Did Jesus Burn Incense? No, Only Priests Burned It in the Temple

No. The Gospels never say that Jesus burned incense. In the temple, burning incense was the work of priests descended from Aaron, and the Letter to the Hebrews points out that Jesus came from the tribe of Judah. He received incense once, as a gift: the Magi brought him frankincense (Matthew 2:11).

Why Jesus did not burn incense in the temple

The law of Moses made incense a priestly duty. God tells Moses that Aaron is to burn fragrant incense on a golden altar every morning when he tends the lamps and again at twilight, “a regular incense offering before the Lord throughout your generations” (Exodus 30:7–8). The altar stood inside the sanctuary, in front of the veil before the ark (Exodus 30:6). After the rebellion of Korah, the bronze of the rebels’ censers became a reminder “that no outsider, who is not of the descendants of Aaron, should draw near to burn incense before the Lord” (Numbers 16:40). When King Uzziah tried it, the priests stopped him: “It is not for you, Uzziah, to burn incense to the Lord, but for the priests, the sons of Aaron, who are consecrated to burn incense” (2 Chronicles 26:18).

Luke’s Gospel shows the rule at work in Jesus’ own generation. Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, was a priest, and “according to the custom of the priesthood, he was chosen by lot to enter the temple of the Lord and burn incense,” while “the whole multitude of the people were praying outside at the hour of incense” (Luke 1:9–10). The Mishnah, the collection of Jewish oral law compiled around AD 200, describes the same lot, cast among priests who had never yet offered the incense (Tamid 5:2).

Jesus was often in the temple. He was found there at twelve among the teachers (Luke 2:46), and as an adult he taught in its courts during the feasts (John 7:14). But he was not a priest of the temple. Hebrews says of him: “For it is evident that our Lord was descended from Judah, and in connection with that tribe Moses said nothing about priests” (Hebrews 7:14), and “if he were on earth, he would not be a priest at all, since there are priests who offer gifts according to the law” (Hebrews 8:4). Hebrews calls Jesus a high priest of another kind, one who entered heaven itself on behalf of his people (Hebrews 9:24).

What is incense in the Bible?

The Hebrew word for incense, qetoret, means the smoke or scent of something burned, and so incense. Frankincense, levonah, is a resin whose name comes from the Hebrew for “white.” The temple incense was a fixed blend:

“Take sweet spices, stacte, and onycha, and galbanum, sweet spices with pure frankincense (of each shall there be an equal part), and make an incense blended as by the perfumer, seasoned with salt, pure and holy.” (Exodus 30:34–35)

The blend was reserved for God. “Whoever makes any like it to use as perfume shall be cut off from his people” (Exodus 30:38). On the Day of Atonement the high priest carried a censer of burning coals and two handfuls of incense behind the veil, “that the cloud of the incense may cover the mercy seat that is over the testimony, so that he does not die” (Leviticus 16:12–13).

The frankincense of the Magi

The one time the Gospels connect Jesus with incense is at the beginning of his life. The Magi found the child with Mary, “and they fell down and worshiped him. Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh” (Matthew 2:11). Isaiah had spoken of a day when those from Sheba “shall bring gold and frankincense” (Isaiah 60:6). Irenaeus of Lyons, writing in the second century, read the gifts as a statement of who the child was: myrrh “because it was He who should die and be buried,” gold “because He was a King,” and frankincense “because He was God” (Against Heresies 3.9.2).

Incense and prayer in the Psalms and Revelation

Scripture links incense with prayer. The psalmist asks, “Let my prayer be counted as incense before you, and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice!” (Psalm 141:2). In Revelation the elders before the Lamb hold “golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints” (Revelation 5:8), and an angel offers much incense “with the prayers of all the saints on the golden altar before the throne, and the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints, rose before God from the hand of the angel” (Revelation 8:3–4). Malachi foresaw a time when “in every place incense will be offered to my name, and a pure offering” (Malachi 1:11).

Why does God reject incense in some passages?

Incense is condemned in Scripture when it is offered to other gods, offered by people without the right to offer it, or offered by people who ignore justice. King Josiah removed the priests “who burned incense to Baal, to the sun and the moon and the constellations” (2 Kings 23:5), and Jeremiah records the people’s vow “to burn incense unto the queen of heaven” (Jeremiah 44:17, King James Version). Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu died after offering “unauthorized fire” with their incense (Leviticus 10:1–2), and fire consumed Korah’s 250 men “offering the incense” (Numbers 16:35).

The sharpest verse is Isaiah 1:13: “Bring no more vain offerings; incense is an abomination to me.” God speaks there to worshipers whose “hands are full of blood” (Isaiah 1:15), and the passage goes on to tell them to “seek justice, correct oppression” (Isaiah 1:17). The objection is to worship offered alongside injustice, and the same passage rejects their sacrifices, Sabbaths and feasts in the same terms (Isaiah 1:11–14).

Scripture forbids copying the holy blend for private use (Exodus 30:37–38), but it has no general rule against fragrance. Proverbs says that “oil and perfume make the heart glad” (Proverbs 27:9).

Did the first Christians use incense?

For their first centuries, Christians did not use incense in worship, and refusing to offer it before the emperor’s image could cost them their lives. Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia from 111 to 113, told the emperor Trajan that he let go the accused who “offered prayer with incense and wine to your image” and cursed Christ, “none of which those who are really Christians, it is said, can be forced to do” (Letters 10.96). Tertullian wrote around AD 197, “We certainly buy no frankincense,” though he added that Christians used costly spices to bury their dead (Apology 42). His objection was to incense as worship. When a place smelled bad, he burned some himself, “but not with the same ceremony, nor in the same dress, nor with the same pomp, with which it is done to idols” (The Chaplet, or De Corona, 10).

The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1910 says of the Church’s worship that “during the first four centuries there is no evidence for its use.” By the 380s the pilgrim Egeria saw censers carried at the Sunday vigil into the cave of the Anastasis, the tomb inside Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, “so that the whole basilica of the Anastasis is filled with odours.” The Apostolic Canons, a collection of church rules compiled in Syria around AD 400, allow nothing to be brought to the altar at the offering “excepting oil for the lamps, and incense” (canon 3).

How churches use incense today

The Catholic Church uses incense at Mass and other services. The General Instruction of the Roman Missal calls incensation “an expression of reverence and of prayer, as is signified in Sacred Scripture,” citing Psalm 141 and Revelation 8:3, and allows it at several points in any form of Mass, from the entrance procession to the showing of the host and chalice after the consecration (no. 276).

Orthodox churches use incense throughout their regular services. In the words of the Orthodox Church in America, Psalm 141 “is always sung at Vespers,” and “during this psalm the evening incense is offered.” At the Divine Liturgy the Gospel book, the icons, the reader and all the people are censed before the Gospel is read, and the altar, the icons and the people are censed again as the Cherubic Hymn is sung.

Anglican practice varies from parish to parish. After the Reformation incense fell out of use in Church of England services, and it returned with the revival of ceremony that followed the Oxford Movement in the nineteenth century. In 1899 the archbishops of Canterbury and York gave the opinion that its liturgical use was illegal, but the clergy it was aimed at did not accept the ruling. Today incense is allowed but not required. The Episcopal Church’s glossary describes it as “used in some churches to symbolize a sacrificial offering to God.”

Why many Protestants do not use incense

Churches in the Reformed tradition hold that worship should include only what Scripture prescribes. The Westminster Confession, a doctrinal standard of Presbyterian churches, says that God “may not be worshiped according to the imaginations and devices of men” or “any other way not prescribed in the Holy Scripture” (21.1). It adds that the ceremonial laws given to Israel, “prefiguring Christ,” are “now abrogated, under the new testament” (19.3). John Calvin treated the temple incense as part of that ceremonial worship. Commenting on Psalm 141:2, he wrote that “at that time the prayers of God’s people were according to his own appointment sanctified through the offering up of incense and sacrifices.” In 2003 the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, answering a question about its worship, said that none of its congregations would be found “using ritual incense, candles, crossings, depictions of deity.”

Related reading

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• Smelling incense when none is burning
• Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox beliefs compared