St. Zechariah was just an ordinary priest the evidence would strongly
suggest that the day in which Gabriel appeared to him was the Day of Atonement,
or at least in the week of the Day of Atonement.
It is stated in the fifth verse that he belonged to the
course of Abijah. In I Chronicles 24,
the priests were divided into twenty-four courses or divisions. All priests were required to do priestly
service on three weeks of the year – the weeks in which Passover, Pentecost,
and Tabernacles occurred. For the rest
of the year, the priestly courses would be assigned weeks of service according
to their lot in a rota, which, after it was completed, would start again in the
same order, so that each course ended up with two weeks assigned especially to
it each year, other than the ones common to all priests. I Chronicles 24:10 tells us that Abijah
was assigned the eighth lot. It is doubtful that the priests of any other
course envied them the spot. This meant
that their first week fell after the week of Pentecost in the Jewish month of
Sivan, and their second week fell immediately before the week of Tabernacles in
the Jewish month of Tishri. Twice a
year, in other words, they had two weeks of service in a row. Yom
Kippur falls on the tenth day of Tishri – five days before the first day of
Sukkot (Tabernacles) and thus in the second week assigned to Abijah.
If the second week assigned to Abijah is the time that St.
Luke had in mind this could explain the language that hints at the Day of
Atonement even without St. Zechariah being the High Priest, and even how the
mistake of the author of the Protoevangelium
of James, if it is indeed an error, came about. Further evidence identifying the day Gabriel
spoke to St. Zechariah as the Day of Atonement, or at the very least the week
as the week of the Day of Atonement, can be found in the thirty-ninth verse of
the second chapter of St. Luke’s Gospel.
This verse follows immediately after the account of the Presentation
of Jesus in the Temple, when the period of Purification for His mother was
completed, forty days after His birth.
The verse says “And when they had performed all things according to the
law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee, to their own city of Nazareth”. This means that either a) the Holy Family
moved to Bethlehem at some point after this but before they received the Visit
from the Magi, then moved back to Nazareth after the Flight into Egypt, b) the
Magi went to Nazareth rather than Bethlehem (which would torture the meaning of
the second chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel and make the Flight into Egypt
unnecessary as Herod targeted Bethlehem and the surrounding coasts in the
Slaughter of the Innocents), or c) the Visit of the Magi, the Flight to Egypt
and the Holy Family’s return had all taken place between the Circumcision of
Christ, eight days after His birth, and His Presentation in the Temple, forty
days later.
Yes, option c) is a real possibility. You can walk to Egypt from Bethlehem in a
little under a week, and with the gifts the Magi had brought – gold,
frankincense and myrrh - it was hardly necessary that the Holy Family
walk. Option c) is the option that best
fits the texts of both St. Luke and St. Matthew. That places the death of Herod the Great in
the forty days between Jesus’ birth and His Presentation in the Temple. This rules out the first week assigned to
the course of Abijah, the week after Pentecost in Sivan, as the week of service
mentioned by St. Luke. If St. Zechariah
had been ministering in Sivan this would place the birth of Jesus around the
time of Tabernacles (the way the conception of John the Baptist, his birth, the
conception of Jesus, and His birth are spaced, Tabernacles and Passover, and
the equinoxes approximate to them, appear in connection to these events, albeit
different ones, regardless of which week of Abijah it was). There are those who prefer this version on
the grounds of the fourteenth verse of St. John’s Gospel – “and the Word was
made flesh, and dwelt among us” because this verse uses the word ἐσκήνωσεν for “dwelt”. This verb is derived from the word from
which our English word “scene” is derived, the word used in the LXX for the
Tabernacle. Liddell and Scott give the primary definition of the verb as to
“pitch tents, encamp” with the derived meanings of “live or dwell in a tent”
and more generally “settle, take up one’s abode”. This is one word, however, in a chapter which
describes Jesus the following way:
In him was life; and
the life was the light of men. And the
light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. There was a man sent from God, whose name was
John. The same came for a witness, to
bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe. He was not that Light, but was sent to bear
witness of that Light. That was the true
Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. (vv. 4-9)
If the use of ἐσκήνωσεν in John 1:14, which those who
support the theory ludicrously suggest ought to be rendered “tabernacled” in
English, is grounds for thinking the Lord was born at Sukkot, the dominant
theme of light earlier in the passage in which this verse is found would be a
counterargument that He was born in Hanukkah.
Note that the Gospel of John is the only book in the New Testament – or,
for that matter, the undisputed books of the Christian sacred canon - to
mention Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights.
At any rate, my point is that Flavius Josephus tells us that
Herod the Great died in the early part of the year before Passover, following a
lunar eclipse. If he died in the first
forty days of Jesus’ life, as the best of the options for fitting the events recorded
in the second chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel into the account in St. Luke’s
indicates, then it had to be John the Baptist who was conceived around the time
of Tabernacles and not Jesus Who was born around then, which confirms what the
Church has pretty much universally thought since the earliest centuries of
Christianity. Josephus also tells us
that after mourning his father for seven days, Herod’s son Herod Archelaus,
whom Herod had named his successor in his will shortly before his death, arrayed in white, ascended a golden throne in
Jerusalem and declared this his reign would be one of leniency and benevolence.
(Antiquities of the Jews, XVII.8.iv) The crowd then began to make demand after
demand, and eventually degenerated into a riotous mob. Archelaus then sent his troops in to crush
the rebellion, and, after about three thousand had been killed, ordered the
cancellation of Passover. (Antiquities
of the Jews, XVII.9.i-iii) The
Gospel according to St. Matthew tells us that after Joseph had received the
message from the angel of the Lord in a dream telling him it was safe to return
from Egypt he did so but hearing that Archelaus had succeeded his father, he
took Mary and Jesus to Nazareth in Galilee (2:19-23). If Joseph brought Mary and Jesus to the
Temple to fulfil the requirements of the Law immediately upon returning from
Egypt, then, hearing of Achelaus’ succession took them back to Nazareth before
the slaughter of the three thousand and the cancellation of Passover, this
would accommodate the narratives of both Evangelists.
Therefore, the narratives of Christ’s birth and infancy in
both SS Luke and Matthew, taken together, make a powerful case that St.
Zechariah had to have been ministering in the Temple, on or about the Day of
Atonement, when Gabriel appeared to him.
This is true regardless of whether he was an ordinary priest, doing the
ordinary priestly duties of his course for that week, or whether he was the
High Priest on the Day of Atonement.
The fact that the first chapter of St. Luke’s Gospel does
not state the latter explicitly does not rule it out either. St. Luke does not assert anything about St.
Zechariah in this chapter that could not be taken as the account of an ordinary
priest, serving at the altar of incense at one of the ordinary sacrifices that
took place twice a day, during his course’s week of duty. Nor does he assert anything that would rule
out the interpretation that he was serving as High Priest on the Day of
Atonement. Interestingly
enough, both Josephus (Antiquities of the
Jews, XVII.17.iv) and the Babylonian Talmud
in numerous places, tell us that on one occasion around this time the first
Matthias ben Theophilos to serve as High Priest (the second served just before
the destruction of the Temple and was possibly the Theophilos to whom St. Luke
was writing) became ritually unclean the day before Yom Kippur and so a
substitute, Joseph ben Elem, was chosen to fulfil his duties in his place, and
then excused from all subsequent priestly duty, even the common ones. It is not entirely out of the range of
possibility that this Joseph ben Elem was the same person as St.
Zechariah. St. Luke does not mention
St. Zechariah’s father’s name, there were plenty of individuals who went by
more than one name, and the only other extent information about this Joseph ben
Elem was that he was related to Matthias ben Theophilos and lived in Sepphoris. The latter would be an argument against the
identification of the two – Sepphoris is in lower Galilee, about 85 miles away
from Hebron, where SS Zechariah and Elizabeth lived. This detail is not found in the oldest
account of the incident, however, that of Josephus. A bigger obstacle to the identification is
the fact that Josephus indicates that the incident occurred on the Day of
Atonement immediately prior to Herod’s death, which is a year too late. However, the fact that something happened
once suggests that it could have happened more than once, and, given how easy
it was to become ritually unclean – in Matthias ben Theophilos’ case it was by
dreaming about his wife – it is likely that this sort of thing happened more
than once. The year prior to the
incident recorded by Josephus, Simon ben Boethus, one of Herod the Great’s
fathers-in-law, was High Priest. If
something similar happened to him, and St. Zechariah was chosen to fulfil his
duties out of the common priests whose course was on duty that week, the Babylonian Talmud (Yoma
12b) indicates that the same thing would have happened to him, he would
have been dismissed from all priestly duty, high and common, immediately after
Simon was ritually cleansed. If this is
what happened, this would bring the day of John the Baptist’s conception even
closer to the Day of Atonement.
If this is what happened, the absence of any explicit
mention of it in St. Luke’s Gospel is harder to explain than the same absence
in Josephus and the Babylonian Talmud. It is only to be expected that the rabbis who
compiled the latter and were blatantly hostile to Jesus Christ and all things
Christian would not want to bring up such an incident involving the father of
John the Baptist and cousin-in-law of Mary, and irregularities in the affairs
of the Temple were not Josephus’ primary concern, although it is strange that
he would only mention the second of two such incidents if they occurred two
years in a row, unless, of course, his own sources of information were
incomplete.
Why, if it happened something like this, would St. Luke not
mention it?
St. Luke does drop hints at the Day of Atonement in the
chapter. Again, his narrative is worded
in such a way that everything mentioned could be accounted for by ordinary
priestly service. However, the way he
describes how “the whole multitude of the people were praying without at the
time of incense” (v. 9) could point to the Day of Atonement. The word rendered “whole multitude” is πλῆθος
from which we get our “plethora” which indicates a very large number and can
mean “the entirety”. It is modified by
the phrase τοῦ λαοῦ (“of the people”) which could just mean the laypeople
as opposed to the priests (our words “lay” and “laity” come from this word),
but could also mean “the people” in the sense of the nation, and if this latter
meaning is intended and the meaning of “the entirety” is intended by πλῆθος
then the image of the Day of Atonement is what is conjured up here. Further support for this interpretation is
found in the references to how when St. Zechariah “saw him, he was troubled and
fear fell upon him” (v. 9), the angel’s assuaging his fears (v. 10), and the
reference to the people waiting for him to come out and marveling at how long
he was taking (v. 21), all of which could suggest that the “time of incense”
indicated was not just the ordinary burning of incense, but the censing of the
Ark in the Holy of Holies. Only the
High Priest could enter there and only on this one day. If, upon returning the censer to the altar
of incense from the Holy of Holies (Lev. 16:12-13) he found someone standing by
the altar when nobody else was supposed to be inside at all (Lev. 16:17), this
would very much produce the described reaction, while the people would have
been wondering if the delay meant he had been struck dead inside and whether
they would have to pull him out by the cord attached for precisely that
purposed.
While the question remains as to why St. Luke would have
made allusion to it in this way without outright stating it, the answer might
very well be that it was a style of narration that he picked up from the
example of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Consider two parables that he records Jesus telling, one of
which is entirely distinct to his Gospel, the other of which is similar to one
that St. Matthew records Jesus’ having told on a different occasion. The latter is the parable of the pounds in
the nineteenth chapter (vv. 12-27). It
was told by Jesus following His encounter with the tax collector Zacchaeus at
Jericho. It is similar to the parable
of the talents that He told as part of the Olivet Discourse (Matt.
25:14-30). The amounts and kind of
money is different. There is one other
big difference. That is that in the
parable of the pounds (minas), Jesus gives a lengthy explanation of the
nobleman’s journey. The details are
taken from the life of Herod Archelaus.
In fact, they are the events from his life that immediately follow the
ones related above. After wreaking vengeance
on the rebelling Jews in Jerusalem, Archelaus sailed to Rome to have Caesar
confirm his succession to his father’s kingdom, but was followed by his own
opponents, including his brother Herod Antipas who contested the will, an entourage of pretended supporters led by
his aunt Salome, the sister of Herod the Great, and one of the greatest female
schemers of all time (1) who actually went to support Antipas and condemn
Archelaus, and a later delegation of Jews from Jerusalem who pleaded with
Caesar not to confirm the appointment because of the aforementioned
atrocities. This was to no avail –
Augustus confirmed the succession and named Archelaus Ethnarch of Judea,
Samaria and Idumea. Josephus tells the whole story in Antiquities of the Jews, XVII.9.iii-vii;11.i-v) Jesus’ allusion to all of this might seem
strange, considering that Archelaus was a despised figure, and the nobleman in
the parable obviously represents Himself, but the parable was a prophecy of the
judgement that would soon be coming upon those who rejected His rule (v. 27).
The other parable is the parable of Dives (Latin for “rich
man”, not a proper name) and Lazarus found at the end of the sixteenth chapter
(vv. 19-31). The entire parable is an
ironic counter-factual allusion to the events recorded by St. John in the
eleventh chapter of his Gospel. The
rich man, while not named, is clearly identified as Caiaphas from the
description of him as wearing the high priestly robes (v. 19) and his telling
Abraham that he had a father and five brothers and home (vv. 27-28), which is a
reference to Caiaphas’ father-in-law Annas, and Annas’ five sons each of whom
served at one point or another as high priest.
One of those sons was Theophilos, the father of Matthias ben Theophilos
II, both of whom are among the possible candidates for being the Theophilos to
whom St. Luke was writing. The entire
point of the parable is found in its final verse in which Abraham tells Dives,
the parabolic caricature of Caiaphas in response to his request that Lazarus be
sent to his father and brothers “If they hear not Moses and the prophets,
neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead”. In the actual events, of course, Lazarus was
raised from the dead, and it was in response to this and the publication of the
fact, that Caiaphas launched the conspiracy to kill Christ (Jn. 11:47-53). In the parable Jesus was also taking aim at
the doctrines of the sect/party of the Sadducees to which Caiaphas and all of
his aforementioned relatives – including the ones to whom St. Luke might have
been writing – belonged. The Sadducees
did not believe in resurrection, even the resurrection at the end of time
prophesied in the Old Testament. This
was because they did not have “Moses
and the prophets”. They recognized only
Moses (the books of Moses, the Torah or Pentateuch) as sacred Scripture.
Since St. Luke records Jesus making such cryptic but extensive
allusions to figures and events that His audience would have been familiar with
in order to say something without saying it directly, a characteristic that
appears to be distinctive of the parables which he alone of the Evangelists
recorded it is not improbable that he would have attempted to follow His Lord’s
example in his own writing style. Later
in St. Luke’s Gospel, his account of the Last Supper (22:14-20) mentions two
cups of wine. Jesus is described as
blessing both of them, but drinking of neither Himself, with the explanation
given with the first cup mentioned that He would not drink of the fruit of the
vine with them again until the Kingdom of God.
This alludes to the four cups of
a traditional Passover Seder. The cup
over which the Eucharist is instituted, the second mentioned in St. Luke’s
text, is undoubtedly the third of these, the Cup of Redemption. This makes it likely that the first
mentioned in the text was the second up, the Cup of Deliverance, with the
implication that Jesus had already drunk with His disciples from the Cup of
Sanctification. (2) It can also be
inferred from this that the fourth Cup – the Cup of Praise – was omitted
altogether that night or rather deferred until after the Resurrection when the
Eucharist both took its place and fulfilled the promise that He would eat and
drink with them again in the kingdom (the Sacrifices of the Old Covenant suggest
the idea of God sharing a meal with His people – this becomes explicit in the
Sacrament that takes their place in the New Covenant). If this is not quite the same thing,
consider the numerous allusions to the best known stories of classical
Greco-Roman literature that St. Luke employs in narrating the Acts of the
Apostles, in the sequel to his Gospel. (3) That this is so characteristic of his style
helps explain why the language suggestive of the Day of Atonement in his
account of St. Zechariah’s service in the Temple, written in such a way that he
could merely be describing an ordinary priest doing common service, might have
been hinting to Theophilos that St. Zechariah was serving as High Priest that
day, even if only for that day for reasons similar to that for which Joseph ben
Elum was known to have so served.
Either way, however, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests
that it was at least the week of Yom Kippur in which this encounter took
place. The Day of Atonement falls from
late September to early October, near the fall equinox. John the Baptist was conceived shortly
thereafter. This places the
Annunciation in March-April, near both the spring equinox and the time of
Passover. It places the birth of Jesus in
December-January. When the early
Christians attempted to narrow it further, some to the sixth of January, others
to the twenty-fifth of December which latter won out, (4) they might have been wrong in their
calculations, but they would not have been far off either way.
So when a hyper-Protestant comes up to you and says in true
Pharisaic spirit “I thank God, that I am not like you pagans, celebrating an
idolatrous sun holiday and thinking you are keeping the birthday of Jesus” pay
him no heed.
Have a very Merry Christmas.
(1) This
Salome should not be confused with the other Herodean Salomes. Herod the Great had a daughter by that name
as well. The best known Herodean Salome
was the daughter of Herod Philip and Herodias who, after her mother re-married
Herod Antipas (Herod Philip’s brother), danced for her step-father and asked
for the head of John the Baptist. None
of the Gospels name her, but we know her name from Josephus. Although it is not uncommon for family
dynasty’s to reuse names the Herodeans made things especially confusing. Salome – the one mentioned in the text of
the essay, the notorious intriguer who was the sister of Herod the Great had a
daughter named Berenice, who is frequently confused with the Berenice who was
the daughter of Herod Agrippa I, who appears with her brother Herod Agrippa II
in the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth chapters of the Book of Acts in which they
hear St. Paul plead his case at Caesarea, and whose doomed love affair with
Titus of Rome is the subject of countless plays, novels, and operas.
(2) Later
that evening, in His prayer at the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus refers to the
suffering of His Passion as a “cup”. (Lk. 22:42) As His disciples had just drunk of the literal
cups at the Passover, He would drink from this cup alone. Earlier He had referred to the same
sufferings as both a “baptism” and a “cup” in His response to the sons of
Zebedee’s request that they sit at His right and left hand in the kingdom (Mk.
10:35-40). On another occasion (Lk.
12:50) He referred to those sufferings as just a “baptism”. It is through His partaking of this “baptism”
and “cup” that He obtained for us the grace of the New Covenant of which
baptism and the Lord’s Supper are the outward marks.
(3) I
will give only a few examples. St. Luke alludes to Homer’s Iliad in his narration of the lives of
both SS Peter and Paul. St. Peter’s escape from prison in the twelfth
chapter of Acts calls to mind King Priam’s escape from the Greek camp after
pleading with Achilles for the body of Hector in the twenty-fourth book of the Iliad.
St. Paul’s farewell address to
the elders of the Church of Ephesus in the twentieth chapter of Acts calls to
mind Hector’s words to Andromache in the sixth book of the same. Note that the parallels drawn are between the
Apostles and the Trojans. Priam was
king of Troy and Hector, his son, was its war leader. The Trojans were believed to be the
ancestors of the Romans – less than a century before St. Luke wrote, Virgil
told the story of how Aeneas, a survivor of Troy, travelled to Latium in Italy,
having a disastrous relationship with Dido of Carthage along the way
foreshadowing the Punic wars, and in Italy fathered the line from which Romulus
would come. Of all the heroes depicted in Homer’s Iliad, the most well-known and loved
epic poem of the ancient world, Priam and Hector would have been the ones the
Romans would have admired the most.
That St. Luke uses language evocative of them to tell the stories of SS
Peter and Paul makes sense when we consider that the latter’s arrival in Rome
brings the book of Acts to its conclusion and that the former we know from the
universal testimony of the ancient Church to have arrived there at about the
same time and to have ministered with St. Paul there before both were martyred
there. Another example is the allusion
to the story of Philemon and Baucis in the eighth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the fourteenth chapter
of Acts. In this example, the people of
Lystra mistake SS Barnabas and Paul as Jupiter and Mercury in reference to Ovid’s
story in which the said Olympians had visited the title characters, an elderly
couple in Phrygia under the guise of poor human travelers. In Ovid’s story the couple are the only ones
who offer the deities hospitality and are rewarded while their countrymen are
punished. In Acts, it is rather the
opposite of this that occurs – the Apostles heal a crippled man and the entire
community tries to worship them as gods.
Many other examples of this sort of thing could be given. Acts abounds in them.
(4) Some
Christians continue to celebrate Christmas on the sixth/seventh of
January. Of these, the Armenian Church
celebrate it on the sixth of January qua
the sixth of January because they accept the rival set of calculations from the
early Church. Others celebrate Christmas
around then as the twenty-fifth of December on the Julian Calendar which was for
a long time twelve days off of the Gregorian Calendar and is currently thirteen
days off, moving towards a fourteen day difference in about seventy years. That the change in calendars would put the
twenty-fifth of December of the old calendar onto the rival date for Christmas
on the new calendar can only be described in Nabokov’s words as “one of those
dazzling coincidences that logicians loathe and poets love”. There are also some who celebrate Christmas
on the Julian sixth of January which is currently the nineteenth of
January. The Western tradition, in
which the sixth of January is the Feast of Epiphany and the twelve days prior
to it from the twenty-fifth of December are the Twelve Days of Christmas accommodates
both of the early Church dates.
