Does John begin His Gospel in the name of the Trinity? “The Word was with God” (Father); “The Word was God” (Jesus the same substance of the Father); “He was in the beginning with God (is this the Holy Spirit or just another reference to the Father?)

Here are some web clips.

When the calendar system of Anno Domini was first introduced by Dionysius Exiguus in AD 525, he assigned the beginning of the new year to March 25, since according to Christian theology, the era of grace began with the Incarnation of Christ.

Scholars are not completely sure whether the date of the Annunciation influenced the date of Christmas, or vice-versa. Before the Church adopted fixed days of celebration, early Christians speculated on the dates of major events in Jesus’ life. Second-century Latin Christians in Rome and North Africa tried to find the day in which Jesus died. By the time of Tertullian (d. AD 225) they had concluded that he died on Friday, March 25, AD 29 (incidentally, this is an impossibility, since March 25 in the year AD 29 was not a Friday). How does the day of Jesus’ death relate to the day of his conception? It comes from the Jewish concept of the “integral age” of the great Jewish prophets. This is the notion that the prophets of Israel died on the same dates as their birth or conception. Therefore, if Jesus died on March 25, he was also conceived that day.

St. Ephraim the Syrian taught that the date of the conception of Jesus Christ fell on 10 Nisan on the Hebrew Calendar, the day in which the passover lamb was selected according to Exodus 12. Some years 10 Nisan falls on March 25, which is the tradition date for the Feast of the Annunciation.

Anyhow the date for the Annunciation was set before there was a German Lutheran church.

By the Way it only snows about once a year in London and then only a trace.

It points out the importance all the more of getting to the heart of Christmas in the incarnation.

By the way — off point — years ago I made a call on a visitor to my vicarage church. She had a very large white Bible on the coffee table. I asked if she ever read it. Her response was without hesitation and very sincere – I don’t need to read it because I watch the movies.

Donkeys and oxen are natural guesses if you are depicting a manger scene. The earliest representation appears to be a fourth-century sarcophagus now in Milan (see Elliott and Cartlidge, Art and the Christian Apocrypha, 17-18). All is fair game homiletically, I guess, but the gospels clearly teach Christ’s mastery over and harmony with creation in other places (calming of the storm, for example). That is not, however, a point that either Matthew or Luke makes in the birth narratives. Again, let’s read the text, and let the word shape our life.

As to the specific day of Jesus’ birth, the springtime dating is pretty standard. I don’t know the origins of the Annunciation dating, but it looks rather like someone calculated back from Dec 25, not the other way around. No reason to celebrate an annunciation if you’re not celebrating a birth. And, on the annunciation also, take a look at the Elliott/Cartlidge book for the development of the imagery of that event in later Christian literature and art.

The artwork from Dura-Europos has been at Yale since the 1930s, should be there for a long time yet, so no hurries. Safe travels.

This is kind of a minor point, but I want to say a word in defense of the ox and ass. I wouldn’t call them fictitious so much as homiletical. They may not occur in the Gospels, but they are certainly biblical. The original source for this pair is not Pseudo-Matthew, but (as Pseudo-Matthew cites) Isaiah 1:3 (“The ox knows its owner and the donkey its master’s crib, but Israel does not know, my people do not understand”). The association between Isaiah 1:3 and the Nativity significantly predates Pseudo-Matthew. Augustine and Gregory Nazianzen both make the connection in their Christmas preaching. And I seem to recall that the ox and the ass also occur in the earliest (fourth century?) artistic representations of the Nativity. The presence of these animals at the manger is a shorthand for prophetic fulfillment, as well as a Christological confession: the donkey knows “την ϕατνην του κυριου” (LXX). All of this is indicative of a reading of scripture that, if not strictly historical, is richly intertextual and profoundly theological . . . and, I would argue, ultimately truer than the reading produced by a nude historicism.

I have been teaching my people that the date of the Annunciation pre-dates the northern Germanic tribes. December 25 is nine months later.

While I too struggle to bring the full weight of the law to our celebrations I am not sure the corporate greed is the best target to set up the Christmas Gospel. If the Good News is that God has become man the bad news should be along the lines that man is not that good at being man. What does that mean? How can the excited child hear that man is sinful? I don’t think we should give up on the children in this season but take them in our arms and bless them. Put flesh on your Christmas Gospel and enjoy it.