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  • The Origins of Feasts, Fasts, and Seasons in Early Christianity
  • Alden A. Mosshammer
The Origins of Feasts, Fasts, and Seasons in Early Christianity. By Paul F. Bradshaw and Maxwell E. Johnson. [Alcuin Club Collections, 86.] (Collegeville, MN: A Pueblo Book, Liturgical Press. 2011. Pp. xvi, 222. $29.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-814-66244-1.)

Paul Bradshaw and Maxwell Johnson, both professors of liturgy at the University of Notre Dame, here provide an excellent introduction to recent [End Page 336]scholarship on early Christian feasts, fasts, and seasons. The book is also readily accessible to nonspecialists interested in these topics. The twenty chapters cover the whole range of the field from the emergence of Sunday as a weekly celebration of the coming Parousiato the beginnings of Marian worship at an earlier date than has often been assumed. The authors take positions, where evidence and argument permit, while judiciously leaving undecided matters that remain controversial.

The authors persuasively overthrow many of the conclusions of an earlier generation of scholars, some of which remain deeply embedded in popular belief. Sunday originates not as a weekly memorial of the Resurrection, but as a celebration of "the Lord's Day," in an eschatological sense. The annual observance of the Passion on the date of the Passover full moon (Quartodecimanism) is the oldest Christian practice, not a later Judaizing innovation. Annual celebration of the Resurrection on the Sunday after Passover grew out of Quartodecimanism, but not until Sunday itself had taken on a paschal significance.

Lent originates not as a gradual extension of the two days of fasting before Easter, but from a three-week period of preparation for baptism associated with several seasons of the year. The tradition of a forty days' fast was originally an imitation of Jesus's forty days in the wilderness and associated, especially at Alexandria, with the feast of the Epiphany.

The rapid acceptance in the fourth century of December 25 as a separate feast of the Nativity was theologically motivated. The feast of Epiphany or Theophany was so named because Jesus appeared as Son of God at his baptism. These "adoptionist" overtones became inappropriate in the context of fourth-century trinitarian theology.

The chapters on "Initiation at Easter" and "The First Martyrs and Saints" are especially enlightening. Because baptism required a preparatory period of fasting and fasting was prohibited on Saturday, except before Easter, Easter became an appropriate time for initiation. Baptism at the Easter Vigil is well attested in North Africa and Milan, but not as universal as has sometimes been supposed. Whereas earlier scholars sometimes relegated the cult of martyrs to the realm of superstition, more recent studies have rediscovered the centrality of such worship to ordinary Christian experience. As the age of persecution passed, veneration was extended to noteworthy ascetics, bishops, and others.

In a few instances, overreliance on secondary sources has left unchallenged the outdated findings of an earlier generation of scholars. The authors repeat, for example (p. 59), the unfounded assumption that differences between Rome and Alexandria on the date of the equinox led to differences in their Paschal calculations. Although March 25 was the traditional date of the equinox in the Roman calendar, the Roman cycle of eighty-four years used [End Page 337]in the fourth and fifth centuries set March 22 as the earliest permissible date for Easter and thus implicitly accepted the Alexandrian date of March 21 for the equinox.

This and a few (very few) other minor errors neither vitiate the authors' conclusions nor detract from the general usefulness of this highly informative book.

Alden A. Mosshammer
University of California, San Diego

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