Passover and Easter: Origin and History to Modern Times

By Paul F. Bradshaw and Lawrence A. Hoffman

Passover and Easter constitute for Jews and Christians respectively the most important festivals of the year. Although sharing a common root, the feasts have developed in quite distinct ways in the two traditions, in part independently of one another and in part in reaction against the other. Following the pattern set in earlier volumes in this series, these two volumes bring together a group of distinguished Jewish and Christian scholars to explore the history of the two celebrations, paying particular attention to similarities and connections between them as well as to differences and contrasts. They not only present a convenient summary of current historical thought but also open up new perspectives on the evolution of these annual observances.

Volume 5 in the series focuses especially on the origins and early development of the feasts and on the way that established practices have changed in recent years. Volume 6, also in the series, focuses on the contexts in which they occur—the periods of preparation for the feasts in the respective calendars and their connection to Shavuot/Pentecost—as well as to their traditional expression in art and music. At the same time, the essays raise some fundamental questions about the future. Have modern human beings so lost the sense of sacred time in their lives, for instance, that these great feasts can never again be what they once were for former generations of believers? And what about recent attempts by some Christians to enter into their heritage by celebrating a Jewish Seder as part of their annual Holy Week and Easter services?

Specialists and general readers alike will find much to interest and challenge them within these two additions to what has become a highly regarded series in the world of liturgical scholarship.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2000
• ISBN: 9780268159139

Book preview

Easter in Christian Tradition

PAUL F. BRADSHAW

The leading liturgical scholar Robert Taft is fond of saying that words are words but things are things. By this he means that in our study of liturgical history we may encounter a wide range of different names for a rite or a variety of different explanations as to its meaning, yet no matter what it is called or how it is defined, it is nevertheless the same ritual act that is persisting throughout different historical periods and often in diverse regional and ecclesiastical traditions. In examining the Christian feast of Easter, however, we are faced with an example of exactly the opposite phenomenon, where the same name persists, but the liturgical celebration to which it refers changes its form and function quite radically in the course of history.

We can see the first of these major shifts, or mutations as we might call them, in the first few centuries of Christianity’s existence, as my own essay in this volume reveals. The celebration of Pascha (as Easter was known) began life as the Christian version of the Passover, observed on the same day as its Jewish antecedent and focused upon Christ as the paschal lamb who had been sacrificed for the sins of the world, although this central theme was set within the context of the whole of the Christ-event, from his birth to his expected second coming. By the fourth century, however, the festival had changed its form and meaning. It was now observed on the Sunday following what would have been the Jewish date and constituted the final part of a three-day celebration (a triduum, as western Christians came to call it) of Friday-Saturday-Sunday, commemorating the passage of Christ from death to resurrection. Its theme was therefore no longer Christ, the Passover lamb, sacrificed for us (cf. 1 Cor. 5:7) but Alleluia! Christ is risen!

Alongside this, further changes had been taking place, as the essays by Maxwell Johnson and Martin Connell indicate (in the companion volume 6 of this series, Passover and Easter: The Symbolic Structuring of Sacred Seasons). On the one hand, the triduum had acquired a preparatory fast of forty days duration. This was an amalgamation of three quite distinct earlier traditions. There had originally been an annual forty-day fast observed by Egyptian Christians in the period following January 6 in imitation of Jesus’ forty days of fasting in the wilderness after his own baptism, and also used as a period of preparation for the baptism of new converts in Egypt. There had also been a three-week period of fasting immediately before Easter kept by those in Rome and North Africa who were preparing for baptism at that festival. And there had been a similar period of fasting before baptism at other times of the year that was observed in other places. As Easter came to be seen universally as the primary occasion in the year for baptism in the fourth century, these customs coalesced everywhere into a standard forty-day season of fasting immediately before that festival. On the other hand, from the end of the second century onwards the Easter celebration had also become extended forwards into a fifty-day season of rejoicing—the days of Pentecost—during which every day was kept as though it were a Sunday, with both fasting and kneeling for prayer forbidden. Thus, more than a quarter of the year was now controlled by the Easter festival.

The unified character of the celebration of sacred time, however, could not survive this liturgical stretching, and cracks quickly began to appear. Eventually, as Joanne Pierce’s contribution in particular demonstrates, the one celebration all but collapsed into a succession of relatively independent feast days, each commemorating some individual occasion in the life of Jesus or of the early church. With this came a change in the style of the liturgical observances themselves. The English liturgical scholar Kenneth Stevenson has offered a very useful categorization of three successive stages in this evolution.¹

The first, which existed during the first three centuries of the church’s existence, he calls unitive. Here the paschal mystery was celebrated as a whole in the single night of the Easter liturgy: it may have been preceded by a short preparatory fast of one, two, or more days, and prolonged into the fifty-day season of Pentecost, but there was no division of the period into discrete portions with separate liturgies focusing on different aspects of the whole.

The second stage he calls rememorative. This emerged during the fourth century, beginning apparently at Jerusalem, where various events recorded in the New Testament in connection with the death and resurrection of Jesus began to be commemorated individually in the very places and on the very days that they were believed to have happened. Since most of the significant events prior to the resurrection of Jesus happened in the seven days immediately preceding it, this period came to be called Great Week by Christians in the East and Holy Week by those in the West. These celebrations incorporated certain elements that featured in the biblical narratives, but no attempt was made as yet to reenact the episodes in all their details. So, for example, on the Sunday before Easter the whole crowd walked down the Mount of Olives carrying branches of palm or olive and repeating Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, in remembrance of Jesus’ triumphal entry into the city, but a donkey was not included in the procession. Similarly, no attempt was made to locate the eucharistic celebrations on Holy Thursday at the supposed site of the Last Supper, and the procession from Gethsemane through the city in the early hours of Good Friday did not replicate precisely the route taken by Jesus, with detours to the house of Caiaphas or Pilate. Instead the procession went directly to Golgotha, where later in the day a supposed relic of the true cross was venerated, but there was no dramatic reenactment of the events leading up to the crucifixion itself.

Thus, whatever motivated these liturgical developments, it was obviously not a desire to follow in every single footstep of Jesus in the last days of his life. For that reason, the term historicism, which is often used of these innovations, may not be the most appropriate expression for them. What the Christians were doing was attaching sacramental importance both to time and to place as means of entering into communion with the Christian mysteries. It was in effect an extension of the already long-established tradition in relation to the Christian martyrs, whose cult was always celebrated on the anniversary of the day of their death and only at the place where their remains were interred.²

The final stage Stevenson terms representational. Here conscious attempts were made to restage, at least partially, all the individual incidents in the last week of Jesus’ earthly life and following his death that are described in the canonical Gospels. This style of celebration reached its full flowering in the late Middle Ages in the West, and included such customs as the washing of the feet of twelve males on Holy Thursday, in imitation of Jesus’ washing of his disciples’ feet, and the burial of a consecrated host in an Easter sepulcher on Good Friday, in imitation of the burial of the body of Jesus. Its aim was pastoral—to make the biblical narratives come alive for the congregation—and it proved very popular, so much so that it spawned the para-liturgical tradition of the mystery plays—full dramatic reenactments of biblical narratives—as well as elaborate musical settings of the liturgy and of popular devotions, as Robin Leaver’s essay in volume 6 reveals.

What the representational gained in terms of popular piety, however, it lost in terms of the theological unity expressed in the earlier stages of liturgical development. Lent came to be viewed more as the season for imitating the self-denial of Jesus than as preparation for the paschal celebration. The devotional center of Holy Week tended to be Good Friday and its focus on the suffering inflicted on Christ by sinful human beings, to which Easter Day constituted a joyful corrective, when God intervened to put right the wrongs. Similarly, the celebration of the Ascension of Christ forty days later and of the gift of the Holy Spirit fifty days later were also seen as distinct events, rather than as aspects of the one paschal mystery. Above all, in a remarkable reversal of the earliest traditions of Christianity, the Easter vigil itself became the least well-attended liturgy of the whole season, and what is more, for the convenience of the clergy, in the course of the Middle Ages it was moved back from Saturday night to Saturday morning, with the result that the drama of the Easter candle shining in the darkness was lost in the brightness of the daylight.

While in the Catholic tradition the rites belonging to this season had undergone major mutations, in the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century they were almost entirely swept away, as part of the Reformers’ general rejection of the use of all ceremonies in worship that were at best not understood by ordinary people and at worst interpreted in a highly superstitious manner. All that were usually left were the names for the more significant days together with the traditional biblical readings belonging to them. Special liturgies as such tended to disappear entirely: thus, ash was not used on Ash Wednesday, nor palms on Palm Sunday, and the Easter vigil vanished completely from sight, leaving Easter Day much like any other Sunday of the year.

It is not surprising, therefore, that in the process of liturgical revision that has been a feature of most western Christian traditions in the second half of the twentieth century, the liturgies of Lent, Holy Week, and the Easter season have undergone quite a major refashioning in the hope of recapturing some of the spirit of the early centuries, as John Melloh’s essay illustrates with regard to the Roman Catholic Church, which pioneered this change. Yet, the results have not been an altogether unqualified success. The gradual and unplanned evolution of the various components of these seasons in the course of history has left several points of tension that current revisions have not resolved. Should we, for example, think of Holy Week as a distinct liturgical unit in its own right—as the equivalent Great Week is in eastern traditions—or should we view Lent as leading directly to the triduum? Indeed, how far is the triduum itself to be celebrated as a unity, and how far as a series of distinct units? Can the Easter vigil ever really be restored as the heart of the Christian year, especially when in many countries today the Easter weekend has become for so many people an occasion for a short vacation rather than a time to spend in intense religious activity in one’s own parish community? And is it realistic—rather than just a liturgical enthusiast’s fantasy—to think of restoring fifty days of paschal rejoicing in congregations that are already tiring of singing Easter hymns by the second Sunday in the season? In other words, has the notion of sacred time as such become so foreign to modern people that it must be replaced by a series of individual colorful liturgical events, from which—as from a menu—worshipers may pick and choose those that appeal to them and discard the rest?

Besides these broad questions, there are also specific issues with regard to Christianity’s relationship with Judaism that also remain unresolved. The tendency already present in the gospel narratives to attribute the blame for the death of Jesus to his Jewish opponents rather than to the Roman authorities was magnified in many elements of the Holy Week liturgies that developed later, and in the para-liturgical mystery plays or passion plays. While some of these have been toned down in modern practice, the legitimacy of others is still debated. Can one still sing Improperia, the Reproaches, in the Good Friday liturgy, for example? This chant contrasts God’s generosity to his people with their own disdain for God. It is argued by many that God’s people should be understood here to denote all humanity and its sinful response to God’s grace, and so there is no problem in continuing to use this ancient text. But others believe that it will nevertheless be heard as referring to the Jewish people. Similarly, the Good Friday liturgy has also traditionally prayed for the conversion of Jews to the Christian faith. Christians are divided over whether this should be retained or whether such prayers should be reworded to pray instead for the continuing fidelity of Jews to the revelation which they have received. But perhaps the greatest uncertainty surrounds the legitimacy of Christians attempting to celebrate a form of Jewish seder during Holy Week. In recent decades this practice has been enthusiastically taken up by Christians in many places in a sincere attempt to enter in a positive way into the Jewish roots of their tradition. However, as Frank Senn’s essay in volume 6 explains, while the motives may be laudable, such celebrations raise serious theological questions that demand a reconsideration of their advisability.

While these two volumes, therefore, chart the course of liturgical practices that have undergone significant mutations both in ancient times and in recent revisions, they do not mark the end of a process of change, but only another stage in a long journey. Future decades will undoubtedly see further alterations and amendments to these rites as Christians attempt both to understand their own past more clearly and to relate more effectively to the world in which they now find themselves.

NOTES

1. See Kenneth W. Stevenson, The Ceremonies of Light—Their Shape and Function in the Paschal Vigil Liturgy, Ephemerides Liturgicae 99 (1985): 175 ff.; On Keeping Holy Week, Theology 89 (1986): 32 ff.; and Jerusalem Revisited: The Liturgical Meaning of Holy Week (Washington, D.C., 1988), pp. 9 ff.

2. See also R. A. Markus, How on Earth Could Places Become Holy? Origins of the Christian Idea of Holy Places, Journal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1994): 257–71.

The Passover Meal in Jewish Tradition

LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN

The history of Easter, as Paul Bradshaw’s opening essay indicates, can most easily be charted as an exercise in plotting the parameters of sacred time. That has not been the case with the parallel Jewish instance of Passover. To be sure, the Passover season attracted its preparatory period and its aftermath (and these are chronicled in volume 6 of this series), but the predominant focus of Passover celebration remained the festive family meal with which the festival begins: the Passover eve seder. Scholarly investigation has largely ignored the flow of Jewish time comparable to the Christian analysis of the Easter season. But a great deal has been written on the origins of the seder in late antiquity and its evolution ever since. My remarks here introduce the essays in volumes 5 and 6 that deal with the seder; I postpone to volume 6 my consideration of the essays that deal specifically with the structuring of sacred time in the Jewish tradition.

Because the topic of the seder is so constrained, and because Jewish scholarship attending to it has been so tiny, compared to Christian research on the many facets of Easter, it is relatively easy to say what we now think we know about the subject, and to offer a context within which the essays that follow may be understood. The modern study of the seder precedes recent decades, but our current views are largely the accomplishment of the last half century, so that we need not dig deeply into the rarities of library archives in order to get a firm grasp on our subject. Although consensus exists on many things, certain issues remain outstanding and are the topic of further essays in these two volumes.

These larger issues resolve themselves into a fairly modest list.

Origins

How did the seder and the Haggadah come into being? The two are intertwined but not identical, since the seder (as ritualized meal) is distinct from the Haggadah (the liturgical script that accompanies it). The seder came first.

The seder is almost certainly related to the Greco-Roman festive meal known as a symposium. The practice is known best, perhaps, as the title of a Platonic dialogue, but it has its own lengthy evolution throughout the Greco-Roman era. We owe this insight primarily to S. [Sigmund] Stein’s influential article of 1957. Stein accepted Plutarch’s definition of a symposium as a banquet followed by a communion of serious and mirthful entertainment, discourse and actions.¹ The seder is a rabbinic symposium, its topic of discourse being the Exodus.

Following Stein, most scholars have assumed the existence of the symposium meal in rabbinic circles, not just for the seder but for festivals in general, the seder being just a special case, for which the Haggadah as liturgical script was developed. As we now have it, the seder looks less like a symposium than we might expect—the meal occurs at the end of the proceedings rather than at the beginning, for instance. But the origin of the seder in the tableship rites of late antiquity is rather firmly established. In 1970, for example, Gordon J. Bahr tried to unravel the eucharistic words of Jesus by exploring the state of the Jewish symposium at the time, seeing Jesus’ charge to his disciples against the backdrop of the Mishnah’s rules for sacred meals.²

Stein’s thesis was challenged by Baruch Bokser. In a line of reasoning that he traced back through Henry Fischel to Morton Smith, Bokser refused to see the seder as just a Jewish symposium. He asked whether the Hellenistic elements of the Passover evening rite determined its character [or whether] the editor of the Mishnah and his sources were aware of the similarities but strove to differentiate between the Jewish rite and the other types of banquets so as to maintain the distinctive character of the Passover celebration.³ Bokser argued that casting the seder as a symposium glosses over its uniqueness as a distinctive religious response to the loss of the Temple in 70. But Bokser’s critique did not become normative, and Bokser himself died an untimely death. He did not live to see the plethora of more recent studies on the symposium that provide clearer evidence of the effect the symposium had on the seder’s beginnings.

Part 1 of volume 5 opens, therefore, with Blake Leyerle’s summary of what we now know about Greco-Roman symposia. Besides providing the necessary background against which to determine the seder’s origins, Leyerle evaluates specifically such issues as the status of women at these banquets and the precise order of the ceremonies. The following essay by Joseph Tabory concludes that the seder was indeed a symposium originally. Tabory traces a three-fold development of the symposium, arguing that the seder emerged out of the second and third versions (after the Temple’s destruction in 70), and interpreting many of the Haggadah’s passages against the backdrop of symposium practice at the time.

The Chavurah

Seeing the seder as a symposium has underscored the obvious but not always appreciated aspect of Judaism as a religion celebrated at table. The seder was no mere anomaly. Spirituality at meals is crucial elsewhere, especially within the institution known as a chavurah (pl. chavurot).

Investigation of the chavurah began in the 1960s and 1970s, prompted not only by the interest in the seder as symposium, but also by the counter-culture of the time, in which young Jews, especially, were leaving synagogues and founding radically democratized institutions that they called chavurot.⁴ Their interest was sparked by the possibility that earlier versions of the same thing might have abounded. Rabbinic chavurot differed from the counter-cultural groups of the 1960s, but the name was the same, and the common terminology helped fuel scholarship that ultimately revised our view of rabbinic society, by taking seriously the aspect of table spirituality.

Instead of seeing the Rabbis engaged primarily in synagogues, we learned to see them occupied with a dual ritual focus: study, on one hand, and mealtime rites, on the other. No one should have been surprised. Table spirituality is central to the Gospels, after all. Moreover, a whole chapter (chapter 8) of B’rakhot (the Mishnah’s tractate on prayer) is devoted to mealtime matters debated by Hillelites and Shammaites, the two rabbinic schools of thought that dominated the first century, and two more of its chapters (chapters 6 and 7) provide detail regarding table blessings before and after eating. This is an enormous allotment of space, given the fact that the Sh’ma and its Blessings and the T’fillah (the two central rubrics of the synagogue service) are given only five chapters between the two of them. The Mishnah thus accords banquet rules as much attention as it does these two statutory synagogue rubrics.⁵ Table prayer was obviously central to rabbinic religion, and the seder was a particular example of table prayer. The chavurah was the milieu in which table prayer proceeded, just as the synagogue (eventually) became the place where the public liturgy of the hours took place.

I say eventually because, as it happens, even as we have affirmed the significance of the chavurah, we have lowered our assessment of the synagogue as a first-century place for prayer. Again, an objective reading of the Mishnah tells the tale. It mentions the synagogue only sparingly (forbidding shortcuts through its precincts, for instance), and without regard to prayer. New Testament evidence pictures Jesus and Paul in synagogues frequently, but again, not praying there. Then too, there is the evidence from funerary and synagogue inscriptions. The former mention synagogues frequently, but not usually in connection with Rabbis, and the latter, which appear on synagogues themselves, rarely include Rabbis on their lists of prominent members. A first-century Greek inscription, for instance, denotes a synagogue built by Theodotus, son of Vettenus, a priest and synagogue president—but apparently not a Rabbi. His synagogue was to be a place where guests might stay the night and where Torah would be taught; absent from his list of functions is prayer. More striking still are inscriptions describing women as prominent synagogue leaders, including presidents⁶—hardly what one would expect of a rabbinic institution, given the Rabbis’ view of women as marginal to communal religious life. The Dura-Europos Synagogue from the Greco-Roman Diaspora is completely unpredictable from rabbinic legislation, not to mention the host of other synagogues we are unearthing which refuse to obey such rabbinic rules as the way they should face.⁷ Lee Levine thus concludes that the synagogue became central for the Rabbis only from the third century on.⁸ It may have functioned as a waystation for guests, a place for study, and a meeting house—but it did not house a prayer service originally.

On the other hand, the Mishnah returns to chavurah meals and membership rules regularly. Nowadays, with the synagogue liturgy for festivals so well established, the seder seems to be a mere prelude to the larger liturgy of public synagogue prayer, but that is not the way it once was. The Mishnah does know daily public prayer for rabbinic circles, but how developed it was, and how important it was relative to the table worship of the seder, is hard to say. Stefan Reif thinks prayer in general was a poor second to Torah study as the liturgy or service of the Rabbis,⁹ and within the class of prayer as opposed to study, table ritual was certainly primary. A distinguishing feature of the particular table ritual of the seder is that it combined prayer and study in ways that often make it hard to distinguish one from the other. Our two volumes on Passover and Easter have little to say about the synagogue liturgy. They concentrate instead on the seder and its attendant ritual script, the Passover Haggadah.

The Haggadah: From Oral Origins to Canonized Text

The broad outline of the seder’s origins is fairly well established. As Tabory explains, at least one version of the standard second-century symposium provided for learned discussion following a meal, the foods for which prompted the conversation. Originally, then, the seder meal was preceded by no liturgy other than the standard blessings with which foods are normally consumed, and the equally usual mealtime benediction for inaugurating sacred time (the Kiddush, or, more fully, K’dushat Hayom, the prayer announcing the Sanctification of the Day).

Following some currents in ritual studies, we may conceptualize the seder as sacred theater, seeing these introductory prayers (1) as the setting of the stage, the stage itself being the table and special foods on which the company dined. The drama opened with (2) a rhetorical question or questions about the food, designed to stimulate (3) a free-flowing account of the Exodus as response. The evening ended with (4) praise of God in the form of