Bible and Saints
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Bible and Saints’
The chill of the night is relieved by the warmth of the beasts in their stalls, prompting Mary and Joseph to reflect on the promises of Scripture.
The Tilers and Thatchers of fourteenth-century York bring their Nativity play to a close, back in the Bethlehem stable where Mary and her guardian Joseph have been forced to find shelter. Mary has given birth to a son and laid him in a manger, while her guardian Joseph was out looking for candles. Now he has returned, to find that his candles are superfluous for another Light is shining in the darkness.
Like the legendary phoenix, the Christian must spend his life making a nest fit for his rebirth in fire.
In The Phoenix, the author (possibly Cynewulf, certainly an admirer of his work) mused on the legend of the firebird that dies in its nest, and is reborn in fire. A godly man builds himself a nest out of his repentance and his love and charity with all men; in life the nest protects him from spiritual enemies, and in death the nest is consumed in fire so that the man may be reborn in a mansion of glory.
The Bishop of Myra’s ceaseless toil to put an end to the worship of Artemis made him some dangerous enemies.
By the 320s, Christians in the Roman Empire were no longer discriminated against, but that did not mean life was easy. As this story shows, the warm-hearted yet combative Bishop of Myra (now Demre in Turkey) made himself some dangerous enemies by continuing to insist that there was one God and one Truth, and that the popular and profitable religions of Rome were the delusions of a dark power.
A prophet-for-hire agreed to help Balak, King of Moab, try to do something about the flood of Israelites pouring into his kingdom.
The story of Balaam and his ass, told in the Book of Numbers, is set in the late thirteenth century BC, some forty years after the Israelites escaped slavery in Egypt. Now they were massing in Moab on the eastern side of the Dead Sea, ready to cross the River Jordan into their Promised Land; but Balak, King of Moab, was feeling far from hospitable and already had a plan for moving them on.
John Mansur, working in Islamic Syria, thought he could safely criticise the Roman Emperor for meddling in Christian worship. But he was wrong.
In 726, the Roman Emperor Leo III, seated in Constantinople (modern Istanbul), declared that images of Christ and his saints were ‘idolatrous’ and must be scrubbed from all church walls. The ban was sternly enforced, but there were rebels; and the outspoken John Mansur encouraged them with stirring pamphlets written from the safety of the Islamic court of Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik, Caliph of Damascus.
The Israelites crossed over into the Land of Promise, only to find their progress barred by the well-fortified city of Jericho.
In 1300-1250 BC or so, the people of Israel escaped a life of forced labour in Egypt, and fled east and north into the desert. Assured by Moses and his brother Aaron that a land ‘flowing with milk and honey’ awaited them, they endured forty years of wandering before reaching the borders of Canaan. As the brothers had now died, the task of making a home there fell to Joshua.