OFFLINE

Due to worsening health I will be away from my computer, and consequently offline, for the foreseeable future.

Please remember me in your prayers, and goodbye for now.

Angels and Demons

The film adaptation of Dan Brown's Angels and Demons, one of the worst books I've ever had the misfortune of reading, is currently the top-grossing motion picture in the world. (Again staring Tom Hanks, an Orthodox Christian, who should be thoroughly ashamed of himself.) Just how awful is the book? Here's a sample of Brown's prose:

Vittoria Vetra stumbled forward, almost falling into the retina scan. She sensed the American rushing to help her, holding her, supporting her weight. On the floor at her feet, her father's eyeball stared up. She felt the air crushed from her lungs. They cut out his eye! Her world twisted. Kohler pressed close behind, speaking. Langdon guided her. As if in a dream, she found herself gazing into the retina scan. The mechanism beeped.

What's long bothered me most about Dan Brown are not his ideas about religious conspiracies – those are just patently stupid and wholly plagiaristic – but just how bad a writer he is. Not only is his prose consistently wretched and utterly unreadable, his plots are strictly formulaic. Consider this plot line: a famed scholar is found brutally murdered with a mysterious code left on his body; Robert Langdon is called in, who soon teams up with a beautiful European love interest; a chase through a major museum guided by codes hidden in the work of an Italian artist ensues; a secret society appears on the scene as religion and science go head-t0-head; and, finally, Langdon saves the day and wins the girl. Sound like the plot to The Duh Vinci Code? Wrong. That's the plot outline of Angels and Demons, only in the latter case the secret society is the Illuminati, the European city is Rome, the museum is in the Vatican, and the Italian artist is Bernini. Dan Browns next opus, The Lost Symbol (to be released on September 15 – order your copy today!), will involve more of the same, this time reportedly featuring Freemasons and Mormons on the lose in Washington, DC.

For a bit more sanity on Angels and Demons see here and here.

Incidentally, I note with abject horror that a film version of the very worst supposedly serious novel I've ever read is being threatened.

Good Intentions

Here's my translation of a curious little question-and-answer exchange with Hieromonk Job (Gumerov):

Question: What is the origin of the expression “the path to hell is paved with good intentions”? Is it true?

Reply: This expression has now become proverbial. The closest source is the two-volume memoir-biography, The Life of Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell (1740-1795), which appeared in 1791. The author states that Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) said in 1775: “Hell is paved with good intentions.” The only difference is that the proverb speaks of the path to hell, whereas Johnson speaks of hell itself. It appears that the author of the aphorism – an English critic, lexicographer, essayist, and poet – relied on a dictum made earlier by the Anglican priest and metaphysical poet George Herbert (1593-1633) in his book Jacula prudentium (Latin, “Aphorisms of the Wise”): “Hell is full of good meanings and wishings.”

All three expressions share in common the idea that wishes and intentions are insufficient for salvation. This is in full agreement with the teachings of the Holy Fathers. Above all one must have faith: But without faith it is impossible to please Him (Heb 11:6). In the words of St Ephraim the Syrian: “without oil a lamp will not burn; and without faith no one will acquire a good thought.” How many utopias, radical movements, revolutionary programs, and the like the world has seen, the leaders and participants of which have wanted to attain human “happiness” without God and against God, relying on their fallen reason. History maintains the sad and tragic memory of this. Individuals, too, blinded by unbelief, wanting to fulfill intentions that seemed good to them, have often caused evil and pain to those around them.

Faith is necessary, but it must be correct faith. Error and delusions can be many, but truth is always one. People who are motivated by mistaken religious doctrine are certain that their intentions are good, but their false spirituality leads them to ruin. All religious falsehoods are performed with the participation of demonic forces.

St John Chrysostom says: “Faith is like a strong staff and a secure haven, saving one from mistaken judgments and calming the soul in great quiet.” The same universal teacher warns, however: “We should not consider faith alone to be sufficient for our salvation, but let us also take care for our behavior and let us lead the best life, so that both the one and the other will allow us to attain perfection.” The Holy Fathers firmly emphasize that a Christian must have a spiritually enlightened mind. Without it one can make dangerous mistakes. St Anthony the Great considered precisely discernment [discretion] to be one of the primary Christian virtues:

“Discernment is the eye of the soul and its lamp, just as the eye is the lamp of the body; therefore if this eye is light, then the whole body (our actions) will be light, and if this eye will be dark, then our entire body will be dark, as our Lord said in the Holy Gospel (c.f., Mt 6:22-23). By discernment a man discriminates in his wishes, words, and deeds, putting aside all those that separate him from God. By discernment he upsets and destroys all the intrigues of the enemy directed against him, distinguishing correctly what is good and what is evil."

Photograph: Metropolitan Laurus with Hieromonk Job at the Sretensky Monastery in Moscow.

Atheist Delusions

Fr Jonathan Tobias, in a recent post on Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, the new book by David Bentley Hart, reminds us of why he is the reigning prose stylist in the Orthodox blogosphere. Here's how Fr Jonathan begins:

What an interesting book Atheist Delusions is (by our reigning favorite, David Bentley Hart; out this year from Yale University Press).

The interest starts with the delusions, if you will, of its reviewers. They all meant well, I'm sure, but their method seems to stop short of the second stage of Adler's bookreading technique. The friendly urbane reviewers discuss Hart's tome as if it were a sure bet in a back alley cockfight with the "new atheists." One of them went so far as to suggest that Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, on the morning they were going to start writing down all their atheistical stuff, should have realized that David Bentley Hart was out there on the field already, sharpening up his Gimli battle axe, just for the enjoyable business of separating the loci of nincompoopery from the corpora of nincompoops. They should have realized this with dudgeon and ire and promptly told the valet to leave them alone and stuck their head back under the eider down.

Come now. Tut, tut and all that. This isn't at all the main job that Hart's took upon himself and done well. His proposition was that the Christian Church brought about a profound revolution, whose effects permeated the world of human society. It established what is facilely known as "Christendom" (West and East): everyone knows that, but Hart proves that what we like to think of as "the West" is fundamentally this very Christendom – despite the current and odious attempt to establish a secular singular Europe. All the liberal things we are justly proud of are in fact Christian inventions; to name just a few: things like hospitals, effective medicine, justice for the powerless, "healthcare and welfare," the prohibition of gladiatorial combat, the eradication of slavery, the full involvement of women in religion (suggesting that the male priesthood contradicts the full participation of women in Orthodoxy is as lamentable as supposing that female motherhood diminishes the participation of males in parenthood, or that female wifehood prohibits the full range of male sexuality).

That last point sounds abrupt in a bozart age when "full participation" has been jingo-ized into hieretical affirmative action. But Christianity was the first to involve all adherents – rich or poor, slave or free, men or women, Greek, Roman and Jew – cramming them all into one single Liturgy and Sacrament, the same font and cup, the same nave. The question of "why can't I be the celebrant?" was never related to St. Paul's "in Christ there is no Jew nor Greek, male or female, slave nor free."

Gabriel Sanchez, another Orthodox blogger I greatly admire, also had a thoughtful post on Dr Hart's book recently. I gave you the beginning of Fr Jonathen' post, and now I'll give you the end of Gabriel's post:

I would encourage you, regardless of past impressions of Hart, to read Atheist Delusions. Don’t be deceived by the fact it is an entertaining read. That’s just icing. Rather, read it to arm yourself against the falsehoods you encounter every day about the Christian faith, its history, and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Read it and be encouraged that retreatism is not the “answer.” Read it and then be sure to follow the Apostle Paul and “preach Christ crucified,” to so many contemporary Christians a stumbling block and unto the secularists foolishness. That is imperative.

I have hitherto studiously ignored David Bentley Hart's work. I did once page through his Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth – his first book, but labeled his magnum opus from the day of its appearance – but was unable to make heads or tails of it. It simply was not the sort of book I'd normally read. (When I do read works of academic theology, I nearly always prefer historical theology to systematic theology, the former seeming not only safer but usually more relevant.) I am now convinced that I should read Dr Hart's latest tome. Now if somebody would only send me a copy, I'd happily review it!

Dylan's Virtues

From a recent profile of Bob Dylan (who has a new record out):

After that evening’s show at the Heineken Music Hall — at around 11:30 p.m. — I interview Dylan again. Because it is Easter weekend, I decide to push him on the importance of Christian Scripture in his life. “Well, sure,” he says, “that and those other first books I read were biblical stuff. Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur. Those were the books that I remembered reading and finding religion in. Later on, I started reading over and over again Plutarch and his Roman Lives. And the writers Cicero, Tacitus and Marcus Aurelius. … I like the morality thing. People talk about it all the time. Some say you can’t legislate morality. Well, maybe not. But morality has gotten kind of a bad rap. In Roman thought, morality is broken down into basically four things. Wisdom, Justice, Moderation and Courage. All of these are the elements that would make up the depth of a person’s morality. And then that would dictate the types of behavior patterns you’d use to respond in any given situation. I don’t look at morality as a religious thing.”

Now, there is a lot that could be said about this. What precisely he's trying to say here is, needless to say, less than entirely clear. Indeed, it's never an easy matter to untangle Dylan's utterances – although he is making more sense here than he often does. (One prominent Orthodox theologian wrote me a few years ago to ask what I made of Dylan's recent lyric "I been to St. Herman's church and I've said my religious vows." My reply was that I wouldn't advise making too much of it, given that the rhyming verse was "I've sucked the milk out of a thousand cows.") Is he simply trying to avoid a direct statement on his current religious beliefs? Is his point primarily to separate religion from morality, or simply to rehabilitate the notion of morality? I doubt we'll ever know, and I rather Dylan himself knew exactly what he was trying to say. All that said, I can't help but register my admiration for any rock star who can correctly list the four classical (or cardinal) virtues.

One of the most intelligent pieces about Dylan I've read, this review by Louis Menard of a collection of interviews with Dylan, makes an essential point about making sense of this odd man. Excerpt:

The discrepancy between Dylan the interview subject and Dylan the musician is not an artifact of celebrity. It seems to have been part of the deal from the start, and it’s almost the first thing that people who knew him mention when they’re asked about their initial impression. “I wanted to meet the mind that created all those beautiful words,” Judy Collins told David Hajdu for “Positively 4th Street,” his delightful group biography of Dylan, Richard Fariña, and Joan and Mimi Baez. “We set something up, and we had coffee, and when it was over, I walked away, thinking, ‘The guy’s an idiot. He can’t make a coherent sentence.’ ” The first time Joan Baez heard Dylan sing one of his own songs—he played “With God on Our Side” for her—she was floored. “I never thought anything so powerful could come out of that little toad,” she said. She proceeded to fall madly in love with him, and bought him a toothbrush.

People who have this experience with Dylan tend to conclude that he is a complicated human being, but the logical conclusion is the opposite one. Shelton, for his biography, interviewed a man named Harry Weber, who knew, and didn’t especially like, Dylan in Minneapolis, back in 1959, when Dylan was a student (sort of) at the University of Minnesota. “Dylan is a genius, that’s all,” Weber said. “He is not more complex than most people; he is simpler.” On most subjects that normal people talk about, Dylan seems either not to have views or to have views indistinguishable from the views of everyone else who’s hanging around the coffeehouse. His conversation is short and not always sweet. But there is one topic he does like. He is a songwriter. He likes to talk about songs. When interviewers figure this out, the work gets easier.

As long as we're on the subject of Dylan generally and Dylan interviews specifically, I feel compelled to cite an interview from February, 1966, in which he addresses the point of wearing one's hair long:

The thing that most people don't realize is that it's warmer to have long hair. Everybody wants to be warm. People with short hair freeze easily. Then they try to hide their coldness, and they get jealous of everybody that's warm. Then they become either barbers or Congressmen. A lot of prison wardens have short hair. Have you ever noticed that Abraham Lincoln's hair was much longer than John Wilkes Booth's?

Asked if he thought President Lincoln wore his hair long to keep his head warm, Dylan replied:

Actually, I think it was for medical reasons, which are none of my business. But I guess if you figure it out, you realize that all of one's hair surrounds and lays on the brain inside your head. Mathematically speaking, the more of it you can get out of your head, the better. People who want free minds sometimes overlook the fact that you have to have an uncluttered brain. Obviously, if you get your hair on the outside of your head, your brain will be a little more freer. But all this talk about long hair is just a trick. It's been thought up by men and women who look like cigars - the anti-happiness committee. They're all freeloaders and cops. You can tell who they are: They're always carrying calendars, guns or scissors. They're all trying to get into your quicksand. They think you've got something. I don't know why Abe Lincoln had long hair.

As a matter of fact, support for at least one or two points that Dylan makes here (about the connection between hair and warmth and brains) can be found in the prayers for the tonsure at the service of Baptism:

Master, Lord our God, who honoured mortals with your image, furnishing them with a rational soul and a comely body, so that the body might serve the rational soul, you placed the head at the very top and in it you planted the majority of the senses, which do not interfere with one another, while you covered the head with hair so as not to be harmed by the changes of the weather, and you fitted all the limbs most suitably to each one, so that through them all they might give thanks to you, the master craftsman.

I've sometimes thought, certainly a bit perversely, that Dylan's arguments could be used in the debate about whether Orthodox clergy should wear their hair and beards long. It would, at the very least, add a bit of color to the discussion.

UPDATE: Aaron, in the comments, rightly chides me for my failure to link to Esteban's relevant (and wonderfully discursive) post.

Doubting Obama

Daniel Larison, one of today's most astute political commentators and an Orthodox Christian (he attends this parish), has an interesting post commenting on President Obama's recent speech at Notre Dame, in which Mr Obama touched on questions of faith and doubt. An excerpt from Daniel's post:

Everyone is stricken with doubt at times, but it has to be understood that doubt, like an illness, is something from which one may suffer but which is something that needs to be remedied rather than perpetuated or celebrated. Physical illness can have a humbling effect, but a proper understanding of theological anthropology tells us that illness, like death, is part of our fallen state. Doubt is a function of a mind clouded by the passions–it is the result of confusion. It does not teach us anything, but rather prevents us from learning. It is important to see the difference between doubt and apophatic theology: one is the function of human confusion, the other is the necessary recognition of the unknowability of God in His essence. Obama misleadingly lumps the two together. As Obama would have it, because we cannot know God in Himself and cannot always understand what He wills for us we must therefore abandon all claims of certainty, even when these are founded in what God has told and revealed to us about Himself. Obama said, “It is beyond our capacity as human beings to know with certainty what God has planned for us or what he asks of us,” but only for the first part of this is true. What God asks of us is well-known. In the Psalms, for example, He tells us, “Be still and know that I am God.” He has not said, “Be ironically detached and suppose that I might very well be God, depending on how the mood strikes you.” We hide behind doubt and any number of other convenient shields to protect our little selfish empires from the demands that we know God makes of us. He has said, “Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and all thy soul and all thy mind and all thy strength.” What He asks of us is quite clear. Indeed, if there is anything we can say that we know with certainty, it is this.

The entire post is worth reading.

In other news, I note with some apprehension that Mr Obama's recent appointee as religious liaison to his Office of Public Engagement, Paul Monteiro, is a Seventh-Day Adventist.   

Archbishop Averky on the Samaritan Woman

I am posting here my thorough revision and correction of a provisional English translation found online of Archbishop Averky's commentary on John 4:1-42, the Gospel reading for the Sunday of the Samaritan Woman:

The Conversation with the Samaritan Woman

(Mt 4:12; Mk 1:14; Jn 4:1-42)

All four Gospels speak of the Lord’s departure to Galilee. Sts Matthew and Mark note that this took place after John had been imprisoned, while St John adds that the reason for this was the rumor that Jesus was receiving and baptizing more disciples than John the Baptist, although the Evangelist explains that it was not He Himself Who was baptizing, but His disciples. After John’s imprisonment, the Pharisees’ entire hatred focused on Jesus, Who bean to seem to them more dangerous than the Baptist. As the time of His suffering had not yet arrived, Jesus leaves Judea and goes to Galilee, in order to avoid persecution by His envious enemies. Only one Evangelist, St John, relates Christ’s conversation with the Samaritan woman that took place on the way to Galilee.

The Lord’s way lay through Samaria — the district located to the north of Judea and formerly belonging to three tribes of Israelites: Dan, Ephraim, and Manasseh. There was a city in this district called Samaria, the former capital of the Israelite government. The Assyrian king Salmanassar had conquered the Israelites and led them into captivity, replacing the population with heathens from Babylon and other places. It was from the mixing of these settlers with the remaining Jews that the Samaritans originated. They accepted the Five Books of Moses, worshipping Yahweh — but did not forget their own gods. When the Jews returned from the Babylonian captivity and began to restore the temple of Jerusalem, the Samaritans also wanted to take part. However, the Jews rejected them, so they erected their own temple on Mount Gerizim. While accepting the Books of Moses, the Samaritans, however, rejected the writings of the Prophets and the entire tradition. Because of this, the Jews’ attitude towards them was worse than to heathens, avoiding any contact with them whatsoever, loathing and despising them.

Passing through Samaria, the Lord and His disciples stopped to rest near a well that, according to tradition, had been dug by Jacob near a town named Sychema, which Saint John calls Sychera. It is possible that the Evangelist employed this name in mockery, restructuring it from the word "shikar" — "ply with wine," into "sheker" — "lie." Saint John points out that it was "about the sixth hour" (noon, according to our time), the time of the maximum heat, which was most likely necessitated taking a rest. "There cometh a woman of Samaria to draw water." While the disciples of Jesus had gone to town to buy food, He turned to the Samaritan woman with a request: "Give Me to drink." Seeing, probably, by clothing or manner of speech that the one addressing her was a Jew, the Samaritan woman expressed her surprise that He, being a Jew, would ask her, a Samaritan, for water, having in mind the hatred and contempt the Jews had towards the Samaritans. But Jesus, having come to the world to save all, and not only the Jews, explains to the woman that she would not have posed such questions if she had known with Whom she was speaking and what good fortune ("the gift of God") God had sent her through this meeting. If she only had known Who was asking her for a drink, then she herself would be asking Him to quench her spiritual thirst and to reveal to her the truth that all people seek to know; and He would have given her "living water," which should be understood as the grace of the Holy Spirit (c.f., Jn 7:38).

The Samaritan woman did not understand the Lord: she thought the living water meant the water found at the bottom of the well. That was why she asked Jesus how He could get the living water if He did not have anything to draw it up with, for the well was deep. "Art Thou greater than our father Jacob, which gave us the well, and drank thereof himself, and his children, and his cattle?" (Jn 4:12). She recalls the Patriarch Jacob with pride and love, as the one who left use of this well to his offspring. Then the Lord raises her mind to the highest understanding of His words: "Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst: but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life" (Jn 4:13-14). In the spiritual life, the grace-filled water has a different effect than that of physical water in earthly life. He who is filled with the grace of the Holy Spirit will never experience spiritual thirst, inasmuch as all his spiritual needs have already been satisfied; meanwhile, he who drinks physical water, just as when he satisfies some other earthly needs, quenches his thirst for some time only, and soon after "shall thirst again."

Moreover, the grace-filled water will remain in man, establishing a source within him, springing up (skipping — the literal translation from Greek) into eternal life, that is, making that person a communicant of eternal life. Still not understanding the Lord, thinking that He is speaking about ordinary water — only some special type that quenches thirst forever — she asks the Lord for some of this water, so as to avoid the need of coming to the well for water. In order to make her realize, finally, that she is speaking with no ordinary man, the Lord initially orders her to call her husband, and then directly accuses her that, while she had had five husbands, she was now, too, living in an adulterous union.

Seeing that before her was a Prophet Who knows everything that is concealed, the Samaritan woman turns to Him for the resolution of the problem that greatly troubled the Samaritans in their relations with the Jews: who is correct in the argument about the place for worshipping God? The Samaritans who, following their fathers, built a temple on Mount Gerizim, and worshiped God there? Or the Jews, who affirmed that one could worship God only in Jerusalem? Basing themselves on Moses’ order to deliver a blessing on this mountain, the Samaritans chose Mount Gerizim for their worship. Although John Hyrcanus destroyed their temple that was erected there in the year 130 BC, they continued to offer their sacrifices on the location of the ruined temple. Responding to the woman’s question, the Lord explains that it would be wrong to think that one can worship God only in one specific place, and that the disputed question between the Samaritans and the Jews will soon lose its meaning by itself, because both types of Divine service — both the Jewish and the Samaritan — will cease in the nearest future. This prophecy was fulfilled when the Samaritans, decimated by soldiers, became disillusioned with the importance of their mountain, while the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the temple was burnt in the year 70 AD.

Nonetheless, the Lord gives His preference for Jewish worship, having in mind, of course, the fact that the Samaritans accepted only the Five Books of Moses, rejecting the Prophetic writings, which contained the detailed description of the Person and Kingdom of the Messiah. For "salvation is of (will come from) the Jews," inasmuch as the Redeemer of mankind will come from the Jewish people. Further, the Lord, elaborating His previous thought, points out that the "hour cometh, and now is" (since the Messiah had already appeared), the time of the new, highest worship of God, which will not be limited to any one location, but will be everywhere, for it will be in spirit and in truth. Only this type of worship is genuine, inasmuch as it corresponds to the nature of God Himself, Who is Spirit. To worship God in spirit and in truth means to strive to please God, not in outward form alone, but by the means of true and openhearted striving for God as Spirit with all the strength of one’s spiritual being; that is, not by means of sacrificial offerings, which both the Jews and Samaritans made, supposing that this was the only way to honor God, but to know and love God, genuinely and un-hypocritically wishing to please Him through the fulfillment of His commandments. Worshiping God in "in Spirit and in truth" by no means excludes the outward, ritual side of honoring God, like some false teachers and sectarians attempt to affirm, but the main force is not contained in this outward side of honoring God. The actual order of honoring God should not be seen as anything prejudicial: it is both essential and unavoidable, for a human consists not only of the soul, but of the body. Jesus Christ Himself worshiped God the Father physically, kneeling and prostrating Himself to the ground, not rejecting similar worshiping of Himself from various people during His earthly life (c.f., for example: Mt 2:11, 14:33, 15:25; Jn 11:32, 12:3; and many other examples in the Gospels).

The Samaritan woman begins as it were to understand the meaning of Jesus’ words, saying in her deliberation: "I know that Messiah commeth, Which is called Christ: when He is come, He will tell us all things." The Samaritans were also awaiting the Messiah, calling Him, in their own way, Gashageb, basing this expectation on the words of Genesis 49:10, and especially on Moses’ words in Deuteronomy 18:18. The Samaritans’ understanding of the Messiah was not as corrupted as that of the Jews, inasmuch as they awaited Him as a prophet and not as a political leader. That was why Jesus, not calling Himself the Messiah among the Jews for a long time, says directly to this simple Samaritan woman that He is the Messiah-Christ promised by Moses: “I that speak unto thee am He” [the Messiah]. Elated with joy from having seeing the Messiah, the woman drops her water-pot at the well and hurries to the city to announce to everybody about the coming of the Messiah, Who, as the Seer-of-hearts, revealed to her everything she had done. His disciples, arriving just then, were surprised that their Teacher was talking to a woman, inasmuch as this was condemned by the rules of the Jewish rabbis, who instructed: "Do not speak for long with a woman" and "nobody should converse with a woman on the road, even with one’s lawful wife" and likewise: "It is better to burn the words of the law, than to teach them to a woman." However, being reverent before their Teacher, the disciples did not in any way express their amazement and simply asked Him to try the food they had brought.

Although Jesus the Man’s natural feeling of hunger stifled His joy about the Samaritan people’s conversion to Him and their salvation, He was joyful that the seeds sown by Him had begun to produce a crop. Therefore He refused to satisfy His hunger, replying to His disciples that the true food for Him was fulfilling the task of people’s salvation conferred upon Him by God the Father. The Samaritan inhabitants that came to Him seemed to Jesus like a cornfield, ripe for the harvest — while in the fields, the harvest is ready only in four months. Ordinarily, the one who sows the seeds reaps the harvest; with the sowing of seeds into souls, the spiritual harvest more often than not is left to others, but together with that, the sower himself rejoices with the harvester, inasmuch as he did not sow for himself but for others. Therefore Christ says that He is sending the Apostles to reap the harvest in the spiritual field, which initially was not prepared and sown by them, but by the others — the Old Testament Prophets and by He Himself. During these explanations, the Samaritans approached the Lord. While many believed in Him "for the saying of the woman," many more of them believed "because of His own word," when, by their invitation, He stayed with them in the city for two days. Listening to the Lord’s teachings, they were convinced, according to their own acknowledgment, that "this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world."

Icon: Fresco by Theophanes the Cretan, Monastery of Stavronikita, Mt Athos, 16th century.