Commontide
Red-Letter Day
January 6
also known as Epiphany, Theophany, Twelfth Night, Three Kings' Day
Epiphany, from the Greek word for manifestation, keeps the showing of Christ to the world. In the West the day belongs to the Magi and the star; in the East it is Theophany, the Baptism in the Jordan, where the Father's voice and the Spirit's descent revealed the Son. It was once a single composite feast holding both, and in Armenia it still is.
On the sixth of January the Church keeps a showing. Two of them, in fact, and which one a Christian has in view depends on where he stands.
In the West the day is the Magi's. Strangers from the East, practitioners of a foreign sacred art, follow a star to a house and kneel to a child, and lay down gold and frankincense and myrrh. Matthew tells it without a date and without a number: he says magi, not kings, and never says how many came. Leo, bishop of Rome in the middle of the fifth century, preached the day as the moment the nations were let in. "They adore the Word in flesh, the Wisdom in infancy, the Power in weakness, the Lord of majesty in the reality of man," he told his people; and of the gifts, "The incense they offer to God, the myrrh to Man, the gold to the King." He is careful about who moved first. The star was given, and understanding of the star was given, and then, Leo says, having drawn out the search, God "offered Himself to be found."
Augustine, preaching at Hippo in the same century, put the matter to his congregation more bluntly still: they themselves were the Gentiles of whom those travellers were the firstfruits. The day existed so that the nations might make thanksgiving for their own inclusion. It is a strange and generous thing to be told that a story about foreigners is a story about you.
In the East the sixth of January is Theophany, and the scene is not a house in Bethlehem but a river. Gregory of Nazianzus preached in Constantinople on this day in the year 381, and named the feast the Holy Day of the Lights, which "has for its origin the Baptism of my Christ, the True Light." The Eastern hymn for the day says what the East saw there: "When Thou, O Lord, wast baptized in the Jordan, the worship of the Trinity was made manifest." Not a child recognised by wise men, but the Son named by the Father while the Spirit came down.
These are not rival feasts so much as one feast that divided. In the beginning January 6 carried everything at once: the Nativity, the Baptism, and in the fuller Eastern and Gallic content the water made wine at Cana. John Cassian, writing early in the fifth century out of his own years in Egypt, reports that the priests there still kept it whole, celebrating Nativity and Baptism "not separately as in the Western provinces but on the single festival of this day." That clause is the hinge of the whole history. By his lifetime the West had already split the two and Cassian names the split as the known alternative. The Armenian Apostolic Church never divided them at all, and keeps the combined feast on January 6 to this day.
The day has been kept with more than words. Egeria, a pilgrim who walked the Holy Land in the 380s and wrote down what she saw, describes the night procession from Bethlehem paced slowly for the monks going on foot, arriving back in Jerusalem "at the hour when one man begins to be able to recognize another"; then eight days of stations, church by church, and at Golgotha, she says, "you see there nothing but gold and gems and silk." Emperors kept it and used it: Julian, still concealing his apostasy in the winter of 360 to 361, went into the church at Vienne on the day "which the Christians call Epiphany" and prayed publicly with them, and a pagan historian wrote it down. Parliament abolished it in 1647 along with all the other festivals as days "superstitiously used and observed," and it came back in 1660. In 2017 the bishops of England and Wales moved it off the nearest Sunday and back onto its own date, arguing that keeping the great mysteries on their own days is itself a form of love shown to God.
What the day says is smaller and steadier than its history. A light was set where people outside the covenant could see it, and they came. The collect the Church has prayed for something like thirteen centuries, from the Latin sacramentaries through Cranmer to the book in use now, asks only one thing on the strength of that: that those who know him now by faith may be led at last to see his glory face to face.
You may find yourself, reading Matthew's second chapter, standing further from the manger than you would like: not a shepherd who was told, not a relative, not anyone with a claim on the family. The Magi have no claim either. They are outsiders working from a sign given to outsiders, and what they know carries them only as far as Jerusalem before they have to ask directions. Augustine's word to his congregation was that this is not a story about other people; the nations who came late are the ones now doing the keeping. Consider what you have actually been given to go on, which may be less than a voice and more than nothing, and whether you have followed it as far as it goes. What would it take for you to make the rest of that journey rather than plan it?
The feast's own history is better evidenced than most, though the evidence thins fast at the beginning, and much of what circulates about it descends from a single article in a 1909 encyclopedia rather than from independent witnesses.
The earliest date attached to January 6 is Clement of Alexandria's, before his death around 216. He reports that the followers of Basilides kept the day of Christ's baptism as a festival, spending the night before in readings, some reckoning it the fifteenth of the month Tubi and some the eleventh. That is a heterodox sect, not the Church, and the honest statement of what it proves is that the date was already marked in Alexandria's religious world by about the year 200. Origen's list of Christian festivals, a generation later, does not include it.
The first clear notice of an established church feast comes from outside the Church altogether. Ammianus Marcellinus, a pagan secular historian, records that Julian in the winter of 360 to 361 entered the Christians' church at Vienne on "the day of the festival at the beginning of January, which the Christians call Epiphany." A feast a Roman officer can name in passing is a feast already in place. The 1909 encyclopedia calls this the first actual reference to the ecclesiastical feast; the ranking is that article's, and the passage stands on its own without it. A feast in Thrace in 304 is reported by the Passio S. Philippi, and the encyclopedia's own hedge, "if we can trust the Passio S. Philippi," belongs with the claim.
From the 380s the record fills in quickly and from several directions at once. Gregory preached at Constantinople on the Nativity, and then twelve days later on the Lights, and the following day on baptism itself: the clearest place in the record where the two feasts can be watched standing apart. Egeria describes the keeping at Jerusalem and Bethlehem in the same decade. Spanish and imperial evidence puts a festal season and civil suspensions in place around the same years: legal business suspended by 380, circus performances prohibited by 400, and the Council of Saragossa in 380 or 381 treating seasonal fasting near this time as customary. Those conciliar and legal items reach us through the encyclopedia and their canon numbers have not been checked against a critical edition.
Rome is the puzzle. The correspondence of Bishop Himerius of Tarragona with Pope Damasus, and Siricius's answer, shows Epiphany a live pastoral question in the 380s, chiefly over whether people should be baptized on it. But the first solid proof of Rome's full adoption is Leo's eight sermons for the day, preached between 440 and 461 and bearing almost wholly on the Magi. Roughly sixty years separate the known issue from the confirmed feast, and no document closes the gap. Leo is also on record against Epiphany baptism, calling the custom an unreasonable novelty; the Council of Gerona in 517 condemned it formally. The Fourth Council of Orleans in 541 gave the day a different job, ordering the date of Easter announced to the people on it, and before printed calendars that made Epiphany the parish's annual almanac.
In the East the day belongs to water. The Great Blessing of Waters is held at the eve or after the Liturgy on the day, with the priest immersing a cross three times; the blessed water is drunk and carried home for the year, and the clergy follow in the weeks after to bless houses with it. The eve, the Paramony, is a strict fast, traditionally without food until the first star. Out of the rite, though not part of it, grew the folk practice of casting a cross into river or sea for young men to retrieve, kept in Bulgaria, Russia, Serbia and Montenegro, and in Russia of immersing three times in a cross-shaped hole cut in the ice.
Beyond the Byzantine world the day takes its own forms. In Ethiopia, Timkat is a national observance: the tabot, a consecrated replica of the Ark, is carried in procession to water on the eve and returned the next day amid enormous crowds. Coptic Egypt keeps it as Eid al-Ghitas, the feast of the immersion, with taro as the festal dish. The Syriac churches call it Denho, the rising.
In the West the keeping went domestic. Chalk is blessed on the feast in the Roman Ritual and given to households, who mark the lintel with the year and the letters C, M, B, read both as the traditional names of the Magi and as a prayer that Christ bless this house; how old the practice is nobody can document. In Spain and Latin America this, not Christmas, is the children's gift day, with shoes left out on the night of the fifth; the parade of the Kings, the cabalgata, was first recorded at Alcoy in 1866 and revived there in 1885. Italian children wait for La Befana. In German-speaking lands children dress as the Magi and sing house to house, a custom old enough to have been banned as begging in the eighteenth century and revived after the war as a children's collection for the poor. English Twelfth Night, with its cake and its hidden bean and its king for the evening, has largely lapsed; Samuel Pepys kept it in 1669, drawing the titles from a hat instead of baking them in, to prevent spoiling the cake, and drew Queen himself.
Book of Common Prayer (2019), the Epiphany proper: source of the collect quoted, "by the leading of a star you manifested your only Son to the peoples of the earth," and of the appointed lessons. Official leaflet: https://bcp2019.anglicanchurch.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/109-Epiphany-January-6.pdf
Leo the Great, Sermon 31 (On the Feast of the Epiphany, I), sections I and II, for "They adore the Word in flesh" and "The incense they offer to God, the myrrh to Man, the gold to the King" and "offered Himself to be found"; translated by Charles Lett Feltoe, NPNF II.12 (1895): https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/360331.htm
Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 39 (On the Holy Lights), section I, for "has for its origin the Baptism of my Christ, the True Light"; translated by Browne and Swallow, NPNF II.7: https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf207.iii.xxii.html
John Cassian, Conferences X.2, for "not separately as in the Western provinces but on the single festival of this day"; NPNF translation: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/350810.htm
Clement of Alexandria, Stromata I.21, for the Basilidian vigil on the fifteenth or eleventh of Tubi; translated by William Wilson, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 2: https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf02.vi.iv.i.xxi.html
Ammianus Marcellinus, Res Gestae XXI.ii.5, for Julian at Vienne and "the day of the festival at the beginning of January, which the Christians call Epiphany"; translated by C. D. Yonge (Bohn, 1862): https://www.ccel.org/ccel/pearse/morefathers/files/ammianus_21_book21.htm
Egeria, Itinerarium, chapter III (Festivals at Epiphany), for the dawn arrival, the eight-day round of stations, and "nothing but gold and gems and silk"; translated by McClure and Feltoe: https://www.ccel.org/m/mcclure/etheria/etheria.htm
Troparion of the Epiphany, for "When Thou, O Lord, wast baptized in the Jordan, the worship of the Trinity was made manifest"; Orthodox Church in America, Selected Liturgical Hymns: https://www.oca.org/orthodoxy/prayers/selected-liturgical-hymns
Ordinance for Abolishing of Festivals, 8 June 1647, for festivals "superstitiously used and observed": https://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/acts-ordinances-interregnum/p954
Samuel Pepys, Diary, 6 January 1668/69, for the titles drawn from a hat "to prevent spoiling the cake": https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4199/4199-h/4199-h.htm
Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, for the 2017 restoration of the feast to its own date and the bishops' stated reasoning: https://www.cbcew.org.uk/why-the-catholic-bishops-have-restored-two-holy-days/
Catholic Encyclopedia (1909), "Epiphany": the single tertiary witness behind the Passio S. Philippi, the Saragossa and Gerona and Orleans canons, the Codex Theodosianus items, the Himerius correspondence, and Leo's "unreasonable novelty"; every canon number in it remains unverified against a conciliar edition: https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05504c.htm
1549 Book of Common Prayer, Epiphany propers, for the collect, Psalm 96, and the office lessons dropped in 1552: http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/1549/Readings_Epiphany_1549.htm
Why January 6 at all is not settled, and this page will not settle it. Three positions are in the field. The first holds that the Church fixed its feast against an existing Alexandrian festival of the birth of the god Aion from the virgin Kore on that night, reported by Epiphanius; that report reaches this account at some remove and should be treated accordingly. The second supposes a computation, a conception or Passion date projected forward, of the same shape as the argument usually made for December 25; no ancient computation document for Epiphany could be produced. The third needs no pagan referent at all, and takes Clement's Basilidian report as evidence of an early Alexandrian reckoning that orthodox and heterodox alike inherited.
In England the feast came down through the Sarum kalendar into Cranmer's book of 1549, which kept it with a proper collect, Psalm 96, the Epistle from Ephesians 3 and Matthew's Gospel of the Magi. For one book only, and never again, the office lessons that day paired the Baptism at Mattins with Cana at Evensong, the old composite feast surviving inside the English rite until it was pruned out in 1552. The Communion psalm has since changed from 96 to 72, which is a return rather than an innovation: Psalm 72, the psalm of the kings and their gifts, was the ancient Roman and Sarum offertory for the day. No committee minute explaining the choice was found. The 2019 Book of Common Prayer sets Epiphany as a Holy Day with its own proper, appointing Isaiah 60:1 to 9, Psalm 72, Ephesians 3:1 to 13 and Matthew 2:1 to 12.
Two modern revisions are worth noting because they run opposite ways. In 1955 Pius XII suppressed Epiphany's octave and its vigil, ending in the Roman calendar the eight-day arc Egeria had described in the 380s. In 2000 the Church of England lengthened the observance instead, establishing a season of Epiphany running from January 6 to the Presentation on February 2.
British (Received Pronunciation): Marcellinus /ˌmɑːsəˈlaɪnəs/; Theophany /θiˈɒfəni/
Isaiah 60:1–9Psalm 72 or Psalm 72:1–11Ephesians 3:1–13Matthew 2:1–12
O God, by the leading of a star you manifested your only Son to the peoples of the earth: Lead us, who know you now by faith, to your presence, where we may see your glory face to face; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.