Passover and Easter

Description

"In these companion volumes of essays, Jewish and Christian liturgical scholars examine, from historical, theological, and aesthetic perspectives, the practices and intricate interrelationships of Passover and Easter. Several essays lament the antisemitism that has infected the Easter liturgy, and one-Israel Yuval's 'Easter and Passover as Early Jewish-Christian Dialogue'-pushes beyond the oft-told tale of Jewish-Christian enmity to explore ways the development of worship patterns of the two faiths have influenced one another. Both volumes are required purchases for libraries supporting liturgical studies. Volume 5 would also be a good choice for broader collections in the history of Judaism and Christianity." -Choice

Sujets

• Rituals
• Jewish Studies
• Philosophie et théologie
• Religión
• Judaism
• Religion
• Practice

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 février 2000
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268159139
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

PASSOVER AND EASTER
TWO LITURGICAL TRADITIONS
Volume 5
Passover and Easter
Origin and History to Modern Times
Edited by P AUL F. B RADSHAW and L AWRENCE A. H OFFMAN
University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, IN 46556 All Rights Reserved
Copyright 1999 by University of Notre Dame Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Passover and Easter : origin and history to modern times/ edited by Paul F. Bradshaw and Lawrence A. Hoffman. p. cm. - (Two liturgical traditions ; v. 5) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-268-03857-0 (cloth : alk. paper). - ISBN 0-268-03859-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Easter-History. 2. Passover-History. 3. Judaism-Relations-Christianity. 4. Christianity and other religions-Judaism. I. Bradshaw, Paul F. II. Hoffman, Lawrence A., 1942- . III. Series. BV55.P275 1999 263 .93 09-dc21 98-41342
The author and publisher thank Tarbiz for permission to use Israel J. Yuval s Easter and Passover As Early Jewish-Christian Dialogue, an expanded version of which appeared originally in Hebrew in Tarbiz 65, no. 1 (October/November 1995). The Magnes Press, The Hebrew University 1995.
eISBN 9780268159139
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Contents
Abbreviations
Introductory Overviews
Easter in Christian Tradition
Paul F. Bradshaw
The Passover Meal in Jewish Tradition
Lawrence A. Hoffman
PART 1 ORIGINS IN ANTIQUITY
Meal Customs in the Greco-Roman World
Blake Leyerle
Towards a History of the Paschal Meal
Joseph Tabory
The Origins of Easter
Paul F. Bradshaw
Easter and Passover As Early Jewish-Christian Dialogue
Israel J. Yuval
PART 2 MEDIEVAL DEVELOPMENTS
Passover in the Middle Ages
Israel J. Yuval
Holy Week and Easter in the Middle Ages
Joanne M. Pierce
PART 3 MODERN TRANSFORMATIONS
The Modern Transformation of the Ancient Passover Haggadah
Carole B. Balin
Revising Holy Week and Easter Rites
John Allyn Melloh
Contributors
Index
Abbreviations
AAS
Acta Apostolicae Sedis
AJS Review
Association of Jewish Studies Review
CIL
Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum
HTR
Harvard Theological Review
HUCA
Hebrew Union College Annual
JBL
Journal of Biblical Literature
JJS
Journal of Jewish Studies
JQR
Jewish Quarterly Review
PG
Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca, ed. J. P. Migne
REJ
Revue des tudes Juives
Easter in Christian Tradition
P AUL F. B RADSHAW
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