After Eusebius invented the idea of the “Chronicle of World History”, subsequent writers produced considerable numbers of these. As a rule these start with Adam, using the Bible and Eusebius to cover stuff up to Constantine, and then whatever continuations and paraphrases were available.
The Chronicon Pascale is an example of this genre. It’s a Greek World Chronicle, composed around 630 AD in the reign of the Eastern Roman Emperor Heraclius, just half a dozen years before the Arabs charge out of the desert and find no-one in any shape to resist them. No translation of the whole thing exists, apart from the renaissance Latin version printed in the Patrologia Graeca 92. Whitby and Whitby made an English translation of the portion from 284 AD onwards.
Bill Thayer of Lacus Curtius forwarded me an email in which someone raised an interesting query:
…in “The Story of Religious Controversy”, a book written in 1929 by Joseph McCabe. In the chapter entitled “Morals in Ancient Egypt,” he is speaking of the son of the goddess Isis–Horus–and says: “An early Christian work, the ‘Paschal Chronicle’ (Migne ed. xcii. col 385), tells us that every year the temples of Horus presented to worshippers, in mid-winter (or about December 25th), a scenic model of the birth of Horus. He was represented as a babe born in a stable, his mother Isis standing by.”
I hope we all know better than to believe the crude falsehoods about Christian origins circulated by bitter atheists online. But does the CP say any such thing? I went off to look.
Skimming over the Latin side , I find a discussion of Jeremiah’s prediction of Christ, starting in col. 383, “De Jeremia”. This starts with one of the messianic passages, mirrored in Matthew – which he quotes – and then says is also in Hebrews. Then he goes on (my own rough translation of key points):
“Jeremiah was from Anathoth, and was killed in Taphais in Egypt by being stoned by the people, and sleeps in the place where Pharaoh’s palace is, (..because he was very respected..) because when they were infested with the aquatic animals, called Menephoth in Egyptian and crocodiles in Greek. Even today those faithful to God who take some of the dust of that place can drive crocodiles away”
One may hope that no-one actually experimented with live crocodiles to verify this.
Then follows a story that Alexander, when he came to Egypt, and heard about the “arcana” which he had predicted, removed the prophet’s relics to Alexandria, for some other similar magic which I can’t quite make out. It then continues:
“This sign Jeremiah gave to the priests of Aegypt, predicting the future, that their idols would be destroyed and ? by a boy saviour born of a virgin, and laid in a manger.”
It goes on:
“Quapropter etiamvero ut deam colunt virginem puerperam, et infantem in praesepi adorant.
For which reason (?) they honour a pregnant virgin goddess and worship an infant in a manger.
When king Ptolemy asked why, they told him that they received this secret from the holy prophet handed down by their fathers. The same prophet Jeremiah, before the destruction of the temple, …” (more stuff about prophecy).
Migne quotes a note by DuCange (25) which says that this bit about a virgin comes from Epiphanius and Simon Logothetes (who?). No reference is given, unfortunately, and I was unable to find it in the Panarion.
This last bit is probably the kernel of the story that we see in highly embroidered form above.
Simeon Metaphrastes, apparently — the result of a quick Google and this article in the Catholic Encyclopedia: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10225a.htm
Thank you! I’ve modified the Wikipedia article to include his name as well (may as well help future searchers).
Please, I would like to know if this chronicle was ever translated into Spanish?
Thanks!
Regards
Maria
I do not know — sorry!
Well, this was quite useful! I had stumbled upon some who were referring to the Chronicon Paschale (or the “Chronicle of Alexandria” as some put it, which I worked out was the Chronicon Paschale thanks to your blog post at https://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2016/11/05/the-chronicle-of-alexandria-a-will-o-the-wisp/) as confirming that Egyptians worshipped a virgin goddess and infant born in a manger, and of course using is to try to claim that Christianity took this from the Egyptians. Rather frustratingly, none of the ones I saw actually bothered to tell me WHERE in the work it was (to McCabe’s credit, he at least bothered).
However, it is fairly obvious that McCabe errs here; as you note, the Chronicon Paschale appears to say nothing at all about this being done specifically on December 25. And to be honest, one must wonder how much confidence they should put into this to begin with, given the Chronicon Paschale was written in the 7th century and the mention of Ptolemy shows we are discussing things from at least 800 years prior (much prior if we are talking about one of the earlier rulers named Ptolemy).
While I suppose it is possible the Egyptians did do this and saying that it came from a prophecy of Jeremiah was an after the fact rationale Christians came up with, I think it’s more likely that the Egyptians never had any sort of virgin-and-child-manger setup to begin with (there certainly seems to be no mention of it before this), and that the whole thing, including the manger detail, was just a legend someone came up with about Jeremiah that the author of the Chronicon Paschale included.
As another commenter said, Simon Logothetes seems to just be a name for Symeon Magister (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symeon_Logothete) who wrote in the 10th century, meaning he would’ve just been taking this from the Chronicon. Epiphanius came before the Chronicon, but we are left wondering what is being cited. Though it should be noted that it says midway through “Haec et quae sequuntur absunt ab Epiphanio: ita autem describuntur apud Logothetam”. This is a footnote saying that what comes after wasn’t from Epiphanius (the earlier part was), but is from Logothes. This footnote is put into the Greek text to show where the cutoff is, and I’m not great with Greek so I’m not 100% sure where the cutoff is, but it looks to me like it’s saying Epiphanius described Jeremiah prophesying about a virgin birth to the Egyptians, and then the latter part–the mention that the Egyptians as a result started worshipping a virgin goddess and child in a manger–was not in Epiphanius, but was in Logothes.
Unfortunately, I can shed no further light on where if anywhere Epiphanius said this, or where Logothes did either (Logothes did write his own chronicles, so it’s presumably somewhere there). It does not seem to be in the Panarion, or at least I didn’t find it, but Epiphanius wrote other things. Who knows, maybe it was something wrongfully attributed to him.
Anyway, this indicates to me, therefore, that the story about Jeremiah telling Egypt priests about the future virgin birth was known in Epiphanius’s time (though such a thing is, almost certainly, just a legend that someone came up with after the Gospels), and then at some point after that it got expanded upon–making its way into the Chronicon Paschale and later Logothes–to claim that the Egyptians actually started worshipping a goddess with an infant in a manger. I think we can say with virtual certainty that this claim of Egyptians having a virgin goddess with an infant in a manger is something that the Egyptians never actually did (given the apparent lack of any references to them outside of these much later texts), and was just a later extension of the already probably legendary story about Jeremiah preaching the virgin birth to them. Note also there is no specification that the goddess was Isis or that the child was Horus.
And it should be noted, in any event, that there is nothing stated about them doing so on December 25 or in the winter.
To be fair to McCabe, he may have been grounding that idea on what he cites afterwards… though his phrasing certainly indicates he was referring to the Chronicon Paschale. Here is what he says more in full, on pages 168-169:
“Her son Horus interests us in another way. An early Christian work, the “Paschal Chronicle” (Migne ed. xcii, col. 385), tells us that every year the temples of Horus presented to worshipers, in mid-winter (or about December 25th), a scenic model of the birth of HOrus. He was represented as a babe born in a stable, his mother Isis standing by. Just in the same way is the birth of Christ dramatized today in every Roman Catholic church in the world on December 25th. The Roman writer Macrobius makes the same statement about the representation of the birth of Horus in the temples (Saturnalia, I., 18), and adds that the young god was a symbol of the rebirth of the sun at that date.”
So perhaps the December 25th part was supposed to be based on Macrobius, though certainly the phrasing makes it look like he’s talking about the Chronicon Paschale. But does Macrobius say such a thing? Well, the reference is available at https://archive.org/details/macrobius-saturnalia-book-01-english-1969/page/129/ and refers to a practice Egyptians had of presenting an infant figure of their sun god around the time of the winter solstice, then an older one in the spring solstice, and finally a full grown one in the summer solstice. But this influencing Christmas is dubious, given that Macrobius (writing in the fifth century) is describing it well after Christmas on December 25 was celebrated, and it is entirely possible this was influenced by the Christian celebration. And nothing about Isis or a stable is mentioned.
So it seems McCabe is combining two separate sources to try to make his claim, but any attempt to say they influenced Christianity or even the date of Christmas seems very dubious given the lateness of the attestations and the question if they are even referring to the same thing.