=St Mary Magdalene= (July 22), who is identified in the West with
the woman who was a sinner, and with Mary the sister of Lazarus, is
distinguished from each of these in the Greek service-books which also
mark her festival on July 22. Among the Easterns she is thought of as
‘the holy myrrh-bearer,’ one of the women who brought the spices to the
tomb of the Lord. In various places in the West, though not at Rome,
the day was a day of obligation in the middle ages. It appears in some
service-books in the tenth and eleventh centuries, but not in missals,
_secundum consuetudinem Romanae curiae_, till the thirteenth[101].
There was a festival of St Mary Magdalene (July 22) in the English Prayer
Book of 1549. The collect and gospel (Luke vii. 36 to the end of the
chapter) show that no English Reformers identified the Magdalene with the
woman who was a sinner. The festival disappears in the Prayer Book of
1552.
=St Barnabas, the Apostle= (June 11). The Greeks commemorate on this
day ‘Bartholomew and Barnabas, Apostles.’ The festival probably marks
the supposed finding of the body of Barnabas (having a copy of St
Matthew’s Gospel in his hand) in the island of Cyprus in the fifth
century. Barnabas is not found at June 11 in the so-called Hieronymian
Martyrology; nor in the Martyrology known as _Gellonense_, but it is
noted in Bede (though there is some doubt whether the entry is not due to
Florus), and in the later Martyrologies.
The Greek Church commemorates (many of them with proper names attached)
the seventy disciples of Luke x. 1, called in the service-books
‘apostles.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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