ABSTRACT
The disciplines of musicology and liturgical history have long been intimately intertwined, but expert address to both of those has seldom been more clearly accomplished than by James McKinnon. In Asia the incarnation and the passion were themes in a liturgical celebration of the entire mystery of redemption. One can imagine such an identification of the dates of conception and death being applied subsequently to the Western historical date for the passion. In 1991, Robert Taft published an extended review of The Origins of the Liturgical Year. Toward the end of that almost embarrassingly appreciative review, his love of the truth finally took over, and he asserted that treatment of the preparatory season for the feast of the nativity, especially as regards the Eastern Church, was woefully inadequate. In Syria by the middle of the fifth century, homilies of Antipater of Bostra reveal memorials of John the Baptist and the Blessed Virgin on the two Sundays preceding the nativity.
