Page 146 - New English Book L

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It is not my intention to deny altogether the truth of the
visit of some Eastern Magi to the crypt of Jesus (pbuh) , but
simply to show the avidity or the ambition of the Church
to exaggerate simple events in the life of Jesus Christ (pbuh)
and to exhibit in them some supernatural characteristics.

The other equally wonderful event, which concerns
our present discourse, is recorded by the Evangelist Luke
(ii. 1-20). Some shepherds were watching their flocks in
a field near Bethlehem on the very night when Jesus (pbuh)
was born in a manger. An angel announces the birth of the
“Saviour Lord,” and suddenly a host of angels appears in
the sky and sings aloud the following hymn:

Glory be to God in the Highest,

And on earth peace,

And among men good will. [Verse14.]

This famous angelic anthem, known as Gloria
in excels is Deo, and sung in all the sacerdotalist
churches during their celebration of the sacraments,
is, unfortunately, only a vague translation from the
Greek text, which cannot be considered at all reliable
or trustworthy because it does not show us the original
words in the language in which the angels chanted
and which the Hebrew shepherds understood. That the
heavenly hosts sang their joyous song in the language
of the shepherds, and that that language was not Greek
but the vernacular Hebrew -or rather the Aramaic- is
an admitted truth. All the scriptural names of Allah,
angels, heaven, John Prophets , etc., are revealed to
us in the Semitic tongues (Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic);
and to imagine that the celestial hosts sang in Greek
to the ignorant Jewish shepherds in the suburbs of
Bethlehem would be equivalent to the belief that such
an angelic army, in the firmament above the mountains
of Kurdistan, sang a similar hymn in Japanese for the