have the names of Sapphira and the “disciple” Dorcas (Acts 9:36). Acts 9:19 mentions that there were disciples in Damascus, quite a distance from the region where Jesus acted during his life.
What may be cause for surprise or doubt to us, was not so for the first Christians. For them, it was common for women to be part of the leadership of the emerging Church.
Year One
It was the year 1269 in the Roman calendar. This calendar counted the years from the foundation of Rome, and governed all documents in the western world. Dionysius Exiguus,—or “Dennis the Small,” because he was short in stature—wished to replace this method for counting years with a new calendar beginning with the Christian era. To do this, it was necessary to establish the year in which Jesus had been born, something that until then no one had thought of determining. Dionysius was a monk and well versed in the science of his time. He mastered mathematics and history, and was an expert in astronomy. He fulfilled every condition for carrying out this task.
With the means available at the time, he calculated dates, estimated stellar data and pored over books in the library. After much investigation, he sentenced the sought-after date, the year in which the Lord had been born. At that time, he concluded that they were living in the year 527 after the birth of Christ. However, even those who know a lot, make mistakes, and Dionysius Exiguus was no exception. Pope Hormisdas—who had commissioned the task—blessed the new date, and we have been dragging the error in our calendar ever since.
Much later it was possible to ascertain that Herod the Great died in the year 4 before Christ. Since the Gospels tell that Jesus was born in the days of Herod, it is obvious that his birth had to have taken place one or two years before the ruler’s death, that is, in our current year 5 or 6 before Christ.
Dionysius also confirmed, through his doubtful scientific research, that the birth of Jesus had taken place on December 25th, a date which coincided with the Natalis Solis Invicti, a Roman pagan celebration for the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun. In the northern hemisphere, this is the date of the spring solstice, when the days begin to lengthen. Therefore, it celebrated the victory of the sun over the darkness which until then had taken minutes away from the light every day.
The Crying Child
She prepared the basket with watery eyes, and a trembling in her stomach that she could not control. It all seemed so absurd, so terrible, but there was no longer an alternative. A child that cries reveals its presence and the punishment is death. The instructions were clear and ruthless: children are our enemies and a threat to our future; they must be cast into the river to ensure our peace and prosperity, proclaimed the decree. Anguished, in the middle of the night, she stealthily sought a place in which to leave him. There were shame and bitterness in her steps. She kissed him. She softly murmured a sweet song in his ear. She caressed the bright brown cheeks with her hand and she covered the basket so that she would no longer see him.
The hours pass, the afternoon arrives and the child cries. He is the only baby who is said to cry in the entire Bible. By crying, the child claims what he wants to say: I’m hungry; I’m cold; I want to live; I’m here. There are no tears or language yet, but the message is clear. He stirs, he moves and he waits in vain for the well-known scent and hand of his mother.
A young woman approaches and opens the basket. Her eyes moisten and her stomach trembles because she understands what is happening. She thinks in horror: He is a child of the Hebrews. She knows of the hard fate that awaits him. He is the child of slaves, of those weaklings, of the foreigners who shape the clay. She works in the palace and knows the law and her duty as an Egyptian woman. She knows of discipline, of loyalty to the king, of the punishment for traitors, of the dagger or cell that awaits those who disobey.
The child cries more loudly now and his crying has more power than the orders of the most powerful man on Earth. The young woman makes a decision: she lifts the baby into her arms, warms him against her breast and takes him to the Pharaoh’s daughter. That day he was given the name Moses.
(Exodus 2:1–10)
Charles Darwin, God and Primates
Those who consider Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution to be enemies of the Christian faith, not only betray their ignorance, but show that they have not read his books nor bothered to understand his thinking. There is nothing better than to read a few paragraphs from his famous works The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man:
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved. (On the Origin of Species)
To believe that man was aboriginally civilized and then suffered utter degradation in so many regions, is to take a pitiably low view of human nature. It is apparently a truer and more cheerful view that progress has been much more general than retrogression; that man has risen, though by slow and interrupted steps, from a lowly condition to the highest standard as yet attained by him in knowledge, morals and religion. (The Descent of Man)
And in his books Darwin does not hesitate to talk about
“. . .the laws impressed on matter by the Creator. . .” (O of S)
Two more paragraphs from Charles Darwin for us to think about:
The question is of course wholly distinct from that higher one, whether there exists a Creator and Ruler of the Universe; and this has been answered in the affirmative by some of the highest intellects that have ever existed. (O of S)
And this one:
Many existing superstitions are the remnants of former false religious beliefs. The highest form of religion—the grand idea of God hating sin and loving righteousness—was unknown during primeval times. (O of S)
In some other paragraph of his book, he writes between the lines that fully aware of human behavior in his time—for Darwin rejected and was hurt by slavery, violence and war—he was happier harking back to those ancestors that, hanging freely from trees, enjoyed the gifts of the Creator.
The Elamite at Pentecost
For Alicia Casas
On that day he understood the value and the drama of words. They have flavor when we know them, but are an unsurmountable barrier when they are strange to us. That is why the growing noise and their modulations made them seem drunk; at times, he also thought they were intoxicated until, among the multitude of sounds, he heard one that was familiar. From the vortex of confusing voices, a string of words arose which he was able to identify. He heard Elamite.
He had arrived from Elam the previous afternoon and did not expect to hear his language in Jerusalem. Like all the Jews of his country, he spoke and communicated in Aramaic, the common tongue of the entire region. But he proudly kept to himself the articulation of Elamite, the tongue of his ancestors. A language uncontaminated by Hindu or Semitic words, similar to Sumerian, the first tongue human beings ever put into writing. Elamite was of the lineage of the first traces of letters ever written in the mud to represent a sound. With its elder Sumerian brothers, they had invented history, recorded memory, and filled libraries.
His blood still rankled against the vile warrior Alexander the Great, who mutilated the Elamite language and replaced it with the crude Greek symbols. Since then, the treasure of the words of
