April 18, 2003

• Good Friday -

  
  

  "Doesn't it seem to you that Easter is awfully late this year?"

  
  

  Do you know how the date of Easter is calculated?  Or why it's different on different calendars?  Easter is the first Sunday, after the first full moon, after the Vernal Equinox.  Eastern Orthodox calculation is based on the Julian Calendar which doesn't conform strictly to astronomical reality and sets the vernal equinox at dates that get slightly more off as time passes.  For this reason Eastern Orthodox celebration of Easter is as much as four weeks later than the Western tradition. 

  
  

  There has long been a scholarly controversy among theologians and historians regarding the events of the Christian holy week which observes important events in the last week of Jesus' earthly ministry before his execution.  On what day did what happen?  What is the Day of Preparation mentioned in the Gospel records?  If Jesus celebrated Pesach (Passover) with his disciples the night before the crucifixion, why do the gospels record that the chief priests had not yet had their own Pesach?  Was Jesus crucified on a Friday?  Have you ever had the thought that we should be able to check the calendar for the first century and just figure out which year had the days of Passover falling as described in the gospels and then know which year the Crucifixion took place?

  
  

  Some of these questions have answers and some may never be known.  First century Judaism much like 20th century Christianity was comprised of multiple "denominations" each of which calculated it's own calendar.  The Emperor Constantine laments in a letter to the Churches following the Council of Nicea that many Jews kept two Pesachs in one year in order that they would get at least one of them right.  The celebration of Passover is set in the Torah as the 14th day of Nisan.  The Hebrew calendar is a lunar based calendar so Nisan begins on the evening of the full moon.  As mentioned above, the Julian calendar which many Jews used in the first century is a solar calendar which sets the equinox and full moon days without strict regard for the actual astronomical occurrence of these events.  To further complicate matters, one sect of first century Jews (The Essenes) celebrated Pesach by a different and even more complicated set of rules to determine the date. 

  
  

  Early in Christianity, a disagreement arose over whether it was appropriate to end the Passover fast according to the Jewish Calendar which could result in Easter falling on a weekday or whether the fast should always end on a Sunday.  When I say early in Christianity, I mean that the first reference to alternative methods of calculating the dates are noted as a problem in the year 120 ce.  That would be less than a century into Christian practice and approximately 50 years after Christianity's split from Judaism.

  
  

  Are you starting to sense that more than one scholarly career could and has been made on the attempt to sort out all the tangles?  My good friend, Yoni, is a scholar living in Jerusalem who's expertise is Judaism in the First Century.  He and I had a conversation about the events of holy week and whether or not they corresponded to the assumptions of later Christianity - by which I mean us today.  He laughed and said, well, there are scholars here [at Hebrew University] who argue that Jesus was crucified as early as Tuesday, some who say it was as late as Thursday, but no one suggests that it took place on a Friday. 

  • 11:20 am
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