The language of Easter
Holy Week? Lent? Maundy Thursday? Good Friday? Easter?
A brief guide to key vocabulary describing Passover & Easter. Please excuse minor errors/oversimplifications and correct major ones in comments. Many thanks.
Lent
Lent is the word Christians use to describe the forty days leading up to Easter. It starts on Ash Wednesday (usually in February) and ends on Easter Saturday, the eve of the Resurrection. For Catholics, Orthodox Christians and some protestant churches it is a time of penitence and fasting
According to the Oxford English Dictionary an old Old English word lencten, meaning spring was shortened to lent
‘the shorter form (? Old Germanic type *laŋgito- , *laŋgiton-) seems to be a derivative of *laŋgo- long […] and may possibly have reference to the lengthening of the days as characterizing the season of spring’
As Lent covers the transition for winter to spring this became the word most associated with the period. The English word differs from that in many other languages in that there is no explicit reference to the forty days of fasting and temptation.
Holy Week
The week of commencing with Palm Sunday — when Jesus rode into Jerusalem in to a welcoming crowd to Easter Sunday. This is the most important seven days in the Christian calendar — a period of reflection on the Passion of Jesus.
In early Roman and Greek liturgical texts the term used was Great Week — in recognition of the momentous events and the person of Christ. The name Holy Week was used in the 4th century by St. Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, and St. Epiphanius of Constantia.
Originally, only Good Friday and Holy Saturday were observed as holy days. Perhaps surprisingly, Wednesday was next added, to mark the day on which Judas plotted to betray Jesus. By the beginning of the 3rd century the other days of the week had been added as holy days.
Maundy Thursday
The first citation of maunde to describe the Last Supper is in middle English — around the mid-15C. It described both The Last Supper and the ceremony of the washing of the feet of the poor or downtrodden.
The immediate origin was the Old French word mandé. This in turn derived from the Latin mandatum or “commandment”.
From a Christian perspective, the crucial reference was to the opening words of the Latin church service for this day, Mandatum novum do vobis “A new commandment I give unto you” (John xiii:34).
This new commandment was to love one another. Its supreme test would be the Passion of Good Friday.
Good Friday
It may seem odd that Christians call their day of greatest sorrow Good Friday. The confusion arises from how we perceive the word ‘Good’. Here it is used in the archaic sense of ‘holy’ or momentous.
Good Friday is the English designation of Friday in Holy Week …called Feria VI in Parasceve in the Roman Missal, he hagia kai megale paraskeue (the Holy and Great Friday) in the Greek Liturgy, Holy Friday in romance languages, Charfreitag (Sorrowful Friday) in German, source
In other words, Good affirms the uniqueness of the Passion and the centrality of the crucifixion and resurrection to the Christian faith.
Easter
The word Easter is not in the New Testament. Nor does it feature in most translations of the Bible into vernacular languages.
There is no direct linguistic link between the English word Easter and the Jewish feast of Passover — as there is in romance languages.
Pâques, in French, covers both Easter and Passover. In Spanish, Semana Santa (Holy Week) is the most common phrase used to describe the festival and Domingo de Resurrección for the day itself. Domingo de Pascua is more formal and used less frequently
Scholars agree that Easter has pre-Christian roots. Beyond that there is little consensus.
- According to the great Anglo-Saxon scholar the Venerable Bede, the Old English word eastre came Eostre, “a goddess associated with spring.”
- April was called Eosturmonath (“Easter-month”) because in pagan times the month was dedicated to Eostre, an Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring.
- The Canadian Oxford Dictionary suggests a link to the Germanic goddess Eostre. It cites Old High German ōstarūn Easter, Old Norse austr to the east, Old Slavonic ustru like summer.
Another theory is that Eostre was simply the Anglo-Saxon word for spring festivals. Linguists trace this word to roots thousands of years old meaning “shine” and “dawn.”
As Spring is a season of lengthening days and increased light the word may have applied to all festivals at this time of year
