The Christian week: Wednesday and Friday
The Didache directs its readers: ‘Do not let your fasts be with the hypocrites, for they fast on the second day and the fifth day of the week, but you shall fast on the fourth and the day of preparation.’1 Regular fasting each week was not something that was prescribed for Jews in the first century, but there are signs that some pious individuals were already choosing to fast on the second and fifth days of the week (Monday and Thursday), the traditional market days of Palestine.2 Thus the ‘hypocrites’ mentioned here may well be Pharisees, who did engage in frequent public fasting (see Matt. 6.16; 9.14; Luke 18.12).3
At first sight it may look as if the compiler of the Didache was simply choosing two other days at random (Wednesday and Friday) in order to differentiate Jewish Christians from other Jews, especially as Friday, the day of preparation for the Sabbath, was one on which Jews would never usually fast. However, many years ago Annie Jaubert argued that religious days were not normally chosen arbitrarily, and drew attention to the solar calendar in use among the Jewish community at Qumran, in which she claimed that Sunday, Wednesday and Friday had a certain prominence, as constituting a possible source for the choice.4 Attested in 1 Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls, this calendar consisted of exactly 364 days, 52 weeks of 7 days, with the consequence that festivals always fell on the same day of the week every year. The first day of the first month always began on the Wednesday following the vernal equinox (or more precisely at sunset on the Tuesday evening) because according to Genesis 1.14 the creation of the lights in the firmament on the fourth day was to be ‘for signs and for seasons and for days and years’. Passover fell 14 days later, on a Tuesday evening/Wednesday every year, Pentecost was always on a Sunday in the third month, and the Day of Atonement on a Friday in the seventh month.5 Liturgical scholars have subsequently tended to conclude, therefore, that while Wednesdays and Fridays were not marked either by fasting or by any special liturgical assemblies on a weekly basis at Qumran so far as we are aware, the Christian choice of these particular days in place of the Pharisaic Jewish ones may have been influenced by the familiarity of some early converts with that solar calendar. On the other hand, it is important to note that James VanderKam has pointed to the existence of a sufficiently large number of exceptions to the alleged liturgical prominence of Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays in the solar calendar as to cast doubts on the validity of Jaubert’s conclusions.6
Other early Christian sources confirm that the practice of fast days on Wednesdays and Fridays each week was not a peculiarity of the Didache nor restricted to Jewish Christianity alone. Clement of Alexandria (Stromateis 7.12), Origen (Homilia in Lev. 10.2), and the Didascalia (ch. 21) are all aware of the custom. The mid-second-century Shepherd of Hermas uses the name ‘station’ for days of fasting (Similitude 5.1), the Latin word statio being a military term to denote a period of sentry duty. Although this work does not specify which those days were, Tertullian mentions keeping fasts on the fourth and sixth day of the week (De ieiunio 14), and these he too calls stations, and says that prayer is always made kneeling on those days (De oratione 23). He is the first to refer to two practices associated with those days that would later become common. The first occurs in his treatise on fasting, where he defended the Montanist custom both of making days of fasting obligatory and not voluntary, and of prolonging the fast beyond the ninth hour of the day. Apparently, his Catholic opponents were using the New Testament example of Peter and John going up to the Temple ‘at the hour of prayer, the ninth hour’ (Acts 3.1) to justify concluding their Wednesday and Friday fasts at that point in the day (De ieiunio 10). This suggests that the Catholics were holding some sort of act of worship at the conclusion of their fasts, and Tertullian confirms that this was also observed by the Montanists, even though it did not form the conclusion of their fasts: it was ‘not as if we slighted the ninth hour, [an hour] which, on the fourth and sixth days of the week, we most highly honour’. He goes on to offer what he thinks is a better explanation than Peter and John’s Temple visit for why this hour should be marked. The practice, he claims,
comes from the death of the Lord; which death albeit it behoves to be commemorated always, without difference of hours yet are we at that time more impressively commended to its commemoration, according to the actual [meaning of the] name of Station. For even soldiers, though never unmindful of their military oath, yet pay a greater deference to Stations. And so the ‘pressure’ must be maintained up to that hour in which the orb – involved from the sixth hour in a general darkness – performed for its dead Lord a sorrowful act of duty; so that we too may then return to enjoyment when the universe regained its sunshine. If this savours more of the spirit of Christian religion, while it celebrates more the glory of Christ, I am equally able, from the self-same order of events, to fix the condition of late protraction of the Station; [namely], that we are to fast till a late hour, awaiting the time of the Lord’s burial, when Joseph took down and entombed the body which he had requested. Thence [it follows] that it is even irreligious for the flesh of the servants to take refreshment before their Lord did.7
Although one might be tempted to think that Tertullian’s explanation for the observance of the ninth hour is likely to have been the true origin of the custom, that is rendered less probable by the fact that it was apparently not used by the Catholics to justify their practice. Nevertheless, the fact that both Catholics and Montanists held some sort of worship assembly at that hour suggests that it must have been a long-established custom, and perhaps ultimately derived from a rabbinic tradition of gatherings to study the law on their weekly fast days, although these are thought to have been in the mornings and not at the ninth hour.
The second practice related to these days that Tertullian mentions is some sort of eucharistic service. In his treatise on prayer, he attempts to counter what was apparently a widespread objection to participation in this assembly, raised on the grounds that reception of the eucharistic bread would break the fast. Tertullian proposes the solution that people should attend the gathering but reserve the sacrament for later consumption, thus fulfilling both aspects of the day, worship and fasting:
Similarly also on station days, many do not think that they should attend the sacrificial prayers, because the station would be undone by receiving the Lord’s body. Does then the eucharist destroy a service devoted to God or bind it more to God? Surely your station will be more solemn if you have also stood at God’s altar? If the Lord’s body is received and reserved, each point is secured, both the participation in the sacrifice and the discharge of the duty. (De oratione 19)
What sort of liturgical assembly was this? Although the language used here (‘sacrificial prayers’, ‘God’s altar’, ‘the sacrifice’) might suggest that a complete eucharistic celebration was taking place, Andrew McGowan believes that such words and phrases are quite consistent with Tertullian’s language about prayer in general, and that therefore this need not indicate a full eucharistic rite but rather the distribution of consecrated bread at the conclusion of a morning gathering for prayer or for a service of the word.8 It can hardly have been the same assembly that took place at the ninth hour, as De oratione was written before Tertullian became a Montanist, and so the fast would have ended by that point in the day and eucharistic reception would then have been no problem. However, Tertullian’s proposed solution to the scruples felt by some was not widely adopted, but as we shall see when we examine fourth-century sources, the celebration of the Eucharist or distribution of communion was instead moved to the end of the day’s fast.
Like Tertullian, other early Christian writers not unnaturally looked towards the final week of Jesus’ life for a possible rationale for the observance of the fast days each Wednesday and Friday. The Syrian Didascalia Apostolorum presented a chronology of that week which located the arrest of Jesus on the Wednesday, but did not link this directly with the weekly fast days. However, Victorinus, Bishop of Pettau in Austria, who was martyred in 304, did make the connection. He spoke in his De fabrica mundi of fasting on the fourth day of the week until the ninth hour, ‘or even until the evening’ or the next day, and claimed that it was on account of Jesus’ capture by a quaternion of soldiers on this day, and ‘on account of the majesty of his works – that the seasons also, wholesome to humanity, joyful for the harvests, tranquil for the tempests, may roll on’, that the fourth day was a station. The sixth day, he said, was similarly observed on account of Christ’s Passion.
When we move into the fourth century we have evidence that not only fasting but also the holding of special services generally marked those days of the week. The ecclesiastical historian Socrates reports that at Alexandria these were services of the word, as they probably had also been for Tertullian:
on Wednesdays and Fridays, the scriptures are read, and the teachers interpret them; and all the usual services are performed in their assemblies, except the celebration of the mysteries. This practice in Alexandria is of great antiquity, for it appears that Origen most commonly taught in the church on those days.9
On the other hand, Origen himself claimed that in the third century at Alexandria larger crowds gathered for worship on Fridays and Sundays than on other days (Homilia in Isa. 5.2). It could just be that Friday, the day of the crucifixion, attracted greater devotion among people, but Harald Buchinger is inclined to believe that because both days are mentioned together, Friday’s service, like Sunday, involved a celebration of the Eucharist.10 However, that would be to cast doubts on the reliability of Socrates’ evidence. An alternative possibility is that the Friday service of the word included the distribution of communion with bread and wine consecrated at a previous Sunday service – a practice that became widespread in later Eastern traditions,11 and that by the fourth century this custom had extended to Wednesdays also at Alexandria, but is not mentioned by Socrates because it was not a ‘celebration of the mysteries’ but was subsumed under the category of ‘all the usual services’.
Egeria describes services being held in Jerusalem at the ninth hour on Wednesdays and Fridays and fasting also being observed on those days – by catechumens as well as by the baptized – unless the feast of a martyr should coincide with them (Itinerarum 27.5). These gatherings took place on Sion, the ancient home of the Jerusalem church, and not at the Anastasis (the church of the resurrection) where all the other weekday services were held, suggesting that these were of greater antiquity. She also says that during the 50 days of Easter they were transferred to the morning, because there was no fasting then (Itinerarum 41). During Lent the same services occur, when ‘all things are done that are customary to do at the ninth hour, except the oblation. For, so that the people may always be taught the law, both the bishop and the presbyter preach assiduously’ (Itinerarum 27.6). It seems likely that the singular ‘presbyter’ is a scribal error and the plural was really meant. But what does she mean by ‘except the oblation’ (her normal term for the Eucharist)? It is thought by many that she was trying to say that during the rest of the year at Jerusalem this service was eucharistic, and only reverted to a pure service of the word in the Lenten season. It is possible, however, that she could have been contrasting Jerusalem practice, which had a service of the word all year round, and the custom with which she was familiar in her home country, where the service was instead regularly eucharistic.
Epiphanius of Salamis, the fourth-century monk and bishop of that metropolitan see in Cyprus, speaks of assemblies (synaxes) held on Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays, which he believes to have been instituted by the apostles, but he does not make it clear whether these were all eucharistic or not. The Wednesday and Friday services were held at the ninth hour because of the fast, except during the Easter season when they took place in the morning, as in Jerusalem; and he also mentions that during the Lenten fast they were held every weekday – a custom also apparently adopted at Antioch.12 Ambrose in Milan declares that the Eucharist was celebrated there at midday on ‘most days’, but on fast days there was not a full celebration and instead communion was received at the conclusion of the fast just before the evening meal (Sermones in psalmum 118 8.48; 18.28) – doubtless the older of the two customs.
Finally, one other practice associated with Fridays should be noted – the observance of an all-night vigil every week in some places in the fourth century. This seems to have been primarily a monastic institution, or if it had originated at an earlier date, a custom that was being kept alive at that time chiefly by urban monastic communities. John Cassian provides a substantial description of its contents as practised in Palestinian monasteries:
In the winter time, however, when the nights are longer, the vigils, which are celebrated every week on the evening at the commencing the Sabbath, are arranged by the elders in the monasteries to last till the fourth cock-crowing, for this reason, that after the watch through the whole night they may, by resting their bodies for the remaining time of nearly two hours, avoid flagging through drowsiness the whole day long, and be content with repose for this short time instead of resting the whole night … And so they divide them into an office in three parts, that by this variety the effort may be distributed and the exhaustion of the body relieved by some agreeable relaxation. For when standing they have sung three psalms antiphonally,13 after this, sitting on the ground or in very low stalls, one of them repeats three psalms, while the rest respond, each psalm being assigned to one of the brethren, who succeed each other in turn; and to these they add three readings while still sitting quietly. And so, by lessening their bodily exertion, they manage to observe their vigils with greater attention of mind.14
This unit of three antiphonal psalms, three responsorial psalms, and three readings was doubtless repeated as many times as necessary throughout the night. Egeria describes a similar Friday night vigil in Jerusalem, but here apparently occurring only during Lent. It began after the normal evening service and continued until the celebration of the Eucharist on Saturday morning, which was held at an earlier hour than in the rest of the year, before sunrise. This was done, she states, so that those who had been fasting all week at that season might break their fast a little sooner. All she says about its contents was that ‘throughout the night they alternate responsorial psalms, antiphons, and various readings’ (27.7–9). She gives no indication of who took part in it, but we may reasonably conclude that it was the especially devout and the members of monastic communities who constituted the great majority. Similar weekly vigils were continued in a number of later monastic traditions, in both West and East.15
Cassian believed that the practice had been observed uninterruptedly among Christians in the East since the time of the apostles: ‘because, when our Lord and Saviour had been crucified on the sixth day of the week, the disciples, overwhelmed by the freshness of his sufferings, remained watching throughout the whole night, giving no rest or sleep to their eyes’.16 While this derivation is highly unlikely, the absence of other evidence makes it impossible to ascertain the antiquity of the custom. Tertullian at the beginning of the third century uses the expression ‘by day the station, by night the vigil’ (De oratione 29) and elsewhere speaks of ‘night assemblies’, nocturnae convocationes (Ad uxorem 2.9), which sound as if they were more frequent than an annual paschal vigil. But beyond that, we have no other information. The probability seems to be that a weekly all-night vigil had come to be the practice of at least some Christians in some places, including North Africa, by the third century, but like many other things survived in the fourth century as the custom only of especially ascetic individuals and of urban monastic religious communities.
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1 Didache 8.1.
2 See Clemens Leonhard, The Jewish Pesach and the Origins of the Christian Easter (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter 2006), pp. 131–5.
3 But cf. Jonathan A. Draper, ‘Christian Self-Definition against the “Hypocrites” in Didache VIII’ in Jonathan A. Draper (ed.), The Didache in Modern Research (Leiden: Brill 1992), pp. 223–44.
4 Annie Jaubert, ‘Jésus et le calendrier de Qumrân’, New Testament Studies 7 (1960), pp. 1–30.
5 For further details, see James C. VanderKam, Calendars in the Dead Sea Scrolls (London: Routledge 1998).
6 James C. VanderKam, ‘The Origin, Character and Early History of the 364-Day Calendar: A Reassessment of Jaubert’s Hypotheses’, Catholic Biblical Quarterly 41 (1979), pp. 390–411, here at pp. 399–402.
7 Tertullian, De ieiunio 10; ET from ANF 4, p. 109.
8 Andrew McGowan, ‘Rethinking Agape and Eucharist in Early North African Christianity’, SL 34 (2004), p. 170.
9 Socrates, Historia ecclesiastica 5.22.
10 Harald Buchinger, ‘Early Eucharist in Transition? A Fresh Look at Origen’ in Albert Gerhards and Clemens Leonhard (eds), Jewish and Christian Liturgy and Worship: New Insights into its History and Interaction (Leiden: Brill 2007), pp. 207–27, here at pp. 210–11.
11 See Stefanos Alexopoulos, The Presanctified Liturgy in the Byzantine Rite, Liturgia condenda 21 (Louvain: Peeters 2009).
12 Epiphanius, Adversus haereses 3.22. For Antioch, see Rolf Zerfass, Die Schriftlesung im Kathedraloffizium Jerusalems, Liturgiewissenschaftliche Quellen und Forschungen 48 (Münster: Aschendorff 1968), pp. 133ff.
13 Of the meaning of antiphonal psalmody at this period, see Robert F. Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press 1986; 2nd edn 1993), p. 139; Robert F. Taft, ‘Christian Liturgical Psalmody: Origins, Development, Decomposition, Collapse’ in Harold W. Attridge and Margot E. Fassler (eds), Psalms in Community (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature 2003), pp. 7–32, here at pp. 19–23.
14 John Cassian, De institutis coenobiorum 3.8; ET from NPNF, 2nd Series 11, pp. 216–17.
15 See Otto Heiming, ‘Zum monastischen Offizium von Kassianus bis Columbanus’, ALW 7 (1961), pp. 89–156, here at pp. 107–8.
16 Cassian, De institutis coenobiorum 3.9; ET from NPNF, 2nd Series 11, p. 217.