The Origins of Feasts, Fasts and Seasons in Early Christianity by P F Bradshaw and M E Johnson

The Origins of Feasts, Fasts and Seasons in Early Christianity

This is the 2011 Alcuin Club Collection and yet again it is a useful contribution to bridge the gap between the scholarly debates about liturgy and the folk in the pew.

Much of the liturgical reform of the Twentieth Century was justified by 'evidence' of the universal practice of the early church.  This volume gives a a balanced assessment of the reseach of the last twenty to thirty years that has questioned the evidence for those practices and certainly demolished claims for their universality.

While I think the some times slavish devotion to the primitive practice of the Church of Twentieth Century reformers was misplaced, and is now impossible due to the diversity there appears to have been in those early centuries, an awareness of origins is useful as we need to know the journey we have been on in order to understand where we have arrived and to make good choices about where to go next.

As a Christian I find the development of the major festivals of the Church fascinating - but I think this book would interest non-Christians too who might want to find out about the beginnings of the shape of our week or Christmas, Lent, and Easter which are still key features of the 'secular' calendar.

Overall this is an accessible volume which I would be happy to highly recommend - however I have to note that it is a book of two halves, the first dealing with change from Sabbath to Sunday and with Lent, Holy Week and Easter is excellent, the second on Christmas and on Saints Days is not as strong for 2 reasons - one the use of extended quotations to make the argument, something that was beaten one of me as a young undergraduate, (with chapters of around 10 pages side long quotations are out of place) while the other is making key points by comparing Greek terms that have not been transliterated - which is a major turn out for the general reader and undermines the potential of the volume.  Thankfully the faults are in the second half and so the reader gets the best of the book before they are encountered.

I will end with an idea from the book that in fact has little directly to do with liturgy but I liked - in one of the extended quotations I have just bemoaned Bernard of Clairvaux speaks of Chirst having 3 comings, first in flesh, second in spirit, third in glory and he says "In the first, Christ was our redemption; in the last, he will appear as our life; in this middle coming, he is our rest and consolation."