Pentecost: the great fifty days
According to Leviticus 23.15–16, the Feast of Weeks was to take place on the fiftieth day after the ceremony of the waving of the omer of barley, which itself was to take place ‘on the day after the Sabbath’ after Passover (23.11). Within early Judaism there was a debate about how ‘the day after the Sabbath’ was to be interpreted. Did it mean the day after the next weekly Sabbath that followed the Passover, or did ‘Sabbath’ here mean either the first or the seventh day of the festival of Unleavened Bread, which were appointed as days of rest when no work was to be done? The Book of Jubilees, however, understood it to be the Sabbath that followed the conclusion of the seven days of the Feast of Unleavened Bread. As Jubilees was following the solar calendar later adopted at Qumran, in which Passover always fell on a Wednesday, the conclusion of the feast would occur on the following Wednesday, and the next Sabbath would be on 25 Nisan. Because there were 30 days in each of the first two months of the year, counting 50 days from the next day (Sunday) would result in the Feast of Weeks always being on the fifteenth day of the third month, a Sunday.1
The earliest references to Pentecost (the Greek word for ‘fiftieth’) in Christian sources are to what is obviously this Jewish feast, rather than a specifically Christian one (Acts 2.1; 20.16; 1 Cor. 16.8). Similarly, when the Epistula Apostolorum claims that the coming of ‘the Father’ will occur between Pentecost and the feast of Unleavened Bread, it is widely agreed that this is referring merely to points on the Jewish calendar and does not indicate the existence of any specifically Christian feast.2 It is not until towards the end of the second century that the earliest attestation of a Christian observance as such occurs, and in contrast to Jewish practice, it consists of a 50-day period beginning on Easter Day rather than a feast on the day of Pentecost alone. It was regarded as a time of rejoicing, and every day was treated in the same way as a Sunday, that is, with no kneeling for prayer or fasting, which seems to suggest that it had originated as an extension of Easter Day. This practice is attested in three sources from different parts of the world at this period: the Acts of Paul from Asia Minor;3 Irenaeus of Lyons (who may have brought it from Asia Minor) in a lost work on the Pascha, at least according to the fifth-century Theodoret of Cyrrhus;4 and Tertullian in North Africa. There is also an allusion to the season by Origen later in the third century (Homilia in Lev. 2.2), as well as in what seems to be quite an ancient section of the so-called Apostolic Tradition (33.3) and in a few other sources. Rouwhorst has questioned the trustworthiness not only of these latter sources but also of the citation attributed to Irenaeus, and so concluded that the only parts of the world in which we can have any certainty that the season was being observed at this time are North Africa, Egypt and Caesarea, and only in some communities in Asia Minor, as none of our other sources from that region mention it.5
Tertullian deals with Pentecost most fully in his treatise on baptism, where he describes it as ‘a most joyous period’ (laetissimum spatium) for conferring baptisms,
because the Lord’s resurrection was celebrated among the disciples and the grace of the Holy Spirit was inaugurated and the hope in the Lord’s coming indicated, because it was then, when he had been taken back into heaven, the angels told the apostles that he would come exactly as he had gone up into heaven – meaning, of course, during the Pentecost.6
As Pascha is still understood at this time as focusing principally on the death of Jesus, it is evident that the whole 50-day season celebrated the resurrection, Ascension and gift of the Spirit, and looked for Christ’s coming in glory.
Because we have no earlier explicit testimony to the Christian observance of the season than those cited above, it is something of a mystery as to why it would emerge apparently from nowhere at this time and yet spread quite rapidly to various parts of the ancient world. While its name is obviously derived from the New Testament, its form and meaning are so markedly different from the Jewish observance that it is not easy to attribute it wholly to that source, even though Georg Kretschmar, followed by Robert Cabié, presented a detailed case for the celebration of the Ascension on the fiftieth day linked to the theme of the Covenant being of ancient Palestinian provenance, and Talley made a valiant attempt to argue that it was not just the day of Pentecost that was sacred to Jews but the whole period between Passover and Pentecost.7
Rouwhorst examined Kretschmar’s argument in detail and exposed the flaws in it, but summarily dismissed the view of some recent biblical scholars that the day of Pentecost was already being kept as a time of covenant renewal and of the reception of new members by some Jewish communities in the first century, which might possibly help explain an early Christian choice of the season as a baptismal occasion.8 Instead he tentatively suggested that the commemoration of the Ascension on the fiftieth day ‘might … have had the character of a farewell ceremony’ and ‘might go back to the tradition of Jerusalem’. At the same time he advanced the hypothesis that the Christian observance of the 50 days could have begun in Egypt, where Alexandrian Jews appear to have been the first to give a new meaning to the Jewish festival, as the commemoration of the Covenant at Sinai, after the destruction of the Temple prevented its continued observance as a harvest festival. In a similar manner to Talley, he drew attention to an alleged parallel Jewish and Christian tendency to view the fiftieth day as being the ‘seal’ or conclusion of a period and not just an isolated feast.9 He appears to lack much firm ground for his theories, however, and Leonhard has resolutely criticized the whole notion that the Christian season of Pentecost had any antecedents prior to the late second century.10
The continuing observance of the 50 days is more widely attested in fourth-century sources, but it may not have become quite as universal as is generally supposed. Thus Canon 20 of the Council of Nicaea refers to some who kneel on Sundays and in the days of Pentecost, ordering them to desist; and Canon 43 of the Spanish Council of Elvira (305) seeks to correct what it describes as a corrupt practice and insists that all should celebrate ‘the day of Pentecost’. On the basis of a variant reading in two manuscripts, Cabié interprets the corrupt practice as being a recent innovation of prematurely terminating the Easter season on the fortieth day, but it is not impossible that the canon is seeking to introduce the celebration of Pentecost to churches which had not previously known it.11
What is even more significant is that neither the Didascalia nor Aphraates and Ephrem in East Syria in the first half of the fourth century make the slightest allusion either to a 50-day season or to any observance on the fiftieth day, but are only cognisant of a single week of celebration following Easter.12 Elsewhere, too, this week receives special emphasis within the 50-day season, which may perhaps be an indication that this shorter period was at one time the only extension of the Easter festival not just in Syria but other places as well. So, for example, Egeria says that the Jerusalem church celebrated ‘the eight days of Easter … like us’, and the services throughout the eight days followed ‘the same order as people do everywhere else’.13 This included the daily instruction of all the newly baptized in ‘the mysteries’, that is, the meaning of the rites of baptism and Eucharist in which they had just participated; and there are in existence the text of these lectures not only from Jerusalem but also from other places.14 Egeria also describes the newly baptized (together with any of the faithful who wished) assembling for a special service of hymns and prayers each afternoon. A further service was held on Easter Day after evening prayer, when John 20.19–25 was read, and this was repeated a week later, when the reading was John 20.26–31, both being done at the very place, day and time that the events described in those readings were said to have happened.15 As with Pentecost, it is not immediately obvious why this eight-day celebration should have emerged. The biblical precedent of the week-long feast of Unleavened Bread (Exod. 12.14–20), the account of the disciples meeting together seven days after the resurrection (John 20.26–29), and also the early Christian understanding of Sunday as the eighth day (above, p. 13), may all have played a part.
In any case, the integrity of the 50 days does not appear to have been so deeply rooted that it was able to resist erosion in the course of the fourth century in response to the influence of the chronology of the Acts of the Apostles. While the church in Egypt seems to have been able to maintain the uninterrupted continuity of the season throughout the fourth and fifth centuries,16 this was not so elsewhere. In addition to the existence in many places of a special emphasis on the first week of the season, in Constantinople, Rome, Milan and Spain the fiftieth day itself came to be celebrated as a commemoration of the gift of the Spirit, while in other places – including Jerusalem – both the Ascension and the gift of the Spirit were celebrated together on that day.17 As one might expect, at Jerusalem, in addition to the normal Sunday services, a second Eucharist was celebrated on Sion, where it was believed that the descent of the Spirit had occurred, and then in the afternoon another non-eucharistic service at the Imbomon, the presumed site of the Ascension. After evening prayer on Eleona, there were further services in the Martyrium, the Anastasis, at the Cross and on Sion, ending about midnight.18 Egeria also records a special observance that was held at Bethlehem on the fortieth day, but this does not seem to have been connected with the Ascension, although what it actually was remains a mystery.19
However, towards the end of the fourth century a separate feast of the Ascension on the fortieth day did emerge in a number of places, including Antioch, Nyssa and northern Italy, and became almost universal early in the fifth century.20 There are also traces of the existence in some places of a ‘mid Pentecost’ festival.21 Although some churches still continued to keep the whole 50 days as a festal season, even when punctuated in this way, others resumed the regular weekly fasts after the fortieth day, because ‘the bridegroom had been taken away’, while still others (at least according to Filastrius, Bishop of Brescia in northern Italy in the late fourth century) fasted even before the Ascension.22
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1 See above, pp. 29–30, and James C. VanderKam, Calendars in the Dead Sea Scrolls (London: Routledge 1998), pp. 31 and 55.
2 See Cantalamessa, p. 39. Gerard Rouwhorst, ‘How Eschatological was Early Christian Liturgy?’, SP 40 (2006), pp. 99–100, has shown that this appears to be the original reading of the text and not ‘between Pascha and Pentecost’, as some have previously supposed.
3 Acta Pauli 1 in Wilhelm Schneemelcher (ed.), New Testament Apocrypha 2 (2nd edn, Cambridge: James Clarke & Co./Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press 1991–2), p. 251. See further Clemens Leonhard, The Jewish Pesach and the Origins of the Christian Easter (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter 2006), pp. 183–5.
4 Quaestiones et Responsiones ad orthodoxos 115; ET in Cantalamessa, p. 51.
5 Gerard Rouwhorst, ‘The Origins and Evolution of Early Christian Pentecost’, SP 35 (2001), pp. 309–22, here at pp. 312–15.
6 Tertullian, De baptismo 19.2; ET from Cantalamessa, p. 91. See also De oratione 23.2; De ieiunio 14.2 (ET in Cantalamessa, pp. 90, 92); De corona 3.4. That Tertullian consistently uses Pentecost to mean 50 days and not the fiftieth day, see Robert Cabié, La Pentecôte: L’évolution de la Cinquantaine pascale au cours des cinq premiers siècles (Paris: Desclée 1965), pp. 40–1; but for a more nuanced judgement, Cantalamessa, p. 22.
7 Georg Kretschmar, ‘Himmelfahrt und Pfingsten’, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 66 (1954–5), pp. 209–53, here at pp. 217–22; Cabié, La Pentecôte, pp. 131–3; Thomas J. Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year (New York: Pueblo 1986, 2nd edn, Collegeville: The Liturgical Press 1991), pp. 59–60.
8 See further below, pp. 76–7.
9 Rouwhorst, ‘The Origins and Evolution of Early Christian Pentecost’, pp. 315–22.
10 Leonhard, The Jewish Pesach and the Origins of the Christian Easter, pp. 159–82.
11 ET in Cantalamessa, p. 94; Cabié, La Pentecôte, pp. 181–2.
12 Cabié, La Pentecôte, p. 153, n. 1 and 154, n. 3. See also Rouwhorst, ‘The Origins and Evolution of Early Christian Pentecost’, p. 311. Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year, pp. 56–7, cites similar testimony from the homilies of Asterius the Sophist, a Cappadocian writing between 335 and 341, but they are now thought to be the work of an otherwise unknown Asterius writing later in the fourth or early in the fifth century. See Wolfram Kinzig, In Search of Asterius: Studies on the Authorship of the Homilies on the Psalms (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1990).
13 Egeria, Itinerarium 39.1. Translators have generally treated the word sero in the Latin text as authentic and rendered it ‘till a late hour’, even though there is no sign that the services went on any later on the weekdays at this season than in the rest of the year. John Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels (3rd edn, Warminster: Aris & Phillips 1999), p. 157, however, has now accepted its emendation to octo, ‘eight’, but failed to remove the phrase ‘till a late hour’ from his translation.
14 Egeria, Itinerarium 47; ET in Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels, p. 163. ET of the lectures from Jerusalem and Milan, and also those from Antioch and Mopsuestia for the same week, though not focused on the rites in these last two instances because that teaching had been done before the baptism, is in E. J. Yarnold, The Awe-Inspiring Rites of Initiation (2nd edn, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark/Collegeville: The Liturgical Press 1994). Although Egeria states that the lectures were given every day in Jerusalem, the surviving set, usually presumed to be the work of Cyril, consists of only five. Cyril says (Catecheses 18.33) that they began on the Monday, and they may also have been omitted on the Wednesday and Friday: see Charles (Athanase) Renoux, ‘Les catéchèses mystagogiques dans l’organisation liturgique hiérosolymitaine du IVe et du Ve siècle’, Le Muséon 78 (1965), pp. 355–9; Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year, pp. 55–6.
15 Egeria, Itinerarium 39.3–40.2; ET in Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels, p. 158.
16 See Cabié, La Pentecôte, pp. 61–76.
17 Cabié, La Pentecôte, pp. 117–38.
18 Egeria, Itinerarium 43; ET in Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels, pp. 159–60.
19 Egeria, Itinerarium 42; ET in Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels, p. 159. For one suggestion, see Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year, pp. 63–5.
20 Details in Cabié, La Pentecôte, pp. 185–97; Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year, pp. 66–9.
21 First attested in the fourth century in the East by Amphilochius, Bishop of Iconium, and in the fifth century in the West by Peter Chrysologus, Bishop of Ravenna; see Cabié, La Pentecôte, pp. 100–5.
22 See Cabié, La Pentecôte, pp. 247–9.