Word: smit
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Once upon a time, as I recall, there was a person who took a broom to the seashore to sweep back the tides. Imagining the hundreds of millions of persons who are filled with traditional Christmas spirit and thoughts, we think of Author Smit as a man with a broom...
Better Off in a Stable. Smit, an Evangelical minister turned Roman Catholic, argues that the birth of Christ in dire poverty and in the dead of winter is just pious nonsense. By the standards of his time, Joseph was comfortably middleclass: the reason he went from Nazareth to Bethlehem-probably several months before Jesus' birth-was that he had property in Bethlehem and owed taxes to the Roman authorities there...
...scholar believes that Jesus was born in December; Smit thinks that the most likely time was the end of August. Not until the 4th century did the early church commemorate the Saviour's birth-and then it shrewdly but arbitrarily picked a date that coincided with a joyous pagan feast...
...from Babylon, and their number is uncertain; early paintings of the Christmas scene show anywhere from two to seven of them. Scholars are divided about the origin and meaning of the star that lured them to Bethlehem. Many critics dismiss Matthew's account of it as pure myth; Smit believes that the star actually was a major conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn that would have been visible in Near Eastern skies from spring through fall...
...from destroying the beauty of the Christmas story, Smit says, this kind of careful attention to historical detail produces a right understanding of the great event. When Christmas is stripped of fable, he claims, "a realm of overpowering truth and beauty will then be revealed, a story which is at the same time completely human and yet beyond all measure divine...