Early Christian sources reveal two quite distinct modes of celebrating Easter.1 The one which ultimately became universal was to keep the feast on the Sunday after the Jewish Passover and to focus its celebration upon the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, which—according to the testimony of the four canonical Gospels—had taken place on the first day of the week. The other ancient form of the celebration is attested chiefly in second-century sources deriving from Asia Minor. This tradition makes Easter a memorial of the death of Jesus, and situates the feast instead at the time of the Jewish Passover itself, during the night from 14 to 15 Nisan. Because of their attachment to the fourteenth day of the Jewish month, those who followed this latter custom were called “Quartodecimans” by other Christians.
The traditional scholarly consensus tended to be that the Sunday celebration was the older of the two (perhaps going back all the way to the apostolic age itself, even though it is only explicitly attested from the second century onwards) and was the one observed by the mainstream of the Christian tradition. The Quartodeciman custom was judged to be no more than a second-century local aberration from this norm, brought about by an apparently common tendency among some early Christians to “Judaize,” a practice already criticized by St. Paul in the first century.2
On the other hand, some scholars have claimed that the Quartodeciman practice began at a much earlier date as a Jewish-Christian adaptation of the Passover festival,3 while others have gone further still and argued that the celebration of Easter on a Sunday was a considerably later development than is often supposed—that it was not adopted at Rome until about 165, although it may have emerged in Alexandria and Jerusalem somewhat earlier.4 Prior to this time, these churches would actually have known no annual Easter observance at all! If this theory is correct—and it certainly seems persuasive—then it effectively reverses the conclusions reached by the majority of earlier scholars: Quartodecimanism is not some local aberration from a supposed normative practice dating from apostolic times, but is instead the oldest form of the Easter celebration.
It is not difficult to understand how leaders of communities of early Christians that did not at first observe an annual commemoration of the death and resurrection of Christ might have desired to adopt the practice that they saw among the Quartodecimans. Nor is it hard to appreciate why they would have preferred to locate this innovation on the Sunday immediately following the Passover rather than on the actual feast itself: since Sunday was already the occasion of their regular weekly celebration of the paschal mystery, it would obviously be easier to develop that existing liturgical day than to persuade congregations to embrace a completely new event.
The above hypothesis certainly helps to explain several otherwise somewhat puzzling features of the early Christian observance of Easter, not the least of which is the meaning that was given to it. For not only in Quartodeciman circles but also at first among those who kept the feast on Sunday, the original focus of the celebration was not on the resurrection of Christ but rather on “Christ, the Passover lamb, sacrificed for us.” While this seems a perfectly natural direction for a feast situated on the Jewish Passover to have taken, it appears to be a less obvious path for the Sunday celebration, if it were not originally derived from the Quartodeciman custom.
The image of Christ as the Passover lamb is found in 1 Corinthians 5:7, and also underlies John’s Gospel. There Jesus is identified as “the Lamb of God” near the beginning (1:36), and then is said to have died on the cross on the day of the preparation of the Passover (i.e., 14 Nisan) at the hour when the lambs for the feast were being slaughtered (19:14 ff). In addition, the soldiers are said to have refrained from breaking the legs of the dead Jesus and so fulfilled the scripture requiring that no bone of the Passover lamb be broken (19:32–36; cf. Exod. 12:46; Num. 9:12).
That this theme of Jesus as the paschal lamb was central to the Quartodecimans’ celebration can be seen not merely from the date on which the festival took place, but also from the emphasis on the suffering and death of Christ found in Quartodeciman writings. Indeed, they even claimed that the name of the feast, Pascha (which in reality is simply a transliteration of the Aramaic form of the Hebrew pesach), was derived from the Greek verb paschein, “to suffer.”5 Nevertheless, as a paschal homily by Melito of Sardis from around 165 makes clear, the focus was not on Christ’s passion in isolation but rather on that event in the context of the whole redemptive act, from his incarnation to his glorification: “This is he who in the virgin was made incarnate, on the cross was suspended, in the earth was buried, from the dead was resurrected, to the heights of heaven was lifted up.”6
Precisely the same interpretation and theology of the feast occur in the writings of those early Christians who kept Easter on Sunday. Thus, for example, Irenaeus in Gaul in the late second century says: “The passages in which Moses reveals the Son of God are innumerable. He was aware even of the day of his passion: he foretold it figuratively by calling it Pascha. And on the very day which Moses had foretold so long before, the Lord suffered in fulfillment of the Pascha.”7
At the end of the second century in Alexandria, however, we encounter a somewhat different understanding of the feast, one that focused upon “passage” rather than “passion”—the passage from death to life. Clement of Alexandria describes the Passover as humanity’s passage “from all trouble and all objects of sense”;8 and Origen in the middle of the third century explains this interpretation more fully: “Most, if not all, of the brethren think that the Pascha is named Pascha from the passion of the Savior. However, the feast in question is not called precisely Pascha by the Hebrews, but phas[h]. . . . Translated it means ‘passage.’ Since it is on this feast that the people goes forth from Egypt, it is logical to call it phas[h], that is, ‘passage.’ ”9
Fourth-century Alexandrian Christians tended to combine the two interpretations. So, for example, Athanasius, in his annual episcopal letter to the Christians of Egypt to announce the date when Easter would fall that year, could on one occasion focus on the feast as a transition from death to life, and on another occasion refer to the sacrifice of Christ.10 The same combination of themes can also be seen in Didymus of Alexandria: “When the spiritual spring arrives and the month of the first fruits is at hand, we keep the Crossing-Feast, called in the Hebrew tongue Pascha. On this day Christ has been sacrificed, in order that, consuming his spiritual flesh and his sacred blood, ‘we should feast with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.’ ”11
Although this change of focus may be in part simply the result of a more accurate exegesis of the Hebrew scriptures, it is also in line with the general tendency among Alexandrian theologians to de-historicize and allegorize the Christian mysteries. To this should also be added the influence that would have been exercised by the day on which the feast occurred: Sundays throughout the year were primarily associated with the resurrection of Christ to new life rather than with his death. For, as we shall see later, discussion in third-century Egypt about the appropriate hour at which to end the Easter vigil centered around the question of the time of Christ’s resurrection. Moreover, evidence from both Egypt and Syria at this period reveals the beginnings of a trend to view the observance as a triduum, a three-day celebration of the transition from death to resurrection. But in order to understand this development, we must first take a look at the origins of the paschal fast.
The limited evidence that exists for the form of the Quartodeciman observance suggests that the period of fasting which in Jewish tradition preceded the eating of the Passover meal at nightfall on 14 Nisan was extended by the Christians into a vigil during the night, so that their celebration of the feast with a eucharistic meal only began at cockcrow (i.e., around 3 a.m.), after the Jewish festivities were over. The reason for the choice of this particular hour is not explained in the Quartodeciman sources, but it seems likely that it has its roots in watching and waiting for the predicted return of Christ to complete his work of redemption, just as Jewish tradition expected the coming of the Messiah to be at Passover time.12
The Sunday celebration by other Christians also included a preceding day of fasting and a night vigil culminating in the celebration of the eucharist. Once again, these two elements are easier to comprehend when understood as appropriations from the Quartodeciman practice than they are when thought of as original creations in this context. For there does not seem to be anything instrinsic to the nature of the Sunday celebration to have given rise either to a day of fasting or to a vigil. Moreover, primitive Christian tradition regarded all Saturdays, like Sundays, as inappropriate for fasting13—no doubt a vestige of respect for the Sabbath that had been inherited from Judaism—and thus the introduction of a fast on a Saturday would have constituted a significant break with tradition which could not have been done lightly.
It was not long, however, before the Saturday fast became extended in some Christian communities. It was already a well-established tradition for Christians to keep every Wednesday and Friday throughout the year as days of fasting, usually up to the ninth hour of the day (about 3 p.m.), when a meal would then be eaten,14 and so some churches began to join the regular Friday fast and the Saturday paschal fast together to create a continous two-day preparatory fast before the festival. According to the fourth-century ecclesiastical historian Eusebius, as early as the late second century Irenaus spoke of the existence of considerable diversity of practice in this regard: “Some think it necessary to fast one day, others two, others even more days; and others measure their day as lasting forty hours, day and night.”15
Christians in Egypt and Syria went even further and created six days of fasting from Monday until the end of the Saturday night vigil. Dionysius of Alexandria in the third century is familiar with a fast of this duration,16 and the Syrian church order known as the Didascalia Apostolorum from the same period gives a detailed explanation of a similar practice. This document maintains that Judas was paid for his betrayal “on the tenth day of the month, on the second day of the week,” and so it was as though Jesus had already been seized on that day, in fulfillment of the Pentateuchal requirement to take a lamb on the tenth day of the month and keep it until the fourteenth (Exod. 12:3, 6). It then continues:
Therefore you shall fast in the days of the Pascha from the tenth, which is the second day of the week; and you shall sustain yourselves with bread and salt and water only, at the ninth hour, until the fifth day of the week. But on the Friday and on the Sabbath fast wholly, and taste nothing. You shall come together and watch and keep vigil all the night with prayers and intercessions, and with reading of the Prophets, and with the gospel and with psalms, with fear and trembling and with earnest supplication, until the third hour in the night after the Sabbath; and then break your fasts. . . .17
This passage is interesting in several respects. First, we may note that because the term Pascha is understood to refer to the passion of Christ, it is used to denote the period of the memorial of Christ’s suffering and death, and not the celebration of his resurrection, as is also the case in other early sources. Thus, “the days of the Pascha” correspond to the week of fasting and therefore end at the conclusion of the vigil, just as what later Christians would call Easter Day is beginning.
Second, the biblical prescriptions about the timing of the Passover have been adapted to fit a quite different chronology, which may possibly be an indication that this section of the text has Quartodeciman roots. Obviously in most years the “second day of the week” and the actual “tenth day of the month” cannot have coincided, but the author expects the readers to understand the Monday of the paschal week as being the symbolical equivalent of the tenth day.
Third, this chronology would clearly make Friday the equivalent of the fourteenth day of the month and the day on which Christ died (even though it does not seem as yet to be marked by any special liturgical observance), and therefore begin to point the Saturday night vigil in the direction of being a memorial more of the resurrection than of the death of Christ or of the whole paschal mystery. This transition of meaning is in fact made clear by another reference to the end of the vigil later in the document: “Thereafter eat and make good cheer, and rejoice and be glad, because that the earnest of our resurrection, Christ, is risen. . . .”18
Finally, although the church order does prescribe six days of fasting, a distinction is still maintained between the older two-day fast and the other days of the week: bread, salt, and water are permitted after the ninth hour on Monday through Thursday, but nothing at all on the last two days. The particular importance of these final days is also emphasized in other parts of the text: “Especially incumbent on you therefore is the fast of the Friday and the Sabbath. . . . Fast then on the Friday, because on that day the People killed themselves in crucifying our Savior; and on the Sabbath as well, because it is the sleep of the Lord, for it is a day which ought especially to be kept with fasting. . . .”19
A similar development can also be seen in the Egyptian sources. In the passage from Clement of Alexandria cited above as the earliest evidence for the understanding of the feast as “passage,” he too spoke of it as having begun “on the tenth day”; and Origen clearly viewed the paschal events as extending over three days, in fulfillment of Hosea 6:2, even if they were not yet liturgically celebrated in this way: “Now listen to what the prophet says: ‘God will revive us after two days, and on the third day we shall rise and live in his sight.’ For us the first day is the passion of the Savior; the second on which he descended into hell; and the third, the day of resurrection.”20
In the light of all this, it is not surprising to find in sources from the late fourth century the emergence of the liturgical observance of Good Friday as the memorial of Christ’s death, with Easter itself now being regarded as essentially the celebration of his resurrection. To this was often added Holy Saturday as the commemoration of his burial and/or descent into hell. This development seems to have begun at Jerusalem itself in connection with the sacred sites associated with the passion and resurrection,21 and spread from there to other parts of the East.22 Its reception in the West, however, seems at first to have been somewhat mixed. Thus we find some fourth-century western authors still adhering to the older notion that Pascha meant “passion,” presumably because their churches had not yet adopted the liturgical observance of the triduum.23 Others, while accepting Origen’s interpretation of Pascha as “passage,” continue to combine it with an emphasis on the passion, again suggesting that the liturgical observance of Good Friday had not yet begun, or at least had not yet succeeded in shifting the focus on the passion entirely to that day.24 But for others, Easter has clearly become a memorial of the resurrection.25
Another sign of the changing character of the feast can be seen in the discussion of the hour at which the paschal vigil should end. All the evidence we have cited so far suggests that the celebration of the Easter eucharist began around cockcrow. But while this may have been the earliest custom, some third-century sources indicate that there was a tendency in certain places to shorten the duration of the vigil. The Syrian Didascalia implies that some people were objecting to prolonging the fast beyond midnight because that involved fasting on a Sunday; and so its author had to insist that Easter was an exception to that rule.26 Similarly, Dionysius of Alexandria, while noting that the church at Rome still adhered to the hour of cockcrow, acknowledged that some others ended the fast earlier. What is particularly interesting is that, according to him, there was general agreement that the feast should not begin until after the hour of Christ’s resurrection—an indication that its primary focus had shifted from the passion. Although admitting that the exact time of the resurrection was unknown, he censured those who ended the fast just before midnight, praised those who persevered until the fourth watch of the night (between 3 and 6 a.m.), and refused to be severe with those who stopped midway between these two points.27 Evidence from the late fourth century shows that many were still adhering to cockcrow, but that others concluded the vigil at midnight.28
The Didascalia is the only source before the fourth century to indicate what happened during the paschal vigil, and as we have seen, it speaks simply of the reading of the Prophets, psalms, and gospel, with prayers and intercessions. By “Prophets” it is likely that the Hebrew scriptures in general are meant, since they were all seen as being prophetic of the Christ-event, and indeed in another place the author uses the term “scriptures” instead when describing the vigil.29
Later sources confirm this general arrangement and supply details of the readings that were then used. There is considerable variation both in the precise number of readings prescribed (although twelve is the most common) and in the particular biblical texts appointed to be read. One might therefore easily imagine that these detailed provisions all belong to this much later period, and that what was read at vigils in early times was either not definitively laid down or has simply not survived.
On the other hand, in the oldest of these lectionaries, the fifth-century Armenian lectionary (which is thought to be based on fourth-century usage at Jerusalem), the first three readings are the story of creation (Gen. 1:1–3:24), the account of the binding of Isaac (Gen. 22:1–18), and the narrative of the Passover (Exod. 12:1–24). Thomas Talley has pointed out that these constituted three of the four themes associated with the Passover in a “Poem of the Four Nights” contained in the Palestinian Targum on Exodus (the fourth being the coming of the Messiah), and suggested that they establish a line of continuity between these vigil readings and the Jewish Passover tradition.30
One other element in the vigil deserves being mentioned here because of the important part it would play in later tradition: the lighting of the paschal candle. By the fourth century, daily evening worship throughout the year in many places began with a ceremonial lighting of the evening lamp, in which were recalled the gifts of the natural light of the day, the lamps to illuminate the night, and above all the light of Christ. The evening hour which began the paschal vigil was no exception to this rule, but the ceremony inevitably took on a special significance in this particular context, and later centuries saw it as symbolizing the light of Christ risen from the dead. While in western tradition it continued to remain in its original position at the very beginning of the vigil, in the East it was later moved from that position to the end of the readings instead, where it constituted a dramatic climax and led into the Easter eucharistic celebration.31
Tertullian in North Africa at the end of the second century is the first Christian writer to suggest that Easter was a particularly suitable occasion for the celebration of baptism. He states: “The Pascha affords a more solemn day for baptism, since the passion of the Lord, in which we are baptized, was accomplished [then].”32 We find a similar sentiment expressed by Hippolytus of Rome in the third century.33 Some would add to this the evidence of the church order known as the Apostolic Tradition and attributed to Hippolytus, but that document is not explicit about the occasion of baptism: it only states that candidates are to fast “on Friday” and assemble “on Saturday” for a final exorcism before spending the night in vigil and being baptized at cockcrow.34 While these directions are fully consistent with baptism at Easter, they do not require that conclusion to be drawn. The document could instead have been referring to baptisms happening in any week of the year.
Although, therefore, we have only two firm witnesses to a preference for baptism at Easter prior to the fourth century, one from North Africa and the other from Rome—two centers of primitive Christianity which frequently resemble one another and differ from the rest of the church with regard to their liturgical practices—scholars have nevertheless tended to assume that paschal baptism became universal in the church during the third century. I have argued elsewhere that such a conclusion is unwarranted. Not only is the complete absence of testimony from other sources quite striking, but there is virtually nothing in the baptismal theology articulated by the Christian literature of this period which would have given any encouragement to such a practice. Only in North Africa and Alexandria was any use made of St Paul’s imagery of baptism into the death and resurrection of Christ, and in the latter case we have reason to believe that the actual practice of baptism was normally in connection with a post-Epiphany fast rather than at Easter.35 Other early writers tended to link Christian initiation instead to Christ’s baptism in the Jordan. In such a theological climate, therefore, there would have been no reason to see Easter as especially appropriate for baptism. It is only from the middle of the fourth century onwards that we encounter as an almost universal phenomenon both the Pauline theology and the practice of paschal baptism.36
The determination of the correct date for the celebration of the Passover each year was a difficult enough matter for Jewish Diaspora communities. Strictly speaking, they depended upon the sighting of the new moon in Jerusalem, which occurred on average every 29 ½ days, making each new month either the 30th or 31st day after the old one. By the time that Passover arrived, two weeks later, communities far from Jerusalem would still not know which of the two days had been declared the new moon. Sometimes, too, the decision to insert an extra month into the Jewish year might be made so late that very distant Diaspora communities would not know about it in time, and so would celebrate their Passover a month early.37 Having the date of Easter dependent upon the determination of the Passover presented an even greater problem for early Christians. While some seemingly felt no embarrassment in having to ask their Jewish neighbors when they should celebrate their festival, others found this demeaning and so sought alternative solutions.
Even the Quartodecimans’ celebration, although supposedly tied to 14 Nisan, was not immune to this difficulty, and thus in Asia Minor, where a local version of the Julian calendar was followed, they attempted to adapt the observance to their native culture. They assigned the celebration instead to the fourteenth day of the first month of spring, Artemisios, according to that calendar, which would be the equivalent of April 6 in our own reckoning of the year.38 It is also possible that some groups in other parts of the world may have opted for March 25, the date assigned to the spring equinox in the Julian calendar.39
Other Christians tried to solve the problem by calculating for themselves the date of the first full moon after the spring equinox each year and computing the date of Easter from that. However, because the science of astronomy was much less exact then than it is today, a variety of tables for finding the date of Easter were produced by different groups of Christians, with the consequence that the feast was often celebrated on divergent dates in different parts of the world.40
After the Council of Nicea in 325, however, the Emperor Constantine directed that all churches were to keep the feast on the same day. His letter cites the scandal of Christians celebrating the feast on different days as a reason for this decree, but it appears that such variation was less of a concern than were the Quartodeciman and Syrian practices of continuing to use the Jewish reckoning to set the date of their celebration. The letter argued that lack of accuracy in Jewish calendrical calculation sometimes resulted in the Passover—and hence Easter—being celebrated prior to the actual spring equinox, and that this was a grave error. But the real motivation was clearly a desire to distance Christianity from Judaism: “it seemed unsuitable that we should celebrate that holy festival following the custom of the Jews.”41
Nevertheless, this decision did not put an end to variation, since some groups of Christians persisted in their traditional customs, and in any case no particular table to compute the date of Easter appears to have been prescribed by Constantine. Thus, for example, the churches of Alexandria and Rome used different tables from one another, and so assigned the equinox to different dates. Another contrast between them was what should be done when the full moon fell on a Sunday: should Easter be kept on that day, or on the following Sunday?42 As a result, in the year 387, Easter was observed at Alexandria and in North Italy on April 25, in Gaul on March 21, and at Rome on April 18.43 It took many centuries for such discrepancies to be finally resolved, and even today the Eastern Orthodox Church observes Easter according to a different calendar from other Christians.
Thus, not only did the occasion observed as the Christian Passover soon change from 14/15 Nisan to the Sunday following that date, but its character, too, was transformed in the course of the fourth century, from a primary emphasis on the sacrifice of Christ, the paschal lamb, to an exclusive focus on his resurrection, as Good Friday and the other days of Holy Week gradually emerged to commemorate the various events connected with the last days of his life. While in some respects this development certainly enriched the paschal season for Christians, it also resulted in a diminution of the sense of Easter as the heart and center of the liturgical year, as the unitive celebration of the totality of the paschal mystery—the incarnation, passion, resurrection, and glorification of Christ, and the sending of his Spirit. Instead it became just one feast, though an important one, among others; and as a result of later western Christianity’s narrow focus on the death of Christ as that which brought salvation, it ceased to occupy such a central position in popular piety. The Easter vigil rite, the original core of the liturgical year, declined in importance until it became virtually unknown to ordinary churchgoers in the West, although maintaining a greater hold among eastern Christians. In the popular mind, Christmas replaced Easter as the central festival of the year, and it is only in the movements of liturgical renewal in the second half of the twentieth century that attempts are being made to redress the balance.
1. Those wishing to study the primary sources are well served by a fine collection of texts with detailed notes prepared by Raniero Cantalamessa and recently translated into English as Easter in the Early Church (Collegeville, 1993). This edition will be cited hereafter simply as “Cantalamessa,” together with the relevant page number.
2. See, for example, A. A. McArthur, The Evolution of the Christian Year (London, 1953), pp. 98–107; Joseph Jungmann, The Early Liturgy to the Time of Gregory the Great (Notre Dame, 1959), pp. 25–26.
3. See, for example, B. Lohse, Das Passafest der Quartadecimaner (Gütersloh, 1953); Joachim Jeremias, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus (London, 1966), pp. 122–23.
4. Karl Holl, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kirchengeschichte, vol. 2, Der Osten (Tübingen, 1927), pp. 204–24; Wolfgang Huber, Passa und Ostern (Berlin, 1969), pp. 56 ff.; Marcel Richard, “La question pascal au Ile siècle,” L’Orient syrien 6 (1961): 179–221; Thomas J. Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year (New York, 1986), pp. 13–27.
5. See Melito of Sardis, Peri Pascha 46 (Cantalamessa, p. 43).
6. Ibid., 70.
7. Adv. haer. 4.10.1 (Cantalamessa, p. 50).
8. Stromata 2.11.51.2 (Cantalamessa, p. 52).
9. Peri Pascha 1 (Cantalamessa, p. 53).
10. Athanasius, Ep. fest. 5, 42 (Cantalamessa, pp. 70–72).
11. Comm. in Zach. 5.88 (Cantalamessa, p. 79). The biblical quotation is from 1 Cor. 5:7.
12. See Talley, Origins of the Liturgical Year, p. 6. The first Christian sources to affirm unambiguously that the vigil was kept in expectation of the return of Christ belong to the fourth century: Lactantius, Divinae institutiones 7.19.3; Jerome, Comm. in Matt. 4 (Cantalamessa, pp. 94, 99). But cf. Gerard Rouwhorst (“The Quartodeciman Passover and the Jewish Pesach,” Questions Liturgiques 77 [1996]: 152–73), who argues that the Quartodeciman celebration originally began at midnight and ended at cockcrow, and that too much prominence should not be given to its alleged eschatological character.
13. See Tertullian, De ieiun. 14.3 (Cantalamessa, p. 92).
14. See Didache 8.1; Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 7.12; Origen, Hom. in Lev. 10.1; Tertullian, De ieiun. 10.
15. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.24.12 (Cantalamessa, p. 36).
16. Ep. ad Basilidem 1 (Cantalamessa, p. 61). Athanasius in the fourth century interprets these six days as a recapitulation of the six days of creation: Ep. fest. 1 (Cantalamessa, p. 70).
17. Didascalia Apostolorum 5.18–19.1 (Cantalamessa, p. 83).
18. Ibid., 5.19.7 (Cantalamessa, p. 83).
19. Ibid., 5.19.6, 9–10. Only the first of these two extracts is reproduced in Cantalamessa (p. 83); the English translation of the second is taken from Sebastian Brock and Michael Vasey, eds., The Liturgical Portions of the Didascalia (Bramcote, Notts., 1982), p. 28. By “the People,” the author means the Jews, and a strong anti-Jewish tone runs throughout these paschal prescriptions.
20. Hom. in Exod. 5.2 (Cantalamessa, p. 55).
21. See the description of the celebration of Good Friday there by the pilgrim Egeria (Cantalamessa, pp. 101–3).
22. See, for example, Basil of Caesarea, Hom. 13, and Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 1 (Cantalamessa, pp. 75–76). The earliest firm evidence for the liturgical observance of Holy Saturday as the burial/descent into hell is in Amphilochius, Bishop of Iconium from 373 to 394, Or. 5 (Cantalamessa, p. 77). On Christ’s descent into hell, see Aloys Grillmeier, “Der Gottesohn im Totenreich: soteriologische und christologische Motivierung der Descensuslehre in der alteren christlichen Überlieferung,” Zeitschrift für Katholische Theologie 71 (1949): 1–53, 184–203.
23. See, for example, Ambrosiaster, Quaestiones Veteris et Novi Testamenti 96.1; Gregory of Elvira, Tractatus de libris SS. Scripturarum 9.9, 16, 20, 22 (Cantalamessa, pp. 98, 104–5). Even though Chromatius of Aquileia was familar with a liturgically celebrated triduum in his church, he too continued to adhere to the older interpretation of Pascha: see Joseph Lemarié, Chromace d’Aquilé: Sermons, Sources chrétiennes 154 (Paris 1969), pp. 91–92.
24. See, for example, Ambrose of Milan, De Cain et Abel 1.8.31; Ep. 1.9–10; and De sacramentis 1.4.12; Gaudentius of Brescia, Tractatus 2.25–26 (Cantalamessa, pp. 95–96, 106).
25. See, for example, Maximus of Turin, Serm. 54.1 (Cantalamessa, p. 108); other sermons of his reveal a gradual development of thought to this position during his episcopate. Augustine is also witness to a triduum celebrating successively the death, burial, and resurrection (Ep. 55.14.24; Cantalamessa, p. 109), as is Ambrose in North Italy (Ep. 23.12–13).
26. Didascalia 5.20.12 (Cantalamessa, pp. 83–84).
27. Ep. ad Basilidem 1 (Cantalamessa, pp. 60–61).
28. See Anscar Chupungco, Shaping the Easter Feast (Washington, D.C., 1992), p. 96 and n. 34; and compare Testamentum Domini 2.12, and Jerome, Comm. in Matt. 4 (Cantalamessa, p. 99). The latter claims that it is an apostolic tradition that the people should not be dismissed from the vigil before midnight.
29. Didascalia 21.5.19.6 (Cantalamessa, p. 83).
30. Talley, Origins of the Liturgical Year, pp. 3, 47–50.
31. See Gabriel Bertonière, The Historical Development of the Easter Vigil and Related Services in the Greek Church (Rome, 1972).
32. De baptismo 19.1 (Cantalamessa, p. 91).
33. Comm. in Dan. 1.16 (Cantalamessa, p. 60).
34. Ap. Trad. 20; see Paul F. Bradshaw, “ ‘Diem baptismo sollemniorem’: Initiation and Easter in Christian Antiquity,” in Maxwell E. Johnson, ed., Living Water, Sealing Spirit: Readings on Christian Initiation (Collegeville, 1995), pp. 137–47.
35. Origen, Hom. in Exod. 5.2 (Cantalamessa, p. 55), links the three days of the paschal triduum with the threefold mystery of being baptized into Christ’s death, being buried with him, and rising with him on the third day. But other evidence suggests that baptisms in Alexandria at this time were celebrated forty days after Epiphany and not at Easter: see Paul F. Bradshaw, “Baptismal Practice in the Alexandrian Tradition, Eastern or Western?” in Paul F. Bradshaw, ed., Essays in Early Eastern Initiation (Bramcote, Notts., 1988), pp. 5–6.
36. For further details, see Bradshaw, “ ‘Diem baptismo sollemniorem.’ ”
37. See T. C. G. Thornton, “Problematical Passovers: Difficulties for Diaspora Jews and Early Christians in Determining Passover Dates during the First Three Centuries A.D.,” Studia Patristica 20 (1989): 402–8.
38. Talley, Origins of the Liturgical Year, pp. 7–9.
39. See August Strobel, Ursprung und Geschichte des frühchristlichen Osterkalenders (Berlin, 1977), pp. 370–72; Talley, Origins of the Liturgical Year, pp. 5–13; Philipp Harnoncourt, “Kalendarische Fragen und ihre theologische Bedeutung nach den Studien von August Strobel,” Archiv für Liturgiewissenschaft 27 (1985): 263–72.
40. For further details of this, see Chupungco, Shaping the Easter Feast, pp. 43–59.
41. Constantine, Ep. ad ecclesias 18 (Cantalamessa, p. 63).
42. For details of this, see Chupungco, Shaping the Easter Feast, pp. 70–71.
43. Ambrose, Ep. 23.