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Advent & Christmas Page
The purpose of this page is to provide hypertext links for busy parish ministers who are looking for useful websites when preparing material for Advent and Christmas.  Click on items underlined to visit them.
Musical Advent Calendar

See the Magi in Ravenna


(Highly recommended!)

(Superior site by Countess
Maria Hubert von Staufer)

(Enjoy with a glass and a mince pie)


(Very useful Catholic site)


Help real donkeys


(French Flavour!)

(Research superb)

(Research commendable ...)



(Impress them at Christmas!)

(Excellent - from the USA)

(Children aged 5-90 need parental supervision.)

(Prehistoric to present. Text in Spanish!)

(Hungarian site with text in English)

(Baby Jesus with red hair and a green nightie!)

(For earlier Celtic magic)

(Illuminated Scottish Prayers)

CofE commended services The Promise of His Glory




(Origins of Winter Festivals)
ADVENT & CHRISTMAS
CHRISTMAS REVISITED

Luke's shepherds and Matthew's wise men have been with us for more Christmases than Auntie Maisie and the Pantomime Cat.  Yet we don't even know their names.  So you won't be surprised to learn that someone decided to put that right.  Almost eight hundred years ago, Solomon, the Nestorian Bishop of Basra in Iraq, beat us to it and claimed there were seven shepherds.  In his "Book of the Bee" he called them Asher, Zebulon, Justus, Nicodemus, Joseph, Barshabba and Jose.  In a richly illustrated French Book of Hours made around 1515, Simon Vostre shows two shepherdesses and four shepherds whom he named  Alison, Mahault, Aloris, Ysanber, Gobin le Gay and Bonny (not Jolly) Roger.

Much earlier, names were given with similar thoughtfulness to the wise men.  You can see them written above their pictures in glittering mosaics on the walls of a church called San Apollinare Nuovo in the port of Ravenna on the north east coast of Italy.  These mosaics date back to the 6th Century.  You can tell, because the wise men don't look anything like the ones on our Christmas cards.  The first is old, the second young and clean-shaven and the third middle-aged.  All have white skins, Phrygian hats like the lady on the old French franc coins, and sport a natty line in multi-coloured ski pants which are secured under the soles of their feet.  It's interesting to note that although Luke never recorded the number of shepherds nor Matthew the number of wise men, the people of Ravenna fourteen hundred years ago, like ourselves, considered that if there were three gifts, gold, frankincense and myrrh, there must have been three wise men to hand them over.  They called them Gaspar, Melchior and Balthassar.

Before the Visigoths gave them trousers to see them through their northern winters. earlier artists from Constantinople, where it was warmer, had them dressed in kilted tunics.  That is how they appear on a silver-gilt flask made two hundred years earlier, in the 4th Century.  It turned up (quite literally) in East Lothian in 1919 - among the treasure found on Traprain Law.  The story of the discovery of the Traprain Treasure reads like the script of an Indiana Jones movie.  On Monday 12 May 1919  the foreman on the "dig" saw a silver bowl on the end of his pick..  Evidence of the find was quickly concealed and a hasty telephone call  made from East Linton to alert the Director of the Royal Scottish Museum. So that no treasure hunters would get word of it the caller could not be explicit.  Unaware that the message was urgent, it wasn't until four o'clock on the following afternoon that Mr Alexander O Curle arrived in response to the caller.  Recording his reaction on reaching Traprain he described the moment as "one never to be forgotten."  All three wise men on the Traprain Flask look like the clean-shaven kid  in the Ravenna mosaic.  Interestingly, some of the best silver in the Roman Empire was made in Ravenna.  Could the East Lothian wise men have originated there ?  You can visit them at the Museum of Scotland.

Another way to go looking for the wise men this Christmas is in the company of an able young journalist who hails originally from East Lothian also.  I recommend to you William Dalrymple's book "In Xanadu."  It's not so much a read as an adventure.  You might also try to read again the openings of  the Gospels according to St Matthew and St Luke.  For whatever age you are there is always something new to be found in them.  Or you might find interesting Adrian Gilbert's book "Magi."

Some people find nowadays that the Christmas stories of Jesus' birth  they first heard as children, provoke difficult adult questions.  If Matthew and Luke were not local reporters on the spot, where did they get their information ?  To express theological truths in a narrative did they create stories about Jesus' birth by borrowing or rewriting passages from the Old Testament ?  Are we dealing with history and biography fit for adults, or are the shepherds and the wise men bound to end up with Saint Nicholas and the Pantomime Cat as we grow older ?  Other people are less inclined to dismiss what they read as fanciful.  For it rings true to their experience.  Luke's shepherds are ordinary working folk with more insight than their religious and political leaders.  Matthew's wise men may have been foreigners but they were not too proud to recognise that the child in the manger was wiser than themselves. Time and again these stories present the same challenge.  Are we blind or can we see ?  Will we line up with Herod and his priests and courtiers or with the shepherds and the wise men and the ox and the ass (which you will find not in the Gospels but in Isaiah 1.3) ?

This web page's Christmas Message, for what it is worth, is that Jesus' whole life from start to finish was about getting right to the truth.  The oldest surviving fragment of any part of the New Testament is a tiny scrap of papyrus dating back to around 125 AD.  Known as Papyrus Rylands and located in Manchester, it contains words which Jesus said to Pilate at his trial, indicating that he recalled the day of his birth on the day of his death.  They are from John 18.37:

"To this end was I born and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth."

Rather than intellectual scepticism or spiritual triumphalism the appropriate response to the Incarnation and the Atonement is a sense of awe.  For the Truth which presents Himself to us in a manger and on a cross will always be far greater than our limited powers of understanding.
                                                                                                                                nlf
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