CHAPTER IX
EASTER AND THE MOVEABLE COMMEMORATIONS
I. Paschal Controversies prior to the Council of Nicaea.
The commemoration of the Pascha is the first annual Christian solemnity with which history makes us acquainted. And it will be well that the student should bear in mind that the term ‘Pascha’ was used in early times to signify, more particularly, not Easter (for which it was used in later times), but the day of the Lord’s Crucifixion, more commonly without, and sometimes together with, the succeeding two days, including the day of the Resurrection. But most commonly the word is employed in the earlier literature of the subject to signify the commemoration of the day of the Crucifixion, which was generally held to have corresponded in the history of the Passion to the day upon which the Paschal lamb was sacrificed in the Jewish ritual[140].
It is scarcely possible to conceive that, even if the Christian religion had taken its rise in circumstances altogether dissimilar from those amid which as a matter of history it actually emerged, there would have been no commemoration of such great events as the death and rising again of its Founder. But the first disciples of Christ being Hebrews, and their converts at first being also in a large measure Hebrews, it was inevitable that the great Hebrew festival of the Passover should take to itself a new colouring and a new significance in Christian thought. Thus we find St Paul speaking of Christ as ‘our Pascha’ (i.e. Paschal victim), which ‘hath been sacrificed for us’ (1 Cor. v. 7). And he adds, ‘therefore let us keep the feast (or keep festival) not with the old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.’ It would indeed be unwarrantable to infer from this passage that a Christian Pascha was actually observed as a festival at the time when St Paul wrote to the Corinthians. But it is obvious that the passage is steeped in reminiscences of the Hebrew festival, and that these are already receiving a new complexion and a new meaning.
The observance of the Christian Pascha first comes into marked prominence about the middle of the second century. At that date it was everywhere a recognised institution of the Church; but there were differences between the Churches of proconsular Asia (the Asia of the seven Churches of the Apocalypse) and the Church at Rome and in other places, as to the particular day upon which the commemoration should be observed. The evidence with regard to the early stages of the dispute is scanty. Such details as we possess are not free from obscurity and have been variously interpreted.
In a work like the present volume we can do no more than lay before the student the results which seem to us to have the greater weight of probability in their favour.
The Asiatics, it would seem, began to celebrate the festival of the Pascha on the fourteenth day of the moon of the Hebrew month Nisan, the day upon which the Jews put away all leaven from their houses and slew the lamb of the Passover. On the whole, the evidence seems to make for the Asiatic Christians terminating the preceding fast on the evening of that day, and on the same evening celebrating the Paschal feast consisting of the Eucharist, accompanied, perhaps, by the Agape. It was on the fourteenth Nisan, according to the prevailing Asiatic belief, that the Lord suffered death upon the cross, and in His sacrifice became the true representative of the Paschal lamb which had been his antitype. Foreign as it must be to us with our habits of thought to conceive of a festival being kept on the day of the Crucifixion (that is, on the evening which was regarded as the beginning of the following day), we must suppose that the realisation of the blessings of the redemption purchased by the Saviour’s blood overtoned (to borrow a term from the art of music) the imaginative presentment of the historical sufferings of the Cross. Our own English term, ‘Good Friday,’ seems to have originated with a similar way of regarding the facts[141].