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Easter: From Passover to Holy Week

In a recent episode of the mid-faith crisis podcast, we touched a little on the development of Easter as a celebration. How was it celebrated in the early church? When did it expand into Holy Week? What did they actually do?

The first thing to say is that Easter, like baptism, is older than the church itself. Easter, of course, is the English name and comes from much later. In Greek it is called Pascha That’s because it originates with the Jewish festival of Passover. The Jewish Pesah became the Christian Pascha; although the early church re-interpreted it, they were clearly building on Jewish tradition and Jesus' reframing of the Passover meal as reflected in the gospels. Like Passover, therefore, Easter is about identity: Passover celebrates the foundation story of Israel, Easter celebrates the foundation story of Christianity.

For this reason it’s also the only Christian festival which we can date with certainty to Apostolic times. (Paul, for example, uses the iconography of Jesus as the Passover Lamb in 1 Corinthians 5:7-8.)

How Christians celebrated it is uncertain. (For that matter we don’t know how Jews celebrated the Passover meal in Jesus' day either: the account of the seder in the Mishnah was only written down some two hundred years later. The Mishnah may well be ret-conning the original.)

The earliest accounts

The oldest account comes from a document called the Epistula Apostolorum (i.e. Letter of the Apostles) written probably around AD 150. It contains a kind of dialogue between Jesus and the disciples, as part of which, Jesus tells them to ‘celebrate the remembrance of my death which is the Passover’. The text implies that there was a nighttime vigil followed by an agape meal at dawn – ‘at the crowing of the cock’.

This seems to be a single, nocturnal celebration, bringing the death and the resurrection of Jesus together in one event. A simple fast, a vigil and a breakfast.

Some Christians later in the second century moved their feast from Passover to the Sunday following, as this was the resurrection day. (And by then Sunday itself had assumed much more importance for Christians.) But the actual celebration remained similar: fast, vigil, breakfast. The Didascalia describes a vigil of prayers, intercessions and scripture readings and then a breakfast ‘at the third hour’.

Holy Week

It was not until the fourth century that a more complicated timetable was developed, fuelled by the legitimisation of Christianity, the building of the great churches and the rise of religious tourism in Jerusalem. All that created a greater stage for the spectacle.

Egeria, who visited Jerusalem in 380 describes a week of events, starting on Palm Sunday with a service and then an early afternoon procession from the Mount of Olives into Jerusalem. The rest of the week saw the normal daily services, but with scripture readings from the account of the passion. On Thursday there were Eucharist(s), then a fast and a vigil overnight.

At dawn on the Friday an account of the crucifixion was read out in front of the church of the Anastasis. This included the opportunity to venerate the true cross which had been conveniently discovered by Constantine’s mother some decades before. Then there were readings until the Friday afternoon.

Saturday was relatively quiet. Then there were Sunday morning baptisms and eucharists in celebration of the resurrection and the new life of the freshly baptised converts.

Of course, the early church was not one unified, centralised body. There was a great deal of local variation, so we cannot say that what happened in one place was uniformly observed.

But it seems that Easter begins as a nocturnal feast of redemption, a retelling of the core story, a fast, a vigil and a big breakfast. It celebrates both crucifixion and resurrection in one event. Only later does it develop into a week-long recreation.

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