A great podcast with fascinating episodes–especially the episode about the acoustics of Hagia Sophia and the experience of singing the Divine Liturgy there. Anthony, the host, recently interviewed me about When Brothers Dwell in Unity: Byzantine Christianity and Homosexuality (McFarland, 2016). Listen to the interview here.
The Conception of the Mother of God by Saint Anna is commemorated by the Orthodox Church on December 9 while the Western Church celebrates on December 8. St. Anna, the mother of the Virgin Mary, was the youngest daughter of the priest Nathan from Bethlehem, descended from the tribe of Levi. She married St. Joachim, who was a native of Galilee. For many years, St. Anna was childless and the couple suffered much reproach for her barrenness. When they were in Jerusalem to offer sacrifice to God, the High Priest, Issachar, upbraided Joachim, “You are not worthy to offer sacrifice with those childless hands.” Both spouses gave themselves to fervent prayer, and the Archangel Gabriel announced to them separately that they would be the parents of a daughter who would bring blessings to the whole human race.
The Orthodox Church does not accept the teaching of the Immaculate Conception, but has also always believed that the Virgin Mary was, from her conception, filled with every Grace of the Holy Spirit in view of her calling as the Mother of Christ our God. The Immaculate Conception is a Western Christian teaching which asserts that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was preserved by God from the transmission of original sin at the time of her own conception. Specifically the doctrine says she was not afflicted by the privation of sanctifying grace which afflicts mankind, but was instead filled with grace by God, and furthermore lived a life completely free from sin. It is commonly confused with the doctrine of the virginal conception of Christ, though the two doctrines deal with separate subjects.
The feast is not exactly nine months before the feast of the Nativity of the Theotokos (September 8) as it is in the West, but one day later. Many have taught this is to show that God alone is perfect.
St. Nicholas was a bishop in 4th-century Turkey but is commonly known as “Santa Claus” in much of the Western World. He brings gifts to good children on his feast day (December 6) or on Christmas Day; in some places, he is said to take away bad children in his empty gift bag. He is sometimes accompanied by a servant or devil who takes away the bad children or leaves switches for their parents to beat them.
His tomb is in Myra (a small town in modern Turkey) but many of the remains were stolen by Italian sailors and taken to Bari in 1087. The sailors from Bari only took the main bones of Nicholas’s skeleton, leaving all the minor fragments in the grave. The city of Venice had interest in obtaining the remaining fragments of his skeleton and, in 1100, a fleet of Venetian ships sailed past Myra on their way to Palestine for the First Crusade. The Venetians took the remaining bones of Saint Nicholas, and brought them to Venice. This story was lent credence in two scientific investigations of the relics in Bari and Venice, which confirmed that the relics in the two cities are anatomically compatible and may belong to the same person.
In the late 1950s, while the crypt was undergoing much-needed restoration, the bones were removed from it for the first time since their interment in 1089. A special Pontifical Commission permitted Luigi Martino, a professor of human anatomy at the University of Bari, to examine the bones under the Commission’s supervision. Martino took thousands of measurements, detailed scientific drawings, photographs, and x-rays. These examinations revealed the saint to have died at over seventy years of age and to have been of average height and slender-to-average build. He also suffered from severe chronic arthritis in his spine and pelvis.
Another test in 2017 in Oxford involved radiocarbon dating, which confirmed that the bones date to the fourth century AD, around the same time that Saint Nicholas would have died, and are not a medieval forgery.