Apologetics – Page 3

Mass Stipends and Simony

If you look at the bulletin for a typical Catholic parish, you’re likely to see a schedule of upcoming Masses along with notes for “Mass intentions” like “for the holy souls in purgatory,” “pro populo,” “the Brown family,” “John and Jane Smith,” etc.

Some of these are straightforward. If the Mass intention is for the holy souls in purgatory, that means that the priest will intend to apply the spiritual benefits of the Mass in a special way to these souls.

Similarly, in Latin, pro populo means “for the people,” and so that Mass will be intended to benefit the people—meaning the people of the parish.

But what about Mass intentions for “the Brown family” or “John and Jane Smith”? Obviously, the Masses are intended for the benefit of the named individuals, but why do they rank? Why do they get Masses celebrated for their benefit?

The answer is that they asked. At some point, they spoke to the priest (or called the parish office), said that they’d like to have a Mass celebrated for their intentions, and got put on the schedule.

You can do the same thing!

But there’s something else that they likely did, which was to offer what’s known as a Mass offering or “stipend.” This is a sum of money that is given to the priest who celebrates the Mass.

At this point, your spider sense make go off. You may be wondering, “Money? For a Mass? Is this some clever device to extract money from the faithful? Is it a form of clerical abuse of the laity? And since the Mass is a sacred thing, is this the sin of simony?”

As we’ll see, the answer to these questions is no—at least, not unless a priest is breaking the law.

The Gospels record Jesus making statements that exist in tension with each other. For example, as Jesus is sending out the Twelve on a preaching mission, he tells them not to take a bunch of supplies with them, because “the laborer deserves his food” (Matt. 10:10). Luke’s parallel passage has “the laborer deserves his wages” (Luke 10:7).

Passages like this indicate that ministers of the Gospel have a right to earn their living from their ministry—a theme stressed in other passages in the New Testament (e.g., 1 Cor. 9:4-14; 1 Tim. 5:18), and St. Paul summarizes Jesus’ teaching by stating, “the Lord commanded that those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel” (1 Cor. 9:14).

On the other hand, just two verses before Jesus told the Twelve that the worker deserves his food, he told them, “You received without pay, give without pay” (Matt. 10:8).

That makes it sound like ministers shouldn’t charge for their work. As we often do in Christianity, we thus have two principles that at first seem opposed and need to be harmonized. They both reflect aspects of a deeper, more complex truth.

Light may be shed on the situation by the case of Simon Magus. In Acts 8, the magic practitioner Simon converts to Christianity through the ministry of Philip the Evangelist in Samaria, and then Peter and John arrive to confirm the Samaritan converts.

When the converts receive the Holy Spirit, Simon is impressed and offers them money, saying, “Give me also this power, that any one on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit” (Acts 8:19). Peter then rebukes him “because you thought you could obtain the gift of God with money” (Acts 8:20).

This led to Simon’s sin being named after him—simony—and today it is defined as “the buying and selling of spiritual things” (CCC 2121).

How can we harmonize the biblical data? On the one hand, ministers have a right to earn their living from the gospel, so they must be able to receive money—or goods and services—in connection with their work. That’s not the problem.

The problem must be something more specific—like how or under what conditions they receive the money.

One way of receiving money is accepting donations in a general way, without them being tied to any specific act of ministry. This is how most ministers today—Catholic and otherwise—earn their salaries.

However, you also could pay someone on a per act basis. This is the way non-salaried employees get paid—e.g., for each bushel of grain harvested, each chair put together, or each article written, they receive a certain amount of money. The same could be applied to ministers.

There’s nothing immoral about either a general salary or a per act payment, and the same applies to ministerial laborers as much as any others.

So what was wrong about Simon’s situation? For a start, he was essentially offering to buy ordination from the apostles. But ordination is not simply a commercial good. It is a gift of God and a calling to the service of others. That fits with the definition of simony as the buying of spiritual things.

But perhaps there’s something more to learn here. What would Simon have done with ordination if he had obtained it? Presumably, he would have used it to make money.

He’d previously amazed people with his magic—from which he no doubt earned income—and after ordination he would offer to give the Holy Spirit to people in exchange for money, which would fit with the other side of simony—the selling of spiritual things.

This also would have been wrong for Simon to do, but why is that the case if ministers have a right to earn their living from ministry?

Think about what happens in a store: There’s something you want to buy—maybe even something you desperately need—and the seller asks money for it. But what if you don’t have the money? What happens then is that you don’t get the wanted or needed item.

Now cast your mind back to the ancient world, when the overwhelming number of people were poor and barely scraping by, living hand-to-mouth.

Spiritual things are the most essential things in life, and if they are being sold—in the proper sense of the term—then the poor would just have to do without spiritual things!

You’re a poor person and can’t pay to get baptized to be forgiven and go to heaven? Too bad for you!

Yet God loves the poor, and so Christian ministry must not allow such situations to occur.

Christian ministers deserve to earn a living from their ministry, but the poor deserve to have the benefits of that ministry, even if they can’t pay. Any system of compensation for Christian ministers must incorporate these principles.

Therefore, ministers cannot act like shopkeepers and deny spiritual goods to those who can’t afford to pay for them. There’s nothing wrong with compensating ministers on a per act-of-ministry basis, but if they refuse to minister to those who cannot pay then they cross the line into selling spiritual goods and thus into simony.

What about Mass stipends? There have been abuses of Mass stipends in the past, but for centuries the Church has implemented strict policies to prevent abuses.

There’s nothing wrong with compensating a priest for saying a Mass for your intentions, but there need to be—and are—laws to keep this from becoming a money-making scheme, an abuse of the faithful, or outright simony.

The principal laws are found in canons 945-958 of the Code of Canon Law. That’s right, 14 canons devoted to just this topic! Counted other ways, the section amounts to 22 subsections and over 800 words—just devoted to regulating the kinds of stipends priests can accept and how they must handle them. That’s an indication of how seriously the Church takes this issue.

A fundamental protection is set up even earlier, when the Code says:

The minister is to seek nothing for the administration of the sacraments beyond the offerings defined by competent authority, always taking care that the needy are not deprived of the assistance of the sacraments because of poverty (can. 848).

So a priest can’t ask (or hint) that he’d like more than what the locally approved offering is. In the United States, this ranges between $5 and $20 for the celebration of Mass, with most dioceses setting it around $10.

And even those who are impoverished are not to be “deprived of the assistance of the sacraments.” Later, this theme is picked up again: “It is recommended earnestly to priests that they celebrate Mass for the intention of the Christian faithful, especially the needy, even if they have not received an offering” (can. 945 §2).

With the poor and others who have not made an offering taken care of, that prevents outright selling and thus simony.

It also keeps this from being a form of spiritual abuse of the faithful: The Church earnestly exhorts the priest to say Mass for the intentions of a member of the faithful even without an offering.

And about this being a money-making scheme? The Code provides, “No one is permitted to accept more offerings for Masses to be applied by himself than he can satisfy within a year” (can. 953).

Except for Christmas, priests are allowed to keep only one Mass offering for himself per day (can. 951 §1), so if you multiply $10 by 365 days, that would be an annual sum of just $3,650. Nobody is going to get rich on that.

The Code also provides numerous other protections for the faithful. For example, if the faithful give an offering and it isn’t clear how many Masses they want said, the priest is supposed to compute it from the offering.

Back when I entered the Church in 1992, the standard Mass stipend in Arkansas was $5, and one family in my parish made a $50 donation—wanting only one Mass—and they were surprised to find 10 Masses listed on the schedule for their intentions!

The Code also mandates a bookkeeping system to ensure that the Masses are said. Pastors of parishes are “to have a special book in which they note accurately the number of Masses to be celebrated, the intention, the offering given, and their celebration,” and the bishop or his representatives are required to audit this book every year (can. 958).

The Code even provides punishments for priests who traffic in Mass offerings (can. 1383).

There are additional provisions to ensure that the wishes of the faithful are strictly honored in this matter, and the Church is very serious about Mass offerings remaining modest, in keeping with the legitimate financial support of the Church and its ministers, and not turning into a crass money-making scheme.

5 Things to Know About the Pope, St. Vincent of Lérins and Doctrinal Development

In a recent interview, Pope Francis invoked St. Vincent of Lérins in relation to the concept of doctrinal development — especially as a remedy to what the Pope called indietrismo (an attitude of “being backward-looking”) among some Catholics. He has done so previously.

The linkage of doctrinal development to Vincent of Lérins may come as a surprise for two reasons. One is that the concept is commonly linked to St. John Henry Newman, and the other is that Vincent is most famous for a quotation that some might take as rejecting doctrinal development.

Here are five things to know and share.

1) Who was St. Vincent of Lérins?

Vincent of Lérins was a French monk who lived in the early 400s. He belonged to a monastery on the Island of St. Honorat, one of the Lérins Islands off the southern coast of France.

When Vincent was born is unknown. His death occurred sometime between A.D. 434 and 450.

One of the controversies of his time centered on questions of grace, free will, predestination and original sin. The two poles of this debate were the British monk Pelagius and the North African bishop St. Augustine. The former stressed free will and minimized the role of grace in the Christian life, while the latter did the reverse.

Many in this time were not fully satisfied with the positions proposed by either Pelagius or Augustine, and some advocated middle positions, some of which were later deemed heretical and referred to as “semi-Pelagianism.”

Like many in France at this time, Vincent has been regarded as a semi-Pelagian, but it is unclear what his exact position was. Further, since semi-Pelagianism had not been condemned in his day, he was not blocked from being regarded as a saint.

His feast day in the Roman Martyrology is May 24.

2) What is St. Vincent famous for writing?

We may have more than one work that Vincent penned, but the only one regarded as certainly by him is called the Commonitories (from a Latin term meaning “remembrances” or “warnings”).

He wrote it under the pen name Peregrinus (Latin, “the Pilgrim”), and he composed it about the year 434 — three years after the Council of Ephesus declared that the Blessed Virgin Mary can be referred to as the Theotokos (Greek, “God-Bearer” or “Mother of God”).

This title is not found in Scripture and arose from popular piety. As a result, some viewed it as an impermissible addition to Christian faith and practice.

Between the Theotokos controversy and the Pelagian-Augustinian controversy, the topic of whether developments of doctrine were legitimate or heretical was under discussion at the time.

It was in this context that Vincent wrote the Commonitories, and he set before himself the task of determining how to distinguish the true Catholic faith from heresies, writing:

With great zeal and full attention I often inquired from many men, outstanding in sanctity and doctrinal knowledge, how, in a concise and, so to speak, general and ordinary way, I might be able to discern the truth of the Catholic faith from the falsity of heretical corruption.

From almost all of them I always received the answer that if I or someone else wanted to expose the frauds of the heretics and escape their snares and remain sound in the integrity of faith, I had, with the help of the Lord, to fortify that faith in a twofold manner: first, by the authority of the divine Law; second, by the tradition of the Catholic Church.

Vincent thus appeals to both Scripture and Tradition, and the Commonitories has passages that have been cited both by those who are cautious about the idea of doctrinal development and by those who are enthusiastic about it.

3) What did Vincent write that those who are cautious about doctrinal development cite?

Vincent explains that, although Scripture is “more than sufficient in itself,” it is interpreted in different and heretical ways by some people, and so he explains that one must interpret it in light of how it has been read in the Church. He states:

In the Catholic Church itself, every care should be taken to hold fast to what has been believed everywhere, always and by all [quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus].

This is truly and properly ‘Catholic,’ as indicated by the force and etymology of the name itself, which comprises everything truly universal.

This general rule will be truly applied if we follow the principles of universality, antiquity and consent.

This is the most famous passage in St. Vincent. It is an expression of what has become known as the “Vincentian Canon” and — taken on its own — it could be read as putting a firm break on any doctrinal development.

If we must “hold fast to what has been believed everywhere, always and by all,” then that could seem to leave no room for development in Catholic teaching over time.

The passage thus has been cited by those who wish to deemphasize the possibility of doctrinal development.

However, this is not the only thing that Vincent has to say on the subject.

4) What did Vincent write that those who are enthusiastic about doctrinal development cite?

Later in the Commonitories, Vincent makes it clear that he believes in the idea of doctrinal development, which he refers to as “progress [profectus] of religion.” He writes:

Teach precisely what you have learned; do not say new things even if you say them in a new manner.

At this point, the question may be asked: If this is right, then is no progress of religion possible within the Church of Christ?

To be sure, there has to be progress, even exceedingly great progress.

You’ll notice that one of the things Vincent mentions is the possibility of teaching things one has learned in the past but saying them “in a new manner.”

This refers to the controversies the Church had gone through in which new vocabulary was introduced to express ideas handed down from the apostles — such as saying that Christ is homoousios (Greek, “consubstantial”) with the Father or that Mary is Theotokos.

This teaching of ancient things “in a new manner” thus refers to a form of what is today called doctrinal development. He later refers to this as “presenting in new words the old interpretation of the faith.”

To explain his idea of progress or development, Vincent states that:

It must be progress in the proper sense of the word, and not a change in faith.

Progress means that each thing grows within itself, whereas change implies that one thing is transformed into another.

Hence, it must be that understanding, knowledge and wisdom grow and advance mightily and strongly in individuals as well as in the community, in a single person as well as in the Church as a whole, and this gradually according to age and history.

Vincent then offers an analogy:

The growth of religion in the soul should be like the growth of the body, which in the course of years develops and unfolds, yet remains the same as it was.

Much happens between the prime of childhood and the maturity of old age.

But the old men of today who were the adolescents of yesterday, although the figure and appearance of one and the same person have changed, are identical.

There remains one and the same nature and one and the same person.

The limbs of infants are small, those of young men large — yet they are the same.

By contrast, he states:

If, on the other hand, the human form were turned into a shape of another kind, or if the number of members of the body were increased or decreased, then the whole body would necessarily perish, or become a monstrosity, or be in some way disabled.

In the same way, the dogma of the Christian religion ought to follow these laws of progress, so that it may be consolidated in the course of years, developed in the sequence of time, and sublimated by age [ut annis scilicet consolidetur, dilatetur tempore, sublimetur aetate] — yet remain incorrupt and unimpaired, complete and perfect in all the proportions of its parts and in all its essentials.

Finally, he states:

It is right that those ancient dogmas of heavenly philosophy should in the course of time be thoroughly cared for, filed and polished; but it is sinful to change them, sinful to behead them or mutilate them.

They may take on more evidence, clarity and distinctness, but it is absolutely necessary that they retain their plenitude, integrity and basic character.

Vincent thus believes in a form of doctrinal development whereby what has been passed down from ancient times can be expressed in new words that provide greater clarity and distinctness but that leave its fundamental substance unaltered.

5) What should we make of St. Vincent’s discussion of these points?

It is clear that Vincent is aware the Catholic faith can be expressed (and has come to be expressed) in ways that were not used in the past, and thus that a form of doctrinal development occurs.

However, this is not a form of development without limits. For Vincent, something is only a genuine development if it preserves what was authoritatively handed down from the beginning — at least implicitly, similar to the way men may grow beards even though babies don’t have them.

Vincent thus seeks to strike a balance that acknowledges the necessity of doctrinal continuity with the past and the need for variability of expression with time in order to bring out ancient truths more clearly in the present.

This is essentially the form of doctrinal development endorsed by St. John Henry Newman and — more recently — by Benedict XVI.

In the Commonitories, Vincent has more to say about the application of the principles he describes — and applying the principles correctly is the real challenge.

However, it would be a mistake to focus on the Vincentian Canon to the exclusion of doctrinal development — as if all development is illegitimate — or to focus on his statements about doctrinal development to the exclusion of the Vincentian Canon — as if we could engage in a form of development untethered from the teaching of Christ and the apostles.

Vincent believed in both continuity and development.

Cleansing the Temple

One of the events recorded in all four Gospels is Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple. On this occasion, Mark tells us, Jesus “entered the Temple and began to drive out those who sold and those who bought in the Temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons; and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the Temple” (Mark 11:15-16).

A question that occurs to almost everyone who reads this passage is: Why did Jesus do this?

However, a second question occurs to those who study the Gospels closely: When did Jesus do this? Matthew, Mark, and Luke present it as occurring at the end of Jesus’ ministry, but John presents it as occurring at the beginning of the ministry.

Here we’ll look at both questions.

On why Jesus did it, the Gospels provide clues. The fullest version is found in Mark, who records Jesus saying, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers” (Mark 11:17).

Here Jesus combines two quotations from the Old Testament. The first is from Isaiah 56:7, where the prophet describes a day when God will bring Gentiles to Jerusalem, where they will worship him, and he will accept their offerings. Thus the Temple is called “a house of prayer for all the nations.”

The Temple was structured as a series of four progressively more holy courtyards. From the outermost to the innermost, they were

- the court of the Gentiles, where Gentiles could (and did!) come to worship God;
- the court of women, where Jewish women could worship;
- the court of Israel, where Jewish men could worship; and
- the court of priests, where Jewish priests ministered.

Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple on the grounds that it was to be a house of prayer for all the nations may indicate that the money-changers and the sellers of sacrificial animals had set up shop in the court of the Gentiles and were misappropriating worship space for ordinary commerce.

That leads us to the second quotation, which is from Jeremiah 7:11, where the prophet excoriates the people of his day for performing immoral and pagan practices and—in God’s eyes—turning his Temple into “a den of robbers” (that is, a place where robbers feel safe in their immoral lifestyle).

The fact the money-changers and sellers felt safe in the Temple—and the fact they were engaged in commerce—make the reference to the den of robbers appropriate.

The other Gospels do not pick up on the detail about the Gentiles that Mark includes. Matthew and Luke omit “for all the nations” from the Isaiah quotation, and John has Jesus telling the sellers of pigeons, “Take these things away; you shall not make my Father’s house a house of trade” (John 2:16).

These accounts focus more on the use of the Temple to earn a living rather than for worship as what is objectionable, though this is consistent with Mark’s account.

On the question of when Jesus did it, there have been several proposals:

1. Jesus chronologically did it at the end of his ministry (per the Synoptic Gospels), and John presents it at the beginning for theological reasons.
2. Jesus chronologically did it at the beginning of his ministry (per John), and the Synoptics present it at the end for theological reasons.
3. Jesus did it twice—at both the beginning and the end of his ministry.

None of these options should be dismissed out of hand. It is demonstrable that the Evangelists do not always record events in chronological order. Instead, they sometimes put material in topical order—as when Matthew gathers together teachings of Jesus into major discourses (e.g., the Sermon on the Mount is a collection of Jesus’ ethical teachings that are scattered in different places in Luke).

There’s more to say about these three possibilities than we can explore here, but I’ll offer a few thoughts.

You might argue for proposal 1 by noting that the Synoptic Gospels link the cleansing of the Temple to Jesus’ death. Immediately after his remark concerning the den of robbers, Mark continues: “And the chief priests and the scribes heard it and sought a way to destroy him” (Mark 11:18).

Matthew and Luke put a little more space between the clearing of the Temple and the plot to kill Jesus, but all three have the cleansing as an initiating event in the conflict between Jesus and the Jerusalem authorities. Mark links them explicitly, and it’s understandable why—after a public outburst in the Temple—the authorities would act against Jesus. One might thus regard this as the chronological placement of the event.

However, you might argue for proposal 2 by pointing out that John is demonstrably concerned with chronology, so one could view his account as an attempt to clarify exactly when the incident happened.

Like the Synoptics, John notes that the incident happened when “the Passover of the Jews was at hand” (John 2:13). The question would be which Passover, and here John provides a clue. Jesus says, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” after which “the Jews then said, ‘It has taken forty-six years to build this temple [Greek, naos], and will you raise it up in three days?’” (vv. 19-20).

Unfortunately, this common translation appears to be mistaken. John distinguishes between the Temple in general, including its courtyards—for which he uses the term hieron—and the inner part of the Temple that only the priests could enter—for which he uses the term naos. Here John uses naos, and the naos was completed in 18/17 B.C.

This reveals that the verse should be translated according to another grammatically possible reading, which would be “This temple [naos] has been built for forty-six years.”

The forty-sixth anniversary of the naos’s completion would be A.D. 30, so John is locating the clearing of the Temple at Passover in A.D. 30.

While some think Jesus was crucified in A.D. 30, this is mistaken. The evidence indicates he was born in 3/2 B.C., and Luke states that he “was about thirty years of age” when he began his ministry (Luke 3:23). That means Jesus began his ministry about A.D. 29, so John situates the clearing of the Temple toward the beginning of Jesus’ ministry—in A.D. 30—with Jesus not being crucified until A.D. 33.

We thus have an indication from the Synoptics that the clearing led directly to the death of Jesus and an indication from John that it happened at the beginning of the ministry.

This leads us to proposal 3—that Jesus cleared the Temple twice, once at the beginning and once at the end of his ministry, like bookends.

This proposal is rejected by many scholars, but it is the most straightforward reading of the evidence.

One author who defends the two-clearings hypothesis is Joel McDurmon, and he proposes a reason why Jesus would clear it twice.

Simply to bookend his ministry with the two actions would be reason enough to do this, but McDurmon proposes that Jesus was modeling his actions after an Old Testament ritual whereby a priest was required to inspect a house that had become infested with “leprosy” (Lev. 14:33-53).

Houses can’t get the disease we call leprosy, so this was most likely a form of mold or mildew. The priest was required to inspect the house more than once:

1. If he found “leprosy” in the house, he would order it closed for seven days.
2. If, when he came back, it appeared that the disease had spread, the priest would have the affected plaster and stones yanked out and replaced.
3. If the disease broke out again later, the priest would order the house destroyed.

McDurmon links the first and second clearings of the Temple to the second and third of these inspections. He concludes that after the initial clearing, Jesus rejected the Temple officials and replaced them with his disciples as “living stones,” and after the second clearing, he announced the destruction of the Temple.

This is interesting, but it is very speculative. The text does not mention or clearly imply a connection to Leviticus 14. Further, the priest is required to visit the house three times before ordering its destruction: (1) an initial inspection, (2) a second inspection seven days later, and (3) a third inspection at a later time if the disease breaks out again.

For the parallel to fit, Jesus would have needed to visit the Temple seven days before the first cleansing and see its corruption, but there is nothing like that in John or the Synoptics.

McDurmon tries to argue that the first visit is accomplished seven days before John’s cleansing by Jesus’ baptism and his constitution as the new Temple, but there are multiple problems with this: (i) Jesus was always the new temple; he didn’t become it upon baptism, (ii) he didn’t see corruption in himself when he was baptized, (iii) he didn’t visit the Jerusalem temple and see its corruption between his baptism and the first cleansing, and (iv) there are more than seven days between Jesus’ baptism and the first cleansing.

McDurmon tries to argue that this period is only seven days, but John does not say or imply this. In John, the length of time between the two is indeterminate. Further, we’ve already seen that Jesus’ ministry began in A.D. 29, but the first cleansing didn’t happen until Passover of 30—considerably more than seven days later.

The theory McDurmon proposes is thus interesting, but it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

Even apart from McDurmon’s proposals, there is reason to favor the two-cleansing hypothesis. John is clearly writing with supplemental intent—that is, he intends to supplement the material found in the Synoptic Gospels by principally relating stories not found in them.

In fact, the outline of John’s Gospel is designed to interlock with the Gospel of Mark, so John expects you to already know the Synoptic tradition, including the clearing of the Temple at Jesus’ final Passover in A.D. 33.

Why wouldn’t he mention both clearings, then? Because of economics. All four Evangelists keep their Gospels to the length of a single scroll because books were fantastically expensive at the time. A single copy of Matthew cost the equivalent of more than $2,200.

Because of his supplemental intent, John chose to include the clearing of the Temple at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, and because of economics, he chose to omit the one at the end so that he could keep his Gospel to a single scroll.

We also have other indications that John’s clearing of the Temple is designed to flesh out the Synoptics’ record. In Mark, Jesus’ accusers claim, “We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will build another, not made with hands’” (Mark 14:58; cf. 15:29).

Jesus doesn’t say anything like that in Mark, but John records that during the first clearing of the Temple, Jesus had said, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). John thus appears to be supplementing Mark to indicate when the witnesses heard Jesus say something along these lines—it was during the first cleansing of the Temple, at the beginning of the ministry.

On that occasion, the Temple authorities didn’t act against Jesus. However, after he grew a reputation as the Messiah over the course of his ministry (cf. John 6:15), when he proved to be a repeat offender by clearing the Temple again, they did act against him.

More can be said about all this. In his book The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, Craig Blomberg offers additional considerations favoring the two-clearings hypothesis (see pp. 216-219). But for our purposes, it’s enough to say that the idea that Jesus cleansed the Temple two times should not be rejected out of hand.

The case may not be 100% conclusive, but the hypothesis should not be dismissed as a naive “harmonization” of the Gospels. John writes with supplemental intent and crafts the outline of his Gospel around that of Mark, so he clearly expects us to read his Gospel in light of the Synoptics.

Blessings: 7 Things to Know and Share

There is currently considerable discussion about whether it is possible to bless persons in same-sex unions.

In light of this, it can be useful to step back and take a look at the topic in general.

Here are 7 things to know and share about blessings.

1) What are blessings?

The English word bless is used to translate the Latin word benedicere and the Greek word eulogein. Both of these mean “to speak good.”

In Scripture, the terms have a variety of uses. For example, one may bless God by speaking good of God—i.e., praising him (Ps. 68:26, Jas. 3:9, etc.).

However, another prominent use of the term is speaking good about something other than God in hopes of bringing about good effects. Thus the patriarch Isaac intended to bless his son Esau to bring good things upon him, but through Rebekah’s intervention, this blessing was stolen by Jacob (Gen. 27).

To bless is the opposite of to curse (Latin, malidicere, “to speak evil”). When a person curses something, he speaks evil about it in order to bring about evil or bad effects. Thus the Moabite king Balak sought to have the prophet Balaam curse Israel to harm the nation, but through God’s intervention the curse was turned into a blessing (Num. 22-24).

Blessings and curses of this type are sometimes called invocative because they invoke either good or evil upon the person or thing.

Whether the blessing or curse ultimately achieves its effect depends on the will of God, who is the one being invoked and asked to help or harm someone.

Another kind of blessing has developed which involves permanently changing the status of someone or something by setting it apart for a holy purpose. This type of blessing is sometimes called constitutive because it constitutes the person or thing in its new, holy status. This form of blessing is also sometimes referred to as a consecration.

The Catechism states:

Certain blessings have a lasting importance because they consecrate persons to God, or reserve objects and places for liturgical use.

Among those blessings which are intended for persons—not to be confused with sacramental ordination—are the blessing of the abbot or abbess of a monastery, the consecration of virgins and widows, the rite of religious profession, and the blessing of certain ministries of the Church (readers, acolytes, catechists, etc.).

The dedication or blessing of a church or an altar, the blessing of holy oils, vessels, and vestments, bells, etc., can be mentioned as examples of blessings that concern objects (CCC 1672).

2) What can be blessed?

A wide variety of people and things can be blessed. The Catechism specifically mentions persons, meals, objects, and places (CCC 1671).

3) Who are the parties involved in a blessing?

There are several parties that can be involved in a blessing. They include:

- The person being blessed (or those that are helped by a blessed object or thing)
- The person who performs the blessing
- The Church, which has authorized some blessings to be given in its name
- God, who is the ultimate source of all blessing (Jas. 1:17)

The Church is not involved in all blessings but only those it has authorized. These may be considered official blessings. They involve the intercession of the Church, as expressed through the authorized person performing the blessing.

Other blessings—such as those performed by ordinary people (e.g., when we say “God bless you” to someone)—may be considered unofficial.

4) Do blessings take effect automatically?

The standard answer is no, but careful reflection suggests that the answer is more complex than that.

In the case of constitutive blessings—such as the blessing of an abbot or abbess or the blessing of a church or an altar—the answer would appear to be yes.

If the Church’s official rite of blessing has been used for an abbot or abbess, that person really has been consecrated or set aside for a holy office, even if the man or woman is personally unworthy. Similarly, if a church or altar has been consecrated, it really has been set apart for sacred use.

When it comes to invocative blessings, the matter is different. Blessings are not sacraments but sacramentals. In fact, the Catechism notes that “Among sacramentals blessings . . . come first” (CCC 1671).

Sacraments are rites instituted by Jesus that God has promised to use to distribute his grace—especially sanctifying grace—so long as the recipient does not put a barrier in the way of receiving it.

Sacramentals are rites instituted by the Church, and so God has not promised to distribute his grace on each and every occasion that they are performed. The 1907 Catholic Encyclopedia states:

Blessings are not sacraments; they are not of divine institution; they do not confer sanctifying grace; and they do not produce their effects in virtue of the rite itself, or ex opere operato. They are sacramentals.

Similarly, the Catechism states:

Sacramentals do not confer the grace of the Holy Spirit in the way that the sacraments do, but by the Church’s prayer, they prepare us to receive grace and dispose us to cooperate with it (CCC 1670).

In general, whether an invocative blessing has its intended effect will depend on the piety of the one receiving the blessing and whether it is God’s will for the person to receive the intended good.

5) What effects do blessings have?

The Catholic Encyclopedia states:

[T]hey produce the following specific effects:

1. 1. 1. Excitation of pious emotions and affections of the heart and, by means of these, remission of venial sin and of the temporal punishment due to it;
    2. freedom from power of evil spirits;
    3. preservation and restoration of bodily health.
    4. various other benefits, temporal or spiritual.

All these effects are not necessarily inherent in any one blessing; some are caused by one formula, and others by another, according to the intentions of the Church.

The particular effects that a blessing involves will depend on the words used in the blessing—i.e., what does the blessing ask God to do?

One should consult The Book of Blessings for the words used in official blessings.

6) Who can perform blessings?

There has long been an association between blessings and the priesthood. Thus Numbers 6:22-27 states:

The Lord spoke to Moses, saying,“Speak to Aaron and his sons, saying, Thus you shall bless the people of Israel: you shall say to them,

‘The Lord bless you and keep you;

the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;

the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.’

So shall they put my name upon the people of Israel, and I will bless them.”

However, blessings were not restricted to priests. In the Old Testament, the patriarchs gave blessings to their children, and various prophets (including Balaam) pronounced blessings also.

Also, Israel—like the Church—was called to be “a kingdom of priests” (Ex. 19:6, Rev. 1:6; cf. 1 Pet. 2:9). As a result, there are situations in which laity also can give blessings. The Catechism explains:

Sacramentals derive from the baptismal priesthood: every baptized person is called to be a “blessing,” and to bless.

Hence lay people may preside at certain blessings; the more a blessing concerns ecclesial and sacramental life, the more is its administration reserved to the ordained ministry (bishops, priests, or deacons) (CCC 1669).

The Church’s Book of Blessings notes who can perform which individual blessings. Sometimes this will be the bishop, sometimes a priest, sometimes a deacon, sometimes a lay person, and sometimes a combination of these.

Among others, laity are authorized to perform the blessing of an Advent wreath, a Christmas manger or Nativity scene, a Christmas tree, and throats on St. Blase’s Day (Feb. 3). They also are authorized to help with the distribution of ashes on Ash Wednesday, though the blessing of the ashes is reserved to a priest or deacon.

There are no limits to who may perform unofficial blessings. Any person can say, “God bless you” to another, bless a meal, or bless their children.

7) Where can I learn more?

The single most authoritative source on blessings is the Church’s Book of Blessings. It contains not only the texts used for individual, official blessings, it also contains introductions to the individual texts, as well as a general introduction to the subject of blessings.

Also helpful is Fr. Stephen J. Rossetti’s book The Priestly Blessing: Recovering the Gift. It contains a discussion of the history of blessings in light of Church teaching and the opinions of theologians.

Pope Francis Celebrates Blaise Pascal

The French mathematician, philosopher, and apologist Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was born 400 years ago. The anniversary of his birth was recently celebrated by Pope Francis in an apostolic letter titled Sublimitas et Miseria Hominis (“The Grandeur and Misery of Man”)—reflecting one of the themes in Pascal’s writing.

Recent popes, such as John Paul II and Benedict XVI, have expressed appreciation for Pascal, and in 2017 Pope Francis reportedly said that he “deserves beatification.”

The pope’s 5,400-word apostolic letter makes for interesting reading. Papal documents like this are commonly ghost written, and the pope then makes the words his own when he signs and issues the document. The same is presumably true of this letter, and it is clear that whoever drafted it knows Pascal’s life and thought very well. It’s a quality read!

At least in Catholic circles, Pascal is best known today for two things: his Provincial Letters, which are a defense of the Jansenists against their Jesuit opponents, and his Pensees (French, “Thoughts”), which consists of notes that he took in preparation for an apology defending the Christian faith that he wanted to write.

However, these writings come from the later period of Pascal’s life, and he is remembered outside Catholic circles for other contributions. As the letter notes, “In 1642, at the age of nineteen, he invented an arithmetic machine, the ancestor of our modern computers.”

Pascal also made contributions in other areas, including physics (specifically, fluid dynamics, where he proposed what is now known as Pascal’s law) and mathematics (where he made numerous contributions, including being one of the founders of probability theory).

Pope Francis’s apostolic letter touches briefly on such contributions, but it focuses on the development of Pascal’s life and his Christian faith, which became more prominent as he got older.

A turning point in this regard occurred on the night of Monday, November 23, 1654, when Pascal was 31-years old. For two hours—between 10:30 p.m. and 12:30 a.m.—he had a profound mystical experience that led to a religious conversion.

Afterward, he wrote an intimate series of thoughts about this experience on a sheet of paper. How meaningful the experience was to him is illustrated by the fact that he thereafter carried the paper with him, keeping it in the lining of his coat, where it was discovered after his death.

What we know about this powerful mystical experience comes from the brief, tantalizing statements he made on the paper. It is now known as Pascal’s Memorial, and an English translation is available here.

Pope Francis’s letter discusses the Provincial Letters and the Jansenist controversy that occasioned them. Since the Jesuits were the target of the Provincial Letters, it is interesting to see what Francis—the first Jesuit pope—has to say. He writes:

Before concluding, I must mention Pascal’s relationship to Jansenism. One of his sisters, Jacqueline, had entered religious life in Port-Royal, in a religious congregation the theology of which was greatly influenced by Cornelius Jansen, whose treatise Augustinus appeared in 1640. In January 1655, following his “night of fire” [i.e., his mystical experience], Pascal made a retreat at the abbey of Port-Royal. In the months that followed, an important and lengthy dispute about the Augustinus arose between Jesuits and “Jansenists” at the Sorbonne, the university of Paris. The controversy dealt chiefly with the question of God’s grace and the relationship between grace and human nature, specifically our free will. Pascal, while not a member of the congregation of Port-Royal, nor given to taking sides—as he wrote, “I am alone. . . . I am not at all part of Port-Royal”—was charged by the Jansenists to defend them, given his outstanding rhetorical skill. He did so in 1656 and 1657, publishing a series of eighteen writings known as The Provincial Letters.

Although several propositions considered “Jansenist” were indeed contrary to the faith, a fact that Pascal himself acknowledged, he maintained that those propositions were not present in the Augustinus or held by those associated with Port-Royal. Even so, some of his own statements, such as those on predestination, drawn from the later theology of Augustine and formulated more severely by Jansen, do not ring true. We should realize, however, that, just as Saint Augustine sought in the fifth century to combat the Pelagians, who claimed that man can, by his own powers and without God’s grace, do good and be saved, so Pascal, for his part, sincerely believed that he was battling an implicit pelagianism or semipelagianism in the teachings of the “Molinist” Jesuits, named after the theologian Luis de Molina, who had died in 1600 but was still quite influential in the middle of the seventeenth century. Let us credit Pascal with the candor and sincerity of his intentions.

Pope Francis also touches on Pascal’s apologetics and his famous work, the Pensees. Interestingly, he does not mention the most famous part of the Pensees, which is a passage in which Pascal seeks to help those who feel unable to choose between skepticism and Christianity based on evidence.

He proposes what has become known as Pascal’s Wager, in which he offers a way to use practical reason to decide between the options when an evidential solution seems unavailable. In essence, Pascal argues that if one adopts or “bets” on skepticism and it turns out that skepticism is true, then one will at most reap a finite benefit. However, if one “bets” on Christianity and it turns out that Christianity is true, then one will receive an infinite benefit. It is thus in one’s interest to wager that Christianity is true if one feels unable to decide based on the evidence.

It should be noted that the Wager is designed only to decide between Christianity and skepticism. However, Wager-like reasoning can be applied to other religious options. (For example, if one is deciding between reincarnation and the view we only have one life, it is better to wager that we only have one life, so we need to make this one count.)

Pascal experienced his final illness in 1662. Shortly before his death, he said that if the doctors were correct and he would recover, he would devote the rest of his life to serving the poor.

However, he did not recover, and he passed on to his reward at the age of 39. It is not clear what he died of, but tuberculosis and stomach cancer have been proposed.

It is good to see Pascal being recognized for his contributions. He was, indeed, a genius, as well as a man of profound faith and insight. He is well worth studying by contemporary apologists.

What Counts as Valid Wine for the Eucharist?

In a disturbing story coming out of the Kansas City archdiocese, The Pillar reports:

“It has recently been reported by two priests, having served in three different parishes, that upon their appointment to these parishes they soon discovered the long-term use of wines that were in fact invalid matter for the confection of the Eucharist,” Archbishop Joseph Naumann noted in a May 31 letter obtained by The Pillar.

As a result, he wrote, in those parishes, “for any number of years all Masses were invalid and therefore the intentions for which those Masses were offered were not satisfied, including the obligation pastors have to offer Mass for the people.”

“This is a gravely serious situation for which we must now petition the Holy See for guidance on restorative matters.”

The article does not say what wines were being used or what made them invalid, but the faithful in other dioceses may be concerned about the wine used at the Masses they attend, so it’s worth looking at what kinds of wine can be validly used to consecrate the Eucharist.

According to the Code of Canon Law:

Can. 924 §1. The most holy eucharistic sacrifice must be offered with bread and with wine in which a little water must be mixed.

- 2. The bread must be only wheat and recently made so that there is no danger of spoiling.
- 3. The wine must be natural from the fruit of the vine and not spoiled.

“Fruit of the vine” means grapes, so wines that are based on other plants are not allowed (e.g., elderberry wine, strawberry wine, dandelion wine, rice wine). If any of the latter were being used in Kansas City, they would be understood to be invalid.

The elements required for the valid celebration of the Eucharist are based on what Jesus used on Holy Thursday: unleavened bread (cf. Matt. 26:17) and grape wine (Jesus references “fruit of the vine,” e.g., in Matt. 26:29).

However, bread and wine were made multiple different ways in the first century, and no detailed instructions were given about which specific types could be used in the Eucharist.

For example, during the festival of Unleavened Bread, Jews were forbidden to have leaven in their houses, so their bread during this period—which would have been made from wheat—was unleavened. But the lack of leaven was not required of Jews at other times of year, and it was not required at all of Gentiles.

Consequently, some early Christians celebrated the Eucharist using leavened bread. The Church determined that this valid matter, and today leavened bread is used in many Eastern Catholic churches.

Similarly, you might think that since the wine becomes Christ’s blood, the use of red wine might be mandatory at Mass, but it’s not. White wine is perfectly valid matter.

It’s also interesting that white wine doesn’t have to be made from white grapes. It is sometimes made from red grapes and the skins are removed during the fermentation process. Thus it appears that you do not have to use the entire grape in making wine for the Eucharist. It is sufficient that grapes—but not necessarily the whole grape—be used.

Given the lack of early, detailed instructions to the contrary and the flexibility that we have just seen, it would appear that anything that the first Christians would have considered wheat bread and grape wine would be valid matter for the Eucharist.

This is suggested by the Congregation for Divine Worship’s 2004 instruction Redemptionis Sacramentum, which states:

The bread used in the celebration of the Most Holy Eucharistic Sacrifice must be unleavened, purely of wheat, and recently made so that there is no danger of decomposition. It follows therefore that bread made from another substance, even if it is grain, or if it is mixed with another substance different from wheat to such an extent that it would not commonly be considered wheat bread, does not constitute valid matter for confecting the Sacrifice and the Eucharistic Sacrament (n. 48).

So only bread made from pure wheat is licit (lawful) to use, but it would still be valid matter if mixed with other substances, as long as it would “commonly be considered wheat bread.”

The same should be true of wine. It might be illicit (unlawful) to use if mixed with other things, but it would still be valid matter as long as it would commonly be considered grape wine.

In regard to both elements, this flexibility is good, and it is part of God’s general policy of making the sacraments hard to break, because humans are fallible and will break things if they can. The sacraments are not meant to be fragile and invalidated by the smallest deviation.

The smallest deviations may be illegal, but the sacrament will still be valid if a priest, sacristan, or other person makes a mistake. As long as you’ve got wheat bread and grape wine—even if they aren’t pure—the consecration will be valid.

What are the limits of valid matter? The Church has not provided us with a comprehensive answer to this question, but it has provided us with pieces of it.

For example, in 2003 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued letter in which it authorized the use of mustum for priests who are alcohol intolerant or who suffer from alcoholism. It stated:

Mustum, which is grape juice that is either fresh or preserved by methods that suspend its fermentation without altering its nature (for example, freezing), is valid matter for the celebration of the Eucharist (n. A.3).

Fresh grape juice contains no alcohol, so the validity of mustum indicates that the alcohol content of Eucharistic wine can be as low as zero percent.

What about the other end of the spectrum? How much alcohol can the wine have?

In 1896, the Holy Office confirmed that it was licit to use wine that had been fortified up to 18% alcohol content (DH 3313), so up to at least that level is valid.

There is an interesting history about how such fortification can occur. In 1887, the Holy Office was asked whether it would be preferable to prevent wine from spoiling by adding a small quantity of brandy (which is made from distilled wine) or by heating it to 149 degrees Fahrenheit.

The Holy Office responded that the heating method was preferable, but it did not rule out adding brandy (DH 3198). This would indicate that the addition of a substance labelled something other than “wine” (i.e., brandy, even though it’s made from wine) could be used in principle.

In 1890, the Holy Office was asked whether you could simply add alcohol to the wine to make it more long-lasting, and the Holy Office said yes, as long as the alcohol was extracted from grape wine (DH 3264).

And in 1896, the Holy Office was asked whether you could add sugar from sugar cane during the fermentation process to raise the alcohol content. The Holy Office replied that alcohol made with grapes should be used instead (DH 3312), but it didn’t say that adding sugar would make the wine invalid.

In 2013, the Congregation for Divine Worship also stated that adding sulfites during the fermentation process and the use of genetically modified organisms would not affect validity (Letter, Dec. 9, 2013, Prot. N. 89/78—44897).

We thus see the competent Vatican dicasteries urging the use of products made from grapes (of any kind, red or white, and including genetically modified ones), but not excluding the use of brandy, sugar, alcohol (made from grapes), or sulfites as preservatives. For some of these, their use was recommended, but in no case did the Holy See say that their use would invalidate the wine.

This indicates that there is flexibility regarding what wine is licit to use, and what wines are valid to use will be even broader.

The Holy See has not tried to tell us what the limits of validity are. It is gravely sinful to use doubtful or clearly invalid wine, but there is more flexibility here than many might suppose.

My suspicion is that the principle used in the early Church is correct—i.e., a wine is valid if it would be considered grape wine in the common opinion of men, even if it has minor admixtures.

I don’t know what kind of wines were being used in the Archdiocese of Kansas City. If they were using wine made from elderberries, other fruit besides grapes, or other plants like dandelions or rice, then it would be clearly invalid. If they were using grape wines that had admixtures, the matter is not as clear.

Fortunately, Archbishop Naumann has indicated the archdiocese will seek guidance from Rome on how to deal with the situation, and Rome’s response may help clarify the limits of validity.

Reconstructed Dialogue in the Bible

June 1, 1993 was my report-to-work date at Catholic Answers. By divine providence, it’s also the memorial of St. Justin Martyr, patron of apologists.

Today–June 1, 2023–is thus my 30th anniversary as a professional apologist, and so I thought I’d put up a post discussing one of the things I’ve developed a clearer awareness of in the last 30 years.

Some Christians appear to believe that the Bible contains nothing but exact quotations of the people it describes. In other words, everything you see between quotation marks in the Bible is exactly what the person said. There’s not one word of difference.

It’s easy for modern Christians to think this since we live in a world of audio and video recorders and stenographers and transcriptionists. Exact quotations come easy to us.

However, the attitude of ancient audiences was different. They lived before any recording devices had been invented, few people were literate, and of those who were literate, only a very few were trained in stenography and capable of taking down exactly what someone said in real time.

As a result, they did not expect exact quotations the way that we do. Instead, they expected texts to convey the gist or basic meaning of what someone said, but not the exact words.

They also recognized that authors would, at times, need to reconstruct the dialogue or conversations that people had.

No Recording Devices

Think about it: Without recorders and transcribers of such conversations, how would anybody remember exactly what had been said on a particular occasion? They might remember the gist of what was said, but likely not the exact words—especially after a long space of time.

Of course, in divinely inspired texts like the books of the Bible, God could reveal the exact words that had been used on a particular occasion. That’s possible. But it’s not what the ancient audience was expecting. They were used to reading books of history that used the convention of reconstructed dialogue, and so that’s what they would have assumed books of Scripture also contained—unless the text said otherwise.

A key principle of good biblical exegesis is reading the text the way the ancient audience would have, and so we also should understand the Bible as using reconstructed dialogue. We should not introduce the added assumption—not shared by the original audience—that God miraculously revealed what was said by minor players in the narrative, like the exact words used by every person who approached Jesus for a miracle.

Nobody would have written down the exact words of a healing request at the time, but the gist would have been remembered (e.g., a blind man asked Jesus for his sight back), and so we would expect the exact words to be reconstructed.

This much we can establish based on a knowledge of how ancient literature worked, but can we find evidence supporting this view in the text itself?

We can! And one way we can do this is by comparing different accounts of the same incident.

Synoptic Parallels

Let’s compare Mark’s and Matthew’s account of what the demons said to Jesus in the case of the Gerasene/Gadarene demoniacs.

Mark 5 presents us with Jesus exorcizing a single demoniac, and we read of the following exchange taking place between Jesus and the demons (statements by the demons are in blue):

“What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.”

For he had said to him, “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!”

And Jesus asked him, “What is your name?”

He replied, “My name is Legion; for we are many.”

And he begged him eagerly not to send them out of the country. Now a great herd of swine was feeding there on the hillside; and they begged him, “Send us to the swine, let us enter them” (Mark 5:7-12).

Now here’s the account of the same event from Matthew 8, where Matthew records that there were two demoniacs that Jesus exorcized:

“What have you to do with us, O Son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time?”

Now a herd of many swine was feeding at some distance from them.

And the demons begged him, “If you cast us out, send us away into the herd of swine” (Matt. 8:29-31).

As you can see, Matthew omits the reference to “Legion,” but the gist is the same in both accounts—the demons ask what Jesus has to do with them, they’re concerned about being tormented, and they ask to go into the herd of pigs.

But the exact words used are different. In Mark the demons say, “What have you to do with me” (singular), because Mark is only mentioning one demoniac, while Matthew has “What have you to do with us” (plural), because Matthew mentions the second demoniac.

In Mark the demons identify Jesus as “Jesus, Son of the Most High God,” while in Matthew they just identify him as “Son of God.”

In Mark the demons make a request about torment—“I adjure you by God, do not torment me”—while in Matthew they ask a question—“Have you come here to torment us before the time?”

Finally, concerning the pigs, Mark’s demons make a simple request—“Send us to the swine, let us enter them”—while in Matthew they make a conditional request—“If you cast us out, send us away into the herd of swine.”

We thus see how the biblical authors Mark and Matthew both wanted to convey the gist of what happened on this occasion, but they don’t feel bound to use the same exact words of dialogue. There is dialogue reconstruction—in the form of paraphrase—happening in these texts.

A More Striking Example

An even more striking example of reconstructed dialogue occurs in Luke’s account of the day of Pentecost in Acts.

After the Holy Spirit descends on the disciples and they begin speaking in tongues, we read:

Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in his own language.

And they were amazed and wondered, saying,

“Are not all these who are speaking Galileans?

“And how is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language?

“Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians, we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God” (Acts 2:5-11).

Note carefully what Luke says: “they were amazed and wondered, saying.” This tells us that the words that follow represent what the crowd—a group of people—said.

Now—unless they’re chanting in unison—when a group of people speak, each person says something different. In real life, they would hold a conversation about the amazing event unfolding before them.

But instead of recording a conversation between individual speakers, Luke represents the crowd as if it is speaking in unison: “How is it that we hear, each of us in his native language? . . . We hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God.”

Interposed between these is a long list of places that the Jews came from, and there is no way in real life that a group of people speaking in unison—without a script—would name the same places in the same order.

What’s more, the list isn’t random. This may not be obvious to modern readers, who aren’t that familiar with ancient place names, but the list mentions places of Jewish settlement moving from east to west. It starts in the far east with Parthia (in modern Iran) and works its way westward through the Holy Land and North Africa before moving up to the capital of the empire—Rome—with Cretans (an island people) and Arabs (a nomadic people) thrown in at the end.

There is no way a crowd would spontaneously come up with this list. If they wanted to speak in unison, they’d need to first decide on the places to name and then figure out the sequence in which to name them.

A Greek Chorus

The way that Luke presents the crowd bursting into common speech will be familiar to readers of ancient literature. What Luke depicts the crowd doing is functioning as a Greek chorus.

Greek choruses were made up of performers in ancient Greek plays. Choruses consisted of 12 to 50 actors, and they sang, danced, and spoke lines in unison. Their purpose was to represent the common people who were witnessing the events of the play, and they provided commentary on them.

They would say things that the main characters couldn’t (e.g., the chorus might comment on the main character’s faults or hidden fears and motives), they would comment in ways that would bring out the significance of events in the story, and they would underscore elements of the plot to make it easier for the audience to follow.

Here’s an example of a chorus speaking in Sophocles’s play Antigone—about the daughter of Oedipus the king. At this point in the play, Antigone has been sentenced to be buried alive in a tomb by the tyrant King Creon, and she has just compared her fate to a somewhat similar fate experienced by Niobe, the daughter of King Tantalus.

The chorus then speaks up and says:

Yet she [Niobe] was a goddess, thou knowest, and born of gods;

we are mortals, and of mortal race.

But ’tis great renown for a woman [you, Antigone] who hath perished that she should have shared the doom of the godlike, in her life, and afterward in death.

You see how the chorus speaks in unison—“We are mortals, and of mortal race.” This kind of speaking in unison would not happen in real life unless people were reading from a script, which is exactly what happened in ancient Greek plays. The actors had a script to direct their speech.

The crowd on Pentecost had no script to read from, but Luke knows that his readers will have seen plays and be familiar with the literary device of a chorus, so he reconstructs dialogue-in-unison to reflect the thoughts and nature of the crowd and has them provide commentary on the miracle they have just witnessed.

No doubt, individual people in the Pentecost crowd did say things like, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans?”, “How is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language?”, and “We hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God.” They probably didn’t use those exact words, but they convey the gist of what people in the crowd said.

Luke then fuses these remarks with a list of the places that the people came from to provide an overall commentary that conveyed to his readers a sense of the multiple languages represented in the miracle and the crowd’s reaction to it.

We thus find a real event being presented with a particularly clear case of reconstructed dialogue.

The Words of Jesus

A question that modern readers will want to ask is what all this says about the words of Jesus.

We can say basically two things: First, that the authors of the Gospels were concerned with accurately presenting the gist of Jesus’ teachings and interactions, and second, that they were at liberty to paraphrase and reconstruct dialogue.

This means that we would expect more exact representations of Jesus’ words in certain types of passages. Teachings were the most important things Jesus said (as opposed, for example, to where the group would be having dinner or spending the night), so they should most closely reflect his actual words.

Also, shorter statements are easier to remember than longer ones, so teachings given in shorter form should convey more of the actual words.

Indeed, we have evidence that Jesus himself took these effects into account, and many of his teachings are framed in short, vivid, easy-to-remember forms. An example is this statement:

The last will be first, and the first last (Matt. 20:16).

This saying uses a literary device known as a chiasm or chiasmus (in Greek chiasma means “crossing”). Chiasms involve a sequence of elements that reverse in order. If we label the word “last” as A and the word “first” as B, this chiasmus has an A B | B A structure.

Such structures make sayings easier to remember, and it appears Jesus used them to make his teachings more memorable.

Another literary device he used to do this was the parable. Jesus’ parables are short, memorable stories that teach spiritual lessons, and humans are wired for stories, so we remember the gist of them easily.

Some of Jesus’ longer discourses—like the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7)—are essentially collections of short, easily memorable sayings, and if you study the Sermon on the Mount, you can see that it’s organized around different collections of sayings that begin the same way (e.g., “Blessed are the X”, “You have heard X, but I say Y”, “When you do X, do not do Y”).

There is also the fact that—as a teacher—Jesus would have given the same teachings multiple times, to many different audiences, so his disciples would have heard his teachings many times and—as his disciples (i.e., students)—they would have made efforts to memorize them so they could preach them to others.

On the other hand, not everything Jesus said would have been remembered in this way. Things he said only once would not be expected to be as close to the original wording, so we would expect more reconstruction in one-off statements.

The same would be true of minor characters—people other than Jesus. Numerous people approached him for miracles of healing or exorcism during his ministry, and their exact words in making the request would not have been memorized. Consequently, we would expect the Evangelists to reconstruct what such people said, basing it on the kind of thing someone with a particular problem would say to Jesus in making a respectful request for relief.

Similarly, things that Jesus said that went on for a long time—very lengthy statements, especially those made only once—would be harder to memorize, and we would expect more paraphrase and reconstruction.

For example, Jesus gives some long speeches in the Gospel of John. One of them runs for five chapters (John 13-17)! And it was apparently given only once, on Holy Thursday. Even though John was an eyewitness (John 21:24), and even though he had supernatural assistance in remembering what Jesus said (John 14:26), the ancient audience would not have expected John to reproduce a word-for-word transcript of a lengthy speech he heard Jesus give only once.

Instead, they would expect the Holy Spirit to help John remember the gist of what was said, and then John would employ the normal reconstruction and paraphrase that was expected in ancient literature.

What we see is thus that the four Evangelists felt the need to accurately preserve the substance of what Jesus said, but not always the exact wording—as can be seen by comparing the Gospel accounts of the same sayings and noting the variation in the exact words used.

No Quotation Marks

Part of the problem modern readers have with the idea that quotations in the Bible may not be exact is because they are encased in quotation marks. When Jesus says something, modern Bibles put quotation marks around it.

However, the original Greek manuscripts of the New Testament (and the Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament) do not contain quotation marks. They are a later invention.

The ancestors of quotation marks were invented in the 2nd century B.C., but they had a different function. At the Library of Alexandria, they were used to signal erroneous or disputed portions of text.

Once the Christian age began, authors began using them to signal quotations, but they were a particular type of quotation—one that came from the Bible. Biblical passages would get quotation marks, regardless of whether someone was speaking or not. Thus when the author of Genesis writes “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” it would get quotation marks, and so would Jesus’ statement “The last will be first, and the first last.”

Later, quotation marks came to be used for quotations of the words another person used in saying something, which is their modern function. And they usually indicated exact quotations—the exact words someone said, with no paraphrase or reconstruction.

This is the connotation that they have today, and their use in modern editions of the Bible leads the reader to suppose that they are being given an exact quotation.

But the quotation marks aren’t in the originals. They are added by modern translation committees. There are even disputes—in some cases—about where a particular quotation begins and ends, because there aren’t any marks in the Greek telling you where it ends and where the author’s voice picks up again. (For example, it’s clear that in Galatians 2:14 Paul begins quoting something he once said to St. Peter, but it isn’t precisely clear where the historic quotation ends and where Paul shifts back to giving his current thoughts rather than what he said to Peter in the past.)

The difference in how ancient writers quoted people and how modern, English-speaking ones do is illustrated by the difference between what are known as direct and indirect discourse.

In direct discourse, a modern English-language writer will be giving you what he believes were the exact words a person used—no paraphrasing allowed—as in this statement:

- John said, “I am hungry”

By contrast, indirect discourse doesn’t present you with a quotation, and so quotation marks are not used, as in the statement:

- John said that he is hungry.

The way English writing works, you know that in the first statement the author is giving you what he thinks is an exact quotation of what John said, while in the second statement he is giving you a summary of what John said, but not necessarily his exact words (e.g., John might have literally said, “I’m famished!” or “I’m peckish” or “I haven’t eaten today,” but you could summarize all of those with “John said that he is hungry”).

Greek has equivalents of direct and indirect discourse, but they don’t work exactly the same way the English versions do. In particular, since ancient authors generally weren’t expected to give you exact quotations, this wasn’t normally part of what Greek direct discourse implied.

But when you add quotation marks to signal direct discourse in English, it tells the reader that what they have before them is supposed to be an exact quotation. This can mask the greater flexibility ancient authors had in presenting quotations. So when you read the statement:

- And Jesus said to the centurion, “Go, as you have believed it will be done for you.”

It may actually mean something more like:

- And Jesus said to the centurion that he should go and that, as he had believed, it would be done for him.

This is not to say that a quotation doesn’t preserve the exact words of Jesus. It may or may not, but it will accurately preserve the gist of what he said.

Dei Verbum

So what can we say in light of all this? One of the things that the Second Vatican Council taught was the following:

Since, therefore, all that the inspired authors, or sacred writers, affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture, firmly, faithfully and without error, teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the sacred Scriptures (Dei Verbum 11).

In other words, everything that the authors of the Bible intended to assert, properly speaking, is also asserted by the Holy Spirit and is thus true.

The authors of the Bible intended to assert the substance of Jesus’ actions and teachings. They didn’t intend to assert the exact words that he and others always used, because that kind of assertion wasn’t a standard part of ancient literature. However, they did intend to assert the gist—the substance—of what he said and did.

Therefore, that substance is guaranteed by the Holy Spirit to be transmitted by the Gospels “firmly, faithfully, and without error.”

Mysteries of the Magi

‘When Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem” (Matt. 2:1).

“Wise men” is a common translation in English Bibles, but it doesn’t give us a good idea who they were. The Greek word used here is magoi, the plural of magos. These terms may be more familiar from their Latin equivalents: in St. Jerome’s Vulgate, we read that magi came from the east; an individual member of the group would be a magus.

Who were the magi?

Originally, the term magi referred to a group of people in Persia (modern Iran). Around 440 B.C., the Greek historian Herodotus listed the magi as one of the six tribes of the Medes (Histories 1:101:1).

Apparently, they were like the Jewish tribe of Levi in that they exercised priestly functions. Herodotus says that whenever a Persian wanted to sacrifice an animal to the gods, he would cut it up and then “a magus comes near and chants over it the song of the birth of the gods, as the Persian tradition relates it; for no sacrifice can be offered without a magus” (Histories 1:132:3).

In the book of Daniel, magi are called upon to interpret dreams (1:20; 2:2, 10, 27).

The Persians also looked to magi to interpret heavenly omens. Consider the case of the Persian king Xerxes I (also known as Ahasuerus, who married the biblical Esther). In 480 B.C., he asked the magi to tell him the meaning of a solar eclipse that occurred as he was about to do battle with the Greeks.

They told him that the sun was special to Greeks, so when it abandoned its place in the daytime, the god was showing the Greeks that they would have to abandon their cities. This emboldened Xerxes (Histories 7:37:4), but things didn’t work out well. His expedition against Greece failed.

Even so, this shows the original magi were interpreters of astronomical portents, as later magi would be for the star of Bethlehem.

Over time, the term magi ceased to refer exclusively to members of the Persian priestly caste. The skills they practiced became known as mageia, from which we get the word magic in English, and by the first century, anyone who practiced magic could be called a magos.

Thus, in Acts 8, we meet a man named Simon, who was a Samaritan, meaning he had mixed Jewish ancestry. Simon practiced mageia (8:9, 11), and so he became known as Simon Magus.

Full Jews also could be magi, and in Acts 13 we meet a Jewish man named Bar-Jesus, who is described both as a magus and a false prophet (13:6). This means that in Jesus’ day, the term magus was flexible, so we need to ask another question.

Who were these magi?

Matthew’s magi were clearly dignitaries of some kind, as shown by the facts that:

They saw themselves as worthy to congratulate a distant royal house on a new birth.
They had the resources and leisure to undertake such a lengthy journey.
They could offer costly gifts.
They received a royal audience with King Herod the Great.

Matthew says that they came “from the East,” which from the perspective of Jerusalem would point to locations such as Arabia, Babylonia, and Persia.

Jews lived in all of these regions. Consequently, some interpreters have proposed that the magi who visited Jesus were Jews, who would naturally be interested in the newborn king of their race.

However, most scholars have concluded this is unlikely. If they were visiting Jewish dignitaries, Matthew would have identified them as co-religionists. The fact he merely describes them as being “from the East” suggests that they were Gentiles who came from a distant eastern land. Matthew also tells us that they went back “to their own country” (2:12), suggesting they were among its native inhabitants rather than Jews living in exile.

In fact, there is a theme in Matthew’s Gospel of Gentiles who respond to the true God. Matthew uses it to show his Jewish readers that Gentiles can be Christians. The pattern culminates in the Great Commission, when Jesus tells the apostles to “make disciples of all nations” (alternate translation: “make disciples of all the Gentiles”; 28:19).

The Magi are part of this pattern: they are Gentile dignitaries who represent an early response to God’s Messiah, in contrast to the Jewish king, Herod, who seeks to kill him. This prefigures how the Jewish authorities kill Jesus, but Gentiles embrace his gospel.

Scholars have concluded that Matthew’s Magi were Gentile astrologers from an eastern land, though we can’t be sure which one (see Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah, 168-170).

The earliest discussion we have is found in St. Justin Martyr, who around A.D. 160 said that they came from Arabia (Dialogue with Trypho 78:1). Around A.D. 210, Tertullian deduced that this is where they came from based on the gifts they offered (Against Marcion 3:13). Although in the ancient world gold and frankincense were associated with Arabia, this isn’t conclusive since they were widely traded in the region.

Many scholars have seen Babylon as a possibility, and the Jewish readers of Matthew would have been familiar with the book of Daniel, which associates magi with Babylonia. It has also been argued that the major Jewish colony there could have given the Magi a special interest in the Jewish Messiah, though this was also a common expectation of Jews in other lands.

Most Church Fathers concluded that the Magi were from Persia. Just after A.D. 200, Clement of Alexandria identified them as coming from there (Stromata 1:15), and they were commonly depicted in early Christian art wearing Persian clothing. They may have been members of the original class of magi.

How did they know?

In popular accounts, the Magi are depicted as following the star that brought them to Bethlehem. That has led many to see the star as a supernatural manifestation that moved around in the sky in a way stars don’t.

But this isn’t what Matthew says. He never claims they were following the star, only that it was ahead of them as they went to Bethlehem and that it stood over the house (2:9). This was a providential coincidence.

They weren’t being led by the star for, as Pope Benedict XVI points out, they initially went to Herod’s palace in Jerusalem—the natural place to find a newborn prince (Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, ch. 4). They assumed that Herod the Great or one of his sons had had a baby boy who would grow up to be king. When the magi learned there was no new prince at the palace, they had to consult with the chief priests and scribes to learn where they needed to go: Bethlehem (2:4).

The fact that the chief priests and scribes looked to a well-known prophecy of the birth of the Messiah (Micah 5:2; cf. Matt. 2:6) suggests the Magi could have seen the appearance of the star as signaling not just the birth of an ordinary king but of a particularly great one: the predicted messiah.

Although Magi weren’t following the star, it did tell them when he was born, for they said, “We have seen his star in the East” (2:2).

Recently, scholars have argued that this is a mistranslation and that the Greek phrase rendered “in the East” (en tê anatolê) should instead be “at its rising”—that is, when it rose over the eastern horizon as the Earth turned. Some have argued that this is a technical term for what is known as a star’s heliacal rising, which occurs when it briefly rises above the horizon just before sunrise.

The real question is what told the Magi that the star was significant and why they linked it to a king of the Jews. Here we can only speculate.

The system of constellations in use at the time, which includes our own zodiac, was developed in northern Mesopotamia around 1130 B.C, and Babylonian and Persian astrologers used it.

It’s not surprising that they would associate a particular star with the birth of a king, because at that time astrology was used to forecast national affairs. Horoscopes weren’t normally worked up for the hoi polloi. Heavenly signs were interpreted as having to do with things of importance, such as relations between nations, wars and rebellions, whether the crops would be good or bad, epidemics—and the birth of kings.

What the star they saw might have been is difficult to determine, but one possibility is Jupiter. At that time, Jupiter and the other planets were considered “wandering” stars, since they moved against the backdrop of “fixed” stars.

Unlike some later Greeks, Mesopotamian astrologers didn’t see the stars as controlling events on Earth. Instead, they thought the gods made their wills known through celestial phenomena, so it was a form of divine revelation. Jupiter was associated with Marduk, the king of the Babylonian pantheon, and it was often involved in signs associated with kings. For example, one Babylonian text says that if Jupiter remains in the sky in the morning, enemy kings will be reconciled.

An Assyrian text indicates that if a lunar eclipse takes place and Jupiter is not in the sky, the king will die. To protect the king, the Assyrians came up with an ingenious solution: they took a condemned criminal and made him a temporary, substitute “king” who could then be executed to save the life of the real king!

Whether Jupiter was the star the Magi saw depends on when Jesus was born, and that’s also something scholars debate.

When was Jesus born?

According to the most common account you hear today, Herod the Great died in 4 B.C., so Jesus would have to have been born before this.

In Matthew 2:7, Herod secretly learns from the Magi when the star appeared, and in 2:16, he kills “all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time which he had ascertained from the wise men.” This indicates the star was understood as appearing at Jesus’ birth, which is to be expected, since such portents were associated with births (as opposed to conceptions).

It also indicates that Jesus was born as much as two years before the magi arrived—though it may not have been a full two years, since Herod may have added a “safety” margin to his execution order.

Many scholars have thus proposed that Jesus was born around 7 to 6 B.C., and this is the date we commonly hear.

However, other scholars have argued that a better case can be made that Herod died in 1 B.C. (see Jack Finegan, Handbook of Biblical Chronology, 2nd ed., and Andrew Steinmann, From Abraham to Paul). This likely would put Jesus’ birth in 3 to 2 B.C., which is the year Church Fathers identify as the correct one.

It also fits with Luke’s statement that Jesus was “about thirty years old” when he began his ministry (3:23), shortly after John the Baptist began his in “the fifteenth year of the reign Tiberius Caesar” (3:1)—i.e., A.D. 29. Subtracting 30 from A.D. 29, we land in the year 2 B.C. (bearing in mind that there is no “Year 0” between 1 B.C. and A.D. 1).

What was in the sky?

Regardless of which date of Jesus’ birth is correct, it occurred in the first decade B.C. So what notable astronomical events took place then that could have served as the star of Bethlehem?

A large number have been proposed. The sidebar below contains only some.

One of the most interesting of these events was the rising of Jupiter and Venus on August 12, 3 B.C. Since Babylonian times, Jupiter was seen as a heavenly king, and Venus was seen as a heavenly queen, suggesting a birth. Furthermore, the Babylonians named Regulus (the brightest star in Leo) “the king,” and the lion was a traditional symbol of the tribe of Judah (cf. Gen. 49:9).

Also interesting is what happened on September 11, 3 B.C. In Revelation, John says, “A great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars” (12:1). This woman gives birth to Jesus (12:5). Some have proposed that this encodes information about when he was born: when the sun was in the middle of Virgo (“the virgin”) and thus “clothing” it, with the moon at her feet.

Obviously, we can’t say which if any of these events corresponds to the star of Bethlehem without knowing precisely when Jesus was born. That’s something the Bible doesn’t tell us, and the Church Fathers had different opinions, with only some proposing December 25.

The role of Jewish thought

Thus far, we’ve looked at how the Magi would have interpreted celestial events in terms of established Mesopotamian astrology. This association with paganism gives rise to the question, “Would God really use pagan astrology to signal the birth of his Son?”

That’s a matter for God to decide. Scripture indicates God cares for all people and makes himself known to them in various ways (cf. Rom. 1:19-20). It wouldn’t be so much God using pagan astrology to mark the birth of his Son as choosing to preserve certain true ideas among Gentiles to point to this event.

Also, if the Magi were Persians, they wouldn’t have been polytheists. By this period, the Persians did not believe in the old gods, and their dominant religion was Zoroastrianism. This faith taught the existence of a single, great, all-good creator god to whom they referred as “the Wise Lord” and whom they believed would vanquish evil in the end. They believed in the renovation of the world, the final judgment, and the resurrection of the dead.

If the Magi were Persians, they could have seen themselves as spiritual kin to the Jews and as worshiping the same God—the only true God—using their own terms for him. Additionally, they may well have had contact with Jews living in their own land and thus may have come into contact with biblical revelation that influenced their perception of the star. They could have learned, for example, of the lion as a symbol of Judah, and they could have associated the coming Jewish Messiah with a star.

One of the most famous messianic prophecies is that “a star shall come forth out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel” (Num. 24:17). At that time, this prophecy had long been associated with the Messiah, which is why in the A.D. 130s the messianic pretender Simon bar Kosiba was hailed as “Simon bar Kokhba” (Aramaic, “Simon, son of the Star”).

What about astrology?

What about the role of astrology itself in this account? Although astrology was popular among Gentiles, it wasn’t so among Jews, many of whom looked down on it. This in itself argues that Matthew’s tradition about the magi is historically accurate. It’s not the kind of thing that Jewish Christians would make up.

However, while astrology wasn’t as popular among Jews as among Gentiles, it did exist. Genesis says that God made the sun, moon, and stars “to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years” (1:14). This could mean that they are simply to be timekeeping markers. But some Jews thought that their function as “signs” included information about future events. Thus, the Dead Sea Scrolls contain astrological texts.

In the ancient world, there was no rigid distinction between astronomy and astrology. It’s only in the last few centuries that the two have been disentangled. This happened as scientists discovered what the effects the sun, moon, and stars do and don’t have on life here on Earth.

Even Thomas Aquinas, based on the science of his day, thought that the heavenly bodies had an influence on the passions and could, for example, make a man prone to anger—but not in such a way that it would overwhelm his free will (Commentary on Matthew 2:1-2, ST I:115:4, II-II:95:5).

Subsequent scientific research showed they don’t have this kind of effect, and consulting the stars for these purposes is superstition. Thus, the Catechism of the Catholic Church warns against consulting horoscopes (CCC 2116).

While the stars don’t have the kind of influence many once thought they did, that doesn’t mean God can’t use them to signal major events in his plan of the ages. The fact he signaled the birth of his Son with a star shows he can. This isn’t what people think of as astrology, but it’s part of divine providence.

In fact, this doesn’t appear to be the only time God did something like that. On the day of Pentecost, Peter cited the prophet Joel’s prediction that the moon would be turned to blood as fulfilled in their own day (Joel 2:31-32; Acts 2:20-21). It so happens that on the night of the crucifixion (April 3, A.D. 33) a lunar eclipse was visible from Jerusalem. The moon did turn to blood.

Sidebar: What Could Account for the Star of Bethlehem?

7 B.C.

December 1: Jupiter and Saturn in conjunction

6 B.C.

April 17: Jupiter has its heliacal rising in Ares (a constellation associated with Judaea), with several other significant features in the sky
May 27: Jupiter and Saturn in conjunction
October 6: Jupiter and Saturn in conjunction

5 B.C.

March: A comet in Capricorn

4 B.C.

April: A comet or nova (which one is unclear) in Aquilea

3 B.C.

August 12: Jupiter and Venus rise in the east, in conjunction with each other, in Leo, near Regulus
September 11: The sun in mid-Virgo, with the moon at the feet of Virgo
September 14: Jupiter in conjunction with Regulus

2 B.C.

February 17: Jupiter in conjunction with Regulus
May 8: Jupiter in conjunction with Regulus
June 17: Jupiter in conjunction with Venus

Will There Be Three Days of Darkness?

In certain Catholic prophetic circles, there is a concept known as the “three days of darkness,” according to which a judgment will come upon the earth, and it will be preternaturally shrouded in darkness.

One of the most famous quotations about this event is attributed to the Italian mystic Bl. Anna Maria Taigi (1768-1837). She is said to have stated:

There shall come over the whole earth an intense darkness lasting three days and three nights. Nothing can be seen, and the air will be laden with pestilence which will claim mainly, but not only, the enemies of religion. It will be impossible to use any man-made lighting during this darkness, except blessed candles. He, who out of curiosity, opens his window to look out, or leaves his home, will fall dead on the spot. During these three days, people should remain in their homes, pray the Rosary and beg God for mercy. All the enemies of the Church, whether known or unknown, will perish over the whole earth during that universal darkness, with the exception of a few whom God will soon convert. The air shall be infected by demons who will appear under all sorts of hideous forms.

Another mystic—Marie-Julie Jahenny (1850-1941)—is said to have claimed that only 100% wax candles will work, and this has led to people selling pure beeswax candles to Catholic households for use during the event.

Some Catholics have been very concerned about this event, because if it were to occur—as described—it would be terrifying.

What should we make of the prediction? How credible is it? And what does the Church have to say about it?

The answer to the last question is easy: Nothing. The Church has nothing to say about it. A search of the Vatican web site reveals no occurrences of the phrase “three days of darkness.” The three days of darkness is not a matter of Church teaching.

Can it be supported by the Bible? Web sites advocating the three days of darkness regularly appeal to the ninth plague of the Exodus (Exod. 10:21-29), in which God caused three days of darkness in Egypt. However, this is a reference to a historical event, not a prediction of a future one.

Appeal also is made to Revelation 6:12 and 16:10—the sixth seal and the fifth vial. These chapters in Revelation most likely pertain to events early in Church history, not our future, and while both passages involve darkness, there is no mention of it lasting three days.

Consequently, the Bible does not contain a prediction of the three days of darkness. However, he could still reveal it through credible private revelations, and it is here that we run into a problem. George Ryan—who passes no judgment on the three days of darkness—writes:

The origins of the prophecy are unclear, but it has been attributed to a number of saints and mystics throughout history. Some believe it comes from St. Hildegard of Bingen, while others attribute it to St. Patrick or St. Teresa of Avila.

This is a problem, because if any of these figures predicted the three days of darkness, it should be possible to find the prediction in their writings, and nobody has been able to do so. It thus appears that some advocates of the view have attempted to give it an air of antiquity by associating older saints with it (St. Patrick lived in the 400s, St. Hildegard of Bingen lived in the 1100s, and St. Teresa of Avila lived in the 1500s), even though they made no predictions about it. The idea thus appears to be of more recent origin.

Of course, there are numerous visionaries operating today, and some of them do speak of the three days of darkness. However, what these visionaries have in common is that none of them have been investigated and had their visions approved.

Some visionaries authentically receive private revelations, but some are hoaxers—because hoaxers exist in every age, including our own—while others may be innocently imagining things based on what they have read in visionary literature.

This is why it is important to have competent investigations done rather than simply giving credence to claims of purported revelations (see, for example, the case of the once very popular Canadian mystic Fr. Michel Rodrigue, who was repudiated by his bishops and whose prophecies have subsequently been falsified).

If we set aside disapproved and uninvestigated claims, what are we left with?

Some advocates of the three days of darkness have claimed that St. Pio of Pietrelcina (Padre Pio, 1887-1968) predicted it. However, the quotation was given with no traceable source, and the Capuchin order that he belonged to has denied that he ever made such a prediction. This also appears to be a case of someone trying to lend the prediction credibility by associating it with a popular modern saint.

What about the most famous quotation concerning the three days of darkness—the one we quoted earlier that is attributed to Bl. Anna Maria Taigi?

Various web pages attribute it to a book titled Private Prophecy, which was published in 1863. This is good, because books of that era have been digitized and are searchable online. However, when we check Archive.org or Google Books, they turn up no book by this title. The same is true if you make the title plural—Private Prophecies (Archive.org, Google Books).

One web site lists the book as having the Italian title Profezie Privata and adds that it was published in Rome. However, the same thing happens again on Archive.org and Google Books. There are no books of this title on record.

After considerable searching (including by other means), it appears that this book simply never existed. Perhaps someone saw the above quotation attributed to a private prophecy of Bl. Taigi from 1863 and thought it was a book title.

However, here we encounter another difficulty. The website The Great Catholic Monarch and Angelic Pontiff Prophecies—which supports the three days of darkness—acknowledges that they were not mentioned until 1863 or 1864—26 or 27 years after her death.

During life, Bl. Taigi reportedly saw an orb-like “mystic sun” that revealed things to her about the future, and she told these to her spiritual director, Raffaele Natali. The website states:

There is no question Bl Anna Maria Taigi saw in her mystic sun several visions of “clouds of darkness” and other horrific disasters descending upon the earth during the times of the punishments, this has been mentioned during her beatification process as seen above. However, the mention of a specific time-frame of Three Days for the foretold “purge” of the earth was first allegedly revealed by her spiritual director, D. Raffaele Natali, who was not only her strongest supporter during her beatification process, but also gave ample testimony regarding her visions, for in obedience, she had told him everything.

According to an article in the El Ermitaño, (Nº 155, Oct. 26, 1871), D. Natali revealed the following during c. August of 1864, a year after her beatification process was opened by Bl. Pius IX in 1863:

“It is very true that the venerable Servant of God announced the scourge of the three days of darkness spread over all the earth. . . .

“In these circumstances, the windows should be closed, and leaning over them should be avoided, and it will be imperative to pray the holy Rosary and pray.”

The website also relates an account in which Natali may have mentioned the three days in the previous year (1863).

This raises grave questions about the quotation attributed to Bl. Taigi—as well as any other quotations attributed to her on the three days of darkness.

The idea was apparently related more than a quarter century after her death by a now-elderly spiritual director. We have to take his word for what she told him, and we are at the mercy of his memory and his honesty, as well as the accuracy of the reports concerning what he said.

Under these circumstances, and given the known problems with other quotations on this topic (such as the false Padre Pio quotation), we should not place confidence in any alleged verbatim quotations attributed to Bl. Taigi—especially lengthy ones—in the absence of verifiable documents written during her life.

Then there is the fact that—as far as I have been able to determine—these revelations were not subject to an ecclesiastical investigation into their validity. When a person’s cause for canonization is opened, a check is made to see whether they said anything that contradicted the Faith. However, a judgment is not made about the validity of any revelations they claimed to have received. That is a separate process, which I have no evidence of being performed in this case.

While I may perform more research in the future, thus far I have not been able to verify any reference to the three days of darkness in an approved apparition. Instead, I have found a highly problematic set of quotations and attributions that appear to be the product of the Apparition Rumor Net rather than competent scholarship.

As vivid and compelling as the prediction of the three days of darkness is, I would not recommend that Catholics be terrified of it or that they invest it with credence given the present state of the evidence.

The Woman Caught in Adultery

The two longest passages in the New Testament that have questionable origins are the longer ending of Mark (16:9-20) and the section on the adulteress in John’s Gospel (7:53-8:11). Interestingly, both passages are twelve verses long.

We’ve already discussed the longer ending of Mark, and here we take up the story of the adulteress.

In scholarly circles, it is known as the Pericope Adulterae (from Greek and Latin roots, meaning “the section on the adulteress”; note that pericope is pronounced per-IH-kuh-PEE).

In the story, a woman caught in the act of adultery is brought before Jesus, and his opponents test him by asking what should be done with her. The Mosaic Law prescribed death for such offenses (Lev. 20:10, Deut. 22:22), but Jesus says, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” The opponents then disperse, and afterward Jesus tells the woman to go and sin no more.

It’s a vivid, memorable story, and many people know it today.

So why would anyone question it? The first reason is that it is not in many of the early manuscripts. The New Testament was written in Greek, but the pericope is not found in any surviving manuscripts before Codex Bezae, which dates to the A.D. 400s. This is significant, because John was one of the most popular Gospels in the early centuries—as evidenced by the surviving number of copies of it—and we would expect the pericope to be in other early copies if it was part of the original. The pericope also is missing from some early Latin, Syriac, and Coptic manuscripts.

The second reason the pericope is questioned is that it floats. That is, when it does appear, it’s found in different places. Sometimes it follows John 7:52, sometimes 7:36, sometimes 7:44, sometimes it’s tacked on at the end of John’s Gospel (after 21:25), and sometimes it’s at the end of Luke 21 (following 21:38). This reflects the behavior of scribes trying to fit it into the Gospels and being unsure where to place it.

The third reason is that none of the Greek commentators mention the passage before Euthymius Zigabenus, around A.D. 1118. Although this is an argument from silence, a silence of more than 1,000 years is striking and could suggest that most of these commentators were unfamiliar with the passage.

The fourth reason is that the style of the pericope differs from John’s Greek style. Experts indicate that it doesn’t sound like him. Instead, it sounds more like Luke’s Greek style. However, arguments from style are not particularly strong, and it’s always possible that an author is closely following an earlier source that had a different style.

For the above reasons, most contemporary scholars hold that the pericope was not originally part of John’s Gospel but was added to it at a later date. Consequently, many contemporary Bible translations put the pericope in brackets and have a footnote discussing the issue of its origin.

However, scholars also acknowledge that there is evidence that the story is ancient. The fact that the style is said to sound like Luke and that it is sometimes placed in Luke’s Gospel has led some to suggest that it may have actually been penned by Luke rather than John.

Further, the early second century writer Papias of Hierapolis—who was gathering his data at the end of the first century—may have mentioned the story. In the 300s, the historian Eusebius stated that Papias “has set forth another story about a woman who was accused before the Lord of many sins, which is contained in the Gospel according to the Hebrews” (Church History 3:39).

Some have thought that this may be a reference to the Pericope Adulterae, but this is not certain. While it could have appeared both in John (or Luke) and the Gospel of the Hebrews, if it was the same story, we’d expect Eusebius to refer to it as being found in one of the canonical Gospels. Further, the pericope involves a woman accused of one sin—an act of adultery that she was caught during—not a multitude of sins.

Still, it is possible that this is early evidence for the existence of the story, if not its placement in a canonical Gospel.

Of the arguments against the pericope’s originality to one of the canonical Gospels, the strongest is its absence in early Greek manuscripts. What could explain this?

One possibility is that—after John (or Luke) wrote the passage—an early, influential scribe left it out of his copy, and this affected the copies that followed. That would explain why later scribes weren’t sure where to reinsert it, and it would explain why Greek commentators didn’t mention the passage for so long. The only remaining argument is stylistic in nature, and we’ve mentioned that stylistic arguments tend to be inconclusive.

The major question would be why an early, influential scribe would omit the passage. While scribes do occasionally omit part of a sentence or a verse by accident, the omission of 12 full verses looks deliberate. So what would the reason be?

A key proposal is that it has to do with the subject that the pericope involves: the forgiveness of adultery.

Adultery was regarded as a particularly heinous sin, and some early Christians believed that a person could be sacramentally forgiven of it only once after baptism. Others believed that it required a very lengthy period of penance before reconciliation. And some thought that it could not be forgiven at all.

Around A.D. 220, Tertullian of Carthage was of this view. “Such [sins] are incapable of pardon—murder, idolatry, fraud, apostasy, blasphemy; of course, too, adultery and fornication” (On Modesty 19).

Around 251, St. Cyprian of Carthage wrote that “among our predecessors, some of the bishops here in our province thought that peace was not to be granted to adulterers, and wholly closed the gate of repentance against adultery” (Letter 51:21).

Given the early stage of doctrinal development, the Pericope Adulterae—in which Jesus simply says to the adulteress, “Has no one condemned you? . . . Neither do I condemn you; go, and do not sin again”—could seem shocking and in conflict with what they otherwise believed about forgiving adultery.

Consequently, there could be a motive for early, influential scribes to remove the passage—presumably thinking it had been added by an earlier scribe who was lax on the issue of adultery.

The nature of the passage may also have made some commentators reluctant to discuss it for the same reason.

If the Pericope Adulterae was not originally in one of the Gospels, what is its status as part of the Bible?

A footnote in the New American Bible: Revised Edition states, “The Catholic Church accepts this passage as canonical scripture.”

The basis for this statement is that the Council of Trent infallibly defined that the books of the Catholic canon are “sacred and canonical, these same books entire with all their parts” (Decree Concerning the Canonical Scriptures).

This affirmation is most clearly directed against the views of Protestants who wanted to consider the deuterocanonical portions of Daniel and Esther to be non-inspired.

There was some discussion at the council of the Pericope Adulterae, but the fact that the final decree does not make it clear which “parts” of biblical books it has in mind—beyond those of Daniel and Esther—could be seen as leaving the matter not fully settled.

However, even if the passage was not original to the Gospels, it still may have been written in the apostolic age and could count as inspired scripture.

And even if this were not the case, the passage teaches nothing contrary to the Christian faith. Early authors who were skeptical of forgiveness for adultery were mistaken, and this passage provides a dramatic, memorable illustration of a truth of the faith:

There is no offense, however serious, that the Church cannot forgive. There is no one, however wicked and guilty, who may not confidently hope for forgiveness, provided his repentance is honest. Christ who died for all men desires that in his Church the gates of forgiveness should always be open to anyone who turns away from sin (CCC 982).