EPIPHANY, FEAST OF, the commemoration of the Bap tism, also called by the Greek fathers of the i 4th century the Theophany or Theophanies, and the Day of Lights, i.e., of the Illumination of Jesus or of the Light which shone in the Jordan. In the Teutonic west it has become the Festival of the three kings (i.e., the Magi), or simply Twelfth day. Leo the Great called it the Feast of the Declaration; Fulgentius, of the Manifestation; others, of the Apparition of Christ.
Clement of Alexandria first mentions it. Writing c. 194 he states that the Basilidians feasted the day of the Baptism, devot ing the whole night which preceded it to lections of the scriptures. They fixed it in the i 5th year of Tiberius, on the i 5th or iith of the month Tobi, dates of the Egyptian fixed calendar equiva lent to January loth and 6th. When Clement wrote the great church had not adopted it, but toward A.D. 300 it was widely in vogue.
In the age of the Nicene Council, A.D. 325, the primate of Alex andria was charged at every Epiphany Feast to announce to the churches in a "Festal Letter" the date of the forthcoming Easter. In Jerusalem, according to the epistle of Macarius to the Arme nians, c. 33o, the feast was kept with zeal and splendour, and was with Easter and Pentecost a favourite season for Baptism. We have evidence of the 4th century from Spain that a long fast marked the season of Advent, and prepared for the feast of Epiphany on the 6th of January. The council of Saragossa c. 38o enacted that for 21 days, from the i 7th of December to the 6th of January, the Epiphany, the faithful should not dance or make merry. Our earliest Spanish lectionary, the Liber comicus of Toledo, edited by Don Morin (Anecd. Maredsol. vol. i.), provides lections for five Sundays in Advent, and the gospel lections chosen regard the Baptism of Christ, not His Birth, of which the feast, like that of the Annunciation, is mentioned, but not yet dated, December 25 being assigned to St. Stephen. In Armenia as early as 450 a month of fasting prepared for the Advent of the Lord at Epiphany, and the fast was interpreted as a reiteration of John the Baptist's season of Repentance.
In Antioch as late as about 386 Epiphany and Easter were the two great feasts, and the physical Birth of Christ was not yet feasted. On the eve of Epiphany after nightfall the springs and rivers were blessed, and water was drawn from them and stored for the whole year to be used in lustrations and baptisms. Epi phanius boldly removed the date of the Baptism to the 8th of November. "January 6" ( =Tobi i 1), he writes, "is the day of Christ's Birth, that is, of the Epiphanies." He uses the plural, because he adds on January 6 the commemoration of the water miracle of Cana. Although in 375 he thus protested that January 6 was the day "of the Birth after the Flesh," he became before the end of the century a convert, according to John of Nice, to the new opinion that December 25 was the real day of this Birth. That as early as about 385, January 6 was kept as the physical birthday in Jerusalem, or rather in Bethlehem, we know from a contemporary witness of it, the lady pilgrim of Gaul (Egeria Silvia), whose peregrinatio, recently discovered by Gamurrini, is confirmed by the old Jerusalem Lectionary preserved in (translated in Rituale Armenorum [1905]).
In 385 Pope Siricius calls January 6 Natalicia, "the Birthday of Christ or of Apparition," and protests against the Spanish custom (at Tarragona) of baptizing on that day—another proof that in Spain in the 4th century it commemorated the Baptism. In Gaul at Vienna in 36o Julian the Apostate, out of deference to Chris tian feeling, went to church "on the festival which they keep in January and call Epiphania." Why the feast of the Baptism was called the feast or day of the Saviour's Birth, and why fathers of that age when they call Christ mas the birthday constantly qualify and add the words "in the flesh," we are able to divine from Pope Leo's (c. 447) i8th Epistle to the bishops of Sicily. For here we learn that in Sicily they held that in His Baptism the Saviour was reborn through the Holy Spirit.
Fortune has preserved to us among the Spuria of several Latin fathers, Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome and Maximus of Turin, various homilies for Sundays of the Advent fast and for Epiphany. The Advent lections of these homilists were much the same as those of the Spanish Liber comicus; and they insist on Advent being kept as a strict fast, without marriage celebrations. Their Epiphany lection is, however, Matt. iii. 1-17, which must there fore have once on a time been assigned in the Liber comicus also in harmony with its general scheme. The baptism is declared by these homilists to have been "the consecration of Christ," and "regeneration of Christ and a strengthening of our faith," to have been "Christ's second nativity." "This second birth bath more renown than his first . . . for now the God of majesty is inscribed (as his father), but then (at his first birth) Joseph the Carpenter was assumed to be his father . . . he bath more honour who cries aloud from Heaven (viz., God the Father), than he who labours upon earth" (viz., Joseph).
Another homily preserved in a ms. of the 7th or 8th century and assigned to Maximus of Turin declares that the Epiphany was known as the Birthday of Jesus, either because He was then born of the Virgin or reborn in baptism. As late as the 9th century the Armenians had at least three discrepant dates for the Annunciation—January 5, January 9, April 6; and of these January 5 and 9 were older than April 6, which they perhaps bor rowed from Epiphanius's commentary on the Gospels. The Epiphany feast had therefore in its own right acquired the name of natalis dies or birthday, as commemorating the spiritual rebirth of Jesus in Jordan, before the natalis in carne, the Birthday in the flesh, as Jerome and others call it, was associated with it. This idea was condemned as Ebionite in the 3rd century, yet it in fluences Christian writers long before and long afterwards.
A letter is preserved by John of Nice of a bishop of Jerusalem to the bishop of Rome which attests a temporary union of both feasts on January 6 in the holy places. The faithful, it says, met before dawn at Bethlehem to celebrate the Birth from the Virgin in the cave ; but before their hymns and lections were finished they had to hurry off to Jordan, 13 m. the other side of Jerusalem, to celebrate the Baptism, and by consequence neither com memoration could be kept fully and reverently. The writer there fore begs the pope to look in the archives of the Jews brought to Rome after the destruction of Jerusalem, and to ascertain from them the real date of Christ's birth. The pope looked in the works of Josephus and found it to be December 25. The letter's genuine ness has been called in question; but from internal evidence it appears that it could not have been invented. Now we know what sort of considerations influenced this sect in fixing other feasts, so we have a clue. They fixed the Birth of Jesus on Pachon 25 (= May 2o), the day of the Niloa, or feast of the descent of the Nile from heaven. We should thus expect January 6 to be equally a Nile festival, as it actually was. On Tobi i 1, says Epiphanius (c. 37o), every one draws up water from the river and stores it up, not only in Egypt itself, but in many other countries. In many places, he adds, springs and rivers turn into wine on this day, e.g., at Cibyra in Caria and Gerasa in Arabia. Aristides Rhetor (c. 16o) also relates how in the winter, which began with Tobi, the Nile water was at its purest.
Two centuries later Chrysostom, as we have seen, commends in identical terms the water blessed and drawn from the rivers at the Baptismal feast. It is therefore probable that the Basilidian feast was a Christianized form of the blessing of the Nile, called by Chabas in his Coptic calendar Hydreusis. Mas`udi the Arab historian of the loth century, in his Prairies d'or (French trans. Paris, 1863, ii., 364), enlarges on the splendours of this feast as he saw it still celebrated in Egypt.
Epiphanius also (Haer. 51) relates a curious celebration held at Alexandria of the Birth of the Aeon. On January 5 or 6 the votaries met in the holy compound or Temple of the Maiden (Kore), and sang hymns to the music of the flute till dawn, when they went down with torches into a shrine under ground, and fetched up a wooden idol on a bier representing Kore, seated and naked, with crosses marked on her brow, her hands and her knees. Then with flute-playing, hymns and dances they carried the image seven times round the central shrine, before restoring it again to its dwelling-place below. He adds : "And the votaries say that to-day at this hour Kore, that is, the Virgin, gave birth to the Aeon." The earliest extant Greek text of the Epiphany rite is in a Euchologion of about the year 795, now in the Vatican. The prayers recite that at His baptism Christ hallowed the waters by His presence in Jordan, and ask that they may now be blessed by the Holy Spirit visiting them, by its power and inworking, as the streams of Jordan were blessed. • BIBLIOGRAPHY.—Gregory Nazianz., Orat. xli.; Suicer, Thesaurus, Bibliography.—Gregory Nazianz., Orat. xli.; Suicer, Thesaurus, s.v. vaa; Cotelerius In constit. Apost. (Antwerp, 1698), lib. v. cap. 13 ; R. Bingham, Antiquities (1834) , bk. xx.; Ad. Jacoby, Bericht fiber die Taufe Jesu (Strassburg, Igoe) ; H. Blumenbach, Antiquitates Epiphaniorum (Leipzig, 1737) ; J. L. Schulze, De festo Sanctorum Luminum, ed. J. E. Volbeding (Leipzig, 1841) ; and K. A. H. Kellner, Heortology (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1906) . (See also the works enumerated under CHRISTMAS.)