mls@dasys1.UUCP (Michael Siemon) (09/15/89)
John Kolassa writes: + In article <Sep.1.02.50.29.1989.18399@athos.rutgers.edu> rock@sun.com + (Bill Petro) writes: + >Agreement on the date of December 25 (in the West at least) + >did not occur until the early 5th century. The Eastern church's + >celebration is on January 6. + Actually, both dates have the same root. December 25 on the Julian calendar + is close to January 6 in the Gregorian calendar. Most Eastern Christians + now use the Gregorian calendar and have been using it since the 1920's; + ... + I think the above is correct; however, the number of days by which the + Julian and Gregorian calendars disagree should be increasing. Does anyone + know why the Jan 6 date is fixed, or know that my explanation is wrong? Sorry to be a wet blanket, but the Julian/Gregorian calendar split (in 1582) has nothing to do with the case -- before then, BOTH East and West used the Julian calendar, and the (Eastern traditional) feast of the Epiphany was on January 6 whereas the (Western traditional) feast of the Incarnation was on December 25 -- in the same calendar. For over a thousand years. Both go back to very early times. The feast on January 6th is first noted (according to the New Catholic Encyclopedia) by Clement of Alexandria around 215 A.D.; it was then, and has remained in the Eastern Church, primarily a celebration of the baptism of Jesus. His first (public) "manifestation" as (the son of) God, which is what "epiphany" means. I don't know how early the Western celebration is (I can look it up if anyone wants to pursue the subject) but it has from its beginning been a feast of the Incarnation. The Western Church took cognizance of the Eastern celebration and conflated the baptism with the visitation of the magi. I do not know if the Orthodox churches have ever recognized the Western Incarnation feast. P.S. an astronomical note on the "star" -- during the course of the year, one *first* sees a given star when it rises just before the sun (this is its "heliacal" rising; in the case of Sirius, that was the phenomenon determining the start of the Egyptian year.) As the days go by, the star rises earlier and earlier into the night -- 4 minutes per day, in fact. So that a week after one first sees Sirius before sunrise, it appears half an hour before dawn -- and so on through the year. But what this also means is that, at any given time of night, the star in question will be FURTHER WEST in the sky than it was before. No one knows for sure what the "star" of Matthew was; but there were some interesting planetary conjugations in the years from 6 to 4 B.C. (the last two years of Herod's reign.) If you are determined to see the Christmas star as "leading" the magi from the east towards Jerusalem, you CAN fit that into the astronomical phenomena of the period. (Major planetariums feel obligated to "illustrate" all this during their Christmas seasons; I am just repeating lectures I gave at Adler in Chicago some 25 years ago!) -- Michael L. Siemon This has been a century of semantic ...!cucard!dasys1!mls and semiotic nostrums; the century of hermeneutical last-ditch stands. -- Wayne C. Booth, _Rhetoric of Irony_