Commontide
Red-Letter Day
The Circumcision & Holy Name
January 1
also known as The Circumcision, The Holy Name, Octave of Christmas
On January 1 the Church keeps the eighth day after the Nativity, when the child born at Bethlehem was circumcised under the Law and given the name Jesus. The day is first attested as a named observance in Gaul in 567; Rome kept the same date as the Octave of the Lord and took up the circumcision title only by the thirteenth or fourteenth century. The Holy Name was for centuries a separate feast on other dates. The Book of Common Prayer 2019 holds both titles and appoints Luke 2:15-21.
Eight days after his birth, the child born at Bethlehem was circumcised, and was given the name that had been spoken before he was conceived: Jesus. Luke reports it in a single sentence and reports nothing else about it. There is no scene, no crowd, no saying. A family did for this child what the Law required of every Israelite family, and the name was fixed on him.
That is the whole of the event, and it is why the day exists. January 1 is not an attested anniversary. It is arithmetic: eight days, counted inclusively, from December 25, which is itself a feast date rather than a recorded birthday. The date followed on its own. What did not follow on its own was the decision to make a solemn feast of it, and that decision is documented.
The earliest firm record comes from Gaul. The Second Council of Tours, in 567, set the fasting rule for monks through the Twelve Days, excepting the first three days of January, in which, in W. R. Clark's English rendering of the canon, the fathers "in order to oppose the heathen usages, ordered private litanies," and then: "On the 1st of January, the festival of the Circumcision, Mass shall be sung at eight o'clock." The day the Church was claiming was already occupied. January 1 was the Kalends, the Roman civic new year, with its banqueting and masking and omens, and the first Christian programme for this date was not celebration but a counter-fast with a Mass at its centre.
Rome, at the same period, was doing something else on the same day. Louis Duchesne states it plainly: "The festival of the Circumcision, as we understand it, is not of Roman origin," and "The official designation of the festival was Octavas Domini." For centuries two conceptions of January 1 ran side by side, a Gallican feast of the Lucan event and a Roman octave of Christmas, before the circumcision title entered Roman use.
The Name has its own, later history. Devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus grew up in the fifteenth century, on other dates and by other authorities, kept on August 7 in the English and Scottish uses and never anciently paired with January 1. Bernard of Clairvaux, preaching not on this feast but on the Song of Songs, had already given that devotion its most quoted words, in the Mount Melleray translation: "Jesus is honey in the mouth, melody in the ear, jubilation in the heart." The dual title under one January date is a modern Anglican arrangement, and a good one, because the Gospel of the day contains both halves.
What the day asks has been consistent where the titles have not. The 1662 collect does not ask the worshipper to remember a rite but to undergo its counterpart: "Grant us the true circumcision of the Spirit." The 2019 collect holds the covenant and the Name together, praying that we may faithfully bear the Name of the one who "was given the Name that is above every name." And an old Latin homily read for this day sees in the eighth day of circumcision a figure of the eighth day of the resurrection, so that the first small obedience of this life already points past it.
You begin a year today, whether you mean to or not, and the Church begins it by showing you an eight-day-old child under an obligation he did not choose and a name he did not pick. Nothing is asked of him but obedience, and nothing is done that anyone would call impressive. The collect appointed for this day does not invite you to admire that; it asks that the same work be done inwardly in you, mortifying what is worldly, so that you obey in all things. Mark Frank, preaching on this day in the seventeenth century, put the new year's business in four words: "amend your lives, and become all new men in Jesus Christ." The Name you bear was given to you as his was given to him, from outside, before you could weigh it. What in this coming year would have to change for that Name to be borne faithfully rather than merely worn?
The documented history of this observance rests on a narrow but solid base: conciliar acts, liturgical books, and two standard modern authorities, Louis Duchesne's study of Christian worship in its 1903 English translation and the 1908 Catholic Encyclopedia article on the feast. Almost every institutional claim about the day traces to one or the other of these, and readers should treat their agreement as a shared reading rather than as two witnesses. Preaching evidence is thin: no January 1 sermon earlier than the seventeenth century was located in English, so the feast's first thousand pastoral years are known from legislation and service books, not from pulpits.
The earliest firm attestation is the Second Council of Tours, 567, canon 17, whose subject is the monastic fasting rule and which appoints a Mass of the Circumcision on January 1 alongside three days of litanies against the Kalends. Isidore of Seville's monastic rule, before 636, attests a holy season running from the Nativity to the Circumcision in Visigothic Spain. The Auxerre recension of the martyrology attributed to Jerome, about 595, notes the Circumcision at January 1, and seventh and eighth century Gallican books, the Missale Gothicum, the Bobbio Sacramentary and the Luxeuil Lectionary, carry the observance.
Rome is the contrast. Its books of the same period title the day In Octabas Domini and do not mention the circumcision; the Gelasian Sacramentary's use of the word circumcisio in its Preface means the Jews collectively, as Duchesne notes, and is not an attestation of the feast. Rome's combined title, Circumcision of the Lord and Octave of the Nativity, is in use by the thirteenth or fourteenth century, but no promulgating act for it has been found. In the East, Byzantine calendars from the eighth century onward give January 1 a double commemoration, the Circumcision together with the repose of Basil the Great; this is later than the Western evidence, and no source claims borrowing in either direction.
The Holy Name feast is a separate track entirely. It arose in the late fifteenth century by the private authority of bishops in Germany, Scotland, England, Spain and Belgium, with an Office and Mass composed by the Franciscan Bernardine dei Busti and approved by Sixtus IV; it was granted to the Franciscans on 25 February 1530, kept variously on January 14, January 15, January 31, January 8 and, in the English and Scottish uses, August 7, and was extended to the universal Roman calendar on 20 December 1721 for the second Sunday after Epiphany.
In England the Circumcision entered the Book of Common Prayer in 1549 and stands in 1662 with its own collect, Epistle Romans 4.8-14 and Gospel St Luke 2.15-21. The medieval Sarum lections had been Titus 2:11-15 and Luke 2:21; Cranmer replaced both while keeping the day, and the American revision of 1928 changed only the Epistle, to Philippians 2:9. The Ordinance for Abolishing of Festivals of 8 June 1647 names the Nativity, Easter and Whitsuntide and does not name the Circumcision; the feast fell under its general clause and returned at the Restoration by simple reversion.
In the Byzantine churches January 1 has been kept without interruption as both the Circumcision and the feast of Basil the Great, whose repose falls on the same date, and the Divine Liturgy of St Basil is served rather than that of St John Chrysostom. The day carries neither Forefeast nor Afterfeast. Domestically, Greek households cut the Vasilopita, a coin loaf, joining the new year to the Nativity season.
Other Eastern churches count the same eighth day from their own Nativity date. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church keeps Gizret among the Nine Minor Feasts of the Lord on Tir 6, January 14 by the Gregorian reckoning, and tells of the circumcision knife that nearly melted, with the Lord declaring that his blood would not be shed until Good Friday. The Coptic Church keeps the Circumcision on Tobi 6, likewise January 14. The Syriac Orthodox and Malankara churches keep it on January 1 among the Feasts of the Lord. The Armenian Apostolic Church has no separate January 1 feast at all: Nativity and Theophany fall together on January 6, and the naming is folded into the octave that ends January 13.
In the medieval West the Sarum use ranked the Circumcision a lesser double of nine lessons. Around this date, in particular churches and particular years, the subdeacons kept the revels called the Feast of Fools; the bishop of Paris capped its Magnificat repetitions in 1199, and the Council of Basel forbade it in 1435. On the Name side, the Society of the Holy Name, tracing to the Council of Lyons in 1274, became by 1910 an organised movement of some five hundred thousand American men pledged to reverent speech.
The Book of Common Prayer (1662), "The Circumcision of Christ, January 1": the collect quoted here, with the Epistle Romans 4.8-14 and Gospel St Luke 2.15-21 appointed with it. Text as hosted by the Church of England: https://www.churchofengland.org/prayer-and-worship/worship-texts-and-resources/book-common-prayer/collects-epistles-and-gospels-8
The Book of Common Prayer (2019), "The Circumcision and Holy Name (January 1)": the collect quoted here, with Exodus 34:1-9, Psalm 8, Romans 1:1-7 and Luke 2:15-21. Official propers: https://bcp2019.anglicanchurch.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/108-Holy-Name-January-1.pdf
Charles Joseph Hefele, A History of the Councils of the Church, vol. IV, translated by W. R. Clark (T. and T. Clark, 1895), p. 391: the Second Council of Tours, 567, canon 17, source of both phrases quoted. Hefele's own apparatus cites Mansi IX. 786 and following, Hardouin II. 354 and following.
Louis Duchesne, Christian Worship: Its Origin and Evolution, English translation (1903), pp. 273-274, with p. 273 n. 2 on the Gelasian use of circumcisio and n. 3 on the Byzantine calendars: source of both Duchesne sentences quoted.
Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Canticle of Canticles, Sermon XV, "On the Names of God, and the Name of Jesus," on Canticles 1:2-3, translated by A Priest of Mount Melleray (Browne and Nolan, Dublin; nihil obstat 14 January 1920): https://archive.org/download/stbernardssermon01bern/stbernardssermon01bern_djvu.txt
Mark Frank, Sermons (Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology, 1849), First Sermon on the Circumcision, on 2 Corinthians 5:17: https://anglicanhistory.org/lact/frank/v1/circumcision1.html
Homiliae de tempore, Homilia XLIII, "In Circumcisione Domini", Migne columns 1185C to 1186A: the eighth-day typology described in the Story. Latin text: https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Homiliae_de_tempore The words are primary at this location; the ascription to Ambrose is the homiliary compiler's label.
Catholic Encyclopedia (1908 and 1910), "Feast of the Circumcision," "Feast of the Holy Name," and "Society of the Holy Name": the institutional history of both observances, including the dates of the Holy Name feast by order and diocese and the Society's nineteenth-century scale.
Modern calendars have diverged. After the Roman reform of 1969, January 1 is the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, and the circumcision leaves the title; the surviving primary account of the day's content by the reforming pope, in Marialis Cultus of 1974, gives Mary's part in salvation and the World Day of Peace and does not name the circumcision. The instrument of that retitling was not verified for this dossier, and the reported changes under the rubrics of 1960 could not be settled either way. The 1979 Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church renames the day The Holy Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ, dropping "Circumcision" from title and collect; no official rationale was retrieved. Common Worship in 2000 keeps both halves as The Naming and Circumcision of Jesus, and the Book of Common Prayer 2019 restores the dual title as a red-letter Holy Day. What 2019 restores is the word, not an ancient union: the two observances were separate feasts on separate dates for roughly four and a half centuries, and Anglican books are not alone in holding both.
Almighty God, your blessed Son fulfilled the covenant of circumcision for our sake, and was given the Name that is above every name: Give us grace faithfully to bear his Name, and to worship him with pure hearts according to the New Covenant; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Exodus 34:1–9Psalm 8Romans 1:1–7Luke 2:15–21