The original date of EasterThe Christian celebration of Easter draws its origins from the Jewish or
biblical Passover, of which the date was the 14th of thefirst month, identified
by all Jews as Nisan, in the spring. The earliest followers of Jesus celebrated
this and all other biblical festivals in the same way as all other Jews (since as is
now widely acknowledged, the early Christian movement was, in its origins,
fundamentally Jewish), but very early on—I would venture to surmise, already
at thefirst Passover after the Crucifixion—the festival was invested with a
distinctive,‘Christian’new meaning: it became the anniversary and commem-
oration of the Passion of Jesus. This new interpretation of the festival gradually
drew away the Christian Easter from the Jewish Passover, eventually leading,
by the later second century, to Melito of Sardis’composition of an anti-Jewish
polemic centred on the meaning of the Christian Easter, thePeri Pascha.^59
But in spite of this highly critical process of differentiation between Jewish
and Christian interpretations of the festival, which presumably led also to the
development of distinct Jewish and Christian rituals, the name (pascha) and
date of the festival appear to have remained, at least through most of thefirst
two centuries of the Christian Era, essentially the same.^60 This means, above
all, that the date of Easter remained lunar. Although evidence is totally lacking
for this period, it seems reasonable to assume that many Christians continued
celebrating Easter on the same day as the Jews, as thefirst followers of Jesus
had done.^61 Melito’s complete silence on the question seems to indicate that
the date of Easter was not, at least to him, a marker of Christian distinctiveness
which could have been used as part of his anti-Jewish polemic.
But whether this can be generalized to all Christians of the first two
centuries is doubtful. As we shall soon see, it is likely that already in Melito’s
period the Church of Rome celebrated Easter on a slightly different date from
the Jews (and therefore from Melito), and further variety may well have
existed elsewhere. However, there is no evidence that in this period the date
of Easter constituted within Christianity a polemical issue. Even those Chris-
tians who used the same date as the Jews were bound to differ from one
another, since—as has been pointed out above—the Jews themselves, from one
(^59) See Hall (1979); the work is tentatively dated to the 160sCE(pp. xxi f.). I shall use the
English name‘Easter’to refer specifically to the Christian festival, although ancient Greek and
Latin sources generally use the same name,Pascha, for both the Jewish and the Christian
festivals.
(^60) E. Schwartz (1905) 6–7; C.W. Jones (1943) 8–9; Simon (1986) 310–22.
(^61) The disagreement between the Synoptic Gospels and John over the date of the Crucifixion
has been explained by several scholars (e.g. Jaubert 1957a)asreflecting the use of different
calendars, or even as due to Jesus and his followers’using a different calendar from that of the
Temple and other Jews. This theory, however, is implausible, because the use of a different
calendar by early Christians would surely have become an explicit polemical issue against other
Jews, yet there is no evidence of this whatsoever.
Sectarianism andHeresy 381