December 2009

  • Frankincense and Myrrh

    By lisala on 12/11/09 9:19pm
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    And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense and myrrh.

    Here's the same passage from the Latin Vulgate:

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  • Christmas and Xmas

    By lisala on 12/10/09 6:12pm
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    I noticed an online acquaintance the other day becoming extremely agitated that someone had referred to Christmas using the colloquialism Xmas. She felt that this was insulting, and offensive in the extreme. What she didn't realize was that Xmas as a shortened form for Christmas has a venerable, and solidly Christian, history.

    The word Christmas is a compound of Christ + mass; we see it first in Old English in the form Cristes mæsse in 1038, according to the OED. The Old English form eventually evolved to the Middle English Christemasse. The word Christ is derived from the Greek word Christos, meaning "anointed," a literal translation of the Hebrew cognate of messiah.

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  • Chi Rho

    By lisala on 12/8/09 7:19pm
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    There is a long Christian tradition of using the Greek letters that spell Christ in various abbreviated forms. Christ in Greek is written with a Chi (X), a Rho (rather like a P) and an Iota (an I or i to you and me). Often the letters were combined to form both the letters, and a design; the graphic to the left of this paragraph is fairly typical of such graphic designs. Sometimes, the I was seen as the stem of the Rho; sometimes it was a separate letter. In the middle ages the name of Christ, or even the first three letters, was specifically seen as something for scribes and artists to illuminate with their very best work.

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