By the second century Christians had begun to celebrate an annual festival on a day in the spring at the time of the Jewish Passover. Unlike the later Christian festival of Easter, the ancient celebration marked not simply the resurrection of Christ from the dead; it was a solemn observance of Christ’s passion (suffering), death, and resurrection—a kind of Good Friday and Easter combined—called the Pasch, from Pascha, the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew term for Passover, pesach. The Paschal celebration, which included the reading of the account of the first Passover in Exodus 12, began in
...more
