Saragossa c. 380 enacted that for 21 days, from the 17th of
December to the 6th of January, the Epiphany, the faithful should
not dance or make merry, but steadily frequent the churches.
The synod of Lerida in 524 went further and forbade marriages
during Advent. Our earliest Spanish lectionary, the Liber
comicus of Toledo, edited by Don Morin (Anecd. Maredsol. vol. i.),
provides lections for five Sundays in Advent, and the gospel
lections[1] chosen regard the Baptism of Christ, not His Birth,
of which the feast, like that of the Annunciation, is mentioned,
but not yet dated, December 25 being assigned to St Stephen.
It is odd that for “the Apparition of the Lord” the lection
Matt. ii. 1-15 is assigned, although the lections for Advent
belong to a scheme which identified Epiphany with the Baptism.
This anomaly we account for below. The old editor of the
Mozarabic Liturgy, Fr. Antonio Lorenzano, notes in his preface
§ 28 that the Spaniards anciently terminated the Advent
season with the Epiphany Feast. In Rome also the earliest
fixed system of the ecclesiastical year, which may go back to 300,
makes Epiphany the caput festorum or chief of feasts. The
Sundays of Advent lead up to it, and the first Sundays of
the year are “The Sunday within the octave of Epiphany,”
“the first Sunday after,” and so forth. December 25 is no
critical date at all. In Armenia as early as 450 a month of
fasting prepared for the Advent of the Lord at Epiphany, and
the fast was interpreted as a reiteration of John the Baptist’s
season of Repentance.
In Antioch as late as about 386 Epiphany and Easter were the two great feasts, and the physical Birth of Christ was not yet feasted. On the eve of Epiphany after nightfall the springs and rivers were blessed, and water was drawn from them and stored for the whole year to be used in lustrations and baptisms. Such water, says Chrysostom, to whose orations we owe the information, kept pure and fresh for one, two and three years, and like good wine actually improved the longer it was kept. Note that Chrysostom speaks of the Feast of the Epiphanies, implying two, one of the Baptism, the other of the Second Advent, when Christ will be manifested afresh, and we with him in glory. This Second Epiphany inspired, as we saw, the choice of Pauline lections in the Liber comicus. But the salient event commemorated was the Baptism, and Chrysostom almost insists on this as the exclusive significance of the feast:—“It was not when he was born that he became manifest to all, but when he was baptized.” In his commentary on Ezekiel Jerome employs the same language absconditus est et non apparuit, by way of protest against an interpretation of the Feast as that of the Birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, which was essayed as early as 375 by Epiphanius in Cyprus, and was being enforced in Jerome’s day by John, bishop of Jerusalem. Epiphanius boldly removed the date of the Baptism to the 8th of November. “January 6” (= Tobi 11), he writes, “is the day of Christ’s Birth, that is, of the Epiphanies.” He uses the plural, because he adds on January 6 the commemoration of the water miracle of Cana. Although in 375 he thus protested that January 6 was the day “of the Birth after the Flesh,” he became before the end of the century a convert, according to John of Nice, to the new opinion that December 25 was the real day of this Birth. That as early as about 385, January 6 was kept as the physical birthday in Jerusalem, or rather in Bethlehem, we know from a contemporary witness of it, the lady pilgrim of Gaul, whose peregrinatio, recently discovered by Gamurrini, is confirmed by the old Jerusalem Lectionary preserved in Armenian.[2] Ephraem the Syrian father is attested already by Epiphanius (c. 375) to have celebrated the physical birth on January 6. His genuine Syriac hymns confirm this, but prove that the Baptism, the Star of the Magi, and the Marriage at Cana were also commemorated on the same day. That the same union prevailed in Rome up to the year 354 may be inferred from Ambrose. Philastrius (De haer. ch. 140) notes that some abolished the Epiphany feast and substituted a Birth feast. This was between 370 and 390.
In 385 Pope Siricius[3] calls January 6 Natalicia, “the Birthday of Christ or of Apparition,” and protests against the Spanish custom (at Tarragona) of baptizing on that day—another proof that in Spain in the 4th century it commemorated the Baptism. In Gaul at Vienna in 360 Julian the Apostate, out of deference to Christian feeling, went to church “on the festival which they keep in January and call Epiphania.” So Ammianus; but Zonaras in his Greek account of the event calls it the day of the Saviour’s Birth.
Why the feast of the Baptism was called the feast or day of the Saviour’s Birth, and why fathers of that age when they call Christmas the birthday constantly qualify and add the words “in the flesh,” we are able to divine from Pope Leo’s (c. 447) 18th Epistle to the bishops of Sicily. For here we learn that in Sicily they held that in His Baptism the Saviour was reborn through the Holy Spirit. “The Lord,” protests Leo, “needed no remission of sins, no remedy of rebirth.” The Sicilians also baptized neophytes on January 6, “because baptism conveyed to Jesus and to them one and the same grace.” Not so, argues Leo, the Lord sanctioned and hallowed the power of regeneration, not when He was baptized, but “when the blood of redemption and the water of baptism flowed forth from his side.” Neophytes should therefore be baptized at Easter and Pentecost alone, never at Epiphany.
Fortune has preserved to us among the Spuria of several Latin fathers, Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome and Maximus of Turin, various homilies for Sundays of the Advent fast and for Epiphany. The Advent lections of these homilists were much the same as those of the Spanish Liber comicus; and they insist on Advent being kept as a strict fast, without marriage celebrations. Their Epiphany lection is however Matt. iii. 1-17, which must therefore have once on a time been assigned in the Liber comicus also in harmony with its general scheme. The psalms used on the day are, cxiii. (cxiv.) “When Israel went forth,” xxviii. (xxix.) “Give unto the Lord,” and xxii. (xxiii.) “the Lord is my Shepherd.” The same lection of Matthew and also Ps. xxix. are noted for Epiphany in the Greek oration for the day ascribed to Hippolytus, which is at least earlier than 300, and also in special old Epiphany rites for the Benediction of the waters found in Latin, Greek, Armenian, Coptic, Syriac, &c. Now by these homilists as by Chrysostom,[4] the Baptism is regarded as the occasion on which “the Saviour first appeared after the flesh in the world or on earth.” These words were classical to the homilists, who explain them as best they can. The baptism is also declared to have been “the consecration of Christ,” and “regeneration of Christ and a strengthening of our faith,” to have been “Christ’s second nativity.” “This second birth hath more renown than his first . . . for now the God of majesty is inscribed (as his father), but then (at his first birth) Joseph the Carpenter was assumed to be his father ... he hath more honour who cries aloud from Heaven (viz. God the Father), than he who labours upon earth” (viz. Joseph).[5]
Similarly the old ordo Romanus of the age of Pepin (given by Montfaulcon in his preface to the Mozarabic missal in Migne, Patr. Latina, 85, col. 46), under the rubric of the Vigil of the Theophany, insists that “the second birth of Christ (in Baptism) being distinguished by so many mysteries (e.g. the miracle of Cana) is more honoured than the first” (birth from Mary).
These homilies mostly belong to an age (? 300–400) when the commemoration of the physical Birth had not yet found its own day (Dec. 25), and was therefore added alongside of the Baptism on January 6. Thus the two Births, the physical and the
- ↑ These are Matt. iii. 1-11, xi. 2-15, xxi. 1-9; Mark i. 1-8; Luke iii. 1-18. The Pauline lections regard the Epiphany of the Second Advent, of the prophetic or Messianic kingdom.
- ↑ Translated in Rituale Armenorum (Oxford, 1905).
- ↑ Epist. ad Himerium, c. 2.
- ↑ Hom. I. in Pentec. op. tom. ii. 458; “With us the Epiphanies is the first festival. What is this festival’s significance? This, that God was seen upon earth and consorted with men.” For this idea there had soon to be substituted that of the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles.
- ↑ See the Paris edition of Augustine (1838), tom. v., Appendix, Sermons cxvi., cxxv., cxxxv., cxxxvi., cxxxvii.; cf. tom. vi. dial. quaestionum, xlvi.; Maximus of Turin, Homily xxx.
