Page 149 - Demo

145It 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 theHighest, 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