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Which has precious nothing to do with the article that I presented or what I was talking about.

Mary

There are a number of good books which will explain the liturgical year in the east. You really ought to read one or even two of them before you come here to teach.

Mary

Dr. Eric. The beginning of the year on Pascha has to do with the lections being read. The readings for Pascha (what byzcaths and orthodx call teh feast of feasts) had readings assigned to it centuries before there was a Byzantine Empire. The early Christians were former Jews who followed their own calendar, no a civil one (especially a Roman Civil one!). I would think the early Christians inherited a Jewish way with things - including a great collection of Holy Writ. The Gospels were written, according to Spong (oh boy!), as proclamation lessons on the Torah; they individually followed the Jewish feasts witht the calendar working backwards from Pascha. The passoin narratives were written first then the journey story (from Galilee to Jerusalem - where Matthew added his teaching material to lengthen Mark's short Gospel) then the beginnings of Jesus' Galilee mission to surpass John the Baptist' work then Matthew and Luke wrote a nativity story to complete. john went one step further and gave us a pre-incarnation story. Jesus came down from heaven. The order of teh Gospel story is reversed order of the order it was written; a progressive regression so to speak.

We have to consider the order of lections as they occured BEFORE a Byzantine new year custom.

What do byzcaths and orthodox observe on September 1: the environment. Christ may not be risen; but the trees are certainly green! Is environmentalism the centerpiece of Eastern Christian liturgical life and Holy Writ?

Your thoughts.

Eddie

Mary. You are a dear and sweet woman of strong faith. God loves you and so do I.

Eddie

And we can safely leave all that to God.

As for your understanding of the Catholic liturgical year, you really do need to go and read a book because what you are doing here is sheer and utter fiction.

http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/ecumenism/calsci_ch4.aspx

Mary

Ed,

I agree with Mary, you assume that we continued as Jewish, when we quickly adopted other rituals. Especially as contact with us Gentiles happened.

No Judaizing for us!!! No Shofar, no Yom Kippur, none of that!

Mary,

In defense of what I have posted, I have always claimed that (1) it was only a theory because (2) no one really knows about the origins of the Gospels � from a literary point. Source criticism and textual criticism aside, the Gospels are something more. If we knew (2) for certain than we would have no reason for (1).

I read the article you linked and did learn some things about the byzcath and orthodox church calendar. I single out those points that speak about the connections with our Jewish past which Dr. Eric has a problem with. Over time, the church incorporated civil calendars (i.e., Julian and Byzantine types) but that really didn�t alter the liturgical cycles inherited from our Semitic past. The fact that byzcaths and orthodox still begin their liturgical �day� at sundown calls to mind the Jewish day. It was a byzcath priest who taught that your Lenten season uses the Roman civil �day�.

Gradually, the �Christ�ians went their separate ways from the non-Christ believing Jews. But the early Christians were actually Jews. Jesus was a Jew. Mary was a Jew. The Apostles were Jews. Saint James, the first shepherd of the Jerusalem community, worshipped in the Jerusalem Temple. Christ-believers continued to worship in synagogues and only later combined their service with the Lord�s Supper meal. Then it became common to worship on the Lord�s Day, Sunday.

From Pentecost to the Great Separation between Christ-believers and Jews, the church modeled its worship on what it already knew. Who the �true� Jew was became the battle. The synagogue service and the lectionary cycle of the Torah readings became the ice-cube tray for how the Gospels were structured. Call it midrash or not, the Jewish-Christians saved their lessons and the Gospel writers put them in proper order (read Luke�s introduction to Chapter 1 of his Gospel). This order was to suit the needs of worship. This is where Gospel happened; in the context of the Christ-believing community.

Here are those points (quotes) that I noticed from the article you suggested that I read. It was very good.

1. "Summoned in Nicaea, a town of Asia Minor, the week before the Feast of Pentecost in 325, this celebrated Synod not only defended some of the most important dogmatic principles of Christianity, but also appropriated the Julian Calendar for ecclesiastical use by conjoining it to the Jewish Calendar in the establishment of a uniform calculation of Pascha�the Paschalion�,"

2. "Distinct from this immovable cycle of Feasts is the Paschal cycle, which derives from and is linked to the ancient Jewish Calendar."

3. "The Word of God incarnate was a Jew, Who obeyed the requirements of the Old Testament, because He did not come to destroy the Law, but to fulfill it."

4. "The Church Calendar is thus a combination of two harmoniously interwoven cycles, the Menaion cycle, which utilizes the solar Julian Calendar, and the Paschal cycle, which relies on the lunar Jewish Calendar, and it is only under these names that the Church Calendar is encountered in service books."

5. "In the immediate centuries after Christ, Christianity quickly spread throughout the Empire (and beyond). The impediments to communication at the time, however, allowed local traditions to develop an undue strength. So it was that the early Christians did not necessarily celebrate Pascha at the same time."

6. "Moreover, when the Evangelical sequence of events between the Jewish Passover and the Christian Pascha is maintained as it is in the Nicene Paschalion, over the course of time, the Jewish and Christian feasts gradually move apart from each other, precisely because the lagging of the Julian Calendar behind the vernal equinox is slightly greater than that of the Jewish Calendar."

7. "Furthermore, the drawing apart of the Jewish Passover from the Orthodox Pascha has deep theological significance, clearly indicating the proportionally increasing hostility over the centuries of Judaism towards Christianity."

8. "this chronological distancing of the central Orthodox Feast from the Jewish one providentially signifies the spiritual distance between these faiths, viz., that Orthodoxy has nothing in common with Judaism. For the adherents of the Gregorian Paschalion, just the opposite is the case, since they often celebrate their Easter together with, or before, the Jewish Passover."

I believe that the Eastern byzcaths and orthodox still observe many customs inherited from the Jews. I mentioned their �day� which begins at sundown, but there is also the Bible that the early Christians (and Jews!) read from; the one that all four Gospel writers used in writing their texts � the Septuagint. I�ve read a good number of Evangelical, Baptist, and Bible-Christian books and many have stated emphatically that the Septuagint was the basis of the New Testament.

Do byzcaths read from the Septuagint or use it in their worship?

As you can read above, the early Christians, nay, the byzcaths and orthodox have Judaism running in their spiritual blood. As one former Pope stated, you are all �spiritual Semites�

Dr. Eric. No one is forcing you to become a Jew. This is not about Judaizing or challenging anti-Semitic fears.

Eddie Hashinsky

Dear E,

Dr. Eric does not have a problem with our Jewish past. He has a problem with your pronouncements about the eastern liturgical calendar and your imposition of your pet theory on the Catholic Church, east and west, papal or Orthodox. I am sure that he is already sorry that he spoke in haste using a short cut rather than writing pages of preemtive text to forstall another set of irrelevant extemporizing from your quarter.

You are also aware the the Catholic west is very much attuned to her Hebrew past as it is expressed in rite and ritual? Every bit as much as the east is aware of similar ties.

The Septuagint clearly is a source document for explicitly Catholic Scripture. You will find that both east and west have been willing to use other texts to correct the Septuagint, if other texts are the consistant ones and the Septuagint falls out of line for some reason.

So it is only very recently, since Orthodoxy in this country has become a heavily protestant convert confession, that the scriptural theory of sola Septuagint has begun to become the expressed ideal.

It is still not the reality of things, because there are still Orthodox scholars who are willing to correct translations using other texts. But I am not active enough in that highly specialized forum in Orthodoxy to give you specifics. At the moment there is no definitive Orthodox bible.

So there's really not much point giving yards of attention to someone wedded to a non-Catholic theory, when I have my Church's long history of dealing with these issues and doing well with them, enough to have survived the liberal on-slaught of the 20th century and held firm to her traditions concerning Scripture, since no new real evidence has been presented to contradict Catholic scriptural traditions.

There are many Catholic articles on Scripture on the Internet and they appear at the touch of a Google For a perspective outside of the secular approach to scripture, I recommend the work of Father William Most.

Mary

glad to see that I am not the only Catholic who sees "Q" as at best, a hypothesis. yes, I see Matthew as the first Gospel, which further debunks "Q", as many liberals claim that Mark was the source for not only Matthew, but Luke as well. as far as my education in this area goes, I sat at the feet of unabashedly Fundamental Baptist profs in seminary, as I have noted in other posts in other topics not a few times.
while we are on the subject of "Q", my profs and I do not hold to the Wellhausen Documentary Hypothesis of Torah, which fractures Torah into layers and fragments (a reflection of Hegelian evolutionary thought) no more than we hold to the "Q" idea. while admittedly this is straying form the subject of the NT, it is still part and parcel as how we Orthodox (whether in communion with Rome, Constantinople or whoever)need to see Holy Writ.
Much Love,
Jonn

Mary,
Thanks for this insight. I had seen a number of posts on these forums, and was wondering what the urgency about a new translation of the LXX was all about. The LXX, as a Jewish translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, and as the text quoted by the writers of the NT, has always been a highly respected text in the Catholic tradition, not least because the meaning of not a few of the Koine terms in the NT can best be understood by seeing their usage in the LXX.

And by "this country" you mean the USA?

Yes, primarily, to your question. There's no diminishment intended in my comments on the Septuagint, of course. It is clearly a pivotal text.

Mary

Since my mentor and my future "landlord" are both Jewish plastic surgeons. I take that as an insult and DEMAND a retraction!

You obviously don't know the difference between being Jewish and holding onto the Judaizing heresy.

Pat Robertson, Chuck Hagee, Kenneth Copeland, to name a few, are encouraging protestants and fundamentalists to adopt practices from Judaism to supplement the lack of ritual in the lecture style of American protestantism.

If you want a verse by verse reason why what they are doing is wrong, you'll have to wait as I am taking my kids outside to play.

Ed Hash is also invoking Godwin's Law.

Dr. Eric. you should mind your tone, especially about Jews. you spoke as if Jews had diseases. if you didn't want your words to be taken as an insult to the Jews then you should express yourself with more care. It is good thta you are not anti-Semitic.


You have obviously gone off the cuff swinging. I only ask that you read what i wrote, not what you are reading into it. That would be called eisegesis. I am talking about the Jewish traditions that the early Christians inherited. One orthodox priest wrote about his experience of attending an orthodox church service (when he was a Jew). He claimed that it was so Jewish.


That is interesting. I've never heard them teach before so I won't know what they are attempting.


Don't bother.

Eddie

Thank you, Mary, for mentioning Father William Most. I have a lot of his writings with me.

i would like to quote a few Most lines from one of his papers on source criticism. I think you will find thta his conclusion is similat to mine - we don't really know. no one does. It is al ltheories from literary studies and speculation.

Here are the main points I pulled from his one article.


Most--->
[11] A key question concerns the order in which the three Synoptics were written.

[15] Numerous solutions to the problem have been proposed. For our purpose, we can reduce the choices to a few general types.

Proponents of the oral-catechesis theory think that teaching on the words and deeds of Jesus was given in a more or less fixed, stereotyped form, both in Aramaic and in Greek.

[16] Another theory proposes mutual dependence of the Evangelists.

[17] A more refined view says that an Aramaic or Hebrew Matthew came first and that various complete or incomplete Greek translations were made from it.

[18] A variation on this theme is the theory that Luke used Matthew and that Mark used both Matthew and Luke.

[19] That Mark wrote first is almost universally accepted today as is the dependence of Luke on Mark.

[20] The third type of solution is the two-source theory. According to it, Mark wrote first, using oral tradition. But at almost the same time there arose a sayings source called Q (for German Quelle, "source").

[21] We cannot offer a definitive solution-no one can.


IN conclussion #21 says the most (no pun intended!). WE CANNOT OFFER A DEFINITIVE SOLUTION. Even your Matthean priority is only a theory, not a dogma of any religion.

Once again thank you for helping me bring this out.

but my posts here reflects another theory, one thta does not rely on traditional biblical criticism. The basis for writing the Gospels is centered on the worshipping community and its needs after the Resurrection - and Pentecost. Christians were Christians before the New Testament was written and later combined. What is important, Mary, is not a belief in a single theory of Gospel origins (many of which are shared between Catholic and non-Cathlic Christians), but the Resurrection faith. Don't you byzcaths and orthodox greet each other with "Christ is risen!" instead of "Matthew came first!"???

Eddie