Early Christian sources reveal two quite distinct modes of celebrating Easter, or Pascha as it was known (the term also used for the Passover). The one which ultimately became universal was to keep the feast on the Sunday after the Jewish Passover and eventually to focus its celebration upon the resurrection of Jesus Christ, 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 and parts of Syria east of Antioch. This tradition made Easter a memorial of the death of Jesus and situated the feast instead at the time of the Passover itself, during the night from 14 to 15 of the Jewish month of Nisan, the first month of spring. Because of their attachment to this day, those who followed this latter custom were called ‘Quartodecimans’ (i.e., ‘fourteeners’) 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 from the first. 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.1
In the second half of the twentieth century, however, the tide began to turn and many scholars now believe that the Quartodeciman practice began at a much earlier date as a Jewish-Christian adaptation of the Passover,2 while others have gone further 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 the year 165, although it may have emerged in Alexandria and Jerusalem somewhat earlier.3 Prior to this time, these churches would actually have known no annual Easter observance at all. This theory 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 was traditionally assumed that the Jewish Passover meal in the first century would have followed substantially the same pattern as we find in sources from later centuries. However, more recent scholarship has cast serious doubts upon this assumption too, and today most Jewish scholars agree that many of the customs described in the later literature only came into being after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in the year 70. The primary act prior to this time was the sacrifice of the Passover lambs during the afternoon of 14 Nisan, each of which was then consumed by a group of participants within the precincts of the city of Jerusalem. That meal would have included the eating of matzah (unleavened bread) and bitter herbs, and often also the drinking of wine. More than that cannot be assumed to have existed at this early date.4 Although after the destruction of the Temple some Jews may have tried to continue the sacrifice at other locations, the majority, including Jewish Christians, had to adapt to a festival that no longer included either the sacrifice or the eating of a lamb. The focus now fell on a meal that developed other highly symbolic overtones, which were sharply different for Christians than for Jews who were not Christians.5 So how did the Quartodeciman Christians celebrate their version of the feast?
Their Pascha is known to us from several sources, but until the twentieth century information from which to reconstruct it was limited almost entirely to the original documents cited by the fourth-century church historian Eusebius when he was recording the dispute that broke out around 195 between the Quartodecimans and those churches which were by then keeping Easter on Sunday, as to which of them was correct.6 In this dispute, in order to demonstrate the antiquity of the Quartodeciman practice, the Asian bishops, led by Polycrates, listed a number of their predecessors reaching back to Apostolic times who, they claimed, celebrated Pascha on 14 Nisan. Beyond that, however, little can be learned from here about the nature of the celebration. Subsequently, however, more texts have come to light.
First, there is the Epistula Apostolorum, a second-century document now extant only in Coptic and Ethiopic translations, but based on a missing Greek original. Once thought by some to be of Egyptian origin, there is now general agreement that it comes from Syria or Asia and makes a brief reference to a Quartodeciman celebration, although this is not explicitly stated.7 In the Coptic version Jesus instructs the apostles to ‘remember my death. Now when the Passover [Pascha] comes, one of you will be thrown into prison …’ Jesus will release him and ‘he will spend a night of watching with [you] and stay with you until the cock crows. But when you have completed the memorial that is for me and my agape, he will again be thrown into prison …’8 Although some commentators have assumed that the ‘memorial’ and the agape meal were two separate events here rather than two ways of speaking about the same event – the Easter Eucharist/agape celebrated in remembrance of Jesus – that is not the most natural interpretation of the text. Because the term ‘Eucharist’ came to be used to refer to what was consumed rather than to the rite itself, other names, including agape, were more often used to denote the eucharistic meal.9
It has also been commonly supposed that the watch or vigil lasted until cockcrow and then the celebration began, but once again, especially if the Ethiopic version is a reliable guide to the original, it appears more likely that the celebration ended at cockcrow10 (although it has to be admitted that some later sources do speak of an Easter celebration beginning then11). Some confirmation of this timing is provided by a Syrian text entitled Diataxis, a fragment of which was known to Epiphanius of Salamis in the fourth century and cited by him.12 This directs that, while the Jews eat their Passover meal (which would have begun at sunset), Christians are to ‘be fasting and mourning for them, because they crucified the Christ on the day of the festival, and when they mourn by eating unleavened bread with bitter herbs, you should feast’. Thus the Christians would have begun their celebration when the Jewish one ended, which would have been by midnight if the rule given in the Mishnah (Pesahim 10.9) were operative.13 Although Jews did not view the Week of Unleavened Bread, which began after the Passover meal, as a time of mourning, it seems that the Christians had developed the idea that it was, in order to create a parallelism between the two activities.
Also according to the same passage in the Mishnah, Jews were to fast from the time of the evening sacrifice (c. 3 p.m.) onwards in order to be better prepared to eat the Passover meal. This would in effect mean not eating after breakfast until the evening meal, as normal practice in the ancient world was to eat only two meals a day, breakfast and dinner in the late afternoon. The Christians no doubt continued this same custom with regard to their paschal fast, but came to extend it later into the evening in order to distinguish themselves from other Jews and kept a vigil together during those extended hours. Alistair Stewart-Sykes, modifying a theory put forward by Cyril Richardson, has suggested that the mid-second-century dispute at Laodicea between two groups of Quartodecimans may have been a disagreement over whether the Christian meal was to be postponed to this later hour or eaten at the same time as the Jews.14
Although the Didascalia Apostolorum is not itself a Quartodeciman text, an older Quartodeciman layer that subsequently has been reworked to fit a Sunday Pascha appears to underlie part of it, and this too indicates that the Christians were to fast and keep vigil while the Jews ate their Passover.15 According to the Didascalia, the purpose of this pre-paschal fast, which is also mentioned by Eusebius and Ephrem the Syrian,16 was to be a sign of mourning for the death of Jesus and a time of intercession for the Jews.17 Gerard Rouwhorst believes that both these explanations for the fast were not peculiar to this source but were shared more generally by Quartodecimans, although the intercession may have functioned more as prayer against the Jews than for their conversion in other Quartodeciman circles, because other sources from that tradition, like early Christian literature in general, are marked by a strongly anti-Jewish tone.18 Stewart-Sykes notes that the anonymous sermon In Sanctum Pascha, once erroneously attributed to Hippolytus of Rome, hints that the fasting is intended as preparation for the paschal Eucharist, and plausibly suggests that this may be a pointer to the original basis for the practice.19 The motivations given in other sources are probably therefore subsequent rationalizations.
Two other important sources that shed some light on Quartodeciman practices are the Peri Pascha of Melito of Sardis, usually dated c. 165 and regarded as a homily delivered during the paschal celebration, and In Sanctum Pascha, referred to above, which shows considerable affinity to Melito’s work, especially with regard to its paschal theology, even though it does not explicitly profess to be of Quartodeciman origin.20 Because both of these are largely devoted to a typological explanation of Exodus 12, and Melito actually begins by stating that this passage has just been read, we would probably be justified in seeing it as having been a regular reading during the vigil that preceded the Easter Eucharist. This seems to have been a uniquely Christian innovation, as its reading did not form part of the Jewish Passover but simply the telling of the story of the exodus.21 None of our sources give any indication of what other readings might have been included at this early date, and Rouwhorst’s suggestion that the Passion narrative was one of them is simply speculative, although he may be right when he proposed that hymns and prayers might also have helped fill out the vigil.22
The typological interpretation that is found in these two works as well as in the Twelfth Demonstration of Aphraates and the Paschal Hymns of Ephrem (both dating from the early fourth century) understands the Passover lamb as prefiguring Christ’s crucifixion and the exodus as foreshadowing Christ’s liberation of humanity. The image of Christ as the Passover lamb is found in 1 Corinthians 5.723 and also underlies John’s Gospel. There Jesus is identified as ‘the Lamb of God’ near the beginning (John 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 (John 19.14ff.). 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 (John 19.32–36; cf. Exod. 12.46; Num. 9.12). Although the central emphasis of the Quartodeciman celebration thus fell on remembrance of the death of Christ rather than his resurrection – and indeed the Quartodecimans even claimed that Pascha (which in reality is simply a transliteration of the Aramaic form of the Hebrew pesach) was derived from the Greek verb pathein, ‘to suffer’24 – it 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 the one made flesh in the virgin, who was hanged on a tree, who was buried in the earth, who was raised from the dead, who was exalted to the heights of heaven.’25 Rouwhorst, however, disputes the common view that the Quartodeciman celebration also had a strongly eschatological character. He does not deny that, especially in its earliest phase, expectation of the parousia may have featured in the vigil and eucharistic meal, but he argues that, if so, it must have lost this quite quickly as it has left no trace in the written sources.26
Finally, we may pay attention to one other second-century text that may possibly embody traces of a Quartodeciman tradition and certainly shows some commonality with Melito’s Peri Pascha.27 The fragmentary Gospel of Peter states that the disciples fasted and grieved from the time that Christ died ‘until the Sabbath’ (27). As the Sabbath began at nightfall that day, this would mean for only three hours. If the phrase were understood as denoting ‘up to and including the Sabbath’,28 the period would be longer, but that interpretation has been dismissed by Rouwhorst on the grounds that the Greek preposition cannot support it.29 He points to another passage in Gospel of Peter 58–9, after the empty tomb has been discovered, when the disciples are said to be still fasting and grieving on the ‘last day of the Unleavened Bread’. As the Week of Unleavened Bread would have begun on the day on which Jesus died, this would have meant the Friday one week later, with the disciples ending their fast at the beginning of the Sabbath that evening.30 However, this would conflict with the canonical accounts of the resurrection known to the author of the Gospel of Peter, and hence Rouwhorst suggests that the key to the problem is to be found in those later Syrian sources that designate the week preceding Pascha – essentially a week of fasting and grieving for Christians – as the ‘Week of Unleavened Bread’. He believes that the original practice would have been for the Week of Unleavened Bread to be kept as a fast by the Christians of that region at the same time as other Jews were celebrating it, beginning immediately after the Quartodeciman Pascha. It would then have moved to Holy Week when Pascha was later transferred to Sunday.31 Rouwhorst’s argument has, however, been rejected by Leonhard, who argues that the work does not presuppose a Quartodeciman Pascha or provide evidence for the existence of a post-Pascha week of fasting.32
This is all we can learn about the content of the Quartodeciman celebration, but a word needs to be said about exactly when it took place. 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 29½ days, making each new month either the thirtieth or thirty-first 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.33 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 neighbours when they should celebrate their festival, others found this demeaning and so sought alternative solutions, in particular the compilation of their own paschal tables.34
Even the Quartodecimans, though supposedly tied to 14 Nisan, were not immune to this difficulty, and thus in both Asia Minor and Cappadocia we find some communities attempting to solve the problem by adapting the observance to their local calendar rather than persevering with ascertaining the Jewish date each year. Those in Asia assigned the celebration to the fourteenth day of Artemisios, the first month of spring in their calendar, which was the equivalent of 6 April in our own reckoning of the year,35 and those in Cappadocia to the fourteenth day of Teireix, their first month of spring and the equivalent of 25 March.36
The Quartodeciman sources not only reveal the wide geographical area in which a Quartodeciman celebration originally flourished, but by the dates of their composition also indicate the time after which it began to decline and to be superseded by a celebration held in the night between Holy Saturday and Easter Day. In Asia this happened in the first part of the third century, while in the Syriac-speaking regions the practice continued to exist for another century until the Council of Nicaea in 325 legislated that all Christians should keep the feast on the Sunday. Although this met with some opposition, the number of churches persisting in following the old date after the middle of the fourth century was very small indeed.37
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1 See, for example, A. A. McArthur, The Evolution of the Christian Year (London: SCM Press 1953), pp. 98–107; Josef Jungmann, The Early Liturgy to the Time of Gregory the Great (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 1959), pp. 25–6.
2 Among early proponents of this view, see Bernhard Lohse, Das Passafest der Quartadecimaner (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann 1953); Joachim Jeremias, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus (London: SCM Press 1966), pp. 122–3.
3 See below, pp. 49–51.
4 See Joshua Kulp, ‘The Origins of the Seder and Haggadah’, Currents in Biblical Research 4 (2005), pp. 109–34, esp. pp. 112–13 and the scholars cited there.
5 For the Jewish development of the feast, and especially how it may have been influenced by what Christians were doing, see Joseph Tabory, ‘Towards a History of the Paschal Meal’, and Israel J. Yuval, ‘Easter and Passover as Early Jewish-Christian Dialogue’ in Paul F. Bradshaw and Lawrence A. Hoffman (eds), Passover and Easter: Origin and History to Modern Times (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 1999), pp. 62–80, 98–124; but cf. the critical comments by Kulp, ‘The Origins of the Seder and Haggadah’, pp. 119–25.
6 Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 5.23–5; ET in Cantalamessa, pp. 33–7.
7 See C. Hill, ‘The Epistula Apostolorum: An Asian Tract from the Time of Polycarp’, JECS 7 (1999), pp. 1–53. The attempt by Karl Gerlach, The Antenicene Pascha: A Rhetorical History, Liturgia condenda 7 (Louvain: Peeters 1998), pp. 97–8, to argue that it refers to a Sunday celebration rather than a Quartodeciman one is rejected as unconvincing by Gerard Rouwhorst, ‘Liturgy on the Authority of the Apostles’ in Anthony Hilhorst (ed.), The Apostolic Age in Patristic Thought (Leiden: Brill 2004), pp. 63–85, here at p. 69, n. 14.
8 ET from Cantalamessa, p. 38.
9 On the identity between Eucharist and agape in early Christianity, see Andrew B. McGowan, ‘Naming the Feast: Agape and the Diversity of Early Christian Meals’, SP 30 (1997), pp. 314–18.
10 Variants in the Ethiopic version include ‘celebrate the remembrance of my death, which is the Pascha … ; and ‘when you complete my agape and my memorial at the crowing of the cock …’. ET in Wilhelm Schneemelcher (ed.), New Testament Apocrypha 1 (2nd edn, Cambridge: James Clarke & Co./Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press 1991–2), pp. 249–84, here at p. 258.
11 See below, pp. 56–7.
12 Epiphanius, Panarion 70.11.3; ET in Cantalamessa, p. 82. See also Rouwhorst, ‘Liturgy on the Authority of the Apostles’, pp. 81–4.
13 See Gerard Rouwhorst, ‘The Quartodeciman Passover and the Jewish Pesach’, QL 77 (1996), pp. 152–73, here at pp. 163–4.
14 Alistair Stewart-Sykes, The Lamb’s High Feast: Melito, Peri Pascha and the Quartodeciman Paschal Liturgy at Sardis (Leiden: Brill 1998), pp. 155–60, 169–72; Cyril Richardson, ‘A New Solution to the Quartodeciman Riddle’, Journal of Theological Studies 24 (1973), pp. 74–84. See Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 4.26.3; ET in Cantalamessa, p. 46.
15 Didascalia Apostolorum 5.20.10; ET in Cantalamessa, p. 83.
16 Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 5.23–4 (see also below, p. 52); Ephrem, De ieiunio 5.
17 Didascalia Apostolorum 5.13–14, 19.2–3; ET in Sebastian Brock and Michael Vasey (eds), The Liturgical Portions of the Didascalia, Grove Liturgical Study 29 (Nottingham: Grove Books 1982), pp. 26, 28.
18 See Rouwhorst, ‘The Quartodeciman Passover and the Jewish Pesach’, pp. 161, 168–9.
19 In Sanctum Pascha 32; Stewart-Sykes, The Lamb’s High Feast, p. 162.
20 Texts in Alistair Stewart-Sykes, Melito of Sardis: On Pascha (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press 2001); and Pierre Nautin (ed.), Homélies pascales I, Sources chrétiennes 27 (Paris 1950). See also Rouwhorst, ‘The Quartodeciman Passover and the Jewish Pesach’, pp. 156–7; Stewart-Sykes, The Lamb’s High Feast, who argues that Melito’s work is a Haggadah rather than a homily; and for critical views, Lynne H. Cohick, The Peri Pascha Attributed to Melito of Sardis (Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies 2000); Clemens Leonhard, The Jewish Pesach and the Origins of the Christian Easter (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter 2006), pp. 42–55.
21 See Rouwhorst, ‘The Quartodeciman Passover and the Jewish Pesach’, p. 172 and n. 94.
22 Rouwhorst, ‘The Quartodeciman Passover and the Jewish Pesach’, pp. 162–3. Stewart-Sykes, The Lamb’s High Feast, p. 176, doubts that the Passion narrative was read during the vigil ‘since this concerns the fulfilment of the paschal hope’.
23 See Gerlach, The Antenicene Pascha, pp. 32–9, for discussion of whether or not this verse implies the existence of a Christian Passover celebration.
24 See Melito of Sardis, Peri Pascha 46; ET in Cantalamessa, p. 43.
25 Melito, Peri Pascha 70; ET from Stewart-Sykes, Melito of Sardis: On Pascha, p. 56. See also Rouwhorst, ‘The Quartodeciman Passover and the Jewish Pesach’, pp. 164–6.
26 Rouwhorst, ‘The Quartodeciman Passover and the Jewish Pesach’, pp. 166–8; Gerard Rouwhorst, ‘How Eschatological was Early Christian Liturgy?’, SP 40 (2006), pp. 93–108, here at pp. 96–103. For a contrary view, see Stewart-Sykes, The Lamb’s High Feast, pp. 182–6. The earliest 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, Commentarium in Matt. 4; ET in Cantalamessa, pp. 94, 99.
27 See Othmar Perler, ‘L’évangile de Pierre et Méliton de Sardes’, Revue biblique 71 (1964), pp. 584–90.
28 As does Raymond E. Brown, The Death of the Messiah (London: Chapman/New York: Doubleday 1994), pp. 1340f.
29 Rouwhorst, ‘Liturgy on the Authority of the Apostles’, pp. 70–1.
30 A solution also proposed by Gerlach, The Antenicene Pascha, pp. 192–3, and by J. Dominic Crossan, The Cross that Spoke (San Francisco: Harper & Row 1988), p. 25.
31 Rouwhorst, ‘Liturgy on the Authority of the Apostles’, pp. 70–1.
32 Leonhard, The Jewish Pesach and the Origins of the Christian Easter, pp. 224–9.
33 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.’, SP 20 (1989), pp. 402–8.
34 See below, pp. 57–9.
35 Thomas Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year (New York: Pueblo 1986; 2nd edn, Collegeville, The Liturgical Press 1991), pp. 7–9; also Thomas Talley, ‘Afterthoughts on The Origins of the Liturgical Year’ in Sean Gallagher et al. (eds), Western Plainchant in the First Millennium (Aldershot: Ashgate 2003), pp. 1–10, here at pp. 2–3.
36 Thomas J. Talley, ‘Further Light on the Quartodeciman Pascha and the Date of the Annunciation’, SL 33 (2003), pp. 151–8, here at pp. 155–6.
37 See Rouwhorst, ‘The Quartodeciman Passover and the Jewish Pesach’, p. 157; and for the Council of Nicaea, below, p. 59.