Why We Need Sacred Tradition

In other articles about Sola Scriptura I’ve mentioned that the Catholic doesn’t merely rely on the Scriptures for all we know about the Faith. This is because God never intended the Scriptures to stand alone but to be part of a tri-fold means of “accurately handling the Word of Truth” as Saint Paul says. That is: The Scriptures, Sacred Tradition and the Magisterium of the Church. This ensures that we have full orbed view of the full meaning that God intends.

This time of the year provides us with some prime examples of that fact. The Christmas story is only partial told in the Bible and there are certain details missing. These missing details lead the Sola Scriptura adherent to conclude that we don’t know this information because, of course, the Bible doesn’t say it so it can’t be accurate. We’ll examine a couple of the common elements of the Incarnation to see how Sacred Tradition fills in the blanks and how those answers were arrived at. Let’s start with Christmas itself.

Jesus Was Born on December 25^th

The non-Catholics for years have claimed that both Christmas and Easter were co-opted pagan holiday that in fact retain many of their pagan elements. While there are things like the Christmas Tree and certain other elements that are part of what we in the West think of as synonymous with the holiday that came from secular and even pagan origin as well as commercialism (Santa is a combination of both) they are not part of what Catholicism teaches about it.

December 25^th was chosen as the day to celebrate the birth for a very good reason…it should be very close to the actual date. How do we know? A careful examination of the facts the Bible provides us will tell the tale. First, we know from Luke 1 that Zechariah, the husband of Elizabeth and father of John the Baptist, was serving in the Temple taking the incense into the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement/Feast of Tabernacles. HUH?? How do we know that…the verses don’t tell us when it was!! Oh, but they do if you know your Old Testament. There were certain Feasts when it was required for all Jews to not only be in Jerusalem but in the Temple and the ritual spoken of happening with all the people standing outside praying would be the Feast of Tabernacles.

Why is this important? Because it’s at this time that the Angel Gabriel tells him that Elizabeth is going to have a son who they will name John. So John was conceived around October 25^th…the date of the Feast that year. Now we move on to the Annunciation when Gabriel comes to Mary and tells her she will have a baby, Jesus. He also tells her that Elizabeth is expecting and that it is the sixth month with her. That would place the Annunciation around March 25^th and 9 months later is December 25^th.

So we see that taking basic information provided by the Scriptures the Church was able to deduce and pass down to us through Sacred Tradition what the Bible doesn’t specifically say…Jesus was born on December 25^th. So the next time someone starts to feed you the “pagan holiday” line supply them with the facts of how the Church actually arrived at the date.

We Three Kings of Orient Are…

The next part of the story we’ll look at is the Three Wise Men. Matthew Chapter 2 tells about them, but tells us nothing about who they were or even how many of them there were. Some people think that just because there were three gifts that folks just assumed there were that many people too. Once again, the Sola Scriptura adherent is limited to what only appears on the pages of his Bible. The Catholic, however, also has Sacred Tradition to help them. Tradition not only tells us that there were indeed three but also their names: Balthazar, Gaspar, and Melchior. How did they arrive at that? Well, there’s this little thing called “history” and there are more writings about history than is contained in the Bible. Extra-biblical writings of the times and the region give solid clues that the Church followed to get a pretty good idea of their identities.

Now granted these both are fairly trivial information. But they indicate a much more important truth: if we don’t know these basic, historical things apart from Sacred Tradition how many much more vital areas are misinterpreted by ignoring Tradition and attempting to “accurately handle the Word of Truth” by Scripture alone. God provided the three fold guardians and we are on dangerous ground doing it our own way.