Pascha Before Easter

Around the year 155 CE, Polycarp of Smyrna traveled to Rome—an old man, revered as a living link to the apostles—to settle a dispute with Bishop Anicetus. The question was the date of the church’s greatest feast, what they called Pascha, the Christian Passover. Polycarp insisted it must fall on the 14th of Nisan, the Jewish day of preparation, regardless of the day of the week. Anicetus held that the celebration should always be on Sunday, the day of resurrection. They could not agree. And yet, in a move that may scandalize modern imaginations, they celebrated communion together and parted in peace.

This fragile moment of diversity held in love was recorded a generation later by Irenaeus, who cited it to cool temps when a later bishop of Rome threatened to excommunicate whole churches over the same issue. The peace did not last forever, but the episode opens a window onto a world of Christian worship far stranger—and more physically demanding—than the Easter most of us recognize.

If you have ever attended an Easter service, the picture is clear: a sunlit sanctuary, lilies, a soaring sermon, perhaps an egg hunt in the churchyard, followed by brunch. The liturgy is polished, the mood celebratory. The story of the resurrection is read, but its opposite—the story of suffering and death—has already been handled, tidily, on Good Friday. This separation feels natural, even inevitable. It is easy to assume that Easter has always been, fundamentally, a Sunday morning service with flowers and a sermon.

That assumption is wrong.

Before the Council of Nicaea in 325, the dominant Christian pattern was not a pair of observances but a single, night-long vigil that held the entire mystery of death and resurrection in one unbroken container. They called it Pascha—never “Easter,” a word that would not appear for centuries and whose origin remains contested. For the early churches, Pascha was not a commemoration of the past but a communal passage through death into life, with baptism at its molten center.

Scholars reconstruct this vigil from sources such as Tertullian, Hippolytus, and later pilgrimage accounts; the precise order and local emphases varied from one city to another, but the core rhythm—fasting, scripture, baptism, dawn eucharist—is widely attested.

Imagine oil lamps flickering in a house-church deep in darkness. The faithful have fasted since the afternoon, taking their cue from Jesus’ own words: “When the bridegroom is taken away, then they will fast” (Matthew 9:15). They are not fasting because of a church calendar obligation but because Christ’s absence is a wound they sit with physically, watchfully. Through the night they listen to Scripture: the Exodus account of Israel’s deliverance, psalms of lament and vindication, prophets who promised dry bones would live, and at last the gospel narratives of Christ’s arrest, death, and rising. There is no separate “Good Friday” service. The passion is not relegated to an afternoon three days earlier; it is present tense in the darkness.

Around the middle of the night the vigil reaches its hinge. Those who have been preparing for months—instructed daily, exorcised, taught to pray—are led to water. The candidates disrobe, face the west to renounce Satan, are anointed with oil, and descend into the pool. Three times they are immersed, confessing their faith in Father, Son, and Spirit. The symbolism is inescapable: they are being buried with Christ, their old humanity drowned, and rising from the water as new-born members of his body. This is not a symbolic gesture; it is the central act of the feast, the moment when the community’s fast gives way to a future they can already taste.

At dawn, the newly baptized, now dressed in white, join the faithful for the first eucharist of the resurrection. The light of sunrise, breaking through the windows of the room, becomes the light of the empty tomb. Fasting ends. The feast begins.

This was Pascha: one night, one seamless movement from mourning to joy, from burial to birth. There was no Easter Sunday service in our sense—only the vigil ending in daybreak. The whole thing was a tunnel dug through darkness, and the other end was life.

So why, then, did Polycarp and Anicetus have anything to argue about? Because already in the second century some communities insisted that Pascha must always fall on a Sunday, the weekly remembrance of the resurrection, while others—the Quartodecimans, from the Latin for “fourteenth”—maintained that the feast must remain anchored to the 14th of Nisan, the actual date of the Passover sacrifice. Both sides celebrated a single Pascha, but the dating dispute embedded two competing theological instincts: one grounded the feast in its Jewish matrix and its historical specific gravity, the other sought to foreground the resurrection’s victory and the new meaning of the Lord’s Day.

The Quartodeciman practice was not a marginal eccentricity. It was widespread, especially in Asia Minor, where Polycarp himself had long served. And for a time, as the meeting in Rome shows, the two positions could coexist without schism. But the tension was unsustainable under the pressures of a growing, increasingly institutional church. At Nicaea, the council fathers severed the Christian reckoning from the Jewish calendar definitively. They ruled that Easter—now to be called that in the West, though the East kept Pascha—would be observed on the Sunday after the first full moon of spring, ensuring it would never coincide with the Jewish Passover date. This decision was not purely anti-Jewish in motive, though supersessionist attitudes played a role; other factors included a desire for a common, empire-wide calculation that did not depend on non-Christian authorities and the growing theological emphasis on Sunday as the exclusive day of resurrection joy.

The Nicene break drove a wedge through the unified night. Over time, the passion was pulled to a separate day, what we now call Good Friday, and the vigil—once the whole feast—was pushed to Saturday night and gradually shortened. The Easter Sunday morning with flowers and sermons is a later reconfiguration, built from the pieces of the ancient vigil after its centre of gravity shifted. The elaborate forty-day preparation of Lent and the three-day enactment of the Triduum that mark many modern churches are direct descendants of this post-Nicene expansion, not the original pattern.

The next time you encounter a contemporary Easter—whether a high liturgy, a children’s egg hunt, or a sunrise service—you can mentally strip away the layers. Look beneath the flowers and the chocolate and the separate Good Friday services, and see the dim house-church, the fasting bodies, the candidates shivering before a pool, the readings that stretch the night, the sunrise eucharist that held all sorrow and all joy in a single breath.

This mental move—recognizing that religious and cultural traditions often accumulate later structures that obscure an earlier, radically different form—travels well beyond Easter. It applies to Christmas, to wedding rituals, to national holidays. When we learn to ask not just “What do we do now?” but “What did our ancestors in this tradition do before us?” we gain a way to see that present practice is never inevitable and always layered.

Try the Move: Imagine a community that wanted to recover something of the ancient Paschal vigil in a modern setting. What might such a service include? Night-time baptism for those who’ve been preparing, a long reading of the Exodus and resurrection accounts, a common fast broken only at dawn with communion—how would it feel to sit through the dark waiting for the light, instead of arriving to a sanctuary already bright with lilies? Write a short description of what participants might experience and how that experience would differ from a typical Easter Sunday. Describe it as if you were inviting a friend to come.