Church History (Vol.1-3). J. H. Kurtz
culminating in the day of the crucifixion, Good Friday, and closing with the day of rest in the tomb. This Great Week or Passion Week was regarded as the antitype of the Old Testament Passover feast. The Old Catholic church did not, however, transfer this name to the festival of the resurrection (§ 56, 4). The day of the resurrection was rather regarded as the beginning of a new festival cycle consecrated to the glorification of the redeemer, viz. the season of Quinquagesima (πεντηκοστή), concluding with the festival of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the anniversary of the founding of the Christian church, which has now come to be known par excellence as Pentecost. The fifty intervening days were simply days of joy. There was daily communion, no fasting, only standing and not kneeling at prayer. The fortieth day, the day of the Ascension, had a special pre-eminence as a day of festal celebrations. The festival of Epiphany on 6th January originated in the East to celebrate the baptism of Christ in Jordan, as the manifestation of his Messianic rank. As yet there is nowhere any trace of the Christmas festival.—Continuation, § 56.
§ 37.2. The Paschal Controversies.—During the 2nd century, there were three different practices prevalent in regard to the observance of the Paschal festival. The Ebionite Jewish Christians (§ 28, 1) held the Paschal feast on the 14th Nisan according to the strict literal interpretation of the Old Testament precepts, maintaining also that Christ, who according to the synoptists died on the 15th, observed the Passover with his disciples on the 14th. Then again the church of Asia Minor followed another practice which was traced back to the Apostle John. Those of Asia Minor attached themselves indeed in respect of date to the Jewish festival, but gave it a Christian meaning. They let the passover alone, and pronounced the memorial of Christ’s death to be the principal thing in the festival. According to their view, based upon the fourth Gospel, Christ died upon the 14th Nisan, so that He had not during the last year of His life observed a regular Passover. On the 14th Nisan, therefore, they celebrated their Paschal festival, ending their fast at the moment of Christ’s death, three o’clock in the afternoon, and then, instead of the Jewish Passover, having an Agape with the Lord’s Supper. Those who adopted either of those two forms were at a later period called Quartodecimans or Tessareskaidekatites. Different from both of these was a third practice followed in all the West, as also in Egypt, Palestine, Pontus and Greece, which detached itself still further from the Jewish Passover. This Western usage disregarded the day of the month in order to secure the observance of the great resurrection festival on the first day of the week. The πάσχα σταυρώσιμον, then, if the 14th did not happen to be a Friday, was always celebrated on the first Friday after the 14th, and the Easter festival with the observance of the Lord’s Supper on the immediately following Sunday. The Westerns regarded the day of Christ’s death as properly a day of mourning, and only at the end of the pre-Easter fast on the day of the Resurrection introduced the celebration of the Agape and the Lord’s Supper. These divergent practices first awakened attention on the appearing of Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna at Rome in A.D. 155. The Roman bishop Anicetus referred to the tradition of the Roman Church; Polycarp laid stress upon the fact that he himself had celebrated the Paschal festival after the manner followed in Asia Minor along with the Apostle John. No common agreement was reached at this time; but, in token of their undisturbed church fellowship, Anicetus allowed Polycarp to dispense the communion in his church. Some fifteen years later a party, not distinctly particularised, obtained at Laodicea in Phrygia sanction for the Ebionite practice with strict observance of the time of the Passover, and awakened thereby a lively controversy in the church of Asia Minor, in which opposite sides were taken by the Apologists, Apollinaris and Melito (§ 30, 7). The dispute assumed more serious dimensions about A.D. 196 through the passionate proceedings of the Roman bishop Victor. Roused probably by the agitation of a Quartodeciman named Blastus then in Rome, he urged upon the most distinguished bishops of the East and West the need of holding a Synod to secure the unequivocal vindication of the Roman practice. On this account many Synods were held, which almost invariably gave a favourable verdict. Only those of Asia Minor with Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus at their head, entered a vigorous protest against the pretensions of Rome, and notwithstanding all the Roman threatenings determined to stand by their own well established custom. Victor now went the length of breaking off church fellowship with them, but this extreme procedure met with little favour. Even Irenæus expressed himself to the Gallican bishops as opposed to it.—Continuation § 56, 3.
§ 37.3. The Ecclesiastical Institution of Fasting.—The Didache gives evidence that even at so early a date, the regular fasts were religiously observed on the Dies stationum by expressly forbidding fasting “with hypocrites” (Jews and Jewish Christians, Luke xviii. 12) on Monday and Thursday, instead of the Christian practice of so observing Wednesday and Friday. The usual fast continued as a rule only till three o’clock in the afternoon (Semijejunia, Acts x. 9, 30; iii. 1). In Passion week the Saturday night, which, at other times, just like the Sunday, was excluded from the fasting period, as part of the day during which Christ lay buried, was included in the forty-hours’ fast, representing the period during which Christ lay in the grave. This was afterwards gradually lengthened out into the forty-days’ fast of Lent (Exod. xxxiv. 28; 1 Kings xix. 8; Matt. iv. 2), in which, however, the jejunium proper was limited to the Dies Stationum, and for the rest of the days only the ξηροφαγίαι, first forbidden by the Montanists (§ 40, 4), i.e. all fattening foods, such as flesh, eggs, butter, cheese, milk, etc., were abstained from.—On fasting preparatory to baptism, see § 35, 1. The Didache, c. i. 3, adds to the gospel injunction that we should pray for our persecutors (Matt. v. 44) the further counsel that we should fast for them. The meaning of the writer seems to be that we should strengthen our prayers for persecutors by fasting. Hermas, on the other hand, recommends fasting in order that we may thereby spare something for the poor; and Origen says that he read in quodam libello as ab apostolis dictum: Beatus est, qui etiam jejunat pro eo ut alat pauperem.
§ 38. The Church Buildings and the Catacombs.
The earliest certain traces of special buildings for divine worship which had been held previously in private houses of Christians are met with in Tertullian about the end of the 2nd century. In Diocletian’s time Nicomedia became a royal residence and hard by the emperor’s palace a beautiful church proudly reared its head (§ 22, 6), and even in the beginning of the 3rd century Rome had forty churches. We know little about the form and arrangement of these churches. Tertullian and Cyprian speak of an altar or table for the preparation of the Lord’s supper and a desk for the reading, and in the Apostolic Constitutions it is required that the building should be oblong in shape. The wide-spread tradition that in times of sore persecution the worshippers betook themselves to the Catacombs is evidently inconsistent with the limited space which these afforded. On the other hand, the painter whose works, by a decree of a Spanish Council in A.D. 306, were banished from the churches, found here a suitable place for the practice of sacred art.
§ 38.1. The Catacombs.—The Christian burying places were generally called κοιμητήρια, Dormitoria. They were laid out sometimes in the open fields (Areæ), sometimes, where the district was suitable for that, hewn out in the rock (κρύπται, crypts). This latter term was, by the middle of the 4th century, quite interchangeable with the name Catacumbæ, (κατὰ κύμβας=in the caves). The custom of laying the dead in natural or rock-hewn caves was familiar to pagan antiquity, especially in the East. But the recesses used for this purpose were only private or family vaults. Their growth into catacombs or subterranean necropolises for larger companies bound together by their one religion without distinctions of rank (Gal. iii. 28), first arose on Christian soil from a consciousness that their fellowship transcended death and the grave. For the accomplishment of this difficult and costly undertaking, Christian burial societies were formed after the pattern of similar institutions of paganism (§ 17, 3). Specially numerous and extensive necropolises have been found laid out in the immediate neighbourhood of Rome. But also in Malta, in Naples, Syracuse, Palermo, and other cities, this mode of sepulchre found favour. The Roman catacombs, of which in the hilly district round about the eternal city fifty-eight have been counted in fourteen different highways, are almost all laid out in the white porous tufa stone which is there so abundant, and useful neither for building nor for mortar. It is