spiritual, of Jesus were celebrated on one and the same day,
and one homily contains the words: “Not yet is the feast of
his origin fully completed, and already we have to celebrate the
solemn commemoration of his Baptism. He has hardly been
born humanwise, and already he is being reborn in sacramental
wise. For to-day, though after a lapse of many annual cycles,
he was hallowed (or consecrated) in Jordan. So the Lord
arranged as to link rite with rite; I mean, in such wise as to be
brought forth through the Virgin and to be begotten through
the mystery (i.e. sacrament) in one and the same season.”
Another homily preserved in a MS. of the 7th or 8th
century and assigned to Maximus of Turin declares that the
Epiphany was known as the Birthday of Jesus, either because
He was then born of the Virgin or reborn in baptism. This also
was the classical defence made by Armenian fathers of their
custom of keeping the feast of the Birth and Baptism together
on January 6. They argued from Luke’s gospel that the
Annunciation took place on April 6, and therefore the Birth
on January 6. The Baptism was on Christ’s thirtieth birthday,
and should therefore be also kept on January 6. Cosmas Indicopleustes
(c. 550) relates that on the same grounds believers of
Jerusalem joined the feasts. All such reasoning was of course
après coup. As late as the 9th century the Armenians had at
least three discrepant dates for the Annunciation—January 5,
January 9, April 6; and of these January 5 and 9 were older
than April 6, which they perhaps borrowed from Epiphanius’s
commentary on the Gospels. The old Latin homilist, above
quoted, hits the mark when he declares that the innate logic
of things required the Baptism (which must, he says, be any how
called a natal or birth festival) to fall on the same day as Christmas—Ratio
enim exigit. Of the argument from the 6th of April
as the date of the Annunciation he knows nothing. The 12th
century Armenian Patriarch Nerses, like this homilist, merely
rests his case against the Greeks, who incessantly reproached
the Armenians for ignoring their Christmas on December 25,
on the inherent logic of things, as follows:
“Just as he was born after the flesh from the holy virgin, so he was born through baptism and from the Jordan, by way of example unto us. And since there are here two births, albeit differing one from the other in mystic import and in point of time, therefore it was appointed that we should feast them together, as the first, so also the second birth.”
The Epiphany feast had therefore in its own right acquired the name of natalis dies or birthday, as commemorating the spiritual rebirth of Jesus in Jordan, before the natalis in carne, the Birthday in the flesh, as Jerome and others call it, was associated with it. This idea was condemned as Ebionite in the 3rd century, yet it influences Christian writers long before and long afterwards. So Tertullian says: “We little fishes (pisciculi), after the example of our great fish (ἰχθύν) Jesus Christ the Lord, are born (gignimur) in the water, nor except by abiding in the water are we in a state of salvation.” And Hilary, like the Latin homilists cited above, writes of Jesus that “he was born again through baptism, and then became Son of God,” adding that the Father cried, when he had gone up out of the water, “My Son art thou, I have this day begotten thee” (Luke iii. 22). “But this,” he adds, “was with the begetting of a man who is being reborn; on that occasion too he himself was being reborn unto God to be perfect son; as he was son of man, so in baptism, he was constituted son of God as well.” The idea frequently meets us in Hilary; it occurs in the Epiphany hymn of the orthodox Greek church, and in the Epiphany hymns and homilies of the Armenians.
A letter is preserved by John of Nice of a bishop of Jerusalem to the bishop of Rome which attests a temporary union of both feasts on January 6 in the holy places. The faithful, it says, met before dawn at Bethlehem to celebrate the Birth from the Virgin in the cave; but before their hymns and lections were finished they had to hurry off to Jordan, 13 m. the other side of Jerusalem, to celebrate the Baptism, and by consequence neither commemoration could be kept fully and reverently. The writer therefore begs the pope to look in the archives of the Jews brought to Rome after the destruction of Jerusalem, and to ascertain from them the real date of Christ’s birth. The pope looked in the works of Josephus and found it to be December 25. The letter’s genuineness has been called in question; but revealing as it does the Church’s ignorance of the date of the Birth, the inconvenience and precariousness of its association with the Baptism, the recency of its separate institution, it could not have been invented. It is too tell-tale a document. Not the least significant fact about it is that it views the Baptism as an established feast which cannot be altered and set on another date. Not it but the physical birth must be removed from January 6 to another date. It has been shown above that perhaps as early as 380 the difficulty was got over in Jerusalem by making the Epiphany wholly and solely a commemoration of the miraculous birth, and suppressing the commemoration of the Baptism. Therefore this letter must have been written—or, if invented, then invented before that date. Chrysostom seems to have known of it, for in his Epiphany homily preached at Antioch, c. 392 (op. vol. ii. 354, ed. Montf.), he refers to the archives at Rome as the source from which the date December 25 could be confirmed, and declares that he had obtained it from those who dwell there, and who observing it from the beginning and by old tradition, had communicated it to the East. The question arises why the feast of the Baptism was set on January 6 by the sect of Basilides? And why the great church adopted the date? Now we know what sort of considerations influenced this sect in fixing other feasts, so we have a clue. They fixed the Birth of Jesus on Pachon 25 (= May 20), the day of the Niloa, or feast of the descent of the Nile from heaven. We should thus expect January 6 to be equally a Nile festival. And this from various sources we know it was. On Tobi 11, says Epiphanius[1] (c. 370), every one draws up water from the river and stores it up, not only in Egypt itself, but in many other countries. In many places, he adds, springs and rivers turn into wine on this day, e.g. at Cibyra in Caria and Gerasa in Arabia. Aristides Rhetor (c. 160) also relates how in the winter, which began with Tobi, the Nile water was at its purest. Its water, he says, if drawn at the right time conquers time, for it does not go bad, whether you keep it on the spot or export it. Galleys were waiting on a certain night to take it on board and transport it to Italy and elsewhere for libations and lustrations in the Temples of Isis. “Such water,” he adds, “remained fresh, long after other water supplies had gone bad. The Egyptians filled their pitchers with this water, as others did with wine; they stored it in their houses for three or four years or more, and recommended it the more, the older it grew, just as the Greeks did their wines.”
Two centuries later Chrysostom, as we have seen, commends in identical terms the water blessed and drawn from the rivers at the Baptismal feast. It is therefore probable that the Basilidian feast was a Christianized form of the blessing of the Nile, called by Chabas in his Coptic calendar Hydreusis. Mas‘ūdī the Arab historian of the 10th century, in his Prairies d’or (French trans. Paris, 1863, ii. 364), enlarges on the splendours of this feast as he saw it still celebrated in Egypt.
Epiphanius also (Haer. 51) relates a curious celebration held at Alexandria of the Birth of the Aeon. On January 5 or 6 the votaries met in the holy compound or Temple of the Maiden (Korē), and sang hymns to the music of the flute till dawn, when they went down with torches into a shrine under ground, and fetched up a wooden idol on a bier representing Korē, seated and naked, with crosses marked on her brow, her hands and her knees. Then with flute-playing, hymns and dances they carried the image seven times round the central shrine, before restoring it again to its dwelling-place below. He adds: “And the votaries say that to-day at this hour Korē, that is, the Virgin, gave birth to the Aeon.”
Epiphanius says this was a heathen rite, but it rather resembles some Basilidian or Gnostic commemoration of the spiritual birth of the Divine life in Jesus of the Christhood, from the older creation the Ecclesia.
The earliest extant Greek text of the Epiphany rite is in a
- ↑ Perhaps Epiphanius is here, after his wont, transcribing an earlier source.
