Father's Day

The idea of setting aside a day especially for fathers was at least partially inspired by the success of MOTHER'S DAY, established in 1914. Sonora Smart Dodd from Spokane, Washington, was listening to a Mother's Day sermon in church and decided that the nation's fathers deserved a similar day of recognition. One of six children raised by her father after her mother's death in 1898, Dodd began working through Protestant churches and local groups in Spokane to promote the holiday. She circulated a petition suggesting the third Sunday in June as an appropriate time and urging people to wear a ROSE that day in honor of their fathers.

Because the petition was originally circulated among ministers and church organizations, the earliest observances took place in churches and modeled themselves on Mother's Day rituals. Father's Day was also seen as a good opportunity to underscore the "masculine" side of Christianity and to remind fathers of their obligation to look after their families' spiritual welfare.

Dodd formed a committee to promote the new celebration by getting political endorsements, answering inquiries from around the country, and staging local celebrations, but the idea was slow to catch on. By the 1920s Father's Day had more or less died out as a local event, and Dodd herself moved on to other projects. But after studying at the Art Institute of Chicago and working as a fashion designer in Hollywood, she returned to Spokane in the early 1930s and resumed her campaign, focusing on the holiday's 25th anniversary observance in 1935. This time she had more success, and Father's Day enjoyed a resurgence-at least in eastern Washington.

The rest of the country, however, regarded it as just another excuse for a holiday. What did fathers want with sentimental gifts and greeting cards? But then the Associated Men's Wear Retailers of New York City took up the cause, recognizing its commercial potential. They set up the National Council for the Promotion of Father's Day in 1938. The council coordinated the efforts of florists, tobacconists, stationers, and men's clothiers across the country to promote Father's Day. "Give Dad Something to Wear" was its slogan, and its goal was to boost sales by increasing the demand for Father's Day gifts.

President Calvin Coolidge had recommended that Father's Day become a nationwide observance as early as 1924. But it wasn't until 1972 that President Richard Nixon signed a proclamation to that effect. By the time Dodd died in 1978 at the age of 96, the Father's Day Council estimated the holiday to be worth more than $1 billion in retail sales.

SYMBOLS AND CUSTOMS

Necktie

What Mother's Day did for the florist industry, Father's Day did for the necktie industry. Along with tobacco, shirts, and other typically masculine gifts, neckties appeared on the earliest Father's Day greeting cards, and retailers wasted no time in turning the holiday to their advantage. Knowing that many people regarded Father's Day gifts as a joke, they designed ads showing fathers surrounded by ridiculous or tacky gifts, and then suggested the purchase of a classic silk necktie or pair of socks. Although their ploys were not difficult to see through, such advertising campaigns made it increasingly difficult to ignore Father's Day altogether.

As early as 1920 the custom of giving ties to fathers as a token of affection had already become a standing joke. The women who chose them often showed questionable taste. But the thought of giving flowers was even more laughable, and at least neckties were a more masculine, less sentimental gift. Along with socks, pipes, cigars, and shirts, neckties have somehow managed to retain their standing as the classic Father's Day gift.

Rose

Just as the carnation became a symbol for MOTHER'S DAY, the rose was suggested as the official Father's Day flower by Sonora Dodd in her 1910 petition to the Spokane Ministerial Association. It would be appropriate, she thought, if people wore a white rose in remembrance of a father who had died and a red rose as a tribute to a living father. Although more than sixty years passed before the holiday was officially established, the rose never encountered any real competition as the symbolic flower of Father's Day.

FURTHER READING

Henderson, Helene, ed. Holidays, Festivals, and Celebrations of the World Dictionary. 3rd ed. Detroit: Omnigraphics, 2005. Ickis, Marguerite. The Book of Religious Holidays and Celebrations. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1966. Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Armenian Christianity

The nature and characteristics of the paganism which preceded Christianity in Armenia are practically unknown to us. Attempts have been made to identify its gods with those of Greece, but all we know are the names and the sanctuaries of its pagan deities. Obscurity likewise shrouds the beginnings of Christianity in the country. Native historians of a rather late period would have us believe that several of the Apostles preached in Armenia, and that some of them, as St. Bartholomew and St. Thaddeus, died there. A popular legend ascribes to the latter the evangelizing of the land. Although the very ancient writers of the country, such as Korioun, Agathangelus, etc., do not even mention the name of Thaddeus, yet the legend, which apparently came at a late period from a Greek source, has so prevailed that even today the head of the Armenian Church claims to be occupying the "throne of St. Thaddeus". Although legendary, this tradition witnesses that Christianity at a rather early date passed from Syria over into Armenia. The letter of Meruzan to Dionysius of Alexandria (A.D. 248-265) confirms us in the belief that Christianity had already penetrated into Armenia before the time of St. Gregory the Illuminator. However, it is around St. Gregory that the story of Christianity's growth in Armenia centers; for in him Armenia had its apostle. Born of the royal stock of the Arsacides, and brought in early infancy to Cesarea of Cappadocia because of a Persian persecution of the Armenians, he was there instructed in the Christian Faith.

After its inclusion in the two world empires of the day, the Armenian kingly line in the Byzantine (western) territories of Armenia was suppressed first, followed by the forced ending of the kingly line in the Persian territories in 428. Since that time Armenia has been the subject of a long line of subjugations: to the Persians,

Arabs, Turks, and most recently the Russians. The first three overlords had no regard for the Christian traditions of the people, and the last had little desire for any cultural independence or (in communist period) for any religious renaissance. The religious literary and political aspirations of the Armenians have been sustained through long centuries of endurance in extraordinary ways. In the 20th century this involved the survival of genocide under Turkish rule (1915­-22) and political suffocation under the Soviets. The reestablishment of a free political base in the modern Republic of Armenia (much diminished in territorial size from Antiquity) and the well-developed Armenian diaspora in the United States have proven to be bright lights in the turn of Armenian fortunes in modern times.

Among many outstanding Armenian Christian leaders throughout the ages must be counted St. Nerses (d. 373),

who was the sixth catholicos and a direct descendant of St. Gregory. He was educated in Cappadocian Caesarea and served at the royal Armenian court before becoming a priest after the death of his wife. After his election as catholicos ca. 363, he initiated a large-scale reform of the church; issuing many canons after the Council of Ashtishat in 365,concerning fasting regulations, and the forbidding of marriages in kindred degrees. His stand against the Arians, the resistance of many of the court nobles to the spread of Christianity, and the use of monastics in the evangelization process,are described in the 5th-century historical writings of P’awstos Buzand. Nerses founded hospitals and orphanages set under church supervision. King Arshak III deposed him after being the focus of Nerses’ criticism for a dissolute life. His successor King Pap restored him in 369, but in turn decided to dispose of him when he too was criticized for immorality; which he did by the expedient of poisoning Nerses during a banquet. He was succeeded by his son,St. Isaac (Sahak) the Great, who was catholicos between ca. 397 and 438 and who was the last descendant of the bloodline of Gregory the Illuminator. It was during the reign of Pap that Armenia first stopped seeking the recognition of the metropolitans of Cappadocian Caesarea for the appointment of its catholicoi, and thus assumed an autonomous ecclesiastical existence.

St. Mesrob Mashtots (ca. 361­-439) was for a long time the assistant bishop to St. Isaac and became the locum tenens after his death, for six months before his own death. He invented the distinctive national Armenian script, which was widely adopted after 406, as part of his lifelong concern to remove Syrian dependence in Armenian church life and establish national traditions and styles. From the 5th century onwards there was a large effort led by St. Mesrob and his disciples to translate Christian literature from other cultures into it, chief among which were the translations of the Bible in 410 (using Syriac manuscripts and later Greek exemplars) as well as key liturgical texts. In patristic times many of the church’s writings were translated into Armenian, and as a result some theological texts now survive only in the Armenian versions that were made in Antiquity.

Important examples of this are the Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching of St. Irenaeus and several of the opera of St. Ephrem the Syrian. Armenia first entered international Christian debate in the time of Mesrob, whose disciples had been to Melitene to study Greek, and who were well aware that the city’s bishop,

Acacius of Melitene, had written in the strongest terms after the Ephesine council of 431 to protest the Constantinopolitan and Alexandrian denigration of the works of Mar Theodore Mopsuestia, a leading light of the Syrian Church. 

Proclos, patriarch of Constantinople 434­-46, wrote a Tome to the Armenians which became an important standard of christological orthodoxy in Armenia and was long used afterwards as a significant reason to negate the influence of Chalcedon.

Because of the political unrest in the country during a rebellion of 451, there were no Armenian representatives at the Council of Chalcedon, though the Armenian Church authorities were kept apprized of developments and approved the Henoticon of Emperor Zeno at the Council of Dvin in 506. In 518 the Byzantine Church condemned the Henoticon, but it was not until 555, two years after Justinian’s revisionist christological council, that the Armenian hierarchy decided that it would not endorse Chalcedon as a significant,

ecumenical synod, nor adopt the “twonature after the Union” theology which it had proposed as a standard. At that time the Armenian synod issued a censure of the Byzantine Church, explicitly condemning the theological errors of “both poles” of the debate: namely, Severus of Antioch,

and Eutyches, on the one hand, and Theodore Mopsuestia, Nestorius, and the Council of Chalcedon, on the other. Since that time Armenian Christianity has often been categorized by commentators in the Byzantine Orthodox tradition as among the “Oriental Orthodox” anti-Chalcedonians,

or “Monophysites,” but this is a misleading oversimplification on both fronts. The formal christological position of the church is to endorse the Christology of the first three ecumenical councils, prioritizing St. Cyril of Alexandria’s early formula:

“One Physis of the Word of God Incarnate” (Miaphysitism, which meant in Cyril’s hands “One concrete reality of the Incarnate Word of God,” not so much an endorsement of a “singularity of nature” which is often meant by the later term “Monophysitism”).

Seventh-century Byzantine emperors tried to reconcile the ecclesiastical division with Armenia, but their efforts were hindered by the Arab Islamic overrunning of the regions after the late 8th century. The ecumenical moves to rapprochement from this time are described in a very important Armenian Church history known as the Narratio de rebus Armeniae (Garitte 1952).

What is Aramaic Primacy?

photo:Manuscript on parchment of the book is Peshitta: Syrian Aramaic translation of the Bible. 

 The term Aramaic Primacy is used, informally, to refer to the claim that the New Testament was originally written not in Koine Greek but in a dialect of Aramaic. This theory is more commonly referred to as “Peshitta Primacy,” referring to the ancient Aramaic manuscripts of the Bible, a collection known as the Peshitta. The Aramaic Primacy Theory is drastically different from the consensus of historians and New Testament scholars, who hold that the original works of the New Testament were in fact written in Greek. A large number of researchers suggest that the Gospels of Mark and Matthew may have drawn from earlier Aramaic sources, but the claims of Aramaic Primacy go far beyond this.

Certain denominations hold to Aramaic Primacy as an article of faith, such as the Assyrian Church of the East. George Lamsa, a proponent of the Nestorian heresy, was instrumental in advancing the view that the New Testament was originally written in Aramaic. As with other views running contrary to general scholarship, Aramaic/Peshitta Primacy is primarily supported by the work of a single author, in this case, Lamsa. Both contemporaries of Lamsa and later scholars have concluded he frequently confused then-modern Syriac with ancient Aramaic, two languages that are extremely similar. More problematic is Lamsa’s translation of the Bible from the Aramaic, published in full in 1957. His translation work is inaccurate and filled with subtle changes to the text that undermine the doctrines of the Trinity and the deity of Christ, among others.

Textual scholars have examined the Peshitta and found clear evidence of influence from later translations. The dialect used in the Peshitta is from a later time period than that of Jesus and His disciples. The Peshitta utilizes phrases that obscure wordplay and metaphor; this is expected of a translation but not an original autograph. The massive number of biblical manuscripts available makes it possible to recognize variations, translation choices, and so forth, over time and geography. In other words, all available evidence points to the Peshitta’s being a later translation, not an original manuscript. Peshitta Primacy, or Aramaic Primacy, is not supported by evidence or scholarship. Despite the traditional view of Syriac churches, certain segments of Messianic Judaism, and the Hebrew Roots Movement, the New Testament was not originally written in Aramaic.