The first people to believe that Jesus was Christ were all Jews; as Jews, their lives were structured by the Second Temple predecessor(s) to the rabbinic festal calendar, by the weekly observance of Shabbat at home and at synagogue and by periodic pilgrimages to the Temple to participate in sacrifice. But at the conclusion of the Sabbath, on Saturday night, they also celebrated a unique meal—a chavurah, to use later Rabbinic language—at home, a domestic banquet connected to the meal practices of Jesus and expressive of the movement’s Jubilee-inspired politics of radical communism. It may be that each celebration of this meal—the eucharistia, or the agape—was always connected to the paschal mystery of Jesus’ death and resurrection; Paul seems to suggest so, anyway, in 1 Corinthians (1 Cor 5:7; 11:23-26). But it might also be the case that this paschal significance was reserved for a specialized celebration of Pesach or, in Greek, Pascha, the Passover, by Jesus-following Jews as a particular sect within Judaism, similar to the manner in which postbiblical Jewish groups have often had idiosyncratic traditions of celebrating different festivals in their shared calendar. The instructions for eucharistic worship found in, for instance, the Didache do not connect the eucharistia to the death or resurrection of Jesus in any obvious way, but to the coming of the Kingdom of God in power (Didache 9:1-10:7). This does not mean that the connection of eucharist to Pascha would have been unknown to the Didache community or to the earliest generations, but that the Last Supper may well narrativize and collectively express a connection that Jesus drew between the feast of the eucharist and his sacrificial flesh and blood more regularly through the course of his ministry; it is in any event clear that the explicit and normative recitation of the institution narrative at the eucharist has little attestation until much later, despite what Paul says (and Paul does not actually say to use the institution narrative as an anaphora).1
Jewish followers of Jesus, then, already knew a slightly modified form of their calendar, to include a domestic eucharistic gathering after Shabbat, and plausibly a form of celebrating the Passover that interpreted Exodus narratives in conjunction with the Passion of Jesus. As the Jesus Movement(s) became the majority-gentile ekklesiai of second, third, and fourth centuries, a distinctively Christian calendar developed, first and foremost with the emergence of Sunday—the day of the resurrection, and therefore the “eighth day” of creation or first day of the week of “new creation”—as the definitive day of Christian worship. Again, by celebrating the eucharist on Saturday nights after the Sabbath, Jewish Jesus-followers were already worshiping on Sunday, since by Jewish liturgical logic, the day begins with evening time and stretches until the successive sunset. But for them, this had been fundamentally connected to the domestic and synagogal worship of the Sabbath; by the late third century, the eucharist was primarily celebrated on Sunday mornings, in truncated form with an assembly of scripture, interpretation, and prayer preceding, as a superior alternative in gentile Christian minds to Shabbat. Meanwhile, Pascha’s identity with Pesach lasted in some places until as late as the fourth century, but at the Council of Nicaea I it was decreed that Pascha would have a fixed date as the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox (hence its variability, as well as its disputation between the Julian-calendar using Orthodox and the Gregorian-calendar using Roman Catholics).2 Pascha itself originally celebrated the entire story of Christ’s suffering, resurrection, and ascension—“the Passion” considered as a whole—but was, through the development of the great basilicas, cathedrals, and their praying traditions in the fourth century, stretched out into the entirety of a preceding week, with a fixed fast to precede it.3 These settings also allowed for the development of Pentecost—again, for Jewish Christ-followers, simply Shavu’ot—as a Christian feast of serious import commemorating the descent of the Spirit, with an Ascension Day placed before it; as with much of the subsequent Christian liturgical calendar, this was effectively an innovation gifted from the liturgy of the Jerusalem church.4 Pentecost was a distinctively Christian alternative to Shavu’ot, moreover, not only insofar as the gift of the Spirit eclipsed in Christian consciousness the gift of the Torah, but also insofar as Pentecost fell fifty days after whatever Sunday the Nicene Pascha fell.
Curiously, and I will return to this point, no distinctively Christian form of the autumnal feasts that retains such explicit connections to its Jewish original—arguably the most important ones on the Jewish calendar and in ordinary Jewish consciousness then and now—was developed. There is no Christian Rosh HaShanah apart from the allusive but relatively insignificant identification of 1 September as the Ecclesiastical New Year.5 There is certainly no Christian Yom Kippur apart from perhaps the much later Ember Day, and this is partly evidenced by gentile observance of the Jewish fast itself well after the destruction of the Temple.6 There simply is no Christian Sukkot, though there is good evidence in antiquity that gentile Christians continued to frequent this feast also in local synagogues, to the chagrin of people like St. John Chrysostom.
Feast days for saints, martyrs, and eventually the Theotokos, together with often elaborate (not infrequently eucharistic?) meals held on mensae erected at or over their tombs and sarcophagi, populated local Christian calendars and spread with the popularity of the saint in question; in Blessed Mary’s case, apocrypha like the Protoevangelium of James and the Transitus Mariae texts encouraged the celebration of feasts of her life: her nativity and presentation in the Temple as advocated by the former and her Dormition by the latter, respectively. Tombs and other places associated with saints and martyrs provided venues and pilgrim destinations for these calendrical observances, in ways often not altogether dissimilar from those in which the life of Jesus himself had been both calendrically and spatially memorialized for late antique and medieval Christians by basilicas in the Holy Land.7 Another cycle of feasts, detailing Jesus’ conception, birth, and baptism—the Annunciation on 25 March, Nativity or Christmas on 25 December, and Theophany or Epiphany on 6 January—was worked out in conjunction with the presumed timing of Jesus’ crucifixion and death, and by the fourth century had succeeded in assimilating, incorporating, and succeeding a variety of pagan winter festivals in the Roman Empire and in Western and Northern Europe to boot.8 Of these, Theophany was both the more original and the more important, though Christmas came to eclipse it in popularity due to its natural relationship to other winter light festivals like Saturnalia or Yule.
By the late middle ages, two parallel liturgical cycles existed for Eastern and Western Christians. For Eastern Byzantine Christians, the ecclesiastical year ran from 1 September to 31 August, beginning with the feast of the Nativity of the Theotokos on 8 September and culminating with the Feast of her Dormition on 15 August. Bookended by the beginning and end of Mary’s life were further feasts of her life and of Christ’s, amounting to a festal calendar of twelve major feasts—in addition to the above, the Exaltation of the Cross, the Presentation of the Theotokos, the Nativity of Christ, the Baptism of Christ, the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple, the Annunciation, the Entry into Jerusalem, the Ascension of Christ, Pentecost, and the Transfiguration—all arrayed beneath the presidency of Pascha as the feast of feasts. For Latin Catholics, many of the same feasts were held in common, though under distinct names—Christmas for Nativity, Candlemas for the Presentation of Jesus, sometimes Whitsunday for Pentecost, etc.—while eventually the liturgical year shifted to begin with the First Sunday of Advent rather than with 1 September. After the ninth century Latins also had another difference from the Orthodox in that the latter celebrated the Feast of All Saints or the Triduum of Allhallowtide not on the Sunday following Pentecost but at the conclusion of October and beginning of November, probably in some connection to the preexisting Celtic festival of Samhain in Britain.9 As late as 1925, Pope Pius XI also introduced Christ the King Sunday to the Roman calendar, which was then later retconned to happen on the Final Sunday before the First Sunday of Advent as opposed to its original insertion as the Final Sunday of October. The Latin calendar thus has a distinctive shape from the Byzantine: where the Byzantine calendar enwraps Christ’s life in that of Mary, the Latin calendar begins with the expectation of Christ’s birth in Advent and moves forward through his Passion, the gift of the Spirit, and the sanctification of the Church to his eschatological enthronement.
The Assyrian Church of the East and the non-Chalcedonian Miaphysite Churches all each have their own calendars too, of course; and in the West, the Anglican Communion has arguably retained a more traditional form of the Latin calendar than the contemporary Roman Church has, albeit fitted to the specifics of the British ritual year and experience. All Christians share certain feasts in common, even if they do not always celebrate them in common on shared days: Pascha, Pentecost, Nativity, and Theophany appear on virtually every classical Christian calendar, as do a variety of feasts concerning Christ’s life (like the Transfiguration) and Mary’s (especially the Dormition). The push for a universal Christian date on which to celebrate Pascha—in antiquity, a way of imposing uniformity on what had not hitherto been an internationally organized movement, in our day, a way of attempting to secure a lowest common denominator of Christian unity in the midst of ecumenical chaos—reflects the sense of these communities that liturgical pluralism is possible provided it is grounded in at least some elements of a shared calendar—most notably, around Christ’s conquest of the universe on the Day of Resurrection.
Yet it is precisely here that all of this Christian liturgical time-keeping becomes a bit strange. In the logic of the Hebrew Bible, Israel’s festal calendar is written into the stars themselves (Genesis 1:14). For the earliest Jewish followers of Jesus, Jesus advanced without effacing the significance of this festal calendar, deepening Pesach/Pascha and Shavu’ot/Pentecost without destroying their prior significance. And for at least some of these early Jewish members of the Jesus Movement, there is a very particular timetable in which they are now living: that is, awaiting the chronoi and the kairoi of God’s restoration of Israel as promised and to be completed by Jesus (Acts 1:11; 3:17-21). Yet Paul commends to gentile members of the movement that they not observe times, years, and festivals (Gal 4:10). All these, Paul thinks, belong to the stoicheia of the kosmos from which his gentile adherents have been freed through their faith and baptism into Christ. Indeed, the time is shortened for Paul (1 Cor 7:29), such that all cosmic distinctions inscribed in flesh ought be observed only in one’s ordinary life in the world, with the caveat that they do not belong in the eucharistic assembly and they are soon to be annihilated through pneumatic transformation. One might well think that the formation in gentile Christianity of an entire way of structuring and constructing time rather misses the eschatological urgency of Israel, not enslaved to the celestial bodies but fellow worshipers with them of the one God, and of Paul, who wants his gentile children of Abraham to suffer no compulsion by the celestial gods they once worshiped. Whence then Holy Week? Whence the Twelve Days of Christmas? And whither?
On the one hand, it should be admitted that the formation of a distinctively Christian liturgical calendar is and only can be the product of the parousia’s delay—that is, the failure of history to end in the first generations of the Christian movement. But whether one accepts either of the two dominant theological apologiae for that fact or not—that is, the belief that God and Christ have postponed the end to allow more time for repentance, or that the eschaton is actually a kind of “vertically” realized rather than “horizontally” unrealized Kingdom of God—it must be admitted that the governing logic of Christian liturgical calendars retains something of that radical eschatology in its very bones: that is, they express the conviction that Christ’s very conquest of the universe in his death, burial, descent into Hades, resurrection, and ascension includes the conquest and in-filling of time with himself. If the apostle Paul forbade a wholesale gentile participation in Israel’s liturgical calendar, and second century and onward Christians found such undesirable or impossible for social and political reasons, then minimally, gentile Christians could structure their experience of time no longer according to the stoicheia—even in their positive form as Israel’s liturgical calendar—but according to the glorified Christ who fills time.
That is to say, Christian liturgical calendars are themselves eschatologies as much as chronologies: they assume and articulate an understanding of God’s relation to Time that is more than purely linear, but often fractal in its spiraling repetition and progression. In Christ’s ascension, Time has become wrinkled and enwrapped around him—that is to say, Time itself is now also his Body.
See Andrew B. McGowan, Ancient Christian Worship: Early Christian Practices in Social, Historical, and Theological Perspective (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 19-64.
See John Fotopoulos, “Some Common Misconceptions Regarding the Date of Pascha/Easter,” Public Orthodoxy (2016).
See McGowan, Ancient Christian Worship, 217-223.
See McGowan, Ancient Christian Worship, 236-239.
The logic of Nicaea here, as with Pascha, was to allude to the Jewish New Year without being dependent on the Jewish community for calendrical matters.
See Daniel Stokl Ben Ezra, The Impact of Yom Kippur on Early Christianity: The Day of Atonement from Second Temple Judaism to the Fifth Century, WUNT 163 (Tubingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2003; idem, “Whose Fast Is It? The Ember Day of September and Yom Kippur,” in The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 256-282; idem,
See Jordan J. Ryan, From the Passion to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre: Memories of Jesus in Place, Pilgrimage, and Early Holy Sites Over the First Three Centuries, Jesus in the First Three Centuries 8 (London: T&T Clark, 2021).
See McGowan, Ancient Christian Worship, 249-258, and Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 1-133.
The Samhain connection is tortured in modern scholarship and apologetics, but see Hutton, The Stations of the Sun, 360-385.