Old vs. New Calendar?

[ialmisry]

It is sad that AB Meletios forced this New Calendar on the peoples.

Why did he have to use the FORCE OF LAW?

What do you think Julius used? (although I'm against how the New Calendar was implemented in many-but not all-places).

Btw, Meletios didn't have the force of law, or Church for that matter, when the New Calendar was adopted.

I suppose that when Caesar's governors ran into provincials who wanted to keep the old Egyptian Calendar, they simply dispatched a few surly legionnaires to set the dissidents on the right path!  

No, just the tax collectors (as in any agrarian state, nature had a nice way of forcing the need of a correct calendar on the state).  Although Egypt stands out in that it had less to do with what the sun was doing (it's always around) than what the Nile was doing-until the 1960's.

[podkarpatska]

It is sad that AB Meletios forced this New Calendar on the peoples.

Why did he have to use the FORCE OF LAW?

What do you think Julius used? (although I'm against how the New Calendar was implemented in many-but not all-places).

Btw, Meletios didn't have the force of law, or Church for that matter, when the New Calendar was adopted.

I suppose that when Caesar's governors ran into provincials who wanted to keep the old Egyptian Calendar, they simply dispatched a few surly legionnaires to set the dissidents on the right path!  

No, just the tax collectors (as in any agrarian state, nature had a nice way of forcing the need of a correct calendar on the state).  Although Egypt stands out in that it had less to do with what the sun was doing (it's always around) than what the Nile was doing-until the 1960's.

Another point against the use of the erroneous Julian for planting cycles. I know we are not agrarian societies for the most part, but at the time of the Fathers, the faithful mostly were living in agrarian cultures - continuing as such through the Industrial Revolution and the mid-19th century for goodness sake.

To me, the only solid argument against the new calendar is the manner in which it came to be used..although I submit, but for the Revolution in Russia, we would not be having much of this discussion today...there would surely have been schisms over the calendar, but for the most part the Orthodox world would be following the Revised Julian Calendar.

Again, it should not divide us on matters of faith! I will follow where my parish and where my bishops tell me to go over this issue and not use it as a source of further division on the Body of Christ. My ancestors saw enough of schism and division and blood feuds to last in the collective memory of their descendants for many generations.

[Mockingbird]

I suppose that when Caesar's governors ran into provincials who wanted to keep the old Egyptian Calendar, they simply dispatched a few surly legionnaires to set the dissidents on the right path!  

No, just the tax collectors (as in any agrarian state, nature had a nice way of forcing the need of a correct calendar on the state).  Although Egypt stands out in that it had less to do with what the sun was doing (it's always around) than what the Nile was doing-until the 1960's.

Many folk in antiquity held the ideal that the calendar should track the tropical year.  The Egyptians were not among them.  The Egyptians had used their 365-day calendar, without intercalations, for centuries without inconvenience.  The priests were aware of the difference between their calendar year and the tropical year, and incorporated it into their predictions of when the Nile would flood.

In the time of the Ptolemies a proposal was put forth (the Canopus Decree) to intercalate a day every four years and so stabilize the calendar's relationship to the seasons, but this proposal was not adopted at the time.  Only after Julius's reform did the Egyptian calendar adopt this approach.  But the old-Egyptian calendar continued to be used for some purposes.  Claudius Ptolemy used it in his computations, for example. 

We hold to the idea that the calendar should align with the tropical year because the Romans and the Jews did.  When Julius reformed the calendar, he set it up so that the Spring equinox would come near its traditional Roman date of March 25.   Whatever may have been the case before the exile, in postexilic Judea the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread were expected to come at the time of the winter-barley harvest, and sufficiently before the winter-wheat harvest that the wheat would not be ruined by a hailstorm (Exodus 9.31).  Josephus wrote that these festivals occured when the sun is "in Aries"--in modern terms, this is when the sun has an ecliptic longitude between zero and thirty degrees.  This association of Passover/Matzoth with the Spring season was carried over into Christianity, and is a working presupposition for all the 3rd-4th century writers on the Paschalion.  Those old-calendar boosters who hold to the view that astronomical and meterological accuracy were never intended by those who set up the Easter cycles are wrong.   

[ialmisry]

I suppose that when Caesar's governors ran into provincials who wanted to keep the old Egyptian Calendar, they simply dispatched a few surly legionnaires to set the dissidents on the right path!  

No, just the tax collectors (as in any agrarian state, nature had a nice way of forcing the need of a correct calendar on the state).  Although Egypt stands out in that it had less to do with what the sun was doing (it's always around) than what the Nile was doing-until the 1960's.

Many folk in antiquity held the ideal that the calendar should track the tropical year.  The Egyptians were not among them.  The Egyptians had used their 365-day calendar, without intercalations, for centuries without inconvenience.  The priests were aware of the difference between their calendar year and the tropical year, and incorporated it into their predictions of when the Nile would flood.

Actually no: they would date things to both the calendar year and tropical year, which is why we can have the exact date on events from the Middle Kingdom (the discrepancy was dealt with) on.

Most Egyptians went by the lunar calendar, leaving it to the hierarchy/monarchy to correct the dates as they went along.

In the time of the Ptolemies a proposal was put forth (the Canopus Decree) to intercalate a day every four years and so stabilize the calendar's relationship to the seasons, but this proposal was not adopted at the time.  Only after Julius's reform did the Egyptian calendar adopt this approach.  But the old-Egyptian calendar continued to be used for some purposes.  Claudius Ptolemy used it in his computations, for example.

 
Yes, Old Calendarism isn't new under the sun.

We hold to the idea that the calendar should align with the tropical year because the Romans and the Jews did.  When Julius reformed the calendar, he set it up so that the Spring equinox would come near its traditional Roman date of March 25.   Whatever may have been the case before the exile, in postexilic Judea the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread were expected to come at the time of the winter-barley harvest, and sufficiently before the winter-wheat harvest that the wheat would not be ruined by a hailstorm (Exodus 9.31).  Josephus wrote that these festivals occured when the sun is "in Aries"--in modern terms, this is when the sun has an ecliptic longitude between zero and thirty degrees.  This association of Passover/Matzoth with the Spring season was carried over into Christianity, and is a working presupposition for all the 3rd-4th century writers on the Paschalion.  Those old-calendar boosters who hold to the view that astronomical and meterological accuracy were never intended by those who set up the Easter cycles are wrong.   

Indeed.  In Constantine's letter from Nicea (or his speech, I don't recall which) he talks about "the season," and its accuracy.

[ialmisry]

I imagine you'll probably come back with the canard that the "revised Julian" is not the Gregorian.

Well, if one doesn't want to deal with the facts, we can't do much for you.

I already explained the facts earlier, but you are too obtuse to recognize them.

BLAH, BLAH, BLAH!!! Do you really expect that people are going to change their minds in response to opinions masqueraded as facts by an anonymous yahoo on an Internet discussion forum?

PeterTheAleut is not your real name, PtA. This is pot calling the kettle black!
Dr. Jonathan Gress is a real person, not an anonymous yahoo.

And yet he's still masquerading his opinions as facts. I don't expect to change peoples' minds when I do that. What makes Jonathan think he can expect to change peoples' minds when he does that?

It is a fact that the "revised Julian" is more similar to the Gregorian than to the Julian. No one has offered any evidence to the contrary.

The Gregorian begins on January 1, both the Revised Julian and Old Calendar start on their own September 1 (the Old Calendar, of course, being off 13 days now).

Happy now?

[Mockingbird]

Many folk in antiquity held the ideal that the calendar should track the tropical year.  The Egyptians were not among them.  The Egyptians had used their 365-day calendar, without intercalations, for centuries without inconvenience.  The priests were aware of the difference between their calendar year and the tropical year, and incorporated it into their predictions of when the Nile would flood.

Actually no: they would date things to both the calendar year and tropical year, which is why we can have the exact date on events from the Middle Kingdom (the discrepancy was dealt with) on.

Most Egyptians went by the lunar calendar, leaving it to the hierarchy/monarchy to correct the dates as they went along.

Actually, no.  The theory of a 365 1/4-day Egyptian "Sothic" calendar is based on a highly speculative interpretation of a single document from the time of Amenhotep I, the so-called Ebers calendar.  Current scholarly fashion, I think, favors an alternative highly speculative interpretation of this document.   

Individual temples may have had lunar calendars, and individual villages and individual peasants may have scheduled some of their activities by the phases of the moon.  But to state that "most Egyptians went by the lunar calendar" goes beyond the written evidence, which suggests that the only common calendar throughout the Two Lands, through most of the Pharaonic period, was the 365-day solar calendar.   In the Persian period, indeed, the Babylonian lunar calendar was used alongside the 365-day calendar:  Documents surviving from the Jewish colony at Elephantine in Upper Egypt give evidence of this.  In the Ptolemaic period the Macedonian calendar was used alongside the 365-day calendar.  This calendar was lunar at first, but was later modified in Egypt (though not elsewhere) to track the 365-day calendar.  In the Roman period the Roman calendar was used alongside the 365-day calendar.

[Daniel Smith]

Just my two sense  on the calendar issue:

1. Both the Orthodox and the Latins used the same Julian calendar before pope Gregory changed it.
2. After the Pope changed it and the paschalion for the Latins, the Orthodox continued using the Julian calendar.
3. The Julian Calendar was revised in the early 20th century for various reasons, but the Paschalion was untouched.

Now, was it a hinderance to the Orthodox living in say, the 13th century when they and Rome celebrated not only the same calendar, but the same Paschalion?  Were they hyper-ecumenists?

And what about now? The Orthodox and the Latins don't have identical Calendars, we have some saints and some feasts overlap, but completely different methods for calculating pascha.

So, if our holy fathers were unperturbed by sharing a common calendar with Rome after the schism, why are we perturbed about not even sharing the same calendar centuries later? This is simply a confusion of priorities. Plani anyone?

[Hawkeye]

Just my two sense   on the calendar issue:

1. Both the Orthodox and the Latins used the same Julian calendar before pope Gregory changed it.
2. After the Pope changed it and the paschalion for the Latins, the Orthodox continued using the Julian calendar.
3. The Julian Calendar was revised in the early 20th century for various reasons, but the Paschalion was untouched.

Now, was it a hinderance to the Orthodox living in say, the 13th century when they and Rome celebrated not only the same calendar, but the same Paschalion?  Were they hyper-ecumenists?

And what about now? The Orthodox and the Latins don't have identical Calendars, we have some saints and some feasts overlap, but completely different methods for calculating pascha.

So, if our holy fathers were unperturbed by sharing a common calendar with Rome after the schism, why are we perturbed about not even sharing the same calendar centuries later? This is simply a confusion of priorities. Plani anyone?

Not that I agree with the premise, but it seems to me that the problem is less the sharing of a calendar and more the submission of the Orthodox Church to the (calendrical) whims of schismatics and heretics.

I myself feel that the Orthodox Church (to which I admittedly do not yet belong) should resolve this issue by simply switching to a new, updated calendar (perhaps the Revised Julian or perhaps another) with a corresponding Paschalion to boot. It might cause more problems than its worth but I don't see how sticking to the present situation or reverting to the increasingly incorrect and irrelevant Julian Calendar is any solution at all. This is coming from a person who has lived his entire ecclesiastical life according to the Old Calendar and who isn't going to wean himself off of it until the whole Church does (unless, as is my present situation, the local parish only functions on the New).

[Mockingbird]

It is an often-repeated cliché that Western Christianity is "legalistic" while Eastern Christianity is not.

My experience is that both are legalistic in different ways.  The calendar controversy is one illustration of this.  Only among the (mostly slipshod) legal arguments for the Julian calendar are one or two that might be deemed self-consistent.  At least in my hearing, no one has convincingly justified the Julian solar or lunar calendars on mathematical, astronomical, or theological grounds.

[ialmisry]

Many folk in antiquity held the ideal that the calendar should track the tropical year.  The Egyptians were not among them.  The Egyptians had used their 365-day calendar, without intercalations, for centuries without inconvenience.  The priests were aware of the difference between their calendar year and the tropical year, and incorporated it into their predictions of when the Nile would flood.

Actually no: they would date things to both the calendar year and tropical year, which is why we can have the exact date on events from the Middle Kingdom (the discrepancy was dealt with) on.

Most Egyptians went by the lunar calendar, leaving it to the hierarchy/monarchy to correct the dates as they went along.

Actually, no.  The theory of a 365 1/4-day Egyptian "Sothic" calendar is based on a highly speculative interpretation of a single document from the time of Amenhotep I, the so-called Ebers calendar.  Current scholarly fashion, I think, favors an alternative highly speculative interpretation of this document.

 
Actually no.  The civil calendar based on the rising of the star Sirius around the time the Nile flooded is well established. Since it took only about a century to fall behind a month, and planting on the Nile couldn't be that loose, the difference was noticed and noted. The observation in the reign of Amenhotep I is only one of a half dozen.  References to the lunar month are also attested, although the moon played no role in the civil calendar (other than given the hieroglyph for "month").

Individual temples may have had lunar calendars, and individual villages and individual peasants may have scheduled some of their activities by the phases of the moon.  But to state that "most Egyptians went by the lunar calendar" goes beyond the written evidence,

most Egyptians couldn't read or write.

which suggests that the only common calendar throughout the Two Lands, through most of the Pharaonic period, was the 365-day solar calendar.   In the Persian period, indeed, the Babylonian lunar calendar was used alongside the 365-day calendar:  Documents surviving from the Jewish colony at Elephantine in Upper Egypt give evidence of this.  In the Ptolemaic period the Macedonian calendar was used alongside the 365-day calendar.  This calendar was lunar at first, but was later modified in Egypt (though not elsewhere) to track the 365-day calendar.  In the Roman period the Roman calendar was used alongside the 365-day calendar.

[Mockingbird]

Many folk in antiquity held the ideal that the calendar should track the tropical year.  The Egyptians were not among them.  The Egyptians had used their 365-day calendar, without intercalations, for centuries without inconvenience.  The priests were aware of the difference between their calendar year and the tropical year, and incorporated it into their predictions of when the Nile would flood.

Actually no: they would date things to both the calendar year and tropical year, which is why we can have the exact date on events from the Middle Kingdom (the discrepancy was dealt with) on.

Most Egyptians went by the lunar calendar, leaving it to the hierarchy/monarchy to correct the dates as they went along.

Actually, no.  The theory of a 365 1/4-day Egyptian "Sothic" calendar is based on a highly speculative interpretation of a single document from the time of Amenhotep I, the so-called Ebers calendar.  Current scholarly fashion, I think, favors an alternative highly speculative interpretation of this document.

 
Actually no.  The civil calendar based on the rising of the star Sirius around the time the Nile flooded is well established.

On the basis of what documents?  I will consider the so-called "Sothic Calendar" to be "well established" when we have unambiguously double-dated documents from the Pharonic period stating that the X day of Pharmuthi in the Civil calendar is, say, the Y day of Thoth in the "Sothic" calendar, or when we have unambiguous references from the Pharonic period to a 6th epagomenal day.

Since it took only about a century to fall behind a month, and planting on the Nile couldn't be that loose, the difference was noticed and noted. The observation in the reign of Amenhotep I is only one of a half dozen. 

Knowing that the calendar drifts relative to the seasons, and estimating the amount, is not the same as maintaining a separate "calendar".  If I know that a certain event moves back by 1 day a year, then if it falls on July 1 this year, I can predict that it will occur on July 2 next year.  I don't need a separate calendar for this.  Neither did the Egyptian priests.

References to the lunar month are also attested, although the moon played no role in the civil calendar (other than given the hieroglyph for "month").

In the Persian period there are indeed double-dated papyri, from the Jewish colony of Elephantine in Upper Egypt, with dates in both the Egyptian and Babylonian calendars.  This was because the lunar calendar was the official calendar of the ruling power.  Maybe there are double-dated documents from the time of Assyrian domination too.  Maybe some of the Amarna letters, written in Akkadian and Canaanite, are dated according to lunar calendars used in Canaan.  Neither these cases, nor the mere existence of "references to the lunar month" can demonstrate that "most Egyptians" in the Pharonic period "went by" (whatever that means) "the" (as if there were only one) lunar calendar.

Individual temples may have had lunar calendars, and individual villages and individual peasants may have scheduled some of their activities by the phases of the moon.  But to state that "most Egyptians went by the lunar calendar" goes beyond the written evidence.

[M]ost Egyptians couldn't read or write.

If you want to claim what "most Egyptians" did, you need to back up your claim with evidence. 

Now, in the Ptolemaic and later periods, many Egyptians wrote in Greek.  Did they routinely double-date documents in both solar and lunar calendars?  If "most Egyptians" are using only the solar calendar in this later period, you need not only evidence that things were different earlier, you also need to account for the change.

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