Today’s the feast of St. Sylvester, who is a delightful character in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Helena. If you haven’t read the book, please do. You owe it to yourself. It’s both beautiful and funny. I know I’ve reviewed it somewhere on this blog. Jeff Ziegler gives us these links on St. Sylvester, his life and times:

— St. Sylvester I, pope (314-35).
— The First Council of Nicaea (325), which took place during Pope St. Sylvester’s reign.
— The creed and canons promulgated at that first ecumenical council.
— The Lateran Basilica, which he dedicated in 324.

I just rediscovered this devotional site the Vatican compiled to celebrate the Jubilee. Lots of great reflections by the Fathers.

Here’s St. Cyril of Alexandria:

Therefore He became like us, that is, a human being, that we might become like Him, I mean gods and sons. On the one hand He accepts what belongs to us, taking it to Himself as His own, and on the other He gives us in exchange what belongs to Him.

I pulled the quote from Deification and Grace, by Daniel Keating, who says he pulled it from Norman Russell’s The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition.

Today is the feast of St. Stephen Protomartyr (see Acts 6-7). St. Augustine was deeply devoted to him and rejoiced in the translation of Stephen’s relics to Africa. Today, he urges us,

We should think of Stephen, called by a Greek name meaning “crown,” the first after the Lord’s resurrection to be crowned with martyrdom. We should think also of those persecutors who turned into so many thousands of believers when the Holy Spirit came.

And elsewhere he spells out the idea further, indicating how we might follow after the example of Stephen:

[Stephen] showed his love for his murderers, in that he died for them … That is the perfection of love. Love is perfect in him whom it makes ready to die for his brothers; but it is never perfect as soon as it is born. It is born that it may be perfected. Born, it is nourished: nourished, it is strengthened: strengthened, it is made perfect. And when it has reached perfection, how does it speak? “To me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. My desire was to be set free and to be with Christ; for that is by far the best. But to abide in the flesh is needful for your sake” (Phil 1:21-24). He was willing to live for their sakes, for whom he was ready to die.

I love the Catholic Near East Welfare Association (CNEWA). It’s a papal agency for pastoral and humanitarian support, and it’s been around for more than eighty years serving people in need in the Middle East, Northeast Africa, India, and Eastern Europe. CNEWA’s mandate is to support the mission and institutions of the Eastern Catholic churches; to provide humanitarian assistance to those in need, without regard to nationality or creed; to promote Christian unity and interreligious understanding and collaboration; and to educate people in the West about the history, cultures, peoples, and churches of the East. CNEWA works especially hard to promote unity of Catholic and Orthodox Christians.

Fans of the Fathers will be especially impressed with CNEWA’s magazine, One. You get it free if you give. But you can sample it online, as the editors post all content. Recent issues have featured The Syro-Malabar Catholic Church of India, tracing its origins back to the Apostle Thomas, and The Syriac Orthodox Church, often caught in the Kurdish-Turkish crossfire.

This isn’t quite a bleg. It’s mostly a patristic link — and one of my favorites. But do consider giving to CNEWA!

Word from Carl Sommer, author of We Look for a Kingdom: The Everyday Lives of the Early Christians:

I’m sending you this link now, while it’s still on my mind, because the archaeologist expresses a new iteration of a theory that’s been around for almost two hundred years. The theory is evocative, and unobjectionable in most of its forms, but it is almost certainly false, since our old friend Hippolytus of Rome wrote about celebrating the birth of Christ on December 25 almost a hundred years before the Council of Nicea … I’ll look up the reference from Hippolytus after the New Year. Whatever the origin of the December 25 celebration of Christmas, it clearly predates the Council of Nicea, at least in Rome.

I was unaware of any testimony from Hippolytus, though I knew about Clement of Alexandria and Julius Africanus, and they go back still further. Thanks to Carl for clueing us in.

Maureen has gifted us all by recording John Henry Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. This is one of the all-time-greatest works of patristic scholarship. And now you can listen to it on your MP3 player. Or you can take it in the old-fashioned way, by reading it. Either way, it’s time well spent.

In the course of the last week, Danny Garland has not only welcomed his first child into the light of day, he’s also published a fine historical study of the doctrine of papal infallibility. Deeply patristic, of course.

Bryn Mawr Classical Review reviews a new collection of lives of St. Daniel of Sketis (Lower Egypt, sixth century). “Daniel is portrayed in these stories as one who has a supernatural capacity to discern secret holiness, to recognize and identify those who are called kruptoi douloi, or secret servants. A common phrase running through these stories is that ‘God knows how many secret servants he has.'”

The folks at the New York Times wants to help you plan a trip to Alexandria, but they left out all the patristic points of reference, which you’ll find here.

Roger Pearse is floating an idea for “an ANF for the new millennium.” And he wants to know what you think. Do drop in.

At Christianity Today, evangelical scholar Darrell Bock suggests a good apologetic approach to the next media-hyped pseudo-history.

Not long ago, topics like textual criticism and the extra-biblical Gospels elicited yawns from my seminary students. I went through the obligatory motions of covering these staples of New Testament study, knowing that no matter how hard I tried, questions would be rare and engagement minimal.

All that has changed. Topics like the James ossuary and the Gospel of Judas have hit Times Square, not only pricking the attention of seminary students, but also garnering coverage from journalists and culture-watchers, from CBS News’s traditional news team to 360 Degrees’s Anderson Cooper.

In the last five years, numerous books on early Christian history have made the bestseller lists. Specials on figures like Jesus and Constantine are produced at a rate that could fill historical cable channels around the clock. And when People magazine weighs in on movies like The Passion of the Christ, you know something new is happening in the world of religion news.

We are seeing a growing public interest in Jesus and the early church. There are two kinds of presentations on these topics: scholarly books and “new find” announcements. Both kinds need our attention because the way this information is released is changing, making it more difficult to tell the difference between fact and fiction. Every Christmas and Easter season, a “blockbuster” story proclaims the need to redefine Christianity. (This Christmas season, the media is touting a book by liberal scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan titled, The First Christmas: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Birth.) …

How should the church respond?…

Read the rest.

A few months back, I posted a review of Bock’s The Missing Gospels: Unearthing the Truth Behind Alternative Christianities.

You’re probably looking for a drop-dead-gorgeous last-minute gift to buy the early-Church-history nerds in your life. This is just the thing: Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art. It’s a big, coffee-table volume with photographs of hundreds of beautiful artworks and essays by the top scholars in the field.

Picturing the Bible is actually the companion volume to an exhibit by the same name, currently showing at Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. And what an exhibit! The only comparable collection of important paleochristian art I’ve seen is the permanent collection in the Vatican Museums — and many of the Vatican’s best pieces are in this exhibit at the Kimbell. I’m not exaggerating. If I had the cash, I’d be on a plane yesterday to see, up close and in one place, so many items that are the standard illustrations in the history texts — alongside several stunning (so-called) “magical gems” that rarely venture forth from the museums they call home. National Review posted something on the exhibit, and so did Touchstone.

But, whether or not you can fly to Fort Worth, do buy the book. The price is right. Here’s a partial table of contents:

1. The Earliest Christian Art: From Personal Salvation to Imperial Power (Jeffrey Spier)
2. Jewish Art and Biblical Exegesis in the Greco-Roman World (Steven Fine)
3. The Emergence of Christian Art (Mary Charles-Murray)
4. Early Christian Images and Exegesis (Robin M. Jensen)
5. Constantine the Great and Early Christian Art (Johannes G. Deckers)
6. Bright Gardens of Paradise (Herbert L. Kessler)
7. The Word Made Flesh in Early Decorated Bibles (Herbert L. Kessler)

The authors know the material, and they know how to present it afresh. Even if you’ve amassed a respectable library on early-Christian art (as I have), I can almost guarantee you’ll see in these pages several pieces you’ve never seen before. And all the contributors draw from deep knowledge of Christian theology, so there’s none of the bonehead speculation you sometimes find in books of art history by clueless secularists. Some readers will disagree strongly with the suggestion that the Constantinian “peace of the Church” brought about an essential change in Christian religion. The idea arises in at least a couple of these essays. But it’s never obnoxious. These scholars are respectful of their subject — the artistic product and the devotion of its practitioners.

Picturing the Bible belongs under your tree, either for you or for someone you love.

For other last-minute gift suggestions, see here.

One of our regular visitors, Joannie the Hoosier, tells us about the amazing new Vatican site, Biblia Clerus, that allows you to cross-reference biblical and liturgical texts with the homilies of the Church Fathers. These are the days of miracles and wonders.

Today’s Joannie’s birthday, by the way, so don’t forget to pray for her as she begins another great adventure in life.