Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Welcome back to The Lord of Spirits podcast. Merry Christmas! I’m Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick on the edge of Pennsylvania Dutch country in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and with me is my co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, broadcasting from the middle of Cajun country in Lafayette, Louisiana. This is a pre-recorded episode of the podcast, so even though you’re going to hear the Voice of Steve telling you how to call in, if you call during this episode, you’re not going to get anybody. Everybody’s either having some kind of Christmas Eve dinner or at church or something like that. So, yeah, this is a pre-recorded episode, but we have tried to incorporate some of your pre-recorded messages that you sent us. So it’s a little bit different, but this is going to be a great episode, and I think you’re going to enjoy this one. This is our Christmas special.

In response to a Judean uprising, the Romans leveled Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple in the year 70, later renaming the city to Aelia Capitolina and refusing re-entry to any Jews. But less well-known, however during this period of Judean revolt from AD 66-73 is that the Romans also invaded Galilee in AD 67. During the first century, the Romans leveled and rebuilt a number of places in the Holy Land. This was the Roman way of letting the local populace know that their rule and culture would dominate and brook no competition.

A paradoxical benefit to this campaign of leveling and burying of settlements is that many places have been preserved and are now being excavated by archaeologists, and among those places are synagogues in the area of Galilee, where Jesus Christ was raised and where he himself would have entered for prayer and teaching. So if we imagine for a moment Jesus entering into one of those Galilean synagogues, we can see in our minds the stone construction, details like the names of donors and important community members inscribed in mosaics. But there’s something else in the mosaics that have been unearthed in our time that may surprise and even shock you.

When Christ entered to pray, and even to preach, in nearly any Galilean synagogue in the first century, quite prominently displayed in mosaic would have been an image of the twelve signs of the zodiac. What could this possibly mean? Were ancient Judeans syncretistically incorporating pagan astrology into their synagogues? And if so, why didn’t Jesus protest this? Astrology means stars, and of course we all know that Christmas famously involves a star, the star of Bethlehem. For this very special Christmas episode of The Lord of Spirits, we’re going to be talking astrology.

So, Fr. Stephen, why would first-century Jews put zodiac imagery in their synagogue? [Laughter] What’s that about?

Fr. Stephen De Young: It turns out Jewish astrology is a thing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s Jewish astrology.

Fr. Stephen: And not just sort of some medieval thing that happened in western Europe where Jewish people sort of took on astrology as it existed in sort of alchemical circles or hermetic circles or as an esoteric thing, but goes back all the way to ancient Israel and basically all of ancient Israel’s neighbors, the Ancient Near East, having a firm sense of what we would now call astrology. So we’ve read a bunch of times—we won’t read it again, because it’s long—but we’ve read several times about the sun, moon, and stars and angelic beings that quote from Philo of Alexandria, where he’s talking about, really, this difference: the difference between, or the nuances between the Jewish view of the sun, moon, and stars and therefore astrology, and the more general pagan view. But we may recall that in that quote he talks about how the sun, moon, and stars aren’t sort of… He calls them gods—he doesn’t hesitate to do that—but they’re aren’t gods in the sense of being worshiped and being sort of independent powers in the heavens, separate from Yahweh, the God of Israel, but that they are sort of lesser-ranking officials in his divine government over the creation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so both Jews and pagans have in common this idea that heavenly bodies are closely associated with divine beings, but the difference is that you don’t worship them if you’re the worshiper of the one true God. And you’re not subject to them either, right? which is really important for what we’re going to be talking about tonight.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Well, not in the same sense. There is still that… They are still part of the government.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so in a lesser way you’re under their authority, but they’re not controlling your life.

Fr. Stephen: Right. The language of the sun to rule the day and the moon and stars to rule the night is all over the place in the Old Testament. We gloss over that “rule” verb very quickly, but it actually is there. What Philo really wants to hammer on is that they’re not independent, meaning God rules and acts through them. They don’t sort of act on their own or have their own authority or control.

Fr. Andrew: Right. They’re his emissaries or exarchs or ambassadors or however you want to put it.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this isn’t just talking about the individual stars and the sun and moon. For example, in the book of Jubilees, which is one of the many Old Testament-adjacent texts in the Orthodox Church—if you are Ethiopian, then it’s in your Old Testament; otherwise, it’s adjacent—in Jubilees 12:14, it says, “All the signs of the stars and the signs of the moon and of the sun are all in the hand of the Lord.” And the “signs” language there is important. It’s not just the sun, moon, and stars, but the signs of the sun and the moon and the stars, meaning their movements, their positions, their tracks.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, now we’re talking astronomy, sort of; at least that’s how we’d understand it in the modern world, as these things moving around, or appearing to move around from our point of view. But for ancient people, they saw them moving. I mean, they understood that they were in motion.

Fr. Stephen: And this is one of the big barriers for us as modern people trying to read Ancient Near Eastern texts. To put a fine point on it, we don’t know much or care much about ancient astrology; we’ve kind of written it off as… As we’ve talked about on the show, sort of as materialists we’ve written off a lot of ancient things as silliness and superstition, but astrology is probably Exhibit A. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I think that just as we’ve talked about, for instance, the modern view of ancient pagan gods is like: “Oh, look at those ancient pagans. They saw lightning and thunder and earthquakes and the ocean, and they made up gods to explain all that.” I think the modern view of ancient astrology is: “Oh look, ancient peoples looked up at the sky, and they saw the stars and the sun and the moon moving around, and they assumed that they could sort of read some kind of… It’s like fortune-telling, like they could read something in there. Or since they saw them moving around, they assumed that they must have some direct influence on us.” A modern person then says, “Okay, yes, maybe some distant star is actually exerting gravitational force on you, but it’s so microscopic there’s no way it’s going to determine your personality and the outcome of your life, much less coming up with a horoscope that shows up in the daily paper.” It just becomes kind of a big joke, because of course we’re scientific and know that you can’t read the future by looking up at constellations.

But that’s not the way that ancient astrology actually worked, right? That’s not what they understood themselves to be doing.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and when you look at any Ancient Near Eastern text, just to take an example that we referred to before: we referred to back in “The Five(ish) Falls of the Angels” episode, when we were talking about the fall of the devil and we were talking about the different accounts of that in the Old Testament, one in Isaiah that refers to him as Helel ben Shakhar that would later get translated Lucifer, son of the Morning. That the Helel ben Shakhar language and the way it’s told in Isaiah seems to draw on ancient texts about the fall of the god Enlil.

So just to use those Enlil texts as an example of this, on earth there is what we would call a political shift at that time, where Babylon in particular takes political supremacy away from Sumeria. So there’s this shift in the power-base from one city to another within Mesopotamia. We would say there’s a political shift. Then, mythologically, there are stories that the god Enlil, of the cities that are losing power, sort of falls, ends up in the underworld, and is replaced in his position in the council of gods by another god—by Marduk in this case. And then there is also, layered into the text, various astrological signs that this has happened, where stars and constellations that are related to these gods change their position in the heavens, and these are seen to be signs of this shift that has happened in the council of the gods.

That even bleeds into the biblical account, because he’s Lucifer, son of the Morning: he’s associated with the morning star, which is the planet Venus, strictly speaking. So even that astrological connection comes over into the Prophet Isaiah’s reference to it. But within these Enlil texts, the writer—and the reader—moves back and forth between these layers, sort of what we would call the political layer, what we would call the mythological layer or the mythical layer, and the astrological layer: back and forth. These are all interrelated and mirror—they’re like layered transparencies, one over the other.

Fr. Andrew: It’s like one sort of set of events that’s playing out both in heaven and on earth at the same time.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, in heaven, earth, and the heavens! In all three, because it’s all connected; because it’s all connected, and they move back and forth. In our modern materialist view, we of course have separated these things, so we’ve got the political, the religious, astrology that we would assign to superstition. And we separate these things. And if you’re a real materialist you say, “Only the political one is real. The other ones are just sort of imaginary and are just being used to justify things in the political realm or explain things in the political realm, but they’re not real.” But for ancient people, all three of these are real, and you sort of have to have all three transparencies layered over each other to look at it and see the whole event and really understand what’s going on.

Fr. Andrew: Now, would they have understood it in a sort of causative sense, like there’s this thing going on between gods, and so therefore we on earth are being deterministically made to play this out politically? Or, I mean, what exactly is that relationship?

Fr. Stephen: Determinism in this case is like turtles: it’s determinism all the way down. [Laughter] And this is something people miss in ancient myth. The gods had their fates determined just like everybody else.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it’s not like they’re the ones with free will in an absolute sense and we’re just ants that they’re stepping on. I recall… So, for instance, in Greek myth, you’ve got the idea of the three Fates, who are measuring out these cords that are people’s lifetimes and then cutting them at the appropriate moment, and that’s what determines your fate: it’s fatalism, but that applies to gods and to men. It’s not just us lowly mortals, because gods can die, gods can lose their battles. They can be cast into the abyss.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And in Norse mythology you’ve got the Nornir, who are the same kind of thing, who are these three sort of witches who determine the future, determine fate. And all of the Norse gods are fated to die in Ragnarok, and they can’t escape that. A lot of Norse myth is them trying to escape that fate. They have this doom hanging over them, which is also, of course, paralleled in the Christian story, because all of those demons do have doom hanging over them, coming at the end, and are unable to escape it.

Fr. Andrew: It’s an interesting thing, actually. I’m about to study Norse myth much more deeply as part of the MA work that I’m doing, and it’s an interesting point actually that almost all Norse myth that we have—so, for instance, the Eddas are one of the big sources of Norse mythology—they’re all written down and preserved by Christians. I kind of wonder sometimes—a lot of mythology, as we said, is demonic propaganda, but I wonder sometimes, like Snorri Sturluson, who is the guy who put down the Eddas—he’s a 13th century Christian—did he kind of say, “Well, that’s wrong. I’m going to fix this?” [Laughter] Was there a little bit of editing happening? I don’t know; I’m not a textual critic of Norse myth, but it’s an interesting point there. Something to ponder.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah—spoilers, there was a lot of editing and changing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I’ve known that there was; I’m just not sure exactly what the details are.

Fr. Stephen: The most obvious example of that is Beowulf, where the versions we have of the Beowulf story, Grendel’s descended from Cain… I mean, it’s completely been…

Fr. Andrew: There’s biblical stuff in there.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So this is all layered together, and the Bible is an Ancient Near Eastern text. So what’s true of those texts, including this astrological layer, is also true of the Bible.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, welcome, everybody. Here’s another surprising thing going on in the Bible. Astrology in the Bible: it’s not just poetic language. I mean, we kind of talked about this a little bit before, that the references to the sun and moon and stars are not just poetic language, but now we’re kind of going deeper into the rabbit hole, that there is actually astrology going on in the Bible. I think it’s important again—we’ve already said this, but let’s just underline that the astrology of the Scriptures, the astrology of Israel, is not the astrology of ancient pagans, and it’s also not—although it’s related; it’s closely related—it is also not the astrology of the horoscope in your local paper. I don’t know if they even do those any more, but it’s barely related to that, if at all. [Laughter] So we should just point that out. When you hear the word “astrology,” we’re not engaging in syncretism. Again, we’re going to be looking closely at the Scriptures and seeing what’s actually going on there.

All right, yeah, that’s… I think that’s some good preliminary ways to point it out. Related to that, we got a question that was sent to us and recorded for us from Richard Rohlin, who is a listener of this podcast and also is now becoming the co-host, the persistent co-host of the Amon Sûl podcast, thus continuing this idea that these are really just one podcast with two different iterations. Let’s listen to the question that Richard sent us.

Mr. Richard Rohlin: Greetings, Fathers. Christ is born! I would like to hear your take on astrology and its possible impact on one’s personality traits, characteristics, etc. And here I’m not really talking about or even interested in the modern horoscope, but more in things like where in medieval literature, for instance, in Dante’s Divine Comedy, we do encounter the idea that because the stars and planets are angels who do have some impact or even influence on the world, there is some kind of a relationship there between us and them, but not to the extent that it either overrides our free will or takes away sort of our personal responsibility. I would love to hear this discussed from an Orthodox point of view.

Fr. Andrew: All right. So what about that? Richard seems to be alluding… He mentions he’s not talking about modern horoscopes, but he’s trying to help us figure out what’s going on here. What is the sort of relationship between us and the stars/angels? And what does that have to do with free will? We’ve touched on that a little bit, but let’s just kind of flesh that out a little bit, especially the difference between the pagan understanding and the understanding of the Scriptures.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and since we’ve said we were doing this episode, we’ve gotten a lot of questions about modern horoscopes and astrology.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, lots of people sent us long questions about horoscopes and modern astrology, and I hope that this episode helps with a lot of that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So we’ve already talked about a couple of distinctions, one being that, obviously, we don’t see the sun, moon, and stars as being gods that function independent of the Creator of the universe, and not as separate entities who control things of their own independent wills. That means, the flip side of that, that we are saying that, like all angelic beings or spiritual beings, that these are beings through whom God can work in his creation, both in terms of governance, as Philo talked about, but also—the word “angel” means messenger; we talked about how that’s a job they do—that means that, as angelic beings, they can serve as messengers; God can communicate through them. We lose the element of determinism because that’s not part of our religion.

Fr. Andrew: Right. That’s not… The God we worship does not do that to us, so of course he’s not going to do it to us through his divine beings.

Fr. Stephen: Right, or through anything else. Yeah, so it’s not that all of these things are playing out in the heavens and in the council of the gods and on earth according to some woven plan somewhere.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, God is not the Fates.

Fr. Stephen: Sorry, Calvinists.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Sorry, not sorry.

Fr. Stephen: Right. [Laughter] But it’s that, just like humans, as we’ve talked about in the last couple episodes, angelic beings are creations of God through whom God works and through whom he can communicate to the rest of his creation. And you see this explicitly in a bunch of places in Scripture. One just real quick, shorthand one is at the beginning of the book of Revelation, you have the seven stars that are the seven angels of the seven churches, and who are each given a letter to bring as a messenger to that church. So right there you have this connection of stars as messengers in a shorthand way. But actually there’s a much deeper biblical theology that you find in the Scriptures regarding the sun, moon, and stars in particular as messengers and agents of God.

Fr. Andrew: Again, it’s not just a poetic image, like: Hey, okay there’s this association between angels and stars. But again, it’s watching their motion and how they relate to each other in the heavens is incorporated into the Scriptures. I think that’s one of the hurdles that we have to kind of get over. It’s not just: “Oh, I think they’re like stars.” It’s… So once you take seriously that the actual stars are associated with angelic beings, then what they’re doing up in the sky becomes really interesting, but maybe not in the way you think! [Laughter] Sorry, dispensationalists. Sorry.

Fr. Stephen: This isn’t “ ‘Tis the East, and Juliet is the sun.” [Laughter] This isn’t just a poetic thing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, thank you. And it’s also not some other version of the Bible code, to take it into the other direction.

Fr. Stephen: No, this is, as we were saying with other ancient texts, this is a layer of meaning that’s there in the Scriptures.

Fr. Andrew: Right. It’s not an overriding thing that determines everything else. Okay, so I know that we have… A really important passage that we want to look at is from Psalm 19 (or it’s going to be 18 if you’re looking at a Bible with the Greek numbering), verses 1-6. I’m just going to read this for you, and as you listen, everybody, you may notice that the translation here is a little bit different from what you’re used to, and we’re going to talk about that, so just listen. So again, this is Psalm 19 if it’s the Hebrew numbering, or 18 if it’s the Greek numbering.

The heavens declare the glory of God
And the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours out speech
And night to night reveals knowledge.
There is no speech nor are there words
Whose voice is not heard.
Their line goes out through all the earth
And their words to the end of the world.
In them he has set a tent for the sun,
Which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber,
And like a strong man runs its course with joy.
Its rising is from the end of the heavens,
And its circuit to the end of them;
And there is nothing hidden from its heat.

And what’s notable about that, if you just read it, whatever translation, is there’s clearly a sense of astronomy at the very least going on here. Okay, it’s talking about the movement of heavenly bodies, but there’s something very specific here, and it’s connected with that verse that probably sounds different from what you’re used to, especially Orthodox people. You’re used to hearing, “Their voice has gone out through all the earth,” and we’re going to talk about that in just a second, but the way I read it was: “Their line goes out through all the earth.” So, Father, what is that about? What’s that “line,” and why are we saying “voice” most of the time?

Fr. Stephen: Right. Well, so let’s drop back for just a second. It’s important that we see this isn’t just talking about… There are other texts, for example, when you get to Psalms 147-50 that talk about the sun, moon, and stars praising the Lord. And we’ve talked about how you shouldn’t read those as purely poetic—but you can; it’s a possible reading. But what this says here in Psalm 19 is that they’re pouring forth speech and revealing knowledge. So that’s different. That means there’s actual content; there’s actually something being communicated.

Fr. Andrew: They’re saying that the heavenly bodies are singing something to us.

Fr. Stephen: Right, not just a general sense of joy or something, or grace and praising God in sort of this vague sense. But, yes, the word there that we translated “line”—which you will find translated, if you get most English Bibles, they’ll have something like “voice” in the main text, probably, and then they’ll have a footnote that says, “literally: line,” down at the bottom of the page.

Fr. Andrew: Because “what could that possibly mean?” so we’re not going to… Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. They sort of don’t know what to do about it. If you get a Bible that’s priding itself on being very literal, they’ll just have “line” there the way we did, because that’s what it says. So that word, “line,” is referring to…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I was just going to say—sorry to interrupt—in the NET Bible, and this is what their note says. I just have to read this, because it’s proof that what you’re saying… It says, “The MT says”—that’s the Masoretic Text—“the Masoretic Text reads: ‘their measuring line.’ The noun (qav, ‘measuring line’) makes no sense in this context.” [Laughter] That’s what it says. “Makes no sense in this context.” In other words, they don’t see it, what we’re about to say.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and—and there’s a reason why: because they’re not interested in and don’t know about astrology, because they’ve written that off as irrelevant. But so what this measuring line here is referring to is what’s called the ecliptic, and that may be a word you’ve not heard either.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, I know the word “eclipse”...

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it’s not unrelated, but… The ecliptic is the path, the sort of lines that you could draw if you were making an astronomical or astrological chart. The ecliptic is the path that the sun follows over the course of a year.

Fr. Andrew: Because it doesn’t rise and set in exactly the same spot on the horizon every single day, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: Exactly in the same spot, right.

Fr. Andrew: It moves around.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and days get longer and shorter, and yeah. So there’s this path of the sun through the sky, and that’s called the ecliptic. And if you have any doubt that that’s what this is talking about in Psalm 19:4, you just have to read the next couple verses. “He has set a tent for the sun, which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber / like a strong man, it runs its course.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it’s talking about the rising and the setting of the sun. It comes out in a “tent.”

Fr. Stephen: And so there is this… The line they’re talking about is that path of the sun. So the ecliptic, that line, that region of the sky, is the region where the different constellations that we would now call the zodiac, enter and leave over the course of the year. It’s their position relative to the path of the sun at that time of the year. This is, at some point, inevitably, we’re going to an episode—or five—about the book of Enoch.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes, yes, yes.

Fr. Stephen: And there’s a huge central portion of the book of Enoch that’s just about the calendar, and the calendar you’re supposed to follow. And it talks about the different gates of the sun at the different times of year, the gates it comes out of and the gates it goes back into. This is sort of a key thing that everyone in the ancient world knew about and could just reference, something we haven’t probably thought much about.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because I woke up this morning with an alarm clock, and I still woke up and still did the same things, and I walked out of the house at the same time on my clock without any reference to when the sun was coming up. I mean, I’ve noticed that it tends to be darker when I leave, but that’s about it. That’s about it, because our lives are governed so much by mechanistic processes now that the naturalistic processes of sunrise and -set and so forth really don’t govern our lives, and so we don’t really notice them that much. And indeed, we even attempt to control them by something called Daylight Saving Time. [Laughter] It’s… yeah. There’s just so much that I think we’re not seeing because we’re just not paying attention to it. It’s happening, but we’re just not paying attention, because we’ve got our attention on something else. I can tell you what time my alarm is set for each day, but I couldn’t tell you what time the sun is rising or setting unless I ask Google. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And it’s important, when we take these six verses together, this means that—the psalm is saying that part and parcel of how the heavens communicate what they’re communicating from God has to do with this path of the sun and the specifics of the movements. You can say, “Well, a psalm is poetry”—and it is, but we’re going to get into it in a little bit, and we’re going to see that when this text is cited later in the Bible, it’s not just cited as sort of poetry and imagery. But we’ll get there.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and this is interestingly specific and astronomical. It’s really… Like, yes, you could just say the poet is taking an image and really running with it, but he really has run with it at the very least! This is not just throwing out astronomical imagery. This is about specific astronomical events.

Fr. Stephen: And that this is a means by which God communicates.

Fr. Andrew: Right. He’s saying something.

Fr. Stephen: And we find—because this is our Christmas episode—we find reference to this in our liturgical hymns for the Nativity. I don’t know if you want to read—you could sing it!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I’m not going to sing for everybody!

Fr. Stephen: Okay.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so this is the Nativity apolytikion, and this is going to be the Christmas hymn in the Orthodox Church that everybody knows, whatever they do in their particular tradition. So there are a little variations in translation, and we’re going to talk a bit about that, but I’m just going to read to you this one.

Thy nativity, O Christ our God, hath given rise to the light of knowledge in the world. For they that worshiped the stars did learn therefrom to worship thee, O Sun of righteousness, and to know that from the East of the highest thou didst come. O Lord, glory to thee!

And of course, it’s the hymn which is the source of the title of this particular episode. So what’s going on in here that has to do with this ecliptic of Psalm 19?

Fr. Stephen: Well, we’ll get into the Magi later on, because of course it will be in the third half of the program that we’ll get to our actual advertised topic, as is our wont.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right: “they that worshiped the stars.” Exactly. This is the podcast that is: “Wait for it…”

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] But we have this element of the Sun of righteousness, and this phrase that was translated, as you read it, “from the East of the highest.” Sometimes it’s “from the Orient from on high.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and we should note that “Sun of righteousness” there is S-U-N, not S-O-N; it’s S-U-N, so it’s all astronomical here—or astrological!

Fr. Stephen: And the actual language that’s translated “from the East of the highest” is actually from the song of Zachariah, St. John the Forerunner’s father, at St. John’s birth.

Fr. Andrew: Oh!

Fr. Stephen: That’s where it’s been picked up from, but what is it referring to? Well, the reason people have trouble translating it into English is that the word that’s translated “East” there is quite literally the word for east; it’s the Greek word anatoli. “The highest” is literally just a form of the preposition “up,” like “high place, high thing.”

Fr. Andrew: Yes, and I’ve seen this also translated as “Orient from on high,” and of course “Orient” is just another word referring to east.

Fr. Stephen: Right. The word anatoli, though, also means the sunrise.

Fr. Andrew: Mm, because that’s where the sun rises, is in the east.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it’s in the east. In fact, that’s how it came to mean east. The word actually refers to the sun rising, and so, if you were going to talk about that direction, you’d say: over there, where the sun rises; head that way. Or head in the direction of the sunset, if you were talking about west.

But the point that’s being referred to here is that it’s not the sunrise in terms of the event; it’s the sunrise in the sense of the location. So this would be… And that “highest” is really just a way of saying extremity, so this is talking about the one end of the ecliptic; this is talking about the extreme of the ecliptic, which is the point of origin, where the sun, like a bridegroom, leaves his tent.

Fr. Andrew: And, so, does that connect with the fact that here we are, around the winter solstice—is this the end? Is this the point at which the sun leaves, the bridegroom leaves his tent?

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah, it’s not directly related to the solstice, no.

Fr. Andrew: Well, good. I figured there were going to be some people who could be thinking that, so we should throw that out there, and we could talk about that a little bit more.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah. No, it’s the point in the sky. That’s the point of origin of the sun, in the same way that the Magi come to know the point of origin of Christ, that point of origin of the sun. And this bridegroom language related to the sun, here: obviously that bridegroom language is something that’s related to Christ. So the troparion is taking all of that into account. But when it refers to the point of origin of Christ, it refers to this point on the ecliptic; it refers to this sort of point of origin. So this troparion, which of course comes later than the Scriptures, also has this astrological layer of meaning in it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is Orthodox astrology now.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome, everybody! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: That’s connecting to the Magi. So it’s referring to that place. But as I mentioned, we have this idea in the psalm that’s not just a poetic idea. You can try to write it off as a poetic idea, that somehow the movement of the stars in relation to the ecliptic conveys knowledge, that God speaks through it, as just some sort of poetic thing. But St. Paul in particular takes this super literally.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, now we’re in Pauline astrology.

Fr. Stephen: Yes! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: So then the first example from our notes is from the book of Romans in the first chapter, starting with verse 18 and going through verse 20.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven, against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them, for his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made, so they are without excuse.

I remember reading that verse when I was an Evangelical, and I just read it as like: Yes, the creation has this amazing design and glorious complexity, so that means there must be a Creator, so I’m responsible for what I do with that natural kind of conclusion to be derived from that. But you’re saying that Paul is actually saying something much more specific than just: Look at the complexity of creation, and you’re responsible for thinking of the Creator. Right?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this also isn’t just natural law, that, hey, everybody knows from nature that murder is wrong, so if you’re a murderer, that’s bad, even though you didn’t have the Torah. Yeah, I took kind of a cheap shot at my Calvinist friends earlier, so as consolation I offer you Romans 1:18-20.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] You’re going to have to explain that to everybody now.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] This is a very popular passage among my Calvinist friends. So this is talking about the fact that… And this is still kind of vague; we’re going to see later in Romans St. Paul’s going to get more specific. But here St. Paul is saying that… St. Paul always lays out sort of his themes and the things he’s going to talk about at the beginning of his epistles and then develops them over the course of the epistle. So this is chapter one: here’s one of his themes that he’s introducing here, that there is actual concrete knowledge about God that is found by the observance and perception of created things, which includes God’s power, his divine nature, his attributes. That’s more than just: there’s some kind of God who created things. Because everyone St. Paul was writing to thought there were gods who created things. There were no atheists! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right. He didn’t need to address that. It’s not a live question in the first century.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so he’s saying, he’s talking to particularly former pagans in this part of Romans 1. He’s going to turn to Jewish Christians in Romans 2, but he’s talking specifically to former pagans here, saying that the pagans are accountable for—he goes on in chapter one to talk about specifics like idolatry and their religious ritual, that they should have known that was wrong, because they should have come to know at least about, in some kind of broad strokes, enough about the true God to not do that. And so they’re accountable for having… It’s not that they… They didn’t know about Yahweh, the God of Israel. They had been assigned to these lesser spiritual beings, and they’d worshiped them but they weren’t supposed to, but how are they supposed to know any better? St. Paul’s saying no. No, you had a way to know, through created things, if you’d paid attention, that there was the true God, God Most High, and that you shouldn’t have been worshiping these other powers. So you’re accountable, because you could have known but you chose to sort of suppress that knowledge.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Now here he doesn’t go into detail exactly how they should know, or what exactly they should have known or how they should have known it, but he says that it’s revealed from heaven, against all of that ungodliness and unrighteousness. And he says that they’ve suppressed the truth, so there is this problem of: you knew the truth, but you were hiding it; you didn’t want anybody to know; you hid it for yourself.

Fr. Stephen: And you wanted to do some other stuff, and so you did it, but it wasn’t a sin of ignorance. It was a sin of deliberation; it was voluntary.

Fr. Andrew: But he does develop that later, right?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, specifically in Romans 10.

Fr. Andrew: Why don’t you read that one for us, then?

Fr. Stephen: Okay. This is Romans 10:12-18. He says:

For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek. The same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him. For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

I’ll just pause and do a little on the way through—not the way we do in my Bible study; we don’t want to be here all day. So he’s saying: Look, there’s one God and one Lord Jesus Christ over everybody, whether you used to be a Jew or you used to be a pagan; now you’re a Christian. Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved the same way. Then he says:

How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? How are they to believe on him in whom they have never heard? How are they to hear without someone preaching? How are they to preach unless they are sent?

This gets quoted a lot in evangelism circles. These people can’t call on the name of the Lord and be saved unless they hear about Christ is, and they can’t hear who Christ is unless someone preaches it to them, and they can’t have it preached to them unless someone is sent to preach it to them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so go out there and preach.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And then St. Paul says, quoting Isaiah:

As it is written, “How beautiful it is who preach the good news (who preach the Gospel).” But they have not all obeyed the Gospel, for Isaiah says (he quotes Isaiah again), “Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?” So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.

So far, so good. I think everybody gets what that’s saying, that not everyone who hears actually is obedient to it. Notice St. Paul uses the word “obeyed” there, not the word “believed” that it was true. Sorry to some people again. [Laughter] So, look, you come to faithfulness, you come to Christianity and the Gospel by hearing it; you hear it through the word of Christ, the Gospel that’s proclaimed. Then he says:

But I ask, “Have they not heard?”

So who’s the “they” here is the pagan world out there, the people who haven’t heard the Gospel. So now he asks the question:

“Have they not heard already?”

Implying: Have they not already heard the Gospel? He says:

Indeed, they have, for: Their voice has gone out to all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world.

And he quotes Psalm 19.

Fr. Andrew: Which is Psalm 19. But that’s the language we’re more used to: “their voice has gone out to all the earth.” Why does he say “voice” there and not “line,” like we said there about the ecliptic?

Fr. Stephen: He’s quoting an already-existing Greek translation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which would you say got it a little bit wrong?

Fr. Stephen: I think they had the problem most English translators have! [Laughter] They weren’t sure what to do with the word. But the meaning is still clear, because if you go to Psalm 19, St. Paul is saying: Hey, that knowledge that’s communicated in Psalm 19 by the heavens, by the stars, the speech that’s poured out? St. Paul is saying—regardless of how you translate that word—St. Paul is saying the Gospel is the content that’s being communicated, the word of Christ.

Fr. Andrew: And we should emphasize that most of the time when the New Testament quotes the Old Testament, especially the psalms, one line is quoted, but the point isn’t to isolate that one line and use it, but rather to say, “But I ask, have they not heard? For indeed they have”—Psalm 19. He’s essentially just referencing the psalm by quoting that one line, although that’s probably the most relevant part of it for the argument that he’s making, that, yes, actually, everybody has heard the Gospel, and they heard it because of these things that are observable in the sky. That’s what he’s claiming, that the Gospel is being preached by the movements of the heavens.

Fr. Stephen: Absolutely.

Fr. Andrew: So how does…? I mean, okay, thinking about that sort of skeptically for a moment, or just, you know… Like, okay, let’s say I did pay attention to where the sun rises every day and I do have this concept of the ecliptic and all that kind of stuff. How do I get from there to the Gospel? that Christ is God and man and he has conquered his enemies and here’s what he expects of us. How do I get there from that?

Fr. Stephen: Right. In five easy steps. [Laughter] No.

Fr. Andrew: “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: We’re picking up… See, again, as you said earlier, we’re going further down a rabbit-hole that we already gazed into in previous episodes.

Fr. Andrew: Right. It’s a kind of spiral-shaped podcast. It just keeps circling and getting deeper and deeper.

Fr. Stephen: Well, I would prefer to say an upward spiral than a downward spiral, but okay. [Laughter] We talked about how the promise to Abraham, the promises to Abraham were made in terms of star-language, when we were talking about the concept of theosis, that his descendants would be like the stars and that they would camp in the gates of their enemies, and that had to do with this replacement idea, of human beings—divinized human beings, human beings who have experienced theosis—replacing the fallen spiritual powers. Well, now we’re going further down that rabbit-hole into some of the particulars in how that was seen and how that’s reflected in the Scriptures.

New word for today is—new Hebrew word for today, at least—mazzaroth.

Fr. Andrew: Matzarot, which doesn’t have anything to do with mozzarella, apparently.

Fr. Stephen: Nothing to do with mozzarella, nothing to do with matzo balls. [Laughter] —to my knowledge. If someone knows there’s some connection to matzo balls, let me know, but I do not believe there is.

Fr. Andrew: Write in, Hebrew scholars! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, scholars of rabbinic Judaism. So that’s the Hebrew word that roughly means constellation, one of the signs of the stars that we talked about in the book of Jubilees earlier. And there are twelve of them—

Fr. Andrew: What do you know!

Fr. Stephen: —just like there are twelve constellations in pretty much all the other Ancient Near Eastern understandings about what we would call the zodiac. What we may not have connected in our heads, though, but which ancient Israel and Second Temple Judaism did connect, is that there are also twelve tribes of Israel.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so does each one of them have their own sign?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Here we go, everybody! Hold on!

Fr. Stephen: There was a constellation associated with each of the tribes.

Fr. Andrew: Now, are these the constellations that we would be familiar with, like Orion and Sagittarius and Cassiopeia?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and they’re roughly the same… These are what we would associate with the zodiac signs.

Fr. Andrew: Man.

Fr. Stephen: And in many cases they’re associated with the same animals.

Fr. Andrew: Mm. Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So Judah with the lion is kind of obvious. You can guess which one that is, and some of the others. And this imagery of those signs was directly connected to the twelve stones that were in the high priest’s ephod, his breastplate, that you can read about in Exodus 28:15-21. That was part of the markings on them when he bore those into the tabernacle and then later the Temple. This means there was likely… We’ve mentioned before, I think, that we don’t know exactly how the Urim and Thummim worked.

Fr. Andrew: Some kind of divination something, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that was if you had some really tricky case where you couldn’t figure out, based on the written Torah, what you should do, this was sort of your last-ditch way. You’d go to the high priest and he’d use the Urim and Thummim to determine what God’s will was. And we don’t know exactly how that worked, but the fact that they were stones in his breastplate that were with these others implies that there may have been some kind of astrological component of this, involved with the Urim and Thummim.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and then in Genesis 49, there’s all of this animal imagery. What’s going on there?

Fr. Stephen: So Genesis 49 is the testament of Israel or the testament of Jacob. A testament is actually a whole genre of literature; there are tons of these adjacent to the Bible in Second Temple literature.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and if you haven’t read it recently, if you pull out your Bible and look at Genesis 49, you will see basically Jacob calls all his sons together, right, and then he sort of lists them off by name. It starts out: “Gather together and hear, you sons of Jacob, and listen to Israel, your father.” That refers to the name that God gives to Jacob. And he starts out talking about Reuben and then Simeon and Levi, and it goes on and on and on. If you read closely, you’ll see that there’s animal imagery that seems to be connected to these various sons. Of course, these sons are the origin of the twelve tribes of Israel.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so you get the lion imagery with Judah, you get serpent imagery with Dan, and that’s not just sort of poetic stuff. It’s prophetic in that he’s talking about what’s going to happen with these tribes, so for example when he talks about his son Judah, he talks about the kingship coming from Judah, and maybe in one of our Lent episodes we’ll end up talking about Palm Sunday and the imagery there in the prophecy about Judah. With Dan, that’s been widely associated, the prophecy there, with the Antichrist, but it also talks there about a viper—and Benjamin also. But there’s also this…

Fr. Andrew: Benjamin’s a wolf, verse 27. Yeah, I mean, Naphtali is a deer. It goes on and on. It goes on and on, yeah. Issachar is a donkey.

Fr. Stephen: And these are associated with constellations, so there’s this astrological layer here where that’s being put into… It’s called a testament because Jacob’s dying at the time, so these are sort of his parting words [to his] sons, his parting prophetic words. But there’s this astrological layer there, associating these twelve tribes with those constellations.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which makes total sense if you go back, again, as we mentioned: the promises to Abraham, that his descendants are going to be “as the stars,” and we’re not just talking about an individual ascension to be like an angel, although that is certainly part of what we’re talking about, but also there is this association with stars in a much more complex level: systems of constellations and so forth. If that’s how Israel understands its identity, that this is their destiny, then it makes total sense, then, that they would have this association with stars, even on this level of zodiac signs in the sky. I mean, this is cool stuff that I had, again, no idea was in there! But here it is. Here it is.

And then that what would have been seen… We started out talking about these mosaics in synagogues. This is what would have been there. So when Jesus walks into a synagogue and there’s the zodiac, it’s the zodiac of Israel; it’s the twelve tribes of Israel and their zodiacal signs. That’s what’s going on there, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right, right, and connecting that to their sacred calendar, yeah, and how that relates to that. So by virtue of the stars, the people are not only connected to the heavens but also to time itself, is directly connected to their lives on this earth through the means of the sacred calendar.

Fr. Andrew: Part of something much bigger than yourself. And this is one of the ways that they understood that that worked.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Cool.

Fr. Stephen: So there’s a very concrete example of taking that “camping in the gates of your enemies” imagery and applying it through the tribes to constellations in a place that we probably haven’t read much.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah… Judges.

Fr. Stephen: And that’s, yeah, the Song of Deborah in Judges 5. So there’s this whole… And this is a cool story, for anybody who hasn’t read it.

Fr. Andrew: It’s one of the brighter spots in Judges, which is largely just dark and awful.

Fr. Stephen: Well for some… There are problems here, too, but… The biggest problem is that there’s a man named Barak who’s chosen to be the judge of Israel and is sort of a wimp and doesn’t do it. So God sends a prophetess, Deborah, to sort of go and take command of Israel’s armies since he… to sort of embarrass Barak. So they have to make war against Sisera, this enemy general who ends up getting a tent-peg driven through his skull into the ground by another woman named Jael. It’s cool stuff, especially if you’re a teenage boy; this is great Bible.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah! Right, I remember the tent-peg. Yeah. Whew.

Fr. Stephen: So after this, the teenage boys quickly lose interest because Deborah sings a song. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, skip the poetry.

Fr. Stephen: When it becomes a musical, teenage boys check out. But there are details in the way in which she describes the victory that Israel has won that are important for what we’re talking about today. We’re going to focus on two verses in particular. In Judges 5:20, it says, “They fought from the heavens, the stars from their courses fought with Sisera.” So leading up to 5:20, Deborah has gone through all the tribes, has listed all the tribes; so she sort of arraying them: here’s the forces who are opposing each other in battle. Here’s all the twelve tribes, who we’ve talked about are associated with these twelve constellations; and then on the other side there’s Sisera and his human army and the stars in their courses.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so he’s got…

Fr. Stephen: Sort of a bunch of rebellious…

Fr. Andrew: He’s got astral allies.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, fighting on his side. And we know, of course, who won, but then in describing that victory later on, in 5:31, it says, “Thus let all your enemies perish, O Lord, but let those who love him be like the sun when it comes out in full strength.” So when the sun comes out, the stars disappear is the idea; the sun shows up, so she’s saying: Yeah, you had these spiritual powers on your side; we had our twelve tribes, but, oh yeah, we had Yahweh, the God of Israel, and when he comes out on the battlefield, it’s like the sun coming up in the sky, because all those stars disappear; they all vanish; they all scatter; they’re all defeated.

What she’s describing is this defeat by Yahweh, the God of Israel, of these spiritual forces that have arrayed themselves with Israel’s enemies, that he does by the tribes of Israel that are going to sort of supplant [them]. This is still a little deeper down the hole, but this is establishing a pattern that’s later going to find its fulfillment later on in the New Testament. When we’re reading Psalm 19 (or 18 in the Greek), and we read that line about their line or their voice going out into all the world and their words to the ends of the universe. Our Orthodox listeners who are attentive might have recognized that as a prokeimenon.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, it’s the prokeimenon that gets sung before the epistle for feasts of the apostles. But of course, it also gets done weekly as well on particular days, for Thursday, but it’s associated with the apostles, especially Peter and Paul, but it could be any apostle, actually: “Their sound has gone out to all the earth.” And it’s sung as a communion hymn for feasts having to do with the apostles as well. It’s connected with this preaching ministry of the twelve apostles in particular. And probably we usually read it like: “Yeah, their sound hath gone forth into all the earth, all those apostles, they really traveled long distances; they really got the word out.” But that’s not what this is talking about, actually, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right, because as we’ve seen, that’s not what the psalm is talking about, that’s not how St. Paul uses the psalm. So this is talking about, quite literally, the apostles having become stars. And we say that even more directly, actually, when we talk about the Fathers. When we do the troparion of the Fathers, we say that they become like luminous stars upon the earth. But that the apostles have now made this move, and that’s not just a general reference to theosis, because, of course, there’s twelve apostles, and Christ had told them they’d sit on twelve thrones and judge the twelve tribes of Israel.

Fr. Andrew: The twelve tribes of Israel, who of course, as everyone knows in the first century in the Holy Land, are associated with zodiac signs.

Fr. Stephen: So this is now the apostles taking over that function. This is a fulfillment of the kind of move that Deborah was talking about in her song.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, man. All right, well, connected with that, then, we got another question, and this from Ray Rieck, and he left us this message.

Mr. Ray Rieck: Hi, my name is Ray Rieck, and I’m near Hershey, Pennsylvania. I’m really enjoying the show and I’ve learned a lot. My question tonight for you is this. There has been some talk in some Evangelical circles over the years and even sermons preached regarding the real meaning of the zodiac. Specifically, I’m thinking of the late Dr. D. James Kennedy, but I am sure that there are others. He essentially said that the zodiac was the Gospel written in the stars, and reinterpreted many of the astrological to promote that narrative. Are you at all familiar with this, and is there any basis for it in historical Christian thought? Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, we will answer that when we come back from our break.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back to the second half of the show, and despite what you just heard from the Voice of Steve, we’re not actually taking calls because this is a pre-recorded episode. So even if you are listening to this in its live premier on Christmas Eve, don’t call, because we’re not on the other end of the phone. But we are very happy to have received some of your questions and comments, and of course we finished off the first part of this episode with that question from Ray Rieck. Yeah! Well, the answer to his question is basically this part.

Now we’ve looked at ancient Jewish astrology and explained how ancient Israelites understood their relationship to the stars. How exactly does that apply to the birth of Jesus Christ, to the Gospel? This is our Christmas episode, so we should probably talk about Christmas a little bit. [Laughter] So, yeah, how does that apply? How does that apply?

Fr. Stephen: I do want to drop just a note about the late Dr. D. James Kennedy who was mentioned in that question.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yes, yes, right!

Fr. Stephen: Who was a Presbyterian pastor in Florida and had a television ministry as well that was very popular amongst us old folks. [Laughter] He passed away close to 20 years ago now, I think.

Fr. Andrew: 2007.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, not that long ago. He had a… Being a Presbyterian, he very much enjoyed St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans and saw the things we were just talking about in Romans, about the stars and the constellations proclaiming the Gospel, and he kind of took that and ran with it and had a very, very developed… I mean, not just a general Gospel presentation, but all kinds of events from the gospels and things all connected to various astrological things in a very detailed and elaborate way.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Presbyterian astrology!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yes! He was a Florida Man. Yeah, and I think… Obviously, I agree with the initial insight that started all that in Romans. I think that is what St. Paul is saying in Romans, but I think it was a little like he discovered a hammer and all of a sudden everything looked like a nail. [Laughter] So we need to sort of hammer that in.

Yeah, we’re going to be talking about, in this second half now, since I’m going to say… Yeah, he kind of ran with it a little too far. What is… How would you see the gospels, the Gospel of Christ being portrayed in the stars? How would that have been communicated? And we’re going to give some examples.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So to begin, we actually have one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite saints. It’s a saint we just celebrated on the calendar, and that’s St. Ignatius of Antioch.

Fr. Stephen: Somebody should write, like, an Orthodox book about him.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s an idea… [Laughter] And we could call it Bearing God.

Fr. Stephen: And it could be available from Ancient Faith and make a perfect last-minute Christmas gift.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. [Laughter] Very last-minute. Yeah, let me think about who should write that one. Yeah, so St. Ignatius and probably… I mean, he wrote seven epistles, but the one that probably gets the most traffic, and rightly so, is his epistle to the Ephesians. There’s just a lot of cool stuff in there. But they’re all amazing. This is from the 19th chapter of his epistle to the Ephesians, and he’s talking specifically now about the birth of Christ. Well, you’ll hear it. So this is what he says.

And hidden from the ruler of this age was the virginity of Mary and the One born from her and likewise the death of the Lord—three famed mysteries which God worked in silence. How, then, was he made manifest to the ages? A star in heaven, shining beyond all of the stars, and its light was ineffable, and its great newness brought about wonderment. The remaining stars, with the sun and moon, became a chorus for that star, and it exceeded, with its light, them all. And there was confusion from whence did this great newness and strangeness come to them.

By this, all magistry was destroyed and every evil chain disappeared. Ignorance was taken away. The ancient kingdom is destroyed utterly. God appeared humanized in order to bring about the great newness of unending life. And that which had been planned by God was given a beginning. Therefore they all were troubled, because the destruction of death was being prepared.

It’s a cool passage, and it goes right from Christ’s birth up through the resurrection, which—Ignatius talks about the resurrection over and over in his epistles, because he’s on his way to be martyred and it’s definitely on his mind and it’s what’s giving him so much joy and hope, because he knows that Christ is risen, which, from his vantage point, happened just a few decades before, because it’s early second century when he’s writing this. So the resurrection comes up over and over again, but for him it’s always connected, as he said, the destruction of death is being prepared.

Well, let’s talk about this. He definitely talks about stars here, but there’s this interesting thing where he talks about all of this happening being hidden from the ruler of this age.

Fr. Stephen: There are these three mysteries that he talks about, and they are of course famed mysteries that God works in silence, so he uses a nice paradox there. They’re worked in silence, but they’re famous. And the three mysteries are, number one, the Theotokos and the virgin birth; number two, Christ’s divine identity, that Christ is God himself; and the third one is Christ’s death and the subsequent defeat of death. So those are the three mysteries that St. Ignatius is talking about. He’s mainly here—and we’re focusing on, because: Christmas episode—on the first two of those, that have to do with the Incarnation directly. The third one, which is Christ’s death and resurrection and the defeat of death, is what gets referred to by scholars a lot in the gospels as the messianic secret, which is especially prominent in St. Mark’s gospel, where Christ will heal someone or tell the disciples something, and then say, “Hey, don’t tell anybody.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that happens all the time.

Fr. Stephen: And they usually end up going and telling everybody, but… [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: That’s right. And kind of the materialist reading of that, maybe, is that the messianic secret is a secret that he’s keeping from everybody but his disciples, which is weird because he’s going around preaching. So it doesn’t make sense if you think that the secret is being kept from human beings. So who was it being…? Ignatius talks about “the ruler of this age”: “even from the ruler of this age.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. That’s whom it’s being hidden from. And St. Ignatius is using language from St. Paul, for example, in 1 Corinthians 2:8, where he’s talking about Christ’s identity, which, he says, “none of the rulers of this age knew, for, had they known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”

Fr. Andrew: Right. Which, again, “the rulers of this age”: it’s not Pontius Pilate and Caesar. I mean, they are rulers, but they are not “the rulers of this age.”

Fr. Stephen: They’re the spiritual powers who stand behind Caesar and were motivating Judas and the Jewish authorities.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which then makes sense when St. Ignatius says, “Hidden from the ruler of this age was the virginity of Mary and the One born from her,” etc., like, he can’t be talking about Caesar. Of course Caesar knew nothing about it! Why say that it was hidden from him? That doesn’t make any sense. It’s like: “Oh, we kept this secret from Caesar.” Well, big whoop. He doesn’t care what’s going on in Judea.

Fr. Stephen: Right. If Caesar had known who Jesus was and believed that he was God, why would he not have wanted him to die? It was good for Caesar—it was good for every human—that Jesus died. If you’re a demon, then Christ’s death is the worst thing that ever happened to you. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, thus Ignatius says, “The ancient kingdom is destroyed utterly,” and again, he doesn’t mean the Roman Empire. He means the kingdom, the rulership of demonic forces.

Fr. Stephen: St. Paul is saying if they had known that he was going to use his death to invade Hades and pillage it and destroy it and bind the devil and take his authority, then, yeah, the devil wouldn’t have killed him! He would have said, “Peace and long life,” right? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, but basically he’s killed, and so that’s opening up the gates of Hades.

Fr. Stephen: And you see that motif over and over again in the Church Fathers when they talk about Christ’s death. St. John Chrysostom using this imagery of a fishhook; St. Gregory the Theologian does, too. That hell or Hades or the devil thinks they’re getting this human body…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he’s being baited.

Fr. Stephen: Once the hook is set, then that’s it; they’re done for. They’re yanked… [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Like in Chrysostom’s Paschal Homily where it says, “Hell took a body and then met God.” Surprise! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so that’s related to this idea of the secrecy surrounding that, that it’s sort of the secrecy before an invasion, where they think it’s defeat in our moment of triumph. So that’s the third mystery, but the ones we’re talking about here are those first two. The virgin birth that happens in Bethlehem, the event, and who Christ is, the Incarnation, the fact that he’s God himself, is kept from him. And the way St. Ignatius talks about that is the reaction of the stars to this sign appearing in the heavens. So this sign appears in the heavens to announce the birth of Christ from the Theotokos, and that’s how the other stars find out that it happened! [Laughter] That’s where it’s revealed.

It’s revealed to them by the sign in the heavens, and when they see it—here’s how we know it’s talking about demons—they’re all troubled and disturbed and shaken, and there’s this imagery of the sign, its light sort of being greater than the rest, the imagery that we saw about the sun in the song of Deborah, sort of causing all the stars to disappear. They’re troubled by it and disturbed by it, because these are rebellious powers. Then when it talks about “the remaining,” that remaining is not like the other ones other than the new one; the remaining are the ones who aren’t disturbed and troubled by it, so these are like the elect angels.

Fr. Andrew: The stars that remained after the other ones rebelled and left.

Fr. Stephen: Right. They rejoice and form this chorus, and the other ones are the rebellious powers, but these are all stars. These are all things going on in the heavens, and that’s where it’s revealed to them. We see those events in the stars that St. Ignatius is talking about in the gospels themselves and the accounts of Jesus’ birth. Obviously, in Matthew 2:2, the Magi see the sign that St. Ignatius is referring to, and that leads them to know “hey, a king’s been born in Judea; let’s go.”

Sometimes I think we kind of soft-pedal this. Judea was not an independent nation; it was just a Roman province. Herod was the king. Herod’s heir being born was not a big deal that would cause people to come from Mesopotamia. So the sign we’re talking about was not just a birth announcement from the ethnarch of a tiny backwater Roman province. The sign we’re talking about was bigger than that, to draw people from that far to take a multi-year journey. When a king has been born in Judea, it’s not: a new king of Judea has been born. This is an astronomical event that signals something of epochal importance to these pagan Magi.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and then the other thing we see is in Luke 2, where the angel appears to the shepherds and announces to them the birth of Christ, and then it says in verse 13-14, “Suddenly with the angel there was a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying: Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace, good will toward men.” It’s funny, again, just sort of rewriting my reading of Scripture here, I think many times I read that as: Okay, so God sends this one angel, and he kind of tells them the message, and then he tells a bunch of other ones to just really reinforce it, like: Hey! But what we’re actually witnessing here is the rest of the angels actually finding out and saying: Oh, yeah! There’s this sort of applause breaking out, so to speak. [Laughter] It’s news to them, too.

Fr. Stephen: And this is the stars singing.

Fr. Andrew: The stars singing…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. The shepherds see the stars singing, which is also referred to in Job 38. Job 38 is part of Job getting bawled out at the end of the book of Job. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, God is basically saying: Look, dude. What is your deal? How dare you bring these complaints to me?

Fr. Stephen: So God is talking about sort of like: You want answers from me; you’re demanding I explain to you why these things have happened to you. And he’s sort of saying: What makes you think you could even understand if I did? So he’s sort of asking a bunch of rhetorical questions. Okay, Job, you’re so savvy, you’re so wise, how about this? Can you answer these questions? Do you know about this? So he’s talking about, in verses 6-7 of Job 38; he’s talking about the creation of the world. So Yahweh asks him: “To what were its foundations fastened?” The foundations of the earth. Or “Who laid its cornerstone? When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy.” This is the stars singing and the angels rejoicing, here in parallel, because of course the angels and stars are the same thing. But this is talking about stars singing. And if you go on in Job 38, it’s not just, again, using stars as poetic imagery, but it refers to specific constellations in the Pleiades and Orion. It talks about particular constellations that Job is asked about.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I think it’s especially notable that the Scripture talks about two times when the stars sing. Number one, this one from Job where it happens at the creation of the world, which, again, for those of you who love J.R.R. Tolkien and you read The Silmarillion, the angels sing at the creation of the world at the beginning of that. I just want to point that out for all you Tolkien nerds. But the other thing is— Because Tolkien reads the Bible! [Laughter] The other thing is of course this here and Luke 2. So this is a moment, the birth of Christ is a moment that is so world-shaking, to use Ignatius’ language, so stellar, to use an absolutely appropriate pun, that it’s appropriate now that the stars themselves should sing again. This moment that is an announcement of the re-creation of mankind is an echo of that original creation.

One of the things that I loved about that passage from St. Ignatius that just leaped out at me when we were going over this beforehand: he says God appeared humanized in order to bring about the great newness of unending life. I mean, this is just essentially echoed, for those of you who know a little bit of St. Athanasius of Alexandria when he says that very famous line: God became man that man might be divinized, or deified, or might become god. That this event is the new life of mankind; it’s the new creation of mankind. He’s the New Adam. It’s just… I don’t know; it’s just astonishing. It’s just so beautiful, so beautiful. Just try to imagine…

When I was in seminary, actually, I had a classmate who unfortunately, God rest his soul, he passed away pretty young from cancer, and I remember when he first got to the seminary, one of the things that often the seminarians would do in the beginning days of the new school year was everyone would go around the room and say their name and then what their home parish was. So he was from Palestine, and he said, “My name is Yad Aher, and I’m from Beit Sahour, and my parish is the parish where the shepherds heard from the angels.” We’re like: “Wait, what?” So he was literally from this place that we’re talking about. He and his family worshiped at the church where this event happened. It’s just… I don’t know. It’s overwhelming. Cool, cool stuff.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and that’s the positive side. Christ’s birth and his appearance to man is the beginning of the Gospel.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s the good news.

Fr. Stephen: The beginning of this newness of unending life, of eternal life, because that which was planned by God was given a beginning, St. Ignatius said. And the flip side is that the demons, when this is revealed to them, are all troubled because the destruction of death was being prepared. So for them this is the beginning of the end.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because death is their power. That’s what they have in their control, especially the devil.

Fr. Stephen: This is D-Day; it’s the beginning of the invasion of their territory, sort of a divine insurgency. So when we see Herod going and slaying the infants, this is the first counter-attack; this is their counter-attack on the invasion that’s beginning. When St. Matthew describes it, he’s very obviously and very clearly making this parallel between Herod and Pharaoh, when Pharaoh at the beginning of Exodus slays all the first-born of Israel; Herod slays all the sons under two years of age. And because we had to, because it’s this show: Remember, Pharaoh is the persecuting giant of old, and Herod is, in the sense that we’ve talked about it, a giant here. How? Because he’s imaging, he’s bringing the works of these evil, hostile powers into the world by murdering small children.

Fr. Andrew: Yep, which is a very giant thing to do.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, to try to destroy. So he is participating in the works of the evil one here, quite literally, in that first counter-attack.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and, you know, to just kind of underline this idea that we’ve been talking about now, about these things being hidden from the angelic powers—if you go to church a lot, if you’re an Orthodox Christian and you go to church a lot, if you’re in… So there’s what’s called “tone of the week,” so for all you Byzantine chanters, or all you chanters, Byzantine or not, all you chanters out there, people who do church music: there’s the tone of the week which begins being used on Saturday night at Great Vespers, and the theotokion—so it’s a hymn about the Theotokos or to the Theotokos—that is appointed for Tone 4, and it’s in the resurrectional tone of the week, tone 4, but also gets used at other times as well, for certain feast days, it goes like this, and maybe you never thought about this very much, but now you’re never going to be able to hear it the same way. So this is the translation that we use in the Antiochian Church. It goes like this:

The mystery which was hidden from everlasting and was unknown of the angels, O Theotokos, was revealed through thee to those who dwell upon earth, in that God, having become incarnate in unconfused union, of his own goodwill, accepted the cross for our sake, whereby he raised again the first-created and hath saved our souls from death.

It’s just a summary of what St. Ignatius says. It’s, again, a summary of what’s in the Scripture.

Fr. Stephen: Kind of from the flip perspective, right, because it’s through her that Christ is revealed to those who dwell upon earth; and St. Ignatius was talking about how it was revealed to the stars.

Fr. Andrew: To us, right; not to the stars, to us.

Fr. Stephen: To the angelic beings. And it’s through her that it’s revealed to those who dwell upon earth, because the shepherds find her with the infant Christ.

Fr. Andrew: The demons are being attacked and we are being rescued. That’s what’s happening.

Fr. Stephen: And when we say these things are mysteries, we’re saying—that were unknown even to the angels—we’re saying that these are things that belong to God’s—can we call it?—internal counsel. Now, there are two different words, both pronounced “counsel,” and this causes great trouble for a lot of people with the name of my other podcast, because they are spelled differently.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, The Whole Counsel of God.

Fr. Stephen: So when we talk about the divine council, we talk about God’s council of angelic beings, that is council: c-o-u-n-C-i-l, council, which is like your parish council. This is a body, a deliberative body.

Fr. Andrew: I hope the parish council is like the divine council.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] I was going to make a joke about all these sub-members being on… I guess I just did it.

Fr. Andrew: You’re on the parish council, everybody! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: The other word, counsel, c-o-u-n-S-e-l, refers to wisdom, like keeping your own counsel. Now, a council, -c-i-l, might offer counsel, -s-e-l, to someone. A counselor would be that -s-e-l spelling. So when we say this is sort of God’s internal counsel, we’re using that -s-e-l language, meaning we’re talking about the Holy Trinity. We’re talking about this is something that is restricted to the Godhead, to the three Persons who share the divine nature.

Fr. Andrew: The mind of God.

Fr. Stephen: Then revealed at a certain time, right? We’re talking about how the first two mysteries were revealed, how they were revealed to the angels, how they were revealed to those who dwell on the earth, and then of course the third mystery that St. Ignatius talked about is still kind of a mystery, still kind of a secret, until the time of Christ’s crucifixion, and then is revealed through the resurrection, to everyone: to the angels and to men. And then there is a fourth mystery that has still not been revealed, that is still held within the internal counsel of God, and that is the time of Christ’s glorious appearing. The reason I use that “glorious appearing” language for everybody is that comes from St. Paul’s pastoral epistles, so it’s biblical language, but when we translate the Greek word, parousia, as return or a second coming, that kind of implies in English that Jesus went away somewhere, like he’s gone, like he’s not here now and he’s going to come back, he’ll be here again. And of course, that’s not what we believe as Orthodox Christians especially, because most liturgies we say, “Christ is in our midst,” and “He is and ever shall be.”

Fr. Andrew: And there’s that bit at the end of the gospels where he said, “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

Fr. Stephen: “Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, I am there in the midst of you,” etc., etc. So, yeah, he’s not gone somewhere, but we don’t see him the way the apostles saw him, and that’s why St. Paul’s “glorious appearing” language—that he will appear to us all, that we will all see him I think is better language to use in English to communicate it.

But when exactly that is, no one knows the day or the hour. And that doesn’t mean, as certain preachers on television and the internet would have you believe, well, you can’t know the day or the hour but you can know the month and the year! No. [Laughter] That means nobody knows when at all, not even a ballpark figure.

Fr. Andrew: No… yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Except it hasn’t happened in the past. Sorry, preterists. No one knows. And there’s this verse that gives a lot of people a lot of trouble. [Laughter] That various people will use to try to prove various things, where Christ says not only does no human know the day or the hour; he says not even the angels, or even the Son, but only the Father. This gives people a lot of trouble, some honestly, some not so honestly because they’re trying to use it for some agenda. The idea that Christ, who’s a Person of the Trinity, who’s fully God, is he saying he doesn’t know? How could one Person of the Trinity know something and the other two not know it? That gives people a lot of fits.

But if you look at how the earliest readers—which would be the Church Fathers and early Christian writers—how they read that, they didn’t read that as saying Christ saying he didn’t know. They read that as Christ saying that it was not his to make known, that it was not his to reveal it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so this is the same kind of mystery, then, as the ones that we were just talking about, which now have been revealed except this one still hasn’t, as you said.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and there’s going to be a time and a place when that is revealed to angels and to men, but it was not for Christ to do before his ascension. That was not the point at which that was going to be revealed. It, like Christ’s incarnation and his resurrection, is going to be revealed when it happens.

Fr. Andrew: Yep. All right, so before we take our second and final break for this episode, we got a message from Alex Radulescu who asked this.

Mr. Alex Radulescu: Bless, Fathers. My name is Alex, and I’m calling from sunny Orlando, Florida. Thank you for producing this illuminating, edifying, and entertaining podcast. You touched on Satan not fully realizing Christ’s identity in a previous episode, I believe. Can you expand on how much Satan would have known, as a former member of God’s council who had fallen from that position? Especially in light of the miracles that surrounded Christ from the earliest days of his conception and the prophecies which he fulfilled. Thank you so much again for the podcast, and I look forward to hearing your latest episode.

Fr. Andrew: All right, so this was obviously related to a lot of what we were talking about, and I guess it raises for me the question of: If the Satan is part of the divine council before he falls, he knows the things that they know. Are they things that he missed out on later, after his fall? There seems to be the sense of hiding these mysteries from all the angels, because even if you reveal it to the elect ones, then the rebellious ones also would find out. Is there something about being an angelic being, whether you’re obedient or fallen, that sort of their access to knowledge is the same? I don’t know. I’m trying to work this out. Help me out here.

Fr. Stephen: Right, well, this wasn’t something that was known by members of the divine council.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, okay, so there’s that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, the end for which man was created was known, and that provoked the devil to jealousy, for example, but these details were not known, until they happened and were revealed to any of the angelic beings—so none of them knew. Yeah, we have to, again… Angels are vast cosmic intelligences, so their knowledge is not sort of restricted by sensory organs like ours.

Fr. Andrew: I feel like that should be on a t-shirt now. That’s going to be one, yeah. We should just call them the VCIs from now on. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, but they’re not, they’re also not omniscient. They’re created beings; they’re finite, so they don’t know everything. But they know far more than we do, and they know it differently. They’re not taking in knowledge through their five senses.

Fr. Andrew: Mm, yeah. So what would be sort of available to be known by any angelic being, all angelic beings would be able to know that. [Laughter] I know I’m just sort of repeating myself, but the point being that if obedient angels can know it, they can’t keep it secret from the rebellious ones.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so the image that St. Ignatius is giving us is this sign appears in the heavens, the angels all go: “Wait, what?” and sort of the elect angels go: “Wait, what? Yay!” and the fallen spirits, rebellious spirits say, “Wait, what? No! This is bad!” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Indeed. All right. Well, fascinating. Let’s go ahead and go to our second and final break. We’ll be right back.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back. This is the third half of our show, and just a reminder that this is actually not airing live. This is a pre-recorded episode, so don’t call that number tonight, but we’ll get back with you live on our next episode which will be in just a couple of weeks.

Connected with all of that, then—because it all turns out to be connected in the end—we got this from our friend, Matthew Namee, who wrote in and asked this question about this event that actually just happened when this airs. This is airing on the 24th of December; just a few nights ago there was this big conjunction in the sky that happened between the planets Jupiter and Saturn, if I remember correctly, and was visible even to the naked eye, although unfortunately out here in eastern Pennsylvania, it was very overcast. I looked, but I couldn’t see a thing; I had to look at other people’s photos. Were you able to see it, or did you look for it, Father?

Fr. Stephen: I did not. We’ve been getting rain.

Fr. Andrew: You did not. Oh, well, there you go. Yeah, but anyway, so there was this even that happened, and Matthew wrote in to ask about that. He writes this.

What would the ancients have said about the whole planetary star thing happening on the exact date of the winter solstice? Would it have had good or bad connotations to them? I’m reading that a great conjunction like this has happened only once since the birth of Christ, in the 1200s, and it didn’t coincide with a solstice or equinox of which the ancients were obsessed.

Just as a comment on that, I think that another one of these is supposed to happen in 60 or 70 years or something like that, but I don’t know that it’s going to happen on the solstice again; I think that may be part of what is making it so relatively rare. Yeah, so what about this? I mean, are we seeing the star of Bethlehem here in 2020? What’s going on?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, my answer to that is no, because as we’re going to talk about in this third half, I think the sign in the heavens is something else, and we’re going to talk about what that is. But this kind of thing absolutely is the kind of thing that ancient people took notice of and had various means for interpreting, things like planetary alignments, planetary alignments on particular days, comets, anything going on in the heavens, especially if it broke the regular pattern, like a comet or a meteor shower, or if it was rare, something that very rarely—conjunctions that very rarely happened.

And there were very elaborately developed means of interpreting these things. In Mesopotamian world, all the way up to Rome, they had the Sibylline books, which were kept underneath a temple on Palatine Hill, and only a particular class of priests were allowed to go and reference them. Whenever something like this happened, or whenever there was some kind of military disaster, or there was a plague, any kind of disaster or just anything weird in the heavens—those weren’t separated—anything rare or odd or strange, any of those things, and they needed to say what’s going on, is this good or bad, what do we need to do. Those priests would be sent to consult those books, and those books would sometimes… We’re not sure. We don’t have the books, and I’ll explain why in a second.

But it’s unclear whether these books just had an excruciating level of detail or whether the priests were really good with PR and would just come out and say, “Hey, we looked in the books and this was all prophesied.” [Laughter] I mean, it may have been books of vague prophecies that you could sort of shape, and the priests could sort of interpret how they wanted to and then come up with something, so it may be a little of both, but they would say things like: We need to take a couple of slaves and bury them alive and then the disaster will pass. I mean, it was that level of stuff.

The reason we don’t have them is that when the Western Roman Empire was falling at the beginning of the fifth century, and the barbarians were invading, a bunch of the still-pagan sympathetic citizens of Rome decided “hey, the gods are mad at us because we became Christians, so we need to go check the books, the pagan books and see what we should do to make things right with them so the barbarians will go away,” and so the Christian governor of Rome burned them. Publicly. So that would not be an option.

Fr. Andrew: “I’m sorry, this is over now.”

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah. “We’re not going back to that.” But, yes, they did notice these things, and there were things that there was a special class of priest, or like the magi in Mesopotamia, in Persian religion, who… their job was kind of to interpret these things, to understand and interpret them.

Fr. Andrew: And that’s who the Magi are that show up at Jesus’ place of birth, although, what, a couple of years later, right? Am I reading that correctly?

Fr. Stephen: Right, two years later, because when they show up, Herod kills everybody who’s two years old and younger.

Fr. Andrew: And they’re in a house. I remember there’s a detail, they’re in a house, by the way; they’re not still hanging out in a cave.

Fr. Stephen: More “Fr. Stephen ruins your Sunday school”: it was two years later when the Magi showed up, and there’s nothing that says there were three of them.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, there’s three gifts, there’s three traditional names, but, yeah… And for those of you who don’t know, the three traditional names of the Magi are: Melchior, Caspar, and Balthazar. There you go. [Laughter] See, I knew that one off the top of my head, so I’m very proud of myself.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, there you go. [Laughter] So, yeah, if we’re going to determine what it is that they saw, we need to have an idea of when it was exactly that Christ was born and what might have been… Once we have an idea of when he was born, we can have a very good idea of what was going on in the sky at the time on any given date.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, fortunately figuring out what’s happening astronomically is just a matter of a lot of complex math, basically.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, which people more mathematically inclined than [I] have done, fortunately.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right. I’m not… This is not me either, by any means.

Fr. Stephen: We’ll start with: What year was Jesus born? There is no “Year 0.” Here’s another “by the way.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah: “Here we are in Year 0.”

Fr. Stephen: There’s 1 BC and then there’s 1 AD, so 0 would be like a point; it would be like exactly midnight on that particular day. Our dating system in terms of BC and AD was worked out in the medieval period and isn’t accurate to when Christ was born, pretty much for sure, because by the time you get to that zero point, Herod had already been dead for a while.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so that wouldn’t work, because, assuming that the biblical account is true—

Fr. Stephen: It’s true.

Fr. Andrew: —which we do; we’re not saying, “Let’s debunk the Bible!”; the opposite, actually—but then if Herod is dead, then that means that the events of the gospels didn’t happen, because he’s a pretty significant character in what’s happening there. So it couldn’t be that zero point.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and you don’t have to be an Orthodox Christian or a Christian at all to realize that the New Testament documents, the gospels, have at least some valid historical information about when Jesus lived, when he was born, and when he died, and when he was crucified, at least that. There are people out there who claim Jesus never existed, but they’re not scholars. If you’ve ever wanted to cheer for Bart Ehrman, which is a hard thing to do and a rare opportunity, he wrote a book, Did Jesus Exist?, where he just… as an atheist who doesn’t believe the Bible is true, who thinks that most of the stuff in the gospels is not true, just goes and dismantles those people who want to say Jesus didn’t exist, pretty epically, without any kind of Christian perspective coming into it; from a historical perspective, it’s ridiculous.

So, yes, when Herod the Great is alive when Jesus is born, he has to die about two years after. This has been historically what scholars try to figure out exactly when Jesus was born, the death of Herod, therefore, is their benchmark, because the gospel writers don’t give us the year; they don’t even try, really.

Fr. Andrew: And a ruler dying is the kind of thing that makes it into records.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Roman records, all the nations: Herod the Great dying… Herod the Great—calling him the Great is kind of like calling Michael Jackson the King of Pop or something. [Laughter] It’s… You know, it’s very relative to a certain time and place. He’s not Alexander the Great; there’s a difference there in “Great"s. But his death is recorded.

Even with that said, though, his death is recorded in ancient records in a certain way, because of course they didn’t have our BC/AD system, so for example when Josephus tells us, as a historian, when Herod died, he gives us a couple benchmarks. He says, well, he died around the time this Olympiad was going on, and he died around the time that these two Roman officials came into power. And the problem with that is those weren’t the same time. Those officials came into power whom Josephus mentioned—I don’t want to go too granular on this, but the officials he mentions came to power, like, a year after the Olympiad ended. So even with the ancient records like Josephus, the ancient historians who talk about Herod’s death, there are some vagaries involved.

Because of that, back in 1890—here come the 19th century German scholars again—a German scholar identified the date of Herod’s death, put forward an argument that Herod died in 4 BC. Based on that, a couple generations of biblical scholars just said, okay, well, that must mean that Jesus was born in 6 BC, because it had to be two years before. So you will still see this a lot in… This is the older scholarly consensus. People who went to universities and studied this in a certain time were just taught that Herod died in 4 BC and Jesus was born in 6 BC, because of that. Now, that causes some problems with other parts of the biblical story.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because we’ve got other sort of data points.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and one of those is in Luke 3:23. It says that Christ begins his earthly ministry when he’s in his 30th year; so he’s 30 years old. St. John’s gospel, when it describes Jesus’ ministry, has his ministry as being three years long, and that’s been taken to be accurate. So that would mean Christ was 33 years old when he was crucified. Well, if he was born in 6 BC, that would mean that Christ would have been crucified and risen in AD 27. First of all, nobody said that’s when he was crucified, but, more importantly, the gospel accounts all agree that the Saturday, the sabbath day, was the Passover; the Passover fell on the sabbath, that sabbath was a high day.

Fr. Andrew: Right. It was the Passover.

Fr. Stephen: In the year that Christ was crucified. That’s why he had to be taken down from the cross so quickly, that’s why the legs were broken of the robbers, etc., etc., etc.

So that doesn’t work.

Fr. Andrew: Because… [Laughter] Because in AD 27, Passover did not fall on a sabbath.

Fr. Stephen: It wasn’t, yeah. So there are several problems, then, making that date gel.

Now, fortunately, we’ve had in the last 25-30 years or so people going back to the question of when Herod the Great died. This is one of the good things… I sometimes kind of pick on biblical scholarship because I say people need to write dissertations so you get some of this weird stuff sometimes, but this is a place where it’s good: people need to write dissertations, so they’re always going back and re-examining old consensuses. So we all had this consensus he must have died in 4 BC, everyone just says that, but some people who had dissertations to do and journal articles to write went back and said, “Hey… How firm is that date? Do we really know that?” And, again, without going super granular about it, if you follow through the way Josephus dates things and the way he counts years of people’s reigns, and you look at the dates of when the things he refers to happen, you actually come to Herod having died in 1 BC. And if Herod the Great dies in 1 BC, that means we have the birth of Christ in 3 BC.

Fr. Andrew: Which then means that the crucifixion happens in AD 30.

Fr. Stephen: 30, when Passover fell on a sabbath day.

Fr. Andrew: Saturday, yep. It all lines up then.

Fr. Stephen: It all works. It all lines up. And there’s other… Like I said, you can go granular with it. There are people whom Herod is supposed to have met and things he’s supposed to have built that wouldn’t be possible if he died in 4 BC. So it’s not just a “well there’s alternate theory that he died in 1 BC”; there’s a much better argument that he died in 1 BC.

Fr. Andrew: It makes sense of data, both biblical and extra-biblical, to date it this way.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, archaeological, yeah, because he did a lot of building projects. That helps with things, too, because you can figure out when things were built.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, okay, so we’ve got the year figured out, or we should say that a model that fits all of the available data very well. Jesus was born in 3 BC. What about—and here’s the one that everyone loves to argue about, and I actually wrote a blog post titled “No, Christmas is Not Pagan. Just Stop.” because of December 25. So the dating of the feast of the Nativity for December 25: Is the claim being made that that is when Jesus was born on that date?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and there are some people who respond to “Well, it’s pagan; that comes from a pagan source, that’s a remaking of a pagan holiday,” there are some people who try to respond to that by doubling-down and saying, “No, Jesus was born on December 25.”

Fr. Andrew: I should probably say that actually, even if you accept this idea that it is derived from paganism, that the date is derived from paganism, their response to that is: “Aha! Checkmate, Christians!” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Which it wouldn’t be.

Fr. Andrew: And then there’s some people who are like: “Oh no, this was chosen quite deliberately to crush paganism that existed, the pagan festivals that existed on it.” So there are both sort of anti-Christians and Christians who both accepted the idea that the date has something to do with paganism and the question is just whether that’s good or bad.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but I just want to say that that… There is a fundamentalist reflex where liberal theory or wacky theory comes along, and we respond to that not by a reality-based approach of, “Okay, what really happened? Where does the December 25 date come from?” but with “I have to defend the December 25 date, because if I don’t all of Christianity falls apart,” which of course is not the case. [Laughter]

There are several problems with that whole hypothesis. You talk about some of them in your article. For example, a lot of the things that are pointed to by these pagan feasts, they say, “Oh look, here are these elements of these pagan feasts. That sounds kind of like Christmas,” even though a lot of it is stuff that didn’t come into the celebration of Christmas until centuries later… “This sounds a lot like Christmas.”

Fr. Andrew: And is geographically local to particular places. Like, “Oh look, you’ve got Christmas trees! You’ve got paganism!” [Laughter] I’m like: Christmas trees… Not everybody uses them, and…

Fr. Stephen: Prince Albert was German, so he and Queen Victoria had one. That’s why people have Christmas trees today. Because of Queen Victoria. It does not go back past that. No one in England had a Christmas tree before that. Anyway.

And in many cases the ones that are valid, a lot of them are from the post-Christian version of those pagan feasts. People tend to forget that things went both ways, that especially in the late second and early third centuries, when Christianity was waxing and paganism was waning, a lot of pagan groups and cults, and even philosophical schools, started taking on elements of Christianity to try to appeal to what clearly the masses were looking for in religion from their perspective, that this seems to be where people are going; they’re gravitating to these things in Christianity. Well, we need to take things on board in our pagan religions to keep these people.

Fr. Andrew: And there’s another layer, which we mentioned earlier when we were talking about Norse myths, which is that a lot of the information that we have about ancient paganism is preserved and commented on and edited by Christians.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so there’s editing that goes on, too, to try to integrate things. All that has to be taken into account. There’s all that evidence in terms of the actual practices kind of falls apart when you push on it.

You also have the basic issue of: it presupposes that Christians didn’t have any kind of winter festival.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so they needed one, because they saw pagans had one.

Fr. Stephen: “Pagans have one, and we have all these people who used to be pagans and are now Christians, and they’re going to keep celebrating the pagan festival unless we come up with something” is the theory. And the big problem with that is there were already a bunch of winter Christian festivals. Part of this is because American Christianity is Puritan Christianity, so the only two feast days we even kind of have left are Christmas and Easter. Like, in the American religious consciousness, those are the only Christian feast days. And for Puritans, Christmas wasn’t even one. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: The original war on Christmas was being waged by Christians, that’s right.

Fr. Stephen: But there’s only those two in the popular mind, but if you go into any… If you go an inch deep into any traditional form of Christianity, you find out there’s a whole lot of feasts. There’s feasts of saints every day of the year.

But already you have, for example, the feast of St. Stephen on December 27. There’s a strong argument—but again, I won’t go granular with it—that the reason St. Stephen’s martyrdom is so prominent in the book of Acts is that it’s actually explaining the origin of his feast day, that his memory and his martyrdom—

Fr. Andrew: Already being celebrated.

Fr. Stephen: —were being celebrated already by the end of the first century, yeah, that he was being remembered, since he was the first martyr. And the memories of martyrs, like the Maccabean martyrs, were already being celebrated by Jewish groups at this time. So this wasn’t like this huge new thing; this was a lateral move for early Christians from a Jewish background, commemorating him as a martyr. So he has this chunk of the Acts of the Apostles devoted to him because it’s explaining here’s the origin of this feast.

But even if you don’t want to go there, we know for a fact that the feast of Theophany, or called Epiphany in the West, but centered around Christ’s baptism, on January 6…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and that that actually in my understanding of liturgical history, that that feast originally was a combination. It was essentially a feast of the appearing of Christ, which then included both his birth and his baptism. So that’s sort of the original Christmas as January 6, and that the December 25 date is added a little bit later.

Fr. Stephen: It comes later.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but the point being that Jesus’ birth was being celebrated, but on a different date, again, not too far away. It’s just twelve days later.

Fr. Stephen: In the winter.

Fr. Andrew: Eventually they get sort of separated out to be two different feasts.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so if they had been worried about pagans still celebrating the pagan feasts, what you would expect to see is a bunch of the pagan stuff being taken over by St. Stephen’s Day and/or Theophany. You wouldn’t expect them to add another day. You’d expect the pagan things to be integrated into those, which of course isn’t what we see. So again that argument that it comes from paganism falls apart.

So when you get, at the beginning of the fourth century, starting in the West and then coming East, we know when Christmas, when the feast of the Nativity was first celebrated in Constantinople, because we have St. John Chrysostom’s sermons, and he says, “Hey, this is the first time we’re celebrating this here.”

Fr. Andrew: That’s convenient!

Fr. Stephen: In the homily!

Fr. Andrew: Thanks, St. John!

Fr. Stephen: So we know 401 and 402 is when it showed up in Constantinople as a feast, but it started earlier in the 300s, in the early fourth century, in the West. So why does it show up then? Paganism does not adequately explain it, as we just said, like, at all.

Fr. Andrew: Especially because paganism is kind of on the wane, especially by that point, right? It’s starting to…

Fr. Stephen: Right. It may not be dead, but it’s coughing up blood. It’s almost… It’s in its last gasps at that point in history. This really comes out of, though a bit indirectly, the Council of Nicaea and one of its decisions. The Council of Nicaea did not say anything about what’s in the Bible and what’s not, but they did…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they didn’t set a canon.

Fr. Stephen: But they did say something about when we should be celebrating Pascha, when we celebrate the Christian Passover. Now it’s called in Germanic languages Easter.

Fr. Andrew: Right, another false-flag paganizing. I’ll just point this out. People will sometimes say, “Oh, Easter, that’s the name of a goddess, blah blah blah blah blah.” I’m like: Number one, there is only a handful of places in the world where it’s called that, and they’re all Germanic language speaking places. Most are calling it some version of the word “Pascha.” Number two, it’s really just about the fact that it fell at a certain time of year that happened to have been named for that goddess, so it was just named for that month. As I like to point out, if you celebrate the fourth of July, that does not mean you are celebrating the divine Julius Caesar after whom that month was named. [Laughter] The fourth of July has as much to do with Julius Caesar as Easter has to do with the goddess Eostre, or however you pronounce it. Just wanted to put that out there.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, as an aside.

Fr. Andrew: Since we’re in full debunking mode now. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: At the time of the Council of Nicaea, there were different groups of Christians who were… Everybody was celebrating the Christian Passover, the death and resurrection of Christ, which happened at the Jewish Passover, so they saw it as: We’re continuing to celebrate the Passover, but we’re celebrating it in its fulfilled sense, because there’s been a fulfillment of what was seen as sort of an icon or image in the deliverance of Israel from Egypt, now has come to its fullness in Christ’s delivery of humanity from slavery to sin and death. But they’re disagreeing on exactly when to celebrate.

So you have Christians who are celebrating it basically at the same time as the Jewish Passover. Just whenever the Jewish Passover falls, that’s when we celebrate.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which could be any day of the week.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, could be Thursday, could be… But just going by the Jewish calculation. You have other Christians who determined that it happened on March 25, historically, and so they were doing it on March 25, whatever day that fell on, sort of the way we celebrate a lot of other feasts. And then there were Christians who were doing a sort of variation of what we’re doing now, even if they were doing it on the Sunday nearest the Jewish Passover or the Sunday nearest the 25th. They said it needs to be on the Lord’s day; it needs to be on the day of the week that Christ rose, but in that vicinity. So this all had to be settled, because it was determined: Hey, Christians need to all celebrate this together, at the Council of Nicaea. So they settled on the means of calculating that they settled on, which is related to the way in which the date of the Passover was calculated by the Jewish community, but slightly different and not done by the Jewish community.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and this episode is not about all of that, but the point is that they came up with this dating, and then out of that comes the date of the Annunciation, March 25.

Fr. Stephen: Right, the settlement. So we have these Christians who are used to celebrating on March 25. So what is proposed in the deliberations of the councils is that there was a Jewish tradition that the date of a prophet’s death would be the same date as his conception.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is this idea of integral age, that your age is exactly an integer, basically.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that’s what it’s called. We won’t get into, go down the rabbit-hole now of whether there’s ever any evidence that there was such a Jewish tradition and how that all works.

Fr. Andrew: But they seemed to think that there was.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, that was set forth as part of the settlement, and therefore if the date that Christ was crucified is March 25, then that would also have been the date of his conception. And so that was the beginning of the celebration of what we now call the feast of the Annunciation, or in Greek the Evangelism of the Theotokos, when the Archangel Gabriel comes and announces to the Theotokos that she’s going to give birth to a Son. That was going to be celebrated on March 25. And if you’re using the old Julian calendar, because of that, sometimes Pascha falls on March 25, and you end up with what’s called Kyriopascha, which is this mix, this liturgical mix of the Annunciation and Pascha.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, mega-mega-feast.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, together. Combines like Voltron and you get sort of the Megazord of feasts, to mix my metaphor. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: And I should add, since we said all of that, actually, if you’re interested in kind of a little bit of the homework behind some of that, there is a good article out there by Dr. William Tighe, T-i-g-h-e, called “Calculating Christmas,” which appeared a number of years ago in Touchstone Magazine, and you can find it online, actually. You can just read it, and it talks specifically about this specific question of integral age and the Annunciation and the whole point is the one that we’re about to make, which is if you know that the Annunciation is on March 25, then nine months after a baby is conceived, he is born, so therefore—December 25. That’s where December 25 comes from.

Fr. Stephen: Right, therefore December 25. So that’s where that date comes from, and it’s not based on a historical memory of the Church that that’s the date that Jesus was born on. It’s not based on that. It’s a liturgical date when it’s celebrated.

Fr. Andrew: I’ll say even if it had been the case that the Church chose to pick something to replace a pagan feast, that’s not syncretism. [Laughter] That’s saying: We’re taking this. We’re occupying.

Fr. Stephen: Reclaiming territory.

Fr. Andrew: Reclaiming territory, right. It’s not the case for Christmas’s date; it’s not. But the point is that’s not a problem and it’s not syncretism. It wouldn’t be syncretism. It’s really about sort of conquest, really, that the one true God is retaking what belongs to him, wherever it… The same thing happens, for instance: pagan temples, where the pagan altars would get destroyed by Christians, and then a Christian altar would be set up and the place would be sanctified and they would put relics of saints in there so as to drive out the demonic presence. It’s not syncretism, but, again, that’s not what’s going on at Christmas in any event. The date is really about the Annunciation; it’s related to the Annunciation.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is kind of important because we don’t take into account the fact that all the months and all the days and everything were dedicated to and governed by these spiritual powers represented by the stars and constellations we’ve been talking about.

Fr. Andrew: That’s why you’ve got to have a liturgical calendar.

Fr. Stephen: So the Christian festal calendar is reclaiming time from the demonic powers. Hi, Dr. Roccas. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I don’t know if she listens to this show or not, but anyway.

Fr. Stephen: I don’t think she does either, but just in case. Someone tell her. Maybe she’ll listen to this one. She’s busy editing a really poorly written book manuscript right now.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] By you. Here’s a hint, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: So I can say that. But, yeah, it’s the reclaiming of time from… But the same way you would reclaim physical space as space with those temples, we’re also reclaiming the days and months of the year for God. And those are being given over to the saints, too, taken from the powers that had them and given to the saints, like St. Stephen.

But to our thrust here—hey, we’re finally going to get to our topic now! [Laughter]—that means that looking at December 25, 3 BC, and trying to figure out what was going on in the stars isn’t going to lead us to the sign in the heavens. That’s not going to do it. What will lead us to it, I think, is what I think is ultimately a bad interpretation of Revelation 12.

Fr. Andrew: All right! Well, what’s that all about, then?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] This is a case where you do the math problem wrong, but you still come up with the right answer, I think. You arrive at the correct answer through the wrong procedure. So some folks—and by “some folks,” I mean a few scholars and a lot of people on the internet—have looked at Revelation 12, which begins with St. John saying he saw a sign in the heavens. So, boom. Okay, something going on in the heavens, and then goes on to describe the woman standing on the moon, clothed with the sun, the dragon at her feet. This is this apocalyptic description of the birth of Christ and the dragon, the devil’s attempts to destroy Christ and the Church. We’ll end up doing an episode on Revelation 12, I’m sure, at some point. We’ve already talked about it a little a couple of times in terms of the fall of Satan in the podcast.

So they say, “Well, if this is a sign in the heavens, what if this is talking about astrological phenomena?”

Fr. Andrew: Right, sure, natural question.

Fr. Stephen: What if the woman is the virgin, Virgo, and what if “clothed with the sun” means the sun is in this position, and “standing on the moon,” so the moon’s in that position? Things start to stretch a little, like the dragon becomes Scorpio, because of some of the Babylonian stuff: he’s more of a dragon than a scorpion, and some Egyptian stuff, where maybe…

Fr. Andrew: Some fudging that needs to go on…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and it starts out strong and then it gets a little shakier and this kind of thing. But what you end up getting described—and there’s a star that appears related to the constellation Leo, the lion, Judah—you end up coming up with this conception, and I think it’s a little bit of work to get it to fit Revelation 12, but it just so happens that this sort of massive conjunction of stars, planets, etc., and the sun and the moon, all happens on 3 BC on a particular day. And so this is why I say I don’t think that’s a good interpretation of Revelation 12; I don’t think it works for interpreting that text to say that St. John gets to what we now call the beginning of chapter 12 and says, “Oh, by the way, do you want to know what day Jesus was born?” And then sort of goes back to his other topics. I don’t think that works. Other people do, but I don’t.

But I think that going through all that has led us to: Hey, 3 BC is the year Jesus was born, and there is this conjunction that happens in 3 BC on this particular day that has all of this massive symbolism regarding kingship, the tribe of Judah, all of these things, and is exceedingly rare to happen at all. One of the reasons I say a lot of people on the internet talk about this is because there was a big furor because this particular conjunction happened again in 2017, and so certain people were super certain that, well, hey, if this is what happened when Jesus was born, then that means when this happens again, he’s coming back. That’s just one of several apocalypses that I’ve survived over the course of my life.

Fr. Andrew: It’s the end of the world again. [Laughter] I feel fine, I feel fine.

Fr. Stephen: Right. I don’t buy that. I want to make clear that “I don’t buy that” is the correct interpretation of Revelation 12, but it has gotten us to: Hey, in 3 BC, the year Jesus was born, this confluence of celestial things happened that would definitely be the most prominent and rare thing that happened that year for the Magi to notice, and it’s the kind of thing that they would have noticed and would have clued them in that a king, a significant king, had been born. And this happens to be a date—another point for this is that this happens to be a date that was very significant for the Judean peoples.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so just to kind of underline the point that you’re making here, it’s: Yes, something really big did happen in the sky, like really big, did happen in the sky in 3 BC, but that’s not what Revelation 12 is talking about.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, gotcha.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, that’s what I’m saying.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Good. I just wanted to spell it out in case people are like: I’m not sure how to follow that.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, very clear. But through that sort of biblical interpretation chicanery, we discovered this astrological thing that happened in that year. And so the date that that fell on on the Jewish calendar that was being used by the Second Temple Judeans at that time is Tishri 1, the first day of the month of Tishri on the Jewish calendar. This is a majorly significant date on the calendar. First of all, it’s New Year’s Day.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so Rosh Hashanah, right?

Fr. Stephen: Rosh Hashanah on the Jewish agricultural calendar. I don’t want to go too granular on this: there were actually two Jewish calendars. We may actually talk about that at some point.

Fr. Andrew: Uh-oh.

Fr. Stephen: It’s New Year’s on the agricultural calendar. Pascha is New Year’s on the festal calendar, and we still kind of have that in the Orthodox Church, but I digress.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we do have kind of multiple calendars going on in the Orthodox Church, even just within a single parish.

Fr. Stephen: Right. This is the equivalent of the Indiction on the modern Orthodox calendar, and it’s around the same time of year, not coincidentally. It’s New Year’s Day. This is also the day that David was coronated or crowned as king of Judah, and so it became sort of the inauguration day for all the kings of Judah throughout Judah’s history, so this makes it obviously a very messianic significant day. If the Messiah is the Son of David as we talked about last episode, this is a majorly significant day. This is also the day that Noah was born.

Fr. Andrew: Oh man.

Fr. Stephen: You can kind of calculate his birthday based on how old it says he was during different months in the flood story.

Fr. Andrew: Interesting. So would the birthday of Noah… I mean, is that a liturgical commemoration on the Jewish calendar?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that was part of the understanding of that day.

Fr. Andrew: All the things going on on that day.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and Noah… See, again, we just read the story of the flood. We start with Genesis 6 and the nephilim and stuff, because we get excited by the giants. But when he’s born, Lamech has this prophecy about Noah, about how God’s going to save the world through him, save the creation through him. So Noah really takes on… He’s this savior-figure, and it’s through him that the world is preserved. He becomes sort of, in the way that Adam was sort of the father of the previous age, he becomes sort of the father of this new age that begins after the flood. So there some New Year connection there.

Fr. Andrew: So he’s a New Adam, right.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and there’s… When you read again, when we do our inevitable series on 1 Enoch, there’s traditions surrounding his miraculous birth, where he’s born sort of glowing and talking, and his father is sort of like: Wait, is he a nephilim? What’s going on here?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Exactly. Is Noah a giant?

Fr. Stephen: And has to be sort of reassured. He has Enoch show up; God sends Enoch to go and tell him: No, it’s okay; he’s really your son. And St. Matthew kind of inverts that whole story with the story of Joseph, when St. Joseph the Betrothed sort of doubts first. When the Theotokos gets pregnant, he’s kind of like: Uhhh… [Laughter] What’s going on? And an angel comes to him and reassures him that it’s not a human’s son. So it’s sort of inverted there. But, yeah, there’s all these: Noah’s birth traditions that get taken up in that day.

So all of that is on that day, and there’s this major, rare astrological Judah-king-related event, on that day in 3 BC. So all of this comes together, for a pretty strong argument, if you’re going to pick a day. Everything we’ve laid out this third half, I think, other than Revelation 12, makes a really good argument for this particular day. And that day, on our modern calendar, was September 11.

Fr. Andrew: There you go. Which of course now has a bit of an apocalyptic… significance for us Americans, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, overtone all its own.

Fr. Andrew: So, okay, are you saying then that there’s this astrological/astronomical event that occurs, some sort of major conjunction that they would have seen, and that is the star that the Magi see in the east?

Fr. Stephen: This is what the Magi see, this is what St. Ignatius is talking about, this is what St. Paul is talking about. Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: And is then the same angel who speaks to the shepherds? Is that how we should read this?

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: So that’s a different angel making that announcement.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, right.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. Gotcha. Wow. Well, it’s been a wild ride, but fun as always. All right, well, let’s just offer some last thoughts. Number one, one of the reasons I love doing this show is because I read the Bible in a new way that I never did before, and honestly it makes so many things kind of fit together, but the other thing I wanted to especially say is: we talked about pagan astrology and syncretism and all that stuff over and over again, and I think that sometimes modern Christians’ understandable fear of those things makes it so that we throw out the baby with the bath water, so to speak. We know that horoscopes are nonsense, and so therefore anything that looks like astrology is bad and not Christian. Well, as we’ve seen that’s simply not the case. I mean, the Bible has astrology in it. It is a different character for sure than pagan astrology, and it’s definitely a different character than the modern fortune-telling type.

This is one of our persistent themes in this podcast: the things that paganism got right, but then also commenting on the ways that they got those right things wrong. To me, this particular one really shows that, and I hope has opened up your eyes, listeners, to, as Fr. Stephen described it, layers of meaning that are also present there and actually show how utterly rich the Scriptures are, just rich, so rich! So many layers upon layers upon layers of meaning. And that it’s not just stuff for us to hear and say, “Oh, that’s cool.” I mean, there are definitely moments when I was just sitting there saying, “Oh, that’s cool”—because it is cool—but rather that as we marvel at the complexity and the glory and the beauty of the astonishing revelation of God to man, that we would be drawn to love him and to worship him.

One of the things that this also does for me is just seeing how all of these pieces fit together so seamlessly is for me a reassurance of the truth of all of it. It is more than any human being could ever design; it really is. That what God is saying to us in all of this has a very specific content, which is that he has sent his Son; he has sent his Son to defeat these evil powers that we’re enslaved to, to rescue us from that bondage, and to set us among the stars, among his divine council. Glory to God in the highest! That’s what the angels say, so that’s what we say as well.

Fr. Stephen: In terms of my final thought, when we talk about the fallenness of humanity—and we’re inevitably going to go into more detail about that and how there’s actually three falls of humanity—when we talk about the fallenness of humanity, we’ve got a pretty good lock in our understanding of our fallenness of this separation and this disjunction, this alienation between us and God. In fact, in some circles of American Christianity, that’s about all you’ve got in terms of human fallenness. But many of us have a little larger view of that, and we understand our fallenness in terms of not only our alienation between us and God, but the alienation between us and our fellow human beings, that there are rifts and gaps and pain caused by sin that separate us from each other. And we understand that in Christ, the communion between us and God, the communion between us and each other is restored.

But there’s a third major element of our fallenness in the Scriptures that we’ve lost sight of almost completely, and that’s the separation and the disjunction and the schism between us as humans and the rest of the creation, this alienation that Adam receives, between him and the ground from which his food is going to come, the even more complete alienation that Cain experiences after he sins. We don’t go outside and hear the stars sing to us any more. We don’t relate to them. We don’t relate to the animals. We don’t feel the ground under our feet, and we don’t work it for most of our food. We don’t know or raise the animals that we eat, or the animals that serve us.

We’re completely disconnected, and in this way, as in all three ways, secularism and materialism are the denouement, they’re the apex of the fallenness of humanity. Secularism and materialism deny that God speaks and he acts, and often even that he exists; deny that the whole spiritual world that we talk about so much on this podcast exists; deny that our departed loved ones still exist and the departed saints still exist. It denies and rejects the real communion between people, it’s separated us as individuals and isolated us. And it’s also separated us—modern materialism has separated us from the rest of the creation. They’re just rocks floating in space, or gas balls, that have nothing to do with us and our lives. Trees are trees, rocks are rocks, concrete is better because it’s smoother and it’s man-made, and we’re completely alienated and separated.

But the truth is that part of what Christ does in our salvation is also reunite us with the rest of creation, and he also reunites us with our departed loved ones; he unites us with the angelic beings, in worship and in praise, and through theosis unites us with them truly in his council and in the heavens. But he also reunites us with the earth that we live on; he reunites us with the nature that surrounds us. We see the saints who are even reunited with sometimes wild animals who come and serve them and live with them.

So a big part of what I hope this podcast can help all of us do is try to break down that barrier as well, that we would not only, as we talked about in the last couple of podcasts, get to know the saints, but we would also get to know our fellow creatures, that we would get to see how all of creation, all of God’s creation, is connected: connected to us, connected with itself, and how God works his love and communicates with us, shows his love for us, and works out of love to bring us closer to him and to work out our salvation through all of the creation, including the stars in the sky and the sun and the moon.

I hope we’ve done a little piece of that today, a little piece of that, beginning of that reunion, where we could sort of take our place again in the whole world of God’s creation that he’s made and he’s blessed us to be a part of.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. That is our show for today. Thank you very much for listening. This episode was not live, but in the future if you would like to connect to us during a live broadcast, you can call in. You can also email us at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com; you can message us at our Lord of Spirits Podcast Facebook page. We read everything but unfortunately can’t respond to everything, but we do save what you send for possible use in future episodes.

Fr. Stephen: And join us for our actual live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific. Don’t forget to like our Lord of Spirits podcast Facebook page; while you’re at it, leave a recommendation. Join our Divine Council Facebook discussion group, and then invite all your friends to both.

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Fr. Andrew: Thank you; God bless you—Christ is born! Glorify him!