For the maintenance of their armed forces, the Roman emperors decreed that their subjects in every district should be taxed every year. This same decree was reissued every fifteen years, since the Roman soldiers were obliged to serve for fifteen years. At the end of each fifteen-year period, an assessment was made of what economic changes had taken place, and a new tax was decreed, which was to be paid over the span of the
By Fr. Stavros Akrotirianakis, December 30, 2018 Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Rise, take the Child and His mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there till I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the Child, to destroy Him.” And he rose and took the Child and His mother by night, and departed to Egypt, and remained there
Nothing about Jesus is so misunderstood, misrepresented, trivialized and falsified as the Resurrection. Everything in the Gospels has to be understood in light of the Resurrection. Christian faith takes its meaning from the Resurrection—every claim about Jesus, every notion of what it means to live in trusting hope, every view of the world, every take on reality. What the Christian knows of God—with “knowledge” that is qualitatively different from knowledge about anything or anyone else—comes
THE ANNUNCIATION of the THEOTOKOS On the twenty-fifth day of this month we celebrate the Annunciation of our Most Holy Lady Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary. Verses The Angel announced to the Virgin the Great Son of the Father’s great Counsel. The Angel said, “Rejoice”, to Mary on the twenty-fifth. Synaxarion God, Who is merciful and loves mankind, is ever solicitous about the race of men. When, as a loving Father, He saw the work of
[The] Gospels state that God has embraced humanity and entered into its suffering with unimaginable love. His Christ is the one who arrives not in royal purple but in silence and simplicity, far from the cheers that attend Augustus and Herod. A king he surely is—hence the swaddling bands and the treasures that are his due—but a new sort of king who makes no claim to worldly authority. In infancy as during his life on
The Peril of Christmas, by Father Leonidas Contos If we make the small effort to translate ourselves into the times which knew the historical Jesus, we are startled to discover how like our own times they were. Certainly it was not an age of peace. Like ours it was one of the oppressive tension and anxiety. In the heart of the Jew there was always expectation, even hope, but these lived side by side with
ON [this day] the Church celebrates the [Synaxis of the Holy Theotokos], the Mother of God, meditating on Mary’s intimate connection with the Incarnation. The feast of the Mother of God is the oldest of the Christian church’s feasts honoring Mary. The placement of this feast within the Christmas season emphasizes its connection to the mystery of Christmas. Because this feast is about the motherhood of Mary, it helps us to grasp more deeply the
As much as any other Christian feast, the significance of Christ’s Nativity comes to expression by means of paradoxical affirmations that speak of the ineffable mystery of the Incarnation by juxtaposing apparent contradictions. The most obvious of these is found in the prologue of St John’s Gospel, which declares that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us…” (John 1:14). As the context makes clear that Word or Logos is the Person of the eternal
The Feast of the Entrance of the Virgin in the Temple is believed to be not among the most ancient festivals of the Church. However, indications that the Feast was observed in the first centuries of Christianity are found in the traditions of Palestinian Christians, which say that the holy Empress Helen (May 21) built a church in honor of the Entry of the Most Holy Theotokos into the Temple. St. Gregory of Nyssa, in
By Aristotle Papanikolaou, PhD What happened on the day of our Lord’s Transfiguration? On this day, Jesus took with him three disciples, Peter, John and James, three of the better-known disciples. He took them to a ‘high’ mountain, the Bible tells us (Mt 17:1-9; Mk 9:2-8; Lk 9:28-36). They are at the ‘high’ mountain, which is often a place of revelation in the Bible, and at this mountain Jesus is transfigured. St. Matthew tells us,
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