May 5
1572: Election of Jeremias II as patriarch of Constantinople, who was then removed him from office twice by the Turks who even imprisoned him once. As patriarch he interacted more with the West, compared to most other predecessors and also made the Russian Orthodox Church self-governing.
1624: Antonio Homem, a Christian theologian from Coimbra University – being a Jew by ancestry, his family was forced to convert to Christianity in the sixteenth century – is burned at the stake by the Portuguese Inquisition, which accused him of Jewish sympathies and secret Jewish worship, partially because he used to recite some of the more Jewish-sounding Psalms from the Latin Vulgate version of the Bible.
1766: Passing away of Jean Astruc, a pioneer in the study of venereal diseases and of biblical criticism. He studied the different contexts of Elohim and Yahweh (Hebrew names for God) and proposed the documentary hypothesis, that Genesis was based on several ancient sources.
1806: [some sources say 1808] Death of James Ireland in Virginia, a Baptist preacher who faced several attempts upon his life at the hands of the established church in Virginia – the Church of England.
1815: Birth of Ithamar Conkey, a New England musical artist, who was a well-known church organist and bass soloist, and also composed the tune RATHBUN, to which the song “In the Cross of Christ I Glory” is sung today.
1886: A General Conference of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church (later renamed the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church) meets in Augusta, GA; it devised a financial system that assesses twenty cents per year on each member, to be divided in the following way: eight cents for bishops; three cents each for missions, education, publishing interests, and for Israel Church and Miles Chapel. The system worked well and was retained with variations for many years.
1899: Centenary celebrations of the Religious Tract Society in London, which had published and distributed Christian literature in over 270 languages and dialects till date.
1925: John T. Scopes, a High school biology teacher, is arrested for teaching the theory of evolution in Dayton, Tennessee.
1941: Arrest of Platon of Banja Luka, the Orthodox bishop, in Croatia by the fascist group the Ustashe. He was killed along with thousands, mostly Serbs, in a campaign of ethnic cleansing.
1950: Jim Elliot, American missionary and martyr, reminded his readers in his journal, “The conflict of science and religion is fought between the errors of both camps.”
1988: Installation of Eugene Antonio Marino as the archbishop of Atlanta, who became the first black Roman Catholic archbishop in the U.S.
Edited by: T. Chempilayil MCBS
Courtesy:Â www.studylight.org