Historical Inaccuraccies in the Troparion for Christmas

GregConstantine said:

I'm talking about a deeper understanding of English. It would avoid misunderstandings like that of the OP in regards to the word "worship".

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I'd venture that many standard objections to Orthodoxy would be diminished if they understood the origins of the words we use in our worship.

While I'm usually not up on EO hymns, I happen to know and like this one quite a lot because I have it on an old LP of Arabic hymns sung by Greek Orthodox Met. Elias Korban of Tripoli, Lebanon. In the Arabic version of this hymn, the word used for 'worship' is "sagideena" (the magi are referred to as "lianna sagideena lilkawakeb" -- those who worship the stars), but this word is a bit more involved than that, because sgd (the unconjugated 'root' form) has a basic meaning more akin to 'prostrate' (sagid). Coptic, interestingly, has the same correspondence, despite Coptic not being a Semitic language, so when we say in a common Coptic hymn "tenoousht emok o pekhristos", it can be translated as "We worship you, O Christ" (the most common way to translate it), or "We prostrate before you, O Christ", because the root word, owsh, means 'prostrate'.

Maybe a minor point, but important to keep in mind when considering what people in the ancient Near East could've been actually doing when we say they worshiped this or that. Would ancient astronomers have 'prostrated' themselves before the power of the stars, at least in a metaphorical sense, despite their actual religion being based around fire worship or something else? It seems quite likely.

JJM said:

Regardless what exactly is the basis for this license? That is really the point though many have helped with minimizing the license in this specific text which I am grateful for.

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Poetic license in hymns and iconography has been used since the early church - and poetic license was used in the Jewish faith beforehand. For example, the Song of Solomon has many areas where it is not literal. Iconography has always been given poetic license in order to convey an underlying truth. That's the ultimate purpose of the hymnography and iconography - to convey a truth to those who hear / sing them.

So what is the truth conveyed by this hymn? The Magi were led to worship and adore Jesus through the star; also, Jesus is made accessible to those who do not follow the Jewish faith (Jews would not worship / adore the stars, and God used that reverence for the star to lead non-Jews to worship and adore the King of Kings).

It is legitimate to use "proskynein" with God, but not legitimate to use "latreuein" with anything but God. I suspect the point was made that they were illegitimately worshiping the stars and changed their mind, but for poetic or textual reasons (repeating verbs is boring) they chose the other verb at the less important part. The point remains, though, that their false worship was corrected to the true and appropriate worship of the God-man, Jesus Christ.

JJM said:

For those not familiar with it look here. Perhaps I'm mistaken, so please inform me if I am, but does it bother anyone that the Magi being Zoroastrians almost certainly didn't worship stars? Does it matter?

I'm not trying to be provocative here; I'm working on a liturgy for Christmas Eve dinner and it is just something that bugs me.

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There is a belief that the Magi were from a sect that Daniel began in Babylon looking forward to the arrival of the Messiah.
There may have been as many as 70 in the group, (there is no mention in the gospel of how many, but of 3 gifts).
Have a look at a video on you tube "the star of Bethlehem". It explains a lot about the occurrence.

JJM said:

For those not familiar with it look here. Perhaps I'm mistaken, so please inform me if I am, but does it bother anyone that the Magi being Zoroastrians almost certainly didn't worship stars? Does it matter?

I'm not trying to be provocative here; I'm working on a liturgy for Christmas Eve dinner and it is just something that bugs me.

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Astrologers thrive under powerful kings. Hindus are well known astrologers for thousands of years. They were strongly supported by the patronage of kings. The only well known kingdoms during Jesus' time were in India. Rome had business contact with them. Jews had settled down in India for trade right from Solomon's time. Apostle Thomas and Bartholomew took the Gospel to India soon after the crucifixion of Jesus. Thomas continued there only to become martyr later.

Therefore, I strongly believe that it was Hindu astrologers who met infant Jesus and worshiped Him.

"I'm working on a liturgy for Christmas Eve dinner"

You're working on a liturgy? What does that mean exactly? And for Christmas Eve dinner?

You mean there's going to be a liturgy during Christmas Eve dinner?

You're talking about the traditional Christmas eve dinner that many Slavic cultures have. No, that's not a liturgy, and we do not get to define for ourselves what a "liturgy" is.

A wonderful and beautiful tradition though. Similar to what the Italians do (that's part of my background) on Christmas eve.

JJM - please help me in my seeming confusion

Would you please give an outline of this ' ritualised communal action consisting of prayers and sacramental actions and object designed to worship God, honor the saints, and enter into the mystery of Christ's nativity '.

OK - i've not been to as many Holy Suppers as many folk here but I'm struggling with your description

Since you're not Orthodox, go ahead and do whatever you want.

Greg - I appreciate how you feel - but that could have been worded a little better.

Yes - he's not Orthodox but he said on his other thread on this topic

I'm quite fond of Eastern practice. my wife's family is Ukrainian Catholic (although by a twist of canon law not she herself)

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From that I would deduce that it's his mother-in-law is of Ukrainian Catholic 'stock'.

We have no idea where this will lead him - if it's to the UGCC - as far as I'm concerned that's fine - if it's actually to Orthodoxy - that's also fine by me. But if we say 'just go ahead and do what you want ' I really don't think that's being helpful. He should know that you can't 'mess' with Liturgy - either Latin Catholic , Eastern Catholic or Orthodox.

I want to know where he's got this idea that the Holy Supper is liturgical

Anhelyna, it's not my place to correct people who are not Orthodox. No one should take that personally.

However, for our general reading audience, an explanation as to why we don't individually come up with our own liturgical services might be helpful.

We believe our liturgical services are divine, they are sanctified by God. This has its roots in the way the church perceives herself. If the church views herself merely as a body of Christians who gather periodically in worship, then making changes in the order and content of services to accommodate changes in the tastes of the church's members is perfectly reasonable. But Orthodoxy maintains that the church is equally the body of Christ and that in the act of worship Christ's whole body is expressing itself.

Because Orthodox Christians believe—perhaps more literally and therefore more seriously than other Christian churches—that the body of believers includes Christians of all times and places, the idea of worship across time and space is very important to us. The saints and angels may have their own worship services—and they must be glorious indeed—but they also worship with us. One of the most awesome moments in the Divine Liturgy occurs when the priest prays, "Before Thee stand thousands of archangels and hosts of angels with the cherubim and the seraphim, six-winged and many-eyed, who soar aloft, borne on their wings, singing the triumphant hymn, shouting, proclaiming, and singing"—and the choir joins in, singing, "Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts." The choir members are not singing alone; they are adding their voices to those of the church triumphant, to the angels and the company of saints!

To put matters simply, then, if the saints and angels are worshiping with us, we would do well to let them have their say—and their song—in the form of worship. This strikes me as paramount in the Orthodox insistence on liturgical continuity. The prayers and hymns that enter into the complex circle of Orthodox services belong to the saints of the Old and New Covenants—Moses, Anna, Isaiah, David, Jonah, Zechariah, Elizabeth, Mary, Simeon, John—as well as hundreds of post-apostolic saints. The songs of the angels—the few that we know—are also regularly sung in Orthodox churches. These include the Thrice-Holy Hymn, the words of Gabriel at the Annunciation, and, of course, the Great Doxology ("Glory to God in the Highest").

We are not alone, we are saved in a community, the Body of Christ. We do these things together, communually, not individually.

While I understand what you mean, Greg (as that is what we OO believe, too), I feel like Catholics would say them same things that you wrote about their own masses and church, despite having made many changes to both over the centuries. So, respectfully, I'm not sure that explanation actually shows how Orthodox and Catholics differ on this point.

It might be easier to just say that liturgies have developed organically over the centuries to reflect the unique theology, ecclesiology, and history of a given church, but within the boundaries of comparatively few models based on the Christian worship of earliest centers of the faith. This is why there are many variations on the worship of Antioch (Syriac of various flavors, Greek/Arabic uses for the Chalcedonians, etc.), but there isn't a specific, organically-developed liturgy for, say, the Congolese -- only adapted musical settings of the Latin mass that was brought to them by the Europeans:


To 'write' an actual liturgy would involve (re-)writing and (re-)arranging the different parts of a liturgical text itself, not just putting the existing forms to new tunes, or adapting them for a Christmas dinner or whatever JJM is doing, wouldn't it? For instance, according to wiki, the Catholic uniates who come from the Nestorian/Church of the East tradition and use that church's Anaphora of Addai and Mari have inserted an explicit institution narrative into their liturgy (presumably to appease/ape the Latins?), where there was not one originally. Some people also argue that this is what the Latins themselves did in creating the Novus Ordo/ordinary form of the Latin Mass in the 1960s, though I don't know enough about the history of the Latin mass to know how true that may be. The point is that these would be inorganic developments, created by committee or possibly even instituted by individuals, and hence light years away from how Orthodox approach their liturgies. After all, the Greeks had some flirtation with organs in America in the 1950s and 1960s, but that didn't make their liturgies anything other than what they were, because their order, textual integrity, and of course the theology, ecclesiology, Christology, etc. expressed through them would be the same. Which is another thing that Roman Catholics would probably say about their new mass or the tinkered-with East Syrian liturgy of their Catholic compatriots -- "but it expresses the same truths, so what's the problem?" The issue is organic v. inorganic development. As a counterpoint, there have been some changes to the Coptic liturgy over the centuries (e.g., the inclusion of the cymbal starting around the 12th century or so), but these are likewise organic and explainable by looking at the historical circumstances of the Copts at that point (from what I've read and been told, it was around this point that the Coptic language was definitively lost by the people, making the cadence of the chant itself too difficult to follow because the new language, Arabic, has very different stress patterns, so they began to use the cymbal around this point to keep everyone on beat; it is meant to be used essentially like a metronome, rather than an instrument, and I have personally witnessed priests admonishing younger deacons for being too fancy with it). We didn't start using it to appease others who already used it (there aren't any others who use it, to my knowledge) and wanted us to conform to their ways, or because we think it sounds nice, or to nativize a foreign liturgy according to the customs of the people (as in the Congolese Latin mass video above), etc.

We're not talking about the development of liturgy. We are talking about an individual taking upon himself to create his own liturgy.