The magi followed the star and found Baby Jesus. What are we to make of this mysterious event, and does it mean astrology is okay?
On January 6 the Church celebrates the feast of “Epiphany.”
This feast commemorates the mysterious visit of the magi to the Baby Jesus.
Who were the magi? What led them to visit Jesus? And what lessons should we–and shouldn’t we!–learn from this incident?
Here are nine things you should know . . .
1. What does the word “Epiphany” mean?
“Epiphany” means “manifestation.”
It comes from Greek roots that mean “to show, to display” (phainein) and “on, to” (epi-).
An epiphany is thus a time when something is shown, displayed, or manifested to an audience.
2. What is the feast of the Epiphany about?
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
The Epiphany is the manifestation of Jesus as Messiah of Israel, Son of God and Saviour of the world. the great feast of Epiphany celebrates the adoration of Jesus by the wise men (magi) from the East, together with his baptism in the Jordan and the wedding feast at Cana in Galilee.
In the magi, representatives of the neighbouring pagan religions, the Gospel sees the first-fruits of the nations, who welcome the good news of salvation through the Incarnation.
The magi’s coming to Jerusalem in order to pay homage to the king of the Jews shows that they seek in Israel, in the messianic light of the star of David, the one who will be king of the nations.
Their coming means that pagans can discover Jesus and worship him as Son of God and Saviour of the world only by turning towards the Jews and receiving from them the messianic promise as contained in the Old Testament.
The Epiphany shows that “the full number of the nations” now takes its “place in the family of the patriarchs”, and acquires Israelitica dignitas (is made “worthy of the heritage of Israel”) [CCC 528].
Here is how the book of Genesis describes the birth and early life of Jacob and his twin brother, Esau:
Genesis 25
[22] The children struggled together within [Rebekah]; and she said, “If it is thus, why do I live?” So she went to inquire of the LORD.
[23] And the LORD said to her, “Two nations are in your womb,
and two peoples, born of you, shall be divided;
the one shall be stronger than the other,
the elder shall serve the younger.”
[27] When the boys grew up, Esau was a skillful hunter, a man of the field, while Jacob was a quiet man, dwelling in tents.
[28] Isaac loved Esau, because he ate of his game; but Rebekah loved Jacob.
The Prophecy
Note the prophecy about the two children: “the elder [Esau] shall serve the younger [Jacob].”
This will ultimately be fulfilled by God using the line of Jacob to give rise to the people of Israel (in fact, “Israel” is an alternate name that Jacob will later acquire), but how will this take place?
At the moment, there seem to be two obstacles:
First, as the older child, Esau has the birthright.
Second, as Isaac favors Esau, he is likely to give him his dying, prophetic blessing.
The first obstacles is overcome when a famished Esau foolishly sells his birthright to Jacob (Gen 25:29-34).
1 January, the octave day of the Nativity of the Lord, is the Solemnity of Mary, the holy Mother of God, and also the commemoration of the conferral of the Most Holy Name of Jesus [Norms, 35f].
2. Didn’t this day used to signify something else?
Yes. Pope Benedict explains:
It was Pope Paul VI who moved to 1 January the Feast of the Divine Motherhood of Mary, which was formerly celebrated on 11 October.
Indeed, even before the liturgical reform that followed the Second Vatican Council, the memorial of the circumcision of Jesus on the eighth day after his birth — as a sign of submission to the law, his official insertion in the Chosen People — used to be celebrated on the first day of the year and the Feast of the Name of Jesus was celebrated the following Sunday [Homily, Jan. 1, 2008].
3. Why would the commemoration of Jesus’ Most Holy Name be moved to January 1?
Mary and Joseph knew the agony of having a missing child. What are we to make of this mysterious incident, and what does it tell us about Jesus' future?
This Sunday we celebrate the mystery of the Holy Family.
What was it like for Jesus, Mary, and Joseph to live together?
Each is a very remarkable person! Put all three together and . . . wow.
Today we have reality shows about interesting and extraordinary families, but they didn’t have reality shows back then.
Fortunately, we are given a glimpse into the domestic life of the Holy Family.
And it’s a glimpse provided by the Virgin Mary herself . . .
Missing Child!
This episode in the life of the Holy Family begins on a holiday: specifically, the feast of Passover.
Luke records that the Holy Family went up to Jerusalem each year for the feast of Passover, apparently in a company of “their kinsfolk and acquaintances,” and when Jesus was twelve, he stayed behind in Jerusalem.
Joseph and Mary did not realize this until they had already gone “a day’s journey” back to Nazareth, at which point they realized he was not with the company.
They thus began to experience the agony and anxiety of parents who discover their child is missing.
And note the foreshadowing: Was there ever another time in Jesus life, at Passover, in Jerusalem, when Mary would be deprived of Jesus?
“On the Third Day”
Joseph and Mary thus return to Jerusalem and “after three days” find him.
The three days, in this case, are apparently:
the first day spent journeying from Jerusalem,
a second day spend journeying back to Jerusalem,
and the third day (or part of a third day) searching for him in Jerusalem.
Again, note the foreshadowing: The three days echo the three days (or, more precisely, parts of three days) that Jesus spent in the tomb, during which Mary and the disciples were deprived of Jesus’ presence but then found him again “on the third day” (cf. Lk. 9:22).
Matthew records that Herod the Great slaughtered the holy innocents in his efforts to kill Jesus. Did this even actually happen?
On December 28, the Church commemorates the slaughter of the holy innocents.
These are the baby boys in Bethlehem that Herod the Great had slaughtered in an attempt to kill the Baby Jesus.
But many people today challenge the idea that this ever took place.
“We have no record of it!” they say.
Actually, we do . . .
Who Was Herod the Great?
Herod the Great was the king of Judea at the time Jesus was born.
He had the title “king,” but he was not an independent ruler. Instead, he was a client king of the Roman empire who had been named “King of the Jews” by the Roman Senate.
This meant that he was a local ruler who ultimately answered to Rome and who owed his throne to the Roman Senate.
Religiously, Herod was a Jew, but ethnically, he was descended from a neighboring people, the Idumeans. They had been forcibly converted to Judaism in the time of the Maccabees (Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 13:9:1).
As a ruler, he built a lot of things–fortresses, aqueducts, theaters, etc. Undertaking major public works projects was one of the ways that rulers in the ancient world built a legacy for themselves.
His most famous building projects was the Temple in Jerusalem, which he began dramatically expanding.
Many parishes will have the "Christmas Proclamation" before Midnight Mass. What is this proclamation and how can we understand what it says about when Jesus was born?
If you attended Mass on Christmas Eve, you may have heard the “Christmas proclamation.”
This is a beautiful, poetic announcement of the birth of Christ.
It says when Jesus was born, dating it from nine different events.
But the ways that they dated events in the ancient world are different than the ones we use today.
Here’s how you can understand the Christmas proclamation when you hear it read . . .
About the Christmas Proclamation
Scott Richert notes:
This Proclamation of the Birth of Christ comes from the Roman Martyrology, the official listing of the saints celebrated by the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church. Traditionally, it has been read on Christmas Eve, before the celebration of Midnight Mass. It situates the Nativity of Christ within the context of salvation history, making reference not only to biblical events but also to the Greek and Roman worlds. The coming of Christ at Christmas, then, is seen as the summit of both sacred and secular history.
In the 1980’s, Pope John Paul II restored the Proclamation of the Birth of Christ to the papal celebration of Midnight Mass. (It had been removed during the reform of the liturgy.) Many parishes have followed the Holy Father’s lead [SOURCE].
The rubrics for the Christmas proclamation state:
The announcement of the Solemnity of the Nativity of the Lord from the Roman Martyrology draws upon Sacred Scripture to declare in a formal way the birth of Christ. It begins with creation and relates the birth of the Lord to the major events and personages of sacred and secular history. The particular events contained in the announcement help pastorally to situate the birth of Jesus in the context of salvation history.
This text, The Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ, may be chanted or recited, most appropriately on December 24, during the celebration of the Liturgy of the Hours. It may also be chanted or recited before the beginning of Christmas Mass during the Night. It may not replace any part of the Mass.
The Proclamation Begins
The proclamation begins by solemnly announcing the day on which the birth of Christ is traditionally celebrated:
The Twenty-fifth Day of December
It then tells us in which year this occurred, dating it in nine different ways. . . .
1. From the Creation of the World
The proclamation first dates the birth of Christ relative to the creation of the world:
when ages beyond number had run their course
from the creation of the world,
when God in the beginning created heaven and earth,
and formed man in his own likeness;
This offers a non-specific date. It is merely after “ages beyond number.”
The traditional version of the proclamation is much more specific: It says “In the five thousand one hundred and ninety-ninth year of the creation of the world.”
This follows an ancient system of reckoning that differs from the Ussher chronology (developed by the Anglican archbishop, James Ussher, 1581-1656), which held that the world began in 4004 B.C.
The currently approved English translation, however, avoids mentioning any specific number of years.
This is the actual Grotto of the Nativity under the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Why is there so much confusion today about Christmas and what it means?
There’s a lot of confusion about Christmas.
Is it a day? Is it a season? Is it based on a pagan holiday? What is its real meaning?
Here are 9 things you should know about Christmas . . .
1. What is “the real meaning of Christmas”?
Although many voices in pop culture suggest that the true meaning of Christmas is being kind to each other, or being with our families, or something like that, the real meaning of the day–and the season it begins–is the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains:
525 Jesus was born in a humble stable, into a poor family. Simple shepherds were the first witnesses to this event. In this poverty heaven’s glory was made manifest. The Church never tires of singing the glory of this night:
The Virgin today brings into the world the Eternal
and the earth offers a cave to the Inaccessible.
The angels and shepherds praise him
and the magi advance with the star,
For you are born for us,
Little Child, God eternal!
2. Christmas is not based on a pagan holiday.
No matter how many times you hear Sheldon Cooper (or anyone else) say Christmas is based on a pagan holiday (whether Saturnalia, Sol Invictus, or anything else), we simply have no evidence of this.
If you read the writings of the Church Fathers, you do not find those who assign Christmas to December 25th saying things like, “Let’s put Jesus’ birthday here so we can subvert a pagan holiday.” (Not that subverting pagan holidays is a bad thing.)
They simply don’t do that. The ones who say Jesus was born on December 25th do so because that is when they think he was born.
In his book, The Spirit of the Liturgy, Pope Benedict comments:
Does the Mayan calendar prove that something momentous will happen in December 2012?
Well, the Mayan apocalypse is almost here. We’re right up to 12/21/12, the day that New Agers across the planet have been waiting for.
Perhaps you know someone who is into the “2012 phenomenon”–or perhaps you’re curious what all the hubbub is about.
Here’s a story that will put things in perspective. . . .
The End Is Here?
On December 21, 2012, something momentous is going to happen.
The Mayan calendar says so.
Everybody knows it.
They’ve been talking about it on the late-night airwaves and on the Internet and in books for years.
But what’s going to happen?
Good question. . . .
You Can’t Hide Your Mayan Lies
The answer seems to depend on whom you ask.
According to some “experts” on the “2012 Phenomenon,” it will be a really good thing, the dawning of a new age in human consciousness and the next step in human evolution. Some say the planet Earth will cross the plane of the galaxy or align with the galactic core and new energies will be unleashed, transforming human consciousness. Also, aliens may show up and invite us to join a galactic brotherhood.
According to other 2012 “experts,” what will happen will be a really bad thing, such as the planet Earth colliding with a black hole and bringing about the end of the world. Or maybe it will be a comet we collide with. Or an asteroid. Or the lost planet Nibiru. Or, even without a collision, Earth’s poles will shift. Or there will be a devastating war. Any way you go, things will be bad.
Other “experts” think that it may be a mixture of good and bad, or that it has the potential to be one or the two, depending on how we respond.
Still others aren’t predicting exactly what will happen, just that it will be big. Really big. They’re sure.
So what’s at the root of all these claims? Who were the Maya? What is their calendar? And what’s the truth about all this?
Let’s take a look . . . because the truth is out there.
Originally, before he was elected pope, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wanted to retire and write a book about his own personal views on Jesus Christ, as he is presented in the gospels. He read many books like this when he was younger, and now he wanted to write his own to help people grow closer to Jesus.
He had even begun working on it in the summer holidays he had in 2003 and 2004, before John Paul II passed on in 2005.
But then he was elected pope and all his free time vanished. He still cared enough about the project, though, to make time for it.
Because he was elected pope at an elderly age, he wasn’t sure how long he would live and if he would have the time and energy to complete the project, so instead of writing one book covering all of the gospels, he wrote three, covering different parts.
Volume 1 of the series covered the first part of Jesus’ earthly ministry. Volume 2 covered Jesus’ passion and resurrection. And now in Volume 3 he is going back to finish the series by covering the “infancy narratives.”
2. What are the “infancy narratives”?
The infancy narratives are the parts of the gospels that deal with Jesus’ life before his adult ministry–that is, the parts when he was an “infant.”
That’s an approximate term, though, because they actually cover the period before he was born (in fact, before he was even conceived) and also an incident later in his childhood, when he was about twelve years old.
Only two of the four gospels–Matthew and Luke–cover this period, and they each devote the first two chapters of their gospels to it.
Properly speaking, the infancy narratives are Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2.
3. Does Pope Benedict think that these parts of the gospels are historical?
Early Christian writers speak of a mysterious, 1st century figure called “John the Presbyter.” Who was he, and why is he significant?
Recently we looked at the claim that Mark derived the information in his Gospel from St. Peter.
This claim dates to a first century source: a figure called “John the Presbyter,” who was a disciple of Jesus.
According to some in the early Church–and according to Pope Benedict–we may have already met this mysterious figure in a surprising way.
Here’s the story . . .
A John By Any Other Name
As we saw previously (CLICK HERE TO READ PART 1), John the Presbyter was a figure apparently distinct from John the Apostle.
He also goes by different names in English, since the Greek word for “presbyter”–presbuteros–can be translated “elder.”
Thus sometimes we read of him as “John the Elder” or “the Presbyter John” or “the Elder John.” It’s all the same in Greek.
He has often been conflated with John the Apostle, for several reasons.
One is that they were both, apparently, disciples of Jesus, though the presbyter was not an apostle.
Another is that, in later years, they both apparently lived at Ephesus.
But they may be related in another way . . .
John the Presbyter and Scripture
There is some reason to think that John the Presbyter–like St. Mark–may have been one of those companions of the apostles who ended up playing a role in writing the New Testament.
You’ll note that 2 John and 3 John are both addressed as being from “the Presbyter”/”the Elder”:
2 John 1: ” The elder to the elect lady and her children, whom I love in the truth . . . “
3 John 1: “The elder to the beloved Gaius, whom I love in the truth.”
Thus St. Jerome reports:
He [John the Apostle] wrote also one Epistle which begins as follows That which was from the beginning, that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes and our hands handled concerning the word of life [i.e., 1 John] which is esteemed of by all men who are interested in the church or in learning.
The other two of which the first is The elder to the elect lady and her children [i.e., 2 John] and the other The elder unto Gaius the beloved whom I love in truth, [i.e., 3 John] are said to be the work of John the presbyter to the memory of whom another sepulchre is shown at Ephesus to the present day, though some think that there are two memorials of this same John the evangelist [Lives of Illustrious Men 9].
Commening on the list of people Papias did research on, St. Jerome remarks:
It appears through this catalogue of names that the John who is placed among the disciples is not the same as the elder John whom he places after Aristion in his enumeration. This we say moreover because of the opinion mentioned above, where we record that it is declared by many that the last two epistles of John are the work not of the apostle but of the presbyter [ibid. 18]
Pope Benedict Weighs In
Over the centuries, the distinction between John the Apostle and John the Presbyter was obscured, but it has received new attention in recent years.
In Jesus of Nazareth, vol. 1, Pope Benedict writes:
This information is very remarkable indeed: When combined with related pieces of evidence, it suggests that in Ephesus there was something like a Johannine school, which traced its origins to Jesus’ favorite disciple himself, but in which a certain “Presbyter John” presided as the ultimate authority.
This “presbyter” John appears as the sender and author of the Second and Third Letters of John (in each case in the first verse of the first chapter) simply under the title “the presbyter” (without reference to the name John).
He is evidently not the same as the Apostle, which means that here in the canonical text we encounter expressly the mysterious figure of the presbyter.
He must have been closely connected with the Apostle; perhaps he had even been acquainted with Jesus himself.
After the death of the Apostle, he was identified wholly as the bearer of the latter’s heritage, and in the collective memory, the two figures were increasingly fused.
At any rate, there seem to be grounds for ascribing to “Presbyter John” an essential role in the definitive shaping of the Gospel [of John], though he must always have regarded himself as the trustee of the tradition he had received from the son of Zebedee.
I entirely concur with the conclusion that Peter Stuhlmacher has drawn from the above data. He holds “that the contents of the Gospel go back to the disciple whom Jesus (especially) loved. The presbyter understood himself as his transmitter and mouthpiece” (Biblische Theologie, II, p. 206). In a similar vein Stuhlmacher cites E. Ruckstuhl and P. Dschullnigg to the effect that “the author of the Gospel of John is, as it were, the literary executor of the favorite disciple” (ibid., p. 207) [Jesus of Nazareth, vol. 1, pp. 226-227].
Pope Benedict thus sees John the Presbyter as the author of 2 and 3 John and as having helped with the writing of the Gospel of John, based on the memories of John the Apostle.
Not an Act of the Magisterium
As Pope Benedict famously said in the preface to Jesus of Nazareth, vol. 1, the work is not an act of the Magisterium, and “everyone is free, then, to contradict me.”
One might thus hold that John the Presbyter had no hand in writing the New Testament.
Or one might hold that the early Church writers are confused and that John the Presbyter is identical with John the Apostle.
New Testament Author Describes History of New Testament?
But what we have read raises the intriguing possibility that we have more than just a first century tradition regarding how Mark’s Gospel was written.
We may, in fact, have a case of another New Testament author telling us about the origin of Mark’s Gospel.
That wouldn’t be the case if John the Presbyter had no hand in writing the New Testament. In that case, he would be merely a first century voice telling us about the origin of Mark’s Gospel (which is exciting enough).
But it would be the case if Pope Benedict (and St. Jerome, and others) is correct that John the Presbyter is a distinct figure who had a hand in writing the New Testament.
And it also would be the case if John the Presbyter is identical with John the Apostle.
Either way, we would have the origin of St. Mark’s Gospel revealed by one of the other authors of the New Testament.
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of the series covered the first part of Jesus’ earthly ministry. 
covered Jesus’ passion and resurrection. And now in 