How do you get Christians, or least Catholics and Protestants, to celebrate Easter and the feasts and fasts calculated from Easter, on fixed dates?
How do you get Christians, or least Catholics and Protestants, to celebrate Easter and the feasts and fasts calculated from Easter, on fixed dates?
You'd need to start by having the weekdays happen on fixed calendar dates, for a start. So perhaps something like Tolkien's notion of having the last day of the year (and the additional day for leap years) not being considered part of the week, so that there are 364 regular weekdays and 1 or 2 non-weekly days every year.How do you get Christians, or least Catholics and Protestants, to celebrate Easter and the feasts and fasts calculated from Easter, on fixed dates?
I mean, there's no inherent reason Christianity has to call it "Good Friday." We call it that because it falls on a Friday every year because of the way Easter works, but there's no inherent reason the Fridayness is special; in a world where Easter had a fixed date, then it would just be "Crucifixion Day" or "Passion Day" or something like that, without any mention of Friday.You'd need to start by having the weekdays happen on fixed calendar dates, for a start. So perhaps something like Tolkien's notion of having the last day of the year (and the additional day for leap years) not being considered part of the week, so that there are 364 regular weekdays and 1 or 2 non-weekly days every year.
Otherwise, it doesn't make much sense for Good Friday to happen on a Tuesday.
I mean, there's no inherent reason Christianity has to call it "Good Friday." We call it that because it falls on a Friday every year because of the way Easter works, but there's no inherent reason the Fridayness is special; in a world where Easter had a fixed date, then it would just be "Crucifixion Day" or "Passion Day" or something like that, without any mention of Friday.
That said, it would have to happen very early in Church history. I suppose you could have the Quartodecimanians win out, and then also have people still use the Hebrew calendar for liturgical purposes, which might eventually give way to it being used more generally.
The tradition of Jesus being crucified on Friday and resurrected on Sunday goes back pretty much to the beginning. There's a reason most Christians worship on Sunday rather than Saturday (which was the Jewish day of rest) - because they deem that it celebrates the Resurrection. It doesn't make a great deal of sense to have Easter Sunday on a Wednesday, any more than having Good Friday moving around would. Both the crucifixion and resurrection are inherently fixed to particular days of the week.I mean, there's no inherent reason Christianity has to call it "Good Friday." We call it that because it falls on a Friday every year because of the way Easter works, but there's no inherent reason the Fridayness is special; in a world where Easter had a fixed date, then it would just be "Crucifixion Day" or "Passion Day" or something like that, without any mention of Friday.
While the Resurrection happening on a Sunday goes back to the beginning, it's not the case that that was always seen as the deciding factor in when to worship. We know there were groups that continued to observe the Jewish Sabbath (i.e. Saturday), and we know that there were groups in the early church that chose to always celebrate Easter on the 14th of Nissan (choosing to emphasize the close connection with Passover instead), and that some fairly big names, including Polycarp, were among them, instead of restricting Easter to a Sunday. So it's not impossible that a different origin, while recognizing that the initial resurrection happened on a Sunday, might choose to focus on the fixed date instead.The tradition of Jesus being crucified on Friday and resurrected on Sunday goes back pretty much to the beginning. There's a reason most Christians worship on Sunday rather than Saturday (which was the Jewish day of rest) - because they deem that it celebrates the Resurrection. It doesn't make a great deal of sense to have Easter Sunday on a Wednesday, any more than having Good Friday moving around would. Both the crucifixion and resurrection are inherently fixed to particular days of the week.
To change this to a fixed date means either having weekdays not moving around the calendar, or rewriting pretty much the entire history of Christianity since they started switching to Sunday in the first place, and Friday was linked to that for the crucifixion.
this seems like a good idea.What about, a semi-fixed date: always the 2. Sunday in April, or somesuch?