Old vs. New Calendar?

[hecma925]

Old Calenda 4 LIFE.

New rap album?

[Jonathan Gress]

Has anyone ever heard that the Church of Jerusalem ever converted to the Revised Julian Calendar? I've never read that anywhere, and I am aware it advised the Pan-Orthodox Congress of 1923 via telegram that that it could not convert because of their long standing agreement for use of the Shrines with the Roman Catholics and several Oriental Orthodox Churches. A guy on facebook is telling me this about the Church of Jerusalem. He claims it converted to the Revised Julian Calendar for one year and the Holy Light did not manifest that year, has anyone ever heard of this?

Yes I think it was about 1971 or thereabouts, under Patriarch Benedict, who also brought the Jerusalem Patriarchate into the World Council of Churches. His successor Patriarch Diodorus then withdrew the JP from the WCC.

[ialmisry]

By the way, this is an important development. The Polish Orthodox Church will return to the Old Calendar beginning with the Feast of All Saints. http://byztex.blogspot.ru/2014/03/polish-orthodox-church-returns-to-old.html This is unprecedented, for a new calendar body to return to the old calendar.

since 97% of the Church was on the Old Calendar before, it hardly left to return.

Sure, if you accept highly inflated figures for the numbers of Russian Orthodox members.

I was talking about Polish Orthodox members.  As for the Russians, you have to distinguish the Ukrainians, etc. in the Patriarchate of Mosocw, all of whom are on the Old Calendar, and all of whom outnumber the rest of us by a great deal.

[Jonathan Gress]

By the way, this is an important development. The Polish Orthodox Church will return to the Old Calendar beginning with the Feast of All Saints. http://byztex.blogspot.ru/2014/03/polish-orthodox-church-returns-to-old.html This is unprecedented, for a new calendar body to return to the old calendar.

since 97% of the Church was on the Old Calendar before, it hardly left to return.

Sure, if you accept highly inflated figures for the numbers of Russian Orthodox members.

I was talking about Polish Orthodox members.  As for the Russians, you have to distinguish the Ukrainians, etc. in the Patriarchate of Mosocw, all of whom are on the Old Calendar, and all of whom outnumber the rest of us by a great deal.

Wait you're saying 97% of the Polish Church was already on the Old Calendar before this proposed change?

[ialmisry]

If we really want to get technical about events such as Pascha on the calendar, perhaps we should examine what EO St. Polycarp celebrated, which is the passover feast - not the Sunday after.  That is the true "old calendar".

You do realize that the Quartodecimans were condemned as heretics? Or, in your fascination with those alternate "successions" in  groups the Church has also condemned for heresy, does that fact really matter to you?

What about EO St. Polycarp, he argued for the passover?

Seeing that the Church didn't condemn the Quartodecimans retroactively but chose only to condemn those who held obstinately to their contrary practice even when the Church solidified its stance against them, I'm not sure this is a problem.

Btw, I think the problem of the Quartodecimans was that they celebrated the death date as the feast of the Resurrection, Christ dying on the 14th Nisan (hence Quartodeci).  Passover is the next day (which would be both the angel of death passing over and the harrowing of hell).

[ialmisry]

By the way, this is an important development. The Polish Orthodox Church will return to the Old Calendar beginning with the Feast of All Saints. http://byztex.blogspot.ru/2014/03/polish-orthodox-church-returns-to-old.html This is unprecedented, for a new calendar body to return to the old calendar.

since 97% of the Church was on the Old Calendar before, it hardly left to return.

Sure, if you accept highly inflated figures for the numbers of Russian Orthodox members.

I was talking about Polish Orthodox members.  As for the Russians, you have to distinguish the Ukrainians, etc. in the Patriarchate of Mosocw, all of whom are on the Old Calendar, and all of whom outnumber the rest of us by a great deal.

Wait you're saying 97% of the Polish Church was already on the Old Calendar before this proposed change?

That is what I saw reported.

[Mockingbird]

Passover is the next day

by which ialmisry meant that Passover is the 15th of Nisan. 

This is not quite right.  Strictly speaking, the Passover is the 14th of Nisan.  So Leviticus:

In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month between the two evenings, is the Lord's passover.  And on the fifteenth day of the same month is the feast of unleavened bread.

Careful first-century writers, such as Philo, observe this distinction. 

Since ancient times, however, "Passover" has been used loosely to refer to the feast of unleavened bread (Luke 22.1), and "Unleavened Bread" was sometimes loosely used to refer to the Passover!  (Mark 14.12).  In modern times, "Passover" has also come mean the 15th of Nisan itself, and the day marked as "Passover" on all our calendars is indeed the 15th of Nisan in the Rabbinic calendar.   But most of the early Christian writers on the calendar are more precise, using the word "Pascha" in a mathematical context to refer to the 14th day (not the 15th) of the 1st lunar month of springtime. 

Since this thread is partly about calendar mathematics, the distinction needs to be maintained here if nowhere else.

[Alpo]

Old Calenda 4 LIFE.

New rap album?

Or an awesome tattoo idea?

Christianity. Only with different calendar.

[PeterTheAleut]

Has anyone ever heard that the Church of Jerusalem ever converted to the Revised Julian Calendar? I've never read that anywhere, and I am aware it advised the Pan-Orthodox Congress of 1923 via telegram that that it could not convert because of their long standing agreement for use of the Shrines with the Roman Catholics and several Oriental Orthodox Churches. A guy on facebook is telling me this about the Church of Jerusalem. He claims it converted to the Revised Julian Calendar for one year and the Holy Light did not manifest that year, has anyone ever heard of this?

Of course we believe everything we see on Facebook, right? Right?

[Mockingbird]

If we really want to get technical about events such as Pascha on the calendar, perhaps we should examine what EO St. Polycarp celebrated, which is the passover feast - not the Sunday after.  That is the true "old calendar".

You do realize that the Quartodecimans were condemned as heretics? Or, in your fascination with those alternate "successions" in  groups the Church has also condemned for heresy, does that fact really matter to you?

As scholar Sacha Stern has pointed out, applying the word "quartodeciman" to the late 2nd-century controversy over the Roman and Asian practices is anachronistic.  In the account in History 5.23ff, Eusebius never uses the word "quartodeciman"--at least not in my English translation--nor do any of the authors he quotes.  The word cannot confidently be held to have existed before the later 4th century.  (A work attributed to a 3rd century author, Hippolytus, uses "quartodeciman" in the caption to a chapter on the practice, but not in the text of the chapter itself.  A caption may be the work of a later editor.)  

Note also that the Asian practice focused on the 14th of Nisan, not on the day of the Passover Seder, which is the 15th. Eusebius calls the Asians' fast-breaking day "the fourteenth day of the lunar month...the day on which the Jews had been commanded to sacrifice the lamb" -- the day the lamb was slain, not the day on which it was eaten.  Polycrates, in the letter quoted by Eusebius, call it "the day the people put away the leaven."  The Mishnah, a source roughly contemporary with Polycrates,  indicates that the day of putting away the leaven is the 13th/14th of the lunar month, not the 14th/15th.  

On the eve of the fourteenth day of Nisan men search for leaven by candlelight....Rabbi Meir said, "men may eat of it [leaven] until the fifth hour, and burn it at the beginning of the sixth....Rabban Gamaliel said, "men may eat ordinary food till the fourth hour, heave-offering until the fifth hour, but they burned the leaven at the sixth hour."

This is why I suspect, notwithstanding the views of many scholars (for a recent example, Bradshaw, though he relies entirely on secondary sources for his argument), that the Asian practice was to break the fast at the sunset that ended the 13th and began the 14th, or perhaps during the hours of daylight on the 14th, and not, as the scholars hold, during the nighttime hours that began the 15th.  But even if my hunch be wrong, it looks to me as though the Sunday custom is just as ancient as the Asian custom.  Sunday was a Christian holiday from very early.  The Christian Sunday assembly is attested well before any annual Christian festivals are.  (At least one scholar, Clemens Leonhard, tries to explain away the New Testament evidence for the Christian Lord's day, but I find his argument unconvincing).  It would have been just as easy for the earliest Christians to mark the annual Sunday of Unleavened Bread for special esteem as it would have been for them to mark out the 14th (or 15th) of Nisan for an annual festival.  

So the late-2nd century Asian practice was certainly old by the time it became controversial, but I can't find any proof that it was older than the Sunday practice.

[Mockingbird]

Oops. Wrong button again.

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