i am sparticus: Part Two: In Which We Find Out That Stealing Other People's Festivals Scores Low On The Novelty Scale For Christians

Part Two: In Which We Find Out That Stealing Other People's Festivals Scores Low On The Novelty Scale For Christians

By far and away the most celebrated Christian festival in the early church was Easter. The dating of the current Easter festivities is another series of (far less interesting) posts but in the early church it was initially celebrated at the same time as the Jewish festival of Passover (March / Aprilish depending on the Moon). In fact, in all probability the first Christians, who were for the vast majority Jews, still continued to celebrate Passover but celebrated it in the light of what Christ has done. They saw Christ's death and resurrection as the fulfilment of everything celebrated at Passover and celebrated it accordingly. This would probably have happened the first year after Jesus's death. Only a year old and already Christians are stealing other religions' festivals! You'd probably want to argue that reinterpreting a Jewish festival so as to fit with the modern developments in God's plan to save the world isn't the same as stealing a Pagan festival and you'd certainly be right in doing so. However that argument doesn't stand with the next festival that Christians are about to steal.

For the first hundred odd years the dates Christians celebrated were as follows. Passover, Pentecost, probably for some at least the Feast of Booths and the Day of Atonement (those are all Jewish festivals) and then the dates of the death of various Apostles and Martyrs. So no real shortage of occasions to take the day off work. However by the second century on the 6th (or possibly 10th) of January a group of people in Egypt had started to celebrate a new and highly exciting festival, the festival of Epiphany. Epiphany is a bit of an odd festival in that it eventually came to remember two unrelated things; the visitation of the Wise Men to Jesus (age 3ish) and Jesus's baptism (age 27ish), initially though it was just Jesus baptism that was remembered. The people who started celebrating epiphany were a heretical Christian sect led by a Gnostic teacher called Basilides who was based in Alexandria, Egypt. I call the group heretical because they believed that Jesus Christ wasn't both one hundred percent man and one hundred percent God but rather God living inside a human body. God the body-snatcher as opposed to God the Son. They believed that Jesus was not God from birth but rather that God came down to earth and took over Jesus's body at Jesus's baptism. So for them, the celebration of Epiphany became a rather important date, being the date that God came down to earth and was made manifest (the root Greek word that gives us Epiphany, epiphaneia, means 'appearing'). Obviously a whole bunch of people didn't like this idea, but those people will have to wait. What's relevant now is why people were celebrating Epiphany on the 6th of January. The reason for this is that January 6th was a very pagan festival, with at least three different Pagan celebrations, included one in which a virgin gave birth, occurring on it. On the night before the 6th the Nile was supposed to gain miraculous powers. This seemed like a suitable time to stand up and proclaim that the real God had already come down to earth and that's what the followers of Basilides did, even if they got the nature of His coming down to earth very wrong.

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