Terminology
Passion Week is, of course, called Holy Week in the West,
and is commonly referred to as ‘Great and Holy Week’ in the East as well.
Under the pre-1969 Roman calendar and in the Episcopal
Church in the United States until 1979, Passion Week once meant (and still does
in the Church of England and some other places in the Anglican Communion) the
week beginning with what was then Passion Sunday, the fifth Sunday of
Lent. In fact, under the older forms,
the entire two-week period leading up to Easter was the season of Passiontide,
which was comprised of Passion Week and Easter Week.
In the Roman and Episcopal churches, the Sunday of Holy Week
is called Palm Sunday: the Sunday of the Passion, and Holy Week is in some
quarters referred to as Passion Week.
Some churches count Passion Week as separate from Lent, others as the
last week of Lent. The Eastern churches
close out Lent with Lazarus Saturday, the day before Palm Sunday.
Basic structure
In Eastern churches, Lazarus Saturday serves as the
end-point for Lent and the dawn of the coming Passion Week.
Palm Sunday begins Passion Week proper. The lessons and observances for Monday,
Tuesday, and Wednesday vary.
The fourth day of Passion Week is often called Spy Wednesday
because since the Early Middle Ages, this was the day of the week of the
Passion upon which Jesus was supposedly betrayed.
Maundy Thursday commemorates the Last Supper, the Agony in
the Garden, and the Arrest.
Good Friday commemorates the Trial, the Crucifixion, and the
Burial.
In the Hebrew calendar, the event of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday took place on the same day.
In the Hebrew calendar, the event of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday took place on the same day.
Holy Saturday, which the Copts call Joyous Saturday and
Saturday of Lights and other Easterners call the Great Sabbath, is mostly a day
of rest and of preparation for Pashca.
Developmental history
The Church had adopted the Lenten, or Quadragesima, fast in
the second century, but not yet the Passion Week. The Doctrina
duodecim Apostolorum, the surviving church order from this century,
mentioning only the ‘Day of the Passion’ and the ‘Day of the Resurrection’.
By the first half of the third century, Passion Week was
firmly established, even what’s now called the Easter or Paschal Triduum,
giving the names ‘Friday of the Passion’, ‘Sabbath of the Annunciation’, and ‘Sunday of
the Resurrection’.
Relation to Christmas and calendar
The designation for Saturday as the ‘Sabbath of the
Annunciation’ means exactly what is sounds like; the day upon which the
Annunciation took place. In ancient
Jewish tradition, great men were thought to have lived full years, dying on the
same day they were born or conceived.
Thus, at least in third century Syria, the Annunciation was fixed on the
day after the Passion.
This was around the time that Pascha was fixed in much of
Christendom on the first Sunday after the spring equinox, then 25 March rather
than the current date. That is why the
feast of the Nativity, eclipsed for centuries by Epiphany, came to be on 25
December, and, coincidentally, the winter solstice, which then was 25 December
instead of the 21st.
Passion Week itinerary, 3rd century
According to the Didascalia
Apostolorum, an ancient church order of about 230 CE, in the third century the
events of the original Passion Week, and this is the core subject here,
followed a much different schedule than commonly believed in the twenty-first
century. The description is in Chapter
21.
Palm Sunday – Entry into Jerusalem
Passion Monday – Cleansing of the
Temple, the Betrayal
Passion Tuesday – Passover; Last
Supper Arrest on the Mount of Olives
Passion Wednesday – Imprisonment
at the house of “Cepha the High Priest”
Passion Thursday – Imprisonment at
Fortress Antonia
Friday of the Passion – Trial, Crucifixion,
Death, Burial
Sabbath of the Annunciation
Sunday of the Resurrection
Significance and implications
The sequence and timing of events here is much different
than that in the gospels as we have them today.
The proximity of the Arrest to the Cleansing of the Temple is much more
likely than the timeline of the Gospel of
Matthew and the Gospel of Luke,
which place the Entry and Cleansing on the first day, then have Jesus hanging
out in the temple teaching the rest of the week unmolested. The timing of the Cleansing given above
follows the Gospel of Mark.
Assuming Jesus was indeed crucified, he suffered a death
meted out only to non-citizen political rebels.
The company his suffered his fate among reinforce that, ‘lestai’ being a
Greek word in the first century for what today we would call ‘terrorist’.
The Cleansing of the Temple as described could only have
taken place in the Royal Stoa, which was where the money-changers and animals
sellers had their tables and booth; the Royal Stoa was also the meeting place
of the Great Sanhedrin, which was presided over by the Nasi (not the High Priest),
and since at this time overall supervision of the Temple compound came directly
under the prefect Pontius Pilatus, an attack on the Royal Stoa was an attack on
Rome.
Were it not for the riot which took place that the same
feast that year, crucifixion may have been avoided. Josephus writes that at the same feast, a
large mob gathered outside Pilate’s Jerusalem headquarters to protest money
having been taken from the Temple treasury to pay for building the new aqueduct
(“give unto Caesar”). The mob rioted,
resulting in possibly scores or even hundreds of Jewish deaths along with a
number of Roman soldiers.
Since this timeline does not sync up with that of the
gospels as we have them today, some may dismiss it out-of-hand as made up by
the compiler(s) of the Didascalia. But since we know beyond the shadow of a
doubt of many words, phrases, and entire
passages have been redacted or interpolated in all the books, it is possible
that this is the original timeline. I
can cite several major interpolations right off the top of my head: (1) the Pericope Adulterae in the Gospel of John; (2) the nativity story
at the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew,
(3) the entire passages on the conceptions and births of both John the Baptist
and Jesus Chrestos in the Gospel of Luke; (4) and (5), the fictional genealogies
in Matthew and Luke; (6) the additional post-Resurrection encounters in John; (7) and the longer ending of Mark.
None of those passages exist in the earliest copies of any of the
gospels.
The Synoptics make the mistake, Matthew and Luke probably
following Mark, mistakenly equate the first day of Matzot with
Pesach, which gives away their Diaspora origin.
Pesach, or Passover, was not the day on which the seder was eaten but
the day on which the lambs were sacrificed, because under the Temple the day of
the sacrifice was what was important. John, in fact, in many respects,
demonstrates much more knowledge of first century Palestine than all three of
the others combined; for example, it does not make the mistake of combining the
two separate observances as one.
In light of the witness from the Didascalia, Christians maybe ought to revise their observances of
Passion Week, although jamming the most important events into just three days
does make it liturgically more convenient, which may be the reason the gospels
were written—or rewritten—the way that they are.
Footnote
Of further interest is the name of the High Priest, the
Cohen ha-Gadol, according to the Didasaclia (‘Cepha’), which also contradicts the
testimony of all four gospels, each of which gives the name “Caiaphas”. All four are incorrect; Jewish sources
instead name Joseph ben Caiaphas as high priest at the time and have no record
of a high priest named Caiaphas. The second
century church order Doctrina duodecim
Apostolorum even claims that Joseph the son of High Priest Caiaphas was a
secret disciple of Jesus post-Resurrection, clearly an impossibility.
The name given in the Didascalia
for the high priest is also incorrect, but is nonetheless highly interesting as
it is the Aramaic form of the name Peter.
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