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Many Happy Returns: When was the Church’s Birthday? E-mail
Written by Michael Tait   
Tuesday, 05 July 2011 10:51

Michael Tait holds the Licence in Sacred Scripture from the Pontifical Biblical Institute and the PhD from the University of Manchester.

As a child, I doubt if I were alone in finding the notion of the Queen’s two birthdays (official and unofficial?/natural and unnatural?) puzzling. Apart from the tantalising questions as to whether she received two sets of presents, two cakes and two parties, the basic difficulty lay in the fundamental oxymoron. It is the same question as that posed by Nicodemus: ‘Can a man be born more than once?’ (cf. Jn 3:4). I was reminded of this conundrum when a postgraduate student friend recently asked me about the birthday of the Church. On reading through his thesis for the umpteenth time, he had just realised that he had referred to the resurrection of Jesus as the birthday of the Church.

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