CHRISTMAS TAKE TWO

I'll bet few of you know that this year Christmas comes on Saturday, 7 January.  This is good news if you can't wait for Sunday, 25 December 2023. I am, of course, speaking of the  “original" Christmas, the one 200 million Greek and Russian Orthodox Christians celebrate, 13 days after Catholics and Protestants make merry. Now, as to why there are two Christmases, well, that has to do with the way theology seems to have been invented specifically to start arguments.

The first successful calendar that we know of was adopted over 6,500 ago by the 18 amalgamated city-states we know as the Sumerians. Being farmers they started their year in the spring, with each of their months beginning with sunset on the night of the new moon. This lunar calendar proved so popular it was adopted with slight modifications by everybody, including a small group of highland Semitic sheep herders known to themselves as the Yehudi – modern English translation being “the Jews”.

The Jewish spring was marked by the birthing of their sheep, what they called the Pesach. Fourteen days into the first Hebrew month of Nisan, at the full moon, they drained the blood of one of their first born kids. That's a baby sheep. The body was then burned, the rising smoke being offered up as a sacrifice to their god Elohim or Yahweh, to ensure he would keep them in milk, wool and lamb chops for the coming year. But, just about the same time as the invention of the calendar, the flocks of many of these Hebrews started dying.

Maybe it was disease and maybe a drought, but these Jewish bands were reduced to seeking work around the Egyptian settlements in the Nile river delta, where they were forced to exchange their Sumerian lunar calendar for an Egyptian solar one, and their mutton for bread. And the first Egyptian bread grain which ripened each spring, about the Nisan full moon, was barley. Now, barley doesn't rise well with yeast. This meant that every spring, when the stockpiles of wheat and rye grains ran short, the Jews were reduced to eating the hard, flat, unleavened barley bread. After leaving Egypt, or, as the religious fanatics described it, “escaping”, the spring Pesach was relabeled the Passover Festival.

Over the next  couple of millennial the Jews established a homeland called Israel, where they were  attacked by the Philistines, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Akkadians, the Hittites, and eventually the Romans. Every new conqueror forced the Hebrews to adopt some of their culture and calendar. 

And as is common with occupied people, the common folk dreamed of a messiah or Christ, who would save them from their oppressors, foreign and Jewish. Over time this produced a seemingly endless stream of messiah candidates. Most were loonies, but a few were dangerous enough that the upper crust Jewish Pharisees felt forced to eliminate them. And it was because of those few that before we got two Christmases, we got two Pesach-es – later renamed Easter.

See, the Romans, who were occupying Israel in the first century, had just stitched together a combination solar and lunar calendar championed by Julius Caesar and enacted on The Kalend, or the first morning of the new month of January, 47 B.C.E.  By Roman law all debts and taxes were paid on the Kalends of each month, including the Temple Tax the Jews paid so they would be excused from sacrificing to the Roman gods.

This Temple Tax was paid to the Roman Governor in the capital of Jerusalem, a city of between 60 and 70,000 people. During Passover, the city had to accommodate another 5 to 10,000 pilgrims in town to sacrifice at their temple. This produced a lot of taxable income for everybody, but with a crowd that large, you were guaranteed at least one Christ-wanna-be a year. 

Which is why, the Christian holy book could be very specific about the date when the most successful Christ, Jesus ben Joseph of Nazareth, was nailed to a cross. He was killed, theologians now figure, about 3:00pm on Friday in the 33^rd year of the common era,   or about 3 hours before the start of Passover that year.  Except killing this Christ only added to the Pharisse's problems.

These Christians kept insisting their dead guy was The Christ sent to reform Judaism which pissed off the Pharisee, who  saw no reason to reform a religion they were running.   Also, all reformers made the Romans nervous, which pissed off the Pharisee even more. A decade after Jesus' crucifixion, the Jewish King Agrippa beheaded the cult's new leader, the Apostle James. 

The next leader, also named James but called "The Just" to separate him from James the dead,  tried to avoid giving the Pharisee any reason to cut off any more heads by strictly obeying Mosaic law for 20 years. However, the Pharisee eventually decided to kill James the Just anyway. So they threw him off the Temple roof. And when that didn't kill him, they had him beaten to death.

But there were other, even more disruptive zealots around, and in the year 66 C.E., bad Roman government and all these revolutionaries set off the First Jewish war, which lead to the Kitos War and then the Bar Kokhba revolt, which ended in 136 C.E. 

This 80 years of violence so pissed off the Romans they destroyed the Jewish temple, then burned and sacked the entire city of Jerusalem, and then outlawed Judaism entirely. The only way for Christianity to survive this Roman repression was to form their own religion, adopting the Julian calendar and inventing a new theology they called Christianity as they went along.

As figured by Professor Rodney Stark, of Baylor College, devotees of Christianity surpassed the “symbolically weighty figure” of 100,000 worshipers attending a hundred or so churches about the year 200 C.E., or 70 years after the last Jewish revolt. And yet, already, their new theology was starting to encounter problems. 

In the year 189 C.E., Rome, received a new bishop, or elder of this new quasi-Jewish church. We know him only by the name of Victor, and that he came from North Africa -  perhaps he was a Berber. We can assume Victor was devout, but we know he also was combative and arrogant. First, he had started calling himself “the Pope”. And secondly, was the way he tried to handle the Quarterdecimani debate.

In plain English, it was “The 14” - as in the 14^th day of Nissan, i.e. the date of Passover. Less than fifty years after the death of Jesus, Polycarp, the Bishop of Smyrna, reminded his fellow Christians that the Paesch was a life giving festival well before it became the Jewish Passover. 

This made 16 Nisson - the second day after Passover – the perfect day to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Which meant the common folk still had to know when Passover started. And Polycarp had been personally trained by the Apostle John, who had personally known both the living and the resurrected Jesus.  So, he ought to know when Jesus died and rose from the dead -at least to within a day or two.

But Victor and most western Bishops wanted to disconnect Christianity from Passover. Too Jewish, you know. That meant converting Jesus ben Joseph into a gentile, like the majority of the new Christian recruits. This was why the Sabbath was moved from the Jewish Friday at sunset and all day Saturday – the end of the week – to Sunday – the beginning of the week. And by using the Julian calendar, which most gentiles were familiar with, they could reenact the mystical Good Friday to Resurrection Sunday, every year. And that was something the “floating” Jewish Passover, which could come on any day of the week, and was favored by the eastern Christians, could not do.

So far, settling such theological issues had followed the example of the Pauline Epistles. The bishops exchanged letters arguing their case, until they were close to agreement. They then held conferences, called synods, which endorsed the new dogma. But bishops still within the Byzantine Empire, who spoke and read Greek, felt as qualified to determine dogma as the upstart Latin speakers from Rome. 

But Pope Victor, a Latin speaker,  now abruptly warned that any Christians who did not sever the direct connection between Passover and Easter would be excommunicated - thrown out of the church and denied Jesus' forgiveness.

Immediately a missive arrived from the proud Bishop of Ephesus. This was a large, wealthy city, so when Bishop Polycrates spoke, other Christians paid attention. He reminded Victor that many respected church leaders celebrated Easter on 16 Nisson, like, “...Philip, one of the twelve apostles....(and) John, who was both a witness and a teacher...and Polycarp in Smyrna...” and the seven bishops in his own family. Polycrates warned Victor. “ I...am not frightened by terrifying words.”  In other words, don't even think about excommunicating me.

Another dissent arrived from the Bishop of Lyon, France. Irenaeus was a Greek who had a strong record opposing “Judaizing” the new faith, which gave him street cred in this argument. Irenaeus cautioned Victor against asserting dominance, because that might start a civil war within the Church. Finally, Victor backed down. 

So,  for the next 800 years, everybody agreed to disagree on the date for Easter and about the power of one Bishop, whatever he called himself, to dictate to other Bishops. The eastern church read their liturgy in Greek, the Romans in Latin. And this divided church survived the fall of the western Roman empire and the rise of Islam, until 1053 C.E., when another hot head was elevated to Pope.

In that year, “Pope” Leo IX went nuclear on a small group of Greek Orthodox churches in southern Italy. Leo ordered them to either “conform” to the Latin Easter or close their doors. 

In Constantinople, the Ecumenical Patriarch, head of the local churches, Micheal I Cerularius, retaliated by dropping the same bomb on the Latin churches in his city.  And his city was far bigger than Rome.

The following year, 1054, Cardinal Humbert, led a Papal delegation to Constantinople to insist that Micheal reopen the Latin churches and acknowledge Leo IV as the supreme leader of the “Catholic”, meaning unified, church.

Oddly enough, Micheal said no.  Whereupon, everybody in sight excommunicated everybody else in sight. This exchange of “Ex” bombs escalated until it widened into the Great Schism, which has divided Christianity ever since. The two sides stopped talking to each other. The Latin churches continue to celebrate Easter on the first Sunday after the Paesch full moon, while the Greek Churches mark Christ's rising from the dead three days after Passover, whatever the day of the week that fell on.

A final bit of confusion was added in 1582, when Pope Gregory XIII introduced a new and refined calendar, which cut that year by 10 days. Initially it was recognized only in Catholic states. Protestant Britain did not make the switch until 1752, by which time the difference between the Julian and the newer Gregorian calendars had grown to 11 days. Russian, being Eastern Orthadox  did not accept the change until the revolution, in 1918, by which time the shift was 13 days. They were followed later by most secular governments.

But the Greek Orthodox Church, still pissed off about the Great Schism, have remained on the Julian calendar. Which is why we have two Easters, and why the Eastern Orthodox Christmas comes on  25 December, Julian Calendar, but actually falls on 6 January, under the Gregorian calendar – 13 days later. Which gives us two Christmases.  Just remember that St. Nicolas, the inspiration for Santa Claus,  was a Bishop in the Eastern Orthodox Church. 

The Jews, of course, have stubbornly stuck to their own clock, insisting the year 2023 is actually the year 5783. And that....is a story for another time.

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