This is how your article should have read! Why do Orthodox …

Thursday, 28th March 2024

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Why do Orthodox Christian priests and monks wear long beards and why Roman Catholics do not?

Here are the few reasons:
Long beard wearing tradition among Orthodox Christian priests and monks comes after Christ
Christ himself had a beard as it was normal and considered proper for a man to wear long beard. The fact that our Lord Jesus Christ had a long beard himself can clearly be observed on all Orthodox Christian icons:
Long beards priest wearing comes as a natural tradition from the Old Testament’s times and the tradition of early Church
If one reads thoughtfully the Old Testament, he will find out that even from Moses and Aaron and onwards the tradition is the same.
All the Godly man and the priests had their long beards unshaved as a mark for their dedication to God.
To generalize the long beards wearing is according to ancient Old Testament ancient tradition.
The long beards tradition as an ancient Jewish religion (Old Testament) tradition can still be clearly observed in Jewish rabbis. The long beards tradition later was adopted by Muslims when Islam emerged as a religion and more specifically by the Muslim priests the Hodjas.
One very interesting historical source of information which proofs that the ancient Church’s priests had the tradition not to cut their beards is given by the historian Egezit who writes in his Chronicles that the Apostle James, the head of the Church in Jerusalem, never cut his hair. A source of confirmation that the long hear and beards wearing was an established tradition that dates back to the Old Testament is found in the Old Testament in (Ezekiel 8:3)
Here is what exactly we read there:
He stretched out what looked like a hand and took me by the hair of my head.
The Spirit lifted me up between earth and heaven and in visions of God he took me to Jerusalem, to the entrance to the north gate of the inner court, where the idol that provokes to jealousy stood.
Long hair and beards wearing by the Monks
An interesting fact is why the monks and novice neophyte lay brothers also stick to the ancient tradition. It appears long hair and beards wearing traces back to the holy life of the ascetics of the deserts (e.g. the hermits). The reason why ascetics did not shaved their hairs or bears as a way to avoid vanity and therefore this old hermitage practice has also had a spiritual reason.
The Nazarite Old Testament tradition
In the Old Testament in Numbers 6:1-21, we read about the term Nazarite which means consecrated / separated
Each boy or man who was to become a Nazarine has been devoted to God for a certain period of time or in some cases for his all life, one of the many conditions for one to be a Nazarite is not to shave his beard or hair.
One can read about this in the Old Testament in Leviticus 21:5
Leviticus 21:5
“They shall not make baldness upon their head,
neither shall they shave off the corner of their beard nor make any cuttings in their flesh.”
There are some other prohibitions relating to Nazarite’s one of the most notable ones is found in Numbers 6:4:
All the days of his Naziriteship shall he eat nothing that is made of the grape-vine, from the pressed grapes even to the grapestone.
One example for people who gave a vow to become temporary Nazarites is found in 1 Maccabees 3:49.
One of the most important figures in Christianity that used to be Nazarite is Samson, his life can be read in the Old Testament in Judges 13 – 16
As we read in Judges, Samson’s great God-given power constituted in a prohibition to shave his hair and not to drink wine.
Reason why Roman Catholic Priests and monks abandoned the ancient tradition of wearing long hairs and beards
In the early Roman Empire it was a custom for men to shave. The “enlightened” Romans believed that only the barbarians did not shaved themselves, and as you can imagine Jewish people and early Christians were of course considered to be barbarians, e.g. being unshaved was a sign for a cultural inferiority in according to Romans comprehension.
The long hair and beard tradition in the Western Church started disappearing and consequentially was completely lost with the Tyranny of Charlemagne at the end of the eight century. With his massive ‘barbarian’ inferiority complex, it was his desire in all things to imitate pagan classical Rome. It was therefore under him that Western clergy were ordered to shave regularly. For example at the Council of Aachen (816), it was stipulated that priests and monks were to shave every two weeks.
By the beginning of the 11th century the tradition of wearing long beards was already completely removed and almost all the Roman Catholic clergy were regularly shaving.
In the sixteenth century beardlessness for Roman Catholic clergy was enforced by further canons, which appear to have been dropped since the Second Vatican Council.
Why do Protestants not wear beards and long hair?
As we all know protestant Church denominations has emerged as schismatics from Roman Catholic church and therefore mostly the influence they had was from Roman Catholics which already had the tradition within their clergy to regularly shave, thus pastors shaving was completely out of question and never come to an established reality among the Protestant Church pastors.

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