1
RABBINIC, CHRISTIAN, AND LOCAL CALENDARS IN LATE ANTIQUE
BABYLONIA: INFLUENCE AND SHARED CULTURE
Sacha Stern
A variety of calendars were used by Jews, Christians, and others in late antique
Babylonian society. Many of these calendars were lunar, and shared common
structural features such as months beginning at the new moon, and years of
twelve or thirteen lunar months; but the precise way these calendars were
reckoned could vary quite considerably. In late Antiquity, moreover, the lunar
calendars of Jews, Christians, and others were in a process of gradual but quite
radical change. The purpose of this paper is to assess the relationship between
rabbinic, Christian, and local lunar calendars in late antique Babylonia. Were
they, in fact, one and the same calendar, or did they have separate and distinct
identities as Jewish, Christian, and other? Was the evolution of different lunar
calendars in this period interrelated – as indeed they seem to follow a similar
trajectory – or did these processes occur, in fact, independently of one another?
If these processes were interrelated, how do we envisage such a shared history
to have unfolded?
Before addressing all these questions, I shall begin with some general,
background information on ancient calendars, and then with some theoretical
musings on the concepts of ‘influence’ and ‘shared culture’ which much of this
article will be leading to. I shall then argue, in the body of this article, that the
rabbinic, Christian, and other local Babylonian calendars evolved in this period
in similar ways and in similar directions, although not necessarily through
mutual influence and not necessarily for the same reasons.
From the mid first millennium BCE to mid first millennium CE, ancient
calendars evolved from flexible, diverse, and empirical methods of time
reckoning to unified and standard, fixed schemes. In the Near East, the
Achaemenid (sixth – fourth centuries) and Seleucid (third – first centuries BCE)
dynasties adopted the Babylonian calendar (assimilated, under the Seleucids,
with the Macedonian calendar) as their official imperial calendar. This calendar
had always been based on empirical sightings of the new moon, but in this
period it was increasingly standardized and fixed through the use of new moon
predictions and the adoption of a fixed pattern of intercalations (i.e. adding a
thirteenth lunar month every two or three years). The standard, 19-year cycle of
intercalations made it easy for the Babylonian calendar to be reckoned
uniformly across the vast expanses of the Empire, from the eastern provinces of
Bactria (northern Afghanistan) to Elephantine in southern Egypt and Lycia in
western Asia Minor, where the Babylonian calendar is known to have been
used. Another calendar instituted under the Achaemenids was completely fixed
and schematic, and modeled entirely on the Egyptian calendar, with a
2
changeless 365-day year. This calendar, later known as Zoroastrian, became the
official calendar of the Persian, Sassanian Empire in late Antiquity (third – sixth
centuries CE); its adoption may have been motivated, among other reasons, by a
desire to rationalize, standardize, and hence simplify the administration of the
Empire. In the Roman Empire, perhaps for similar reasons, the Julian calendar –
another fixed, schematic calendar based on a 365-day year, instituted by Julius
Caesar in 46 BCE – extended by the end of the first century BCE throughout the
Mediterranean basin as a standard imperial calendar, albeit in a variety of
forms; it eventually became, as we know, the modern, Gregorian calendar in
global use today.1
Small pockets of resistance to the rise of these large-scale, official
imperial calendars remained. Particularly relevant to us, in late Antiquity, are
the Jews in the Roman Empire, who stubbornly clung to their lunar calendars
and refused to adapt them (as most others had done in the Roman Near East) to
the Julian, solar year. The Christians, who in the first few centuries were not
always clearly distinguishable from Jews, also dated some of their most
important festivals, above all Easter, according to a lunar reckoning. In the firstthird centuries CE, Jewish and Christian lunar calendars were flexible and
empirically based, and for that reason, could vary significantly from one locality
to the next. But in subsequent centuries – the period of ‘late Antiquity’ with
which this article will be concerned – the calendars in both traditions remained
lunar but followed the general historical trend outlined above, and became
increasingly schematic, standardized, and fixed. Similar conditions appear to
have also affected the local calendars in Babylonia that had remained lunar.2 In
the late antique Near East, moreover, the calendars of Jews, Christians, and all
others who used Aramaic language shared in common the same month names,
regardless of how their calendars were structured: these were the month names
of the standard Babylonian calendar which had been used by the great empires
of the first millennium BCE as official calendar, and which had survived in
various derivative forms in late Antiquity.
All these similarities will raise the questions of whether Jews,
Christians, and others (‘pagans’) in Babylonian were under the influence of one
another, or whether instead they shared a common culture, or whether again,
they were affected by wider, common historical conditions – and further
possibilities could also be considered. The phenomenon of cultural transfer and
exchange has received much attention in recent years, especially with reference
1
S. Stern, Calendars in Antiquity. Empires, States, and Societies (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2012); id., ‘The Babylonian month and the new moon: sighting and prediction’,
Journal for the History of Astronomy 39 (2008), 19-42. I am grateful to François de Blois for
reading this article and providing very helpful comments.
2
Stern 2012 and id., Calendar and Community: A History of the Jewish Calendar, 2nd
century BCE – 10th century CE (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
3
to late antique society; this present volume, indeed, is a contribution to this
growing concern. In this context, some modern scholars have repudiated
altogether the concept of ‘influence’ in favour of a model of ‘common (or
shared) culture’, on the grounds that ‘influence’ assumes a single, unidirectional
transfer, usually from dominant to weak, which is over-simplistic and does not
satisfactorily reflect the complexities and multiple forms of cultural transfer and
exchange in late antique and other societies.3 Indeed, in the context of
Sassanian-ruled Babylonia it would be difficult to identify Jews, Christians, or
pagans as either dominant or weak, and hence in a privileged position to exert
influence over one another; a more egalitarian model of cultural exchange
should perhaps be preferred.
However, the adoption of shared culture as a basic paradigm is equally
reductionist, besides erring excessively on the side of vagueness and
indeterminacy. Shared culture is not demonstrably preferable or more true than
the almost contrary paradigm of cultural differentiation, which used to be
favoured in earlier scholarship with the assumption, for example, of ‘Jews’ and
‘Christians’ as separate and well-defined groups in late antique society. In fact,
there is no good reason to blacklist a priori a concept such as ‘influence’,
because in certain circumstances there is no doubt that influence can and does
occur. It is misleading, moreover, to treat ‘influence’ as the logical opposite, or
at least sole counterpart, of ‘shared culture’ (as many scholars, in this field,
appear to have assumed). Influence, coercion, mimicry, emulation, borrowing,
appropriation, accommodation, trade, exchange, distribution, free access, free
sharing, etc., are all possible and legitimate ways for culturemes to be
transferred between people or groups of people, and thus to account for
resulting similarities between them.4
For example C. Hezser, ‘Interfaces between Rabbinic Literature and Graeco-Roman
Philosophy’, in P. Schäfer and C. Hezser (eds), The Talmud Yerushalmi and Graeco-Roman
Culture, vol.2 (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2000), pp. 161-87: ‘I advise against the positivist
search for “influences” when dealing with similarities’ (ibid. 162) – a statement that has often
been cited, although Hezser does not clearly explain the basis of her position. A similar but
slightly more nuanced position is adopted by D. Boyarin, ‘Hellenism in Jewish Babylonia’, in
C. E. Fonrobert and M. S. Jaffee (eds), The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic
Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 336-63: ‘while in this case, I am
claiming a particular direction of influence, … this is not the general burden of my thesis here,
suggesting as I am, rather, a shared cultural milieu’ (ibid. 337, and further 359 n.5); ‘the time
has come, I think to cease thinking in terms of influence and think, rather, of shared and
overlapping cultures imbricated on each other and partly simply just the same culture in
different variants’ (349).
4
Detailed analysis of this range of different processes has been attempted, most notably, in
post-colonial theory, although post-colonial theory tends to be excessively politicized and
focused on unequal relations opposing, for example, ‘hegemonies’ to the ‘subalterns’. As a
starting point, see H. K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York:
Routledge, 1994). A more recent discussion of the use of concepts such as ‘influence’ or
3
4
The only point I wish to make – and which will determine the direction
of this paper – is that cultural transfer and similarity do not occur solely by
virtue of physical or social proximity between different groups and cultures. To
illustrate what I mean by an example, the similarity of Jewish and Christian
calendars in late antique Babylonia, which will be presented in this article,
cannot be accounted simply by virtue of the fact that Jews and Christians lived
close to each other or even interacted with each other on a regular basis.
Influence, or any other type of culture transfer (I have listed some examples
above), does not happen just like that. It occurs in a specific social context
(which can be, for example, political or economic domination, conflict and
polemic, coexistence and partnership, mobility and migration, etc.), and as a
result of concrete and specific events or social processes. It is not sufficient, for
the historian, to identify similarities between different cultures or groups and
then explain them away with catch-phrases such as ‘influence’ or ‘common
culture’. An investigation of the social context and specific social processes
which brought about these similarities – to the extent that these processes can
unfathomed from the available evidence – is an essential part of what
constitutes historical explanation and historical research.
The notion of ‘similarity’, in this context, is also problematic, as it is
largely subjective and a matter of perspective. For example, in connection with
calendars, a fourth-century Christian theologian such as Aphrahat had a very
clear idea of the distinction, indeed the almost logical opposition, between the
Jewish Passover and the Christian Easter – even though both festivals shared the
same origin, and both occurred, in the eastern tradition which Aphrahat most
likely followed, on approximately the same dates.5 But a Zoroastrian might have
taken a rather different view: for according to a sixth-century Syriac chronicle
of unknown authorship, when Asthebid encountered the Roman armies at
Callinicum during the last week of Lent in 531 CE, he asked his Roman
adversary Belisarius to postpone the battle out of respect for the ‘feast’ (i.e.
Easter), ‘for the sake of the Nazarenes and the Jews who are in the army that is
with me, and for the sake of you who are Christians’. This Persian general – at
least as represented by a Christian chronicler, which only complicates the
picture further – seems to have assumed that for Jews and Christians (and
Nazarenes, if this represents a distinct religious group), Passover and Easter
‘shared culture’ in the context of late antique Babylonia can be found in A. H. Becker, ‘The
comparative study of “scholasticism” in late antique Mesopotamia: rabbis and east Syrians’,
AJS Review 34 (2010), 91-113 (esp. 98-9).
5
Aphrahat, Twelfth Demonstration (c.344CE); M. J. Pierre, Aphraate le sage Persan: Les
Exposés, Sources Chrétiennes 359 (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1989), p. 578; see Stern 2001, p. 69,
n.68.
5
were all one and the same feast.6 Given the fluidity and subjectivity of these
concepts, ‘similarity’ and ‘difference’ can hardly serve as satisfactory criteria
for assessing the cultures in late antique Babylonia, let alone for identifying
specific phenomena such as shared culture, influence, or other forms of cultural
exchange and transfer.
This should not cause us, however, to descend into a methodological
impasse. Calendars are sufficiently well defined, in terms of structure, to permit
a useful comparison and to attempt a history of calendars in late antique
Babylonia.
Survey of the sources
Evidence of calendars in Sassanian Babylonia is limited. To my knowledge,
there are no epigraphic or documentary sources from this period that are dated
or inform us, in any other way, about the calendars that may have been in use in
this region. We are restricted, therefore, to literary sources, and these again are
limited: for there are no literary sources from this period by pagans,
Zoroastrians, or Mandaeans, that could provide us information about the
calendars that they used. We only have on the Jewish side the Babylonian
Talmud, and on the Christian side, some acts of synods and a body of literature
known as the Syriac Martyr Acts.
It may be appropriate to comment, at this stage, on the relevance of the
Syriac Martyr Acts to Babylonia and the Babylonian Talmud. This body of
texts, of which a comprehensive critical edition and translation is still awaited,
is largely focused on geographical locations in central and lower Mesopotamia
(which I shall call ‘Babylonia’) and the Khuzistan (or Elam, or Bēt Huzaye),
where most of the martyrdoms are depicted as having taken place, all under
Sassanian rule. It is in these regions that these martyrdom stories most probably
originated and were eventually produced in their extant literary form.7 Scholars
6
Chronicle of Ps-Zachariah, 9:4a, text in E.W. Brooks, Historia Ecclesiastica Zachariae
Rhetori Vulgo Adscripta, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 83-4 (Paris:
Gabalda, 1919-1921); translation in G. Greatrex, C. Horn, and R. Phenix, The Chronicle of
Pseudo-Zachariah Rhetor: Church and War in Late Antiquity (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2011), p. 322. I am grateful to Geoffrey Greatrex for drawing my attention
to this passage. On the identity of ‘Nazarenes’ in the context of this passage, see F. de Blois,
‘Nasrânî [Nazoraios] and hanîf [ethnikos]: Studies on the religious vocabulary of Christianity
and of Islam’, BSOAS 65, 2002, 1-30, on 8-10. On a sixth-century Zoroastrian confusing
Jews with Christians in another source (but again, only according to a Christian narrator), see
Becker 2010, 108-9. As far as I can tell, the Babylonian Talmud and other early rabbinic
sources appear not to be aware of the Christian Easter at all.
7
The standard edition of the Syriac Martyr Acts is P. Bedjan, Acta Martyrum et Sanctorum, 7
vols (Leipzig, 1890-7), which provides a text with some variant readings; fully critical
editions of some individual Acts have been sporadically published, especially in Analecta
Bollandiana. German translations of some of the Acts are in G. Hoffmann, Auszüge aus
6
seeking to relate Syriac Christianity to the Babylonian Talmud have often
focused on what might be called high Syriac literature, with fourth-century
authors such as Aphrahat and Ephrem, and on the great Christian academies of
Edessa and Nisibis in upper Mesopotamia, where much of this literature was
composed.8 Without denying their relevance, it is important to stress the
geographical remoteness of Edessa and Nisibis from the rabbinic centres of
learning in Babylonia (even though some second-third-century rabbis were
located in Nisibis, and one Nestorian academy was eventually established in
Seleucia, very near the rabbinic centres of learning in Mahoza, in the sixth
century).9 It is also important to note the pronounced and explicit dependency of
high Syriac literature on Hellenistic literary, philosophical, and theological
traditions.10 The Syriac Martyr Acts, in contrast, were composed in the same
region as the Babylonian Talmud, and represent perhaps a more popular, less
elitist genre of literature which may have been more accessible or
understandable to Babylonian rabbis; as such, these sources offer much
potential – still largely untapped – for the study of the broader social context of
Babylonian rabbinic Judaism.11
This said, the Babylonian Talmud is largely focused on the rabbinic
traditions it had inherited from Palestine (mainly in the third century), and
seems remarkably impervious to the non-Jewish (and even, one could add, nonrabbinic) cultures of its surrounding society. Calendars are no exception to this.
In contrast to the Syriac Martyr Acts, where a variety of calendars and dating
syrischen Akten persischer Märtyrer, Abhandlungen für Kunde des Morgenlandes der
Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 7.3 (Leipzig, 1880), and O. Braun, Ausgewählte
Akten persischer Märtyrer, Bibliothek der Kirchenväter 22 (Kempten and Munich, 1915). For
a general survey see J. Rist, ‘Die Verfolgung der Christen im späntantiken Sasanidenreich:
Ursachen, Verlauf und Folgen’, Oriens Christianus, 80 (1996), 17-42; and for quick
reference, Bibliotheca Hagiographa Orientalis (Brussels, 1910). Finally, for an in-depth
study of one of the Acts, see J. T. Walker, The legend of Mar Qardagh: Narrative and
Christian Heroism in late antique Iraq, The Transformation of the Classical Heritage 40
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
8
See for example J. Neusner, A History of the Jews of Babylonia, vol.3 (Leiden: Brill, 1968),
pp. 195-200; I. Gafni, ‘Nestorian literature as a source for the history of the Babylonian
Yeshivot’, Tarbiz 51 (1981-2), 567-76 [Hebrew]; J. L. Rubenstein, The Culture of the
Babylonian Talmud (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), pp. 3538; Boyarin 2007, p. 350; N. Koltun-Fromm, Hermeneutics of Holiness: Ancient Jewish and
Christian Notions of Sexuality and Religious Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010) (focused almost entirely on the Acts of Thomas and on Aphrahat); Becker (2010).
9
See discussion in Koltun-Fromm 2010, pp. 21-2.
10
For an excellent discussion of the similarities and differences, see Becker, ibid. (and on the
school in Seleucia, ibid., p. 94).
11
On the general neglect of the Syriac Martyr Acts in modern scholarship, see Walker 2006,
pp. 113-15; and see now M. Bar-Asher Siegal, Early Christian Monastic Literature and the
Babylonian Talmud (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
7
systems are used (as we shall see below), the Babylonian Talmud only knows
the Jewish calendar. Not only are festivals, fasts, and other liturgical occasions
dated, as would be expected, according to the Jewish calendar, but so are
seasons of the year12 and legal documents.13 There are hardly no references,
however, to the Persian-Zoroastrian or Julian calendars, nor dates in any of
these calendars.
The only possible exception appears in a passage listing names of
Graeco-Roman, Babylonian, and Persian (or Zoroastrian) festivals (bAvodah
Zarah 8a-b and 11b), where one of the Babylonian festivals is given the date of
10 or 20 Adar.14 This date must be in the Babylonian calendar, although being
lunar, it would not have differed much from its Jewish equivalent; the Talmud
itself, indeed, does not point out any distinction. However, the Babylonian and
Jewish Adar were not necessarily identical, as the years were not necessarily
intercalated in the same way. Evidence of the survival of pagan, Babylonian
calendars in late Antiquity will appear further below.
Another reference in the Babylonian Talmud to a month that is not of
the Jewish calendar appears in bRosh Hashanah 15a, where Shevat shel tequfah
is mentioned in contrast to Shevat shel ḥodashim. The latter, ‘Shevat of
months’, is the lunar month of Shevat in the Jewish calendar; but the former,
‘Shevat of the solstice’ (or perhaps the equinox, but in relation to Shevat, most
likely the winter solstice), belongs to some other calendar which, as the context
indicates, is most probably non-lunar. A similar phrase appears once in the
Palestinian Talmud: Nisan shel tequfah (‘Nisan of the equinox: pTaanit 1:7,
64d). The reference, in both passages, to an astronomical concept (tequfah)
suggests that these might be months of a zodiac calendar, of which the first sign,
Aries, would normally begin at the spring equinox, and of which each zodiac
sign would be designated with a name of the Babylonian (or ‘Jewish’) calendar;
on this interpretation, Shevat would correspond most likely to the sign of
12
E.g. bShabbat 43b, bBava Qamma 113a.
The months of ‘Nisan’ and ‘Tishre’ are paradigmatically used for dates of legal documents:
e.g. bBava Mezia 17a, bBava Batra 171b. Although these month names are not inherently
Jewish – indeed, Syriac or Aramaic-speaking Christians used them ubiquitously, even for
Julian calendar months – in the context of the Babylonian Talmud it is reasonable to assume
that they refer to the Jewish calendar. This is evident, in fact, from a baraita that is cited in
bBava Batra 171a, according to which a document dated ‘Sabbath’ or ’10 Tishrei’ is
presumed to be post-dated, on the grounds that 10 Tishrei is the date of yom kippur.
14
This date appears in bAvodah Zarah 11b, but the textual witnesses are divided: the first
printed edition (Pesaro, 1511), followed by all subsequent editions, reads 10; but mss. Paris
(BN Heb.1337) and JTS (Rab. 15) read 20. The reading of ms. Munich (BSB Heb. 95,
fol.375b) is ‫ואסרי‬, which seems more like the name of a festival than a gross misspelling of
either 10 or 20 (similarly, perhaps, ‫ ועיסרי‬in the printed edition of R. Ḥananel’s commentary).
All versions have, however, the month Adar, which in this context must be Babylonian.
13
8
Aquarius, in January-February, and Nisan to Aries, in March-April.15 But
alternatively, these non-lunar months could be of the Julian calendar, for which
Aramaic speakers used (and still use today) Babylonian month names, not only
in the Roman province Syria and other parts of the Roman Near East but also in
Sassanian Babylonia where, as we shall soon see, the Julian calendar was
commonly used by Christians.16 This is the interpretation of a Geonic
commentator (on the passage in bRosh Hashanah 15a), who writes: ‘and what is
“of the tequfot”? That is according to the count of the Greeks’.17 The ‘count of
the Greeks’ means the Julian calendar: indeed, this is how the Julian calendar is
referred to in contemporary Christian Syriac sources (as we shall soon see).
Similarly, R. Ḥananel (11th cent.) assumes in his commentary that Shevat shel
tequfah refers to the Julian calendar; he identifies this month with January,
which seems incorrect as in the Syrian calendar, Shebat is the name of
February. However interpreted, these references to non-lunar, either zodiacal or
A zodiac calendar of this kind, which we need not identify as specifically ‘Jewish’, is
attested in Palestine in the mosaic floor of the synagogue of Sepphoris, of which one of the
central panels represents a zodiac wheel: each sign of the zodiac is identified with the name
of the sign and its depiction, but also with a Babylonian-Jewish month name, in such a way
that Aquarius (for example) bears the name of Shevat (the Aquarius/Shevat panel, however,
is badly damaged: see Z. Weiss, The Sepphoris Synagogue: deciphering an ancient message
through its archaeological and socio-historical contexts (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration
Society and Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2005), pp. 110-23. The same scheme is attested
in the Mandaean calendar and zodiac, which is likely to go back to late Antiquity (E. S.
Drower, The Book of the Zodiac (Sfar Malwašia) (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1949);
eadem, The Thousand and Twelve Questions (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1960), pp. 12-13;
eadem, The Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran (Leiden: Brill, 1962), pp. 82-84). This interpretation
is assumed, for pTaanit 1:7 (64d), by Maimonides in his Code (Laws of Fasting 3:9), and for
bRosh Hashanah 15a by Rashi (ad loc.), although the latter conceptualizes this zodiac month
as a ‘solar Shevat’, beginning 30 days after the winter solstice (when solar Tevet begins). A
different interpretation is put forward elsewhere by Maimonides with reference to bRosh
Hashanah 15a (M. Y. L. Sachs, Hiddushei ha-Rambam la-Talmud (Jerusalem: Mekhon haTalmud ha-Yisreeli ha-Shalem, 1963)), according to which Shevat shel tequfah is the first
lunar month following the winter equinox. I cannot relate this to any known calendar.
16
Nowadays, these Babylonian month names are used not only for the Julian months of the
liturgical calendar but also for the Gregorian months of the civil calendar, not only by
Aramaic but also by Arabic speakers, Muslim and Christian, in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere in
the Near East.
17
A. E. Harkavy, Zikhron Kamah Geonim (also known as Teshuvot ha-Geonim) (Berlin:
Itzkowsky, 1887), p. 119 (from manuscripts of the Firkowitch collection in St Petersburg);
also in B. M. Lewin, Otzar ha-Geonim, vol.5 (Rosh Hashanah) (Jerusalem: Hebrew
University, 1932/3), p. 24: ‫ואיזו היא שלתקופות? זו שלפני מנין יונים‬. The preposition ‫( לפני‬literally
‘before’) is strange; perhaps it is an error for ‫‘( לפי‬according to’).
15
9
Julian calendar months, are very exceptional in rabbinic literature and the
Babylonian Talmud.18
The insularity of the Babylonian Talmud with respect to calendars is
reciprocated to some extent in Eastern Christian sources of late Antiquity,
where the Jewish calendar appears to be never used or mentioned.19 This should
not surprise us, if Christians regarded the Jewish calendar as specific to the Jews
and Judaism, and if its use in broader society was limited. Christian sources,
however, use and refer to several other calendars that are likely to have been in
public use in Sassanian Babylonia. The dating system perhaps most frequently
used in these sources is the Syrian calendar, which is well attested in the Roman
part of the Near East (especially in the Roman province of Syria and in western
Syriac literary and epigraphic sources), and which consists quite simply of the
Julian calendar but with Syriac, Babylonian-derived month names (thus Teshri I
= October, etc.). This calendar is used, for example, in the Acts of the synods
that were held in Seleucia-Ctesiphon from the early fifth century onwards,
which suggests perhaps that Eastern Church leaders treated the calendar of the
Roman Empire as the official calendar of the Christians, albeit under Sassanian
rule. This choice of calendar was natural, however, as it served to determine the
fixed (i.e. non-lunar) Christian liturgical dates such as Christmas and Epiphany.
Thus, the synod of Mar Isaac is dated Tuesday 1 Shebat, year 11 of
Yazdegird (which began on 14 August 409);20 the weekday is compatible to the
Julian date of 1 February (410 CE), and this is almost certainly what is intended.
By extension, it may be assumed that all Syriac month names in the Acts of the
Synods are Julian.21
18
Although this tradition is attributed in bRosh Hashanah 15a to Palestinian sages, the
reference to Shevat shel tequfah is most likely the contribution of a Babylonian editor.
Indeed, the parallel source in the Palestinian Talmud, pBikkurim 2:4 (65a-b), refers only
generally to the ‘order of years’ and ‘order of solstices/equinoxes’ ( ‫כסדר של שנים או כסדרן של‬
‫)תקופות‬, which means, respectively, the calendar (which is lunar) and the solar year. This
suggests that the notion of a zodiacal or Julian month was not specifically Palestinian (as
evidenced in the passage in pTaanit 1:7, 64d), but also employed by the editors of the
Babylonian Talmud. The identification of Shevat with January is attested in European
medieval sources: see S. Stern, ‘Christian calendars in Hebrew in Jewish medieval
manuscripts’, Medieval Encounters (forthcoming).
19
The theory put forward by R. Mercier, ‘The Dates in Syrian Martyr Acts’, Analecta
Bollandiana 117 (1999), 47-66 (= R.W. Burgess, Studies in Eusebian and Post-Eusebian
Chronography (Stuttgart: Frank Steiner Verlag, 1999), pp. 287-301 (‘appendix 3’); see also
ibid. 13, p. 245 n.183, pp. 246-47, and pp. 249-50), that the lunar dates in the Syriac Martyr
Acts are drawn from the Jewish calendar, is refuted by S. Stern, ‘Near Eastern lunar calendars
in the Syriac Martyr Acts’, Le Muséon 117 (2004), 447-72.
20
J. B. Chabot, Synodicon Orientale ou Recueil de Synodes Nestoriens, Notices et Extraits
des Manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Nationale et Autres Bibliothèques 37 (Paris: Klincksieck,
1902), pp. 18-19 (text) and pp. 255-57 (translation).
21
E.g. Teshri I (ibid. 69), for the synod of Mar Aba I in 540 CE.
10
Julian dates also appear in the Syriac Martyr Acts, where they are
sometimes identified explicitly as ‘according to the Greeks’: for example, the
martyrdom dates of Piruz on 5 Ilul (= September) in the early 420s CE, and of
Jacob Intercisus on Friday (which should perhaps really be Saturday) 27 Teshri
II (= November), probably 420 CE.22 In most cases, the date is unspecified but
can be identified, on the basis of the weekday, as Julian: thus, the martyrdom
dates of Malkē on Thursday 21 Nisan, 626 SE (= 21 April 315 CE), Mahdok on
Sunday 12 Kanun II, year 9 of Shapur (= 12 January 318 CE), and Petion on
Friday 25 Teshri I, 9 Yazdgerd (= 25 October 446 CE). Another case of Julian
calendar use is the martyrdom date of Giwargis, which it is given without a
weekday as 14 Kanun II, 926 SE (= 14 January 615 CE). The identification of
this date as Julian is based on the equivalent Persian date 28 Mihr, which is
given in the same source and which corresponded to (Julian) 14 January in that
year.23
Persian (or Zoroastrian) calendar dates, such as the one just mentioned,
are rare in Christian sources and not attested before the mid fifth century CE.
The Persian calendar is based on a 365-day year, but unlike the Julian calendar
it does not have a leap year, which means that it recedes by one day every four
years in relation to the Julian calendar.24 The relatively late arrival of Persian
dates in Christian sources may be taken as evidence that the official calendar of
the Sassanian dynasty took some time, perhaps more than a century, to infiltrate
Babylonian public life. This explanation, however, would depend on the
assumption that the dates of the Martyr Acts were recorded at the time and place
of the martyrdoms, and not reconstructed some time later, for instance when the
narratives were redacted or written. But although this assumption cannot always
be made,25 in this context, where Persian dates are always provided together
with Julian equivalent dates, it is likely that both dates were recorded at the time
22
On the problems surrounding both these dates see Stern 2004, pp. 449-50 and n.10, with
reference to the primary sources and modern scholarship. Piruz and Jacob Intercisus were
martyred in Bēt-Lapat, the Sassanian capital and Christian ecclesiastical centre of the province
of Khuzistan (Bēt Huzaye), later known as Gundeshapur (Walker 2006, pp. 95-6); the city is
mentioned in the Babylonian Talmud, bTa’anit 22a (Be-Lapat), though not as a centre of
rabbinic activity.
23
Ibid. p. 449. SE stands for Seleucid Era, which in the Syrian calendar began in Autumn
312 BCE. Mahdok was martyred in Mount Bĕrain, near the Lesser Zab river (which marks the
southern border of Adiabene) (Bedjan 1890-7, ii, pp. 1-39). The locations of Petion and
Giwargis are unspecified.
24
F. de Blois, ‘The Persian calendar’, Iran 34 (1996), 39-54. This calendar is structurally
identical to, and indeed originally derived from, the Egyptian civil calendar.
25
For example, the martyrdom of Malkē is located not in Babylonia but in Egypt (Bedjan
1890-7, v, p. 467), where one expects it to have been dated originally according to the
Alexandrian calendar; if the story is historical, we would have to assume that its date was
converted later into its Julian/Syriac equivalent.
11
of the event, because the conversion of Julian to Persian dates (or perhaps viceversa) requires a complex calculation that is unlikely to have been carried out,
for no useful purpose, years after the event.26
The earliest of these is the martyrdom of Anahid, dated ‘in the month of
Haziran, on day 18, that is the month of Spndrmd (= Persian month Spandārmuδ),
on Friday, year 9 of Yazdgerd’ (447 CE).27 Then follows the martyrdom of
Grīghōr, although it does not provide, strictly speaking, a Persian date: it is said
to have occurred in the month of Adar and at the time of the Zoroastrian festival
of Prwrdgn (= Frawardigān), in year 30 of Kavad (518 CE).28 After that come
two dates in the Acts of the Synods, in connection with the synod of Mar Aba
(which was held in Seleucia-Ctesiphon, 540 CE): it is dated ‘in the month of
Tishrei I, that is the month of Tirmah (= ‘month of Tīr’), in year 10 of Khusrau’,
and records of the synod were compiled by Mar Aba ‘in the month of Shahrir (=
Shahriwar), in year 13 of Khusrau’.29 It may be noted that the latter provides
only a Persian month, without any Julian or other date. Somewhat later, the
martyrdom of Giwargis in 615 CE is given a precise Persian date (alongside the
Julian date), including the day of the Persian month (see above) – in contrast to
the earlier Persian dates that only provide the month name. These last two cases
(Mar Aba and Giwargis), if significant, suggest perhaps, each in their own way,
that use of the Persian calendar became increasingly dominant in Babylonia in
the last century of Sassanian rule.
The third calendar attested in the Syriac Martyr Acts, and possibly the
most frequent in this body of literature, is lunar. A considerable number of
dates, indeed, are referred to explicitly as ‘according to the moon’. For a reason
that remains to be explained, the use of this phrase appears to be confined to
dates of martyrdoms from the reign of Shapur II (309-79 CE); but as I have
argued elsewhere, dates of martyrdoms from other reigns can also be
determined as lunar, on the basis of the weekday supplied alongside the day
number of the Syriac month.30 The use of the same, Syriac month names for
both Julian and lunar dates, in most cases without specification, is confusing to
us and may well have caused confusion to the calendar users in late Antiquity.
26
This does not mean that the narratives of the Syriac Martyr Acts must be treated as factual
or historical, but I am assuming, at the very least, that their dates originate from authentic – if
unrecoverable – historical events.
27
Bedjan 1890-7, ii, 603; Stern 2004, 462-63. The correspondence with the Persian date
suggests that Haziran is erroneous, and should really be Tammuz; if so, the date of Friday 18
Tammuz 447 CE could be either Julian (i.e. 18 July) or lunar.
28
Hoffmann 1880, 79; de Blois 1996, 47. The correlation fits a Julian month of Adar (=
March), as in 518 CE the Frawardigān occurred in mid March; however, a lunar month would
be equally possible.
29
Chabot 1902: 69 and 68 (respectively). In 540 CE, the Persian month of Tīr began on 7
Tishrei I (October); in 543, Shahriwar began on 6 December.
30
Stern 2004; on dates ‘according to the moon’, ibid. 448 n.2.
12
The nature of the lunar calendar, moreover, is unclear. The suggestion that it
might be the Jewish calendar – i.e. a calendar set and determined by Jews – is
groundless and without evidence, and in the context of Christian writings, not
particularly likely.31 Equally unlikely is the possibility that this lunar calendar is
the Christian Easter cycle: although lunar, this cycle was primarily designed for
the determination of the date of Easter (and hence other dates in the Christian
calendar that depend on it, e.g. the beginning of Lent), but not as a continuous
calendar with named months running through the whole year (at least not before
the Middle Ages); it is also unclear to what extent Easter cycles were used in
the East in the early Sassanian period (more on this below). It seems most
likely, therefore, that the dates ‘according to the moon’ were based on local,
indigenous Babylonian calendars that had remained lunar from the origins until
late Antiquity. The Syriac Martyr Acts, however, and the passage in bAvodah
Zarah 11b mentioned above, would be the only sources attesting their existence.
The lunar calendars of late antique Babylonia
Jewish and other, local lunar calendars in late antique Babylonia shared
common origins and a common history. As their Babylonian month names
reveal, they originally derived from the standard Babylonian calendar that had
served as official imperial calendar in the great Near Eastern empires of the first
millennium BCE, especially in the Achaemenid and Seleucid periods. This
calendar survived the disintegration of the Seleucid Empire and remained in use
the Parthian kingdom as well as of the smaller city-states and kingdoms of the
post-Seleucid Near East, including, for example, the Judaean Hasmonean
kingdom.
The chief characteristics of the standard Babylonian calendar were,
firstly, that the months began when the new moon was first sighted (either
actually, or when its first visibility was predicted), and secondly, that the year
was intercalated with a second month of Adar (or less frequently, Elul) on the
basis of a 19-year cycle, in such a way that Nisan never began before the spring
equinox.32 In the post-Seleucid period, however, city-states and kingdoms
reckoned the Babylonian calendar independently from one another, which led to
the diversification and fragmentation of the calendar. In some cases, deviation
from the standard Babylonian scheme may have been a way of asserting
political autonomy; but in others, it may have served particular circumstances
and needs.33
31
As argued in full in Stern 2004, 456-9, contra Mercier (see above, n.19). In this article I
conclude, like here, that the lunar dates in the Syriac Martyr Acts were drawn from local
Babylonian calendars.
32
S. Stern, ‘The Babylonian month and the new moon: sighting and prediction’, Journal for
the History of Astronomy 39 (2008), 19-42, and Stern 2012, ch.2.
33
Stern 2012, ch.5.
13
The Judaean (or ‘Jewish’) calendar, for example, appears not to have
followed a fixed 19-year (or any other) cycle, and to have allowed the
intercalation of a second month of Adar but never of Elul. These changes may
have been related to a certain understanding of the proper season for the
observance of Passover, on the 14th of Nisan. Further changes continued into
late Antiquity. By the fourth century CE, the Jewish Nisan was occurring earlier
than according to the Babylonian calendar, so that Passover frequently occurred
before the equinox.34 From this period onwards, moreover, Jewish calendars did
not consistently begin the month at the first sighting of the new moon: in late
Antiquity, some Jewish calendars began the month near the time of the
conjunction (when the moon is very close to the sun and totally invisible),
which occurs typically one or two days earlier, and which can only be
determined by calculation or on the basis of some fixed scheme.35
These changes were related to wider, more fundamental changes that
were affecting Jewish calendars in this period. From the fourth century CE
onwards, some Jews were abandoning empirical methods such as new moon
sighting, and opting instead for fixed calendar schemes. For example, a list of
Jewish Passover dates in a document issued by a faction of Syrian bishops at the
Council of Serdica (343 CE) implies not only a month beginning at or near the
conjunction, but also a simple scheme for calculating Passover dates, as well as
a fixed rule whereby Passover could only occur in the Julian month of March.36
Another Jewish calendar that underwent schematization in late
Antiquity, in the long term far more important, was the rabbinic calendar –
i.e. the calendar represented in rabbinic literature. The earliest rabbinic
sources, redacted in early third-century CE Palestine (e.g. the Mishnah and
Tosefta), present an entirely empirical lunar calendar where the beginning of
the month was determined on the basis of new moon sightings, and the
intercalation decided year by year on the basis of the crops, the weather, and
other empirical criteria. But in the course of the Amoraic period (third-fifth
centuries CE), a number of rules appear to have been introduced,
determining the length of certain months and preventing the year from
beginning on certain weekdays. These rules, which overrode the empirical
observations, had the effect of gradually transforming the calendar into a
fixed scheme: by the time of the redaction of the Palestinian Talmud (end of
the fourth century), the rabbinic calendar consisted largely of a fixed
sequence of full and hollow months in alternation, and there is talk in one
passage of ‘those who calculate’ the calendar, suggesting that the methods
34
Stern 2001, 66-98.
Ibid. 132-43. It is important to refer to ‘Jewish calendars’ in the plural, because in the
Diaspora as well as in Palestine they were reckoned in a variety of ways. Nevertheless, some
common trends in the history of Jewish calendars can be identified.
36
Ibid. 74-9 and 124-32.
35
14
were no longer empirical.37 From the sixth century there is evidence that the
beginning of the month in the rabbinic calendar was based on the
conjunction (and no longer on observation of the new moon); this is already
implicit in a fourth-century Babylonian tradition cited in the Babylonian
Talmud.38
Although most of these changes appear to have originated in Palestine,
whose authority, in calendrical matters at least, appears to have been
accepted by the Babylonian rabbinic community in the Talmudic period, the
Babylonian Talmud is distinctive for its interest in calendar calculations and
schemes, far more than Palestinian rabbinic sources. Thus we find in the
Babylonian Talmud the full exposition of a schematic calculation of
equinoxes and solstices, based on a 28-year cycle (b‘Eruvin 56a); rules for
the prediction of new moon visibility (of which the scientific value remains,
however, obscure: bRosh Hashanah 20b); and a lengthy passage about
calendar calculations and the length of months and years (b‘Arakhin 8b10a).39 In many passages, the Babylonian Talmud cites and discusses an
obscure Tannaitic tradition on a rule attributed to ‘Others’ that implies a fixed
length of the year; this tradition is barely attested in Palestinian sources.40 It is
again in the Babylonian Talmud – but not in any Palestinian source – that we
find the rule that Passover cannot occur before the spring equinox (bRosh
Hashanah 21a). Finally, the Babylonian sage Samuel (early third century) is
said to have boasted that he could set the calendar for the entire Diaspora
(bRosh Hashanah 20b); and as proof of his knowledge, he once sent to
R.Yoḥanan, his leading Palestinian contemporary, a calendar or schedule of
intercalations for sixty years (Ḥullin 95b).41 The Babylonian Talmud’s
37
A fixed sequence of months, at least from Adar to Tishrei, is implicit in pMegillah 1:2
(70b); ‘those who calculate’ are mentioned in pSukkah 4:1 (54b). See ibid. 157-75. The
medieval tradition that the fixed rabbinic calendar was instituted whole piece by a patriarch
named Hillel in the mid fourth century is not supported by Talmudic sources (ibid. 175-81).
38
Sixth-century evidence: ibid. 182-4, where I overlooked a tradition in bSanhedrin 41b-42a
attributed to the ‘Nehardeans’ whereby the full moon occurs on the 16th of the month, which
implies a month beginning at the conjunction; the Nehardeans are usually associated with the
fourth century CE. A 19-year cycle of intercalations (not identical, however, to that of the
standard Babylonian cycle) was eventually adopted, though not much before the eighth
century, and it is only by the early tenth century that the fixed rabbinic calendar, still
normative today, finally came into existence (ibid. 191-210).
39
Note also that a passage in the Babylonian Talmud, unparalleled in Palestinian sources, extols
those who calculate tequfot (equinoxes and solstices) and mazzalot (stars and planets): bShabbat
75a.
40
The main source is b‘Arakhin 9b; also bShabbat 87b, bRosh Hashanah 6b and 20a, and
bSukkah 54b. In Palestinian sources this tradition is only attested in t‘Arakhin 1:11
(Zuckermandel ed., pp.543-4).
41
Whether it was a calendar or a list of intercalations depends on the meaning of the term
‫עיבורא‬. See, on all this, Stern 2001, 257-63.
15
interest in calendrical schemes suggests that Babylonia may have played a
critical role in shifting the rabbinic calendar, during the Talmudic period,
from an empirical to a fixed calendar.42
Local, non-Jewish calendars in late antique Babylonia had similar origins
to the Jewish calendar; it may be presumed, indeed, that they were direct
descendants of the standard Babylonian calendar. Unfortunately, no explicit
evidence of these calendars has survived; their existence can only be tentatively
inferred from the prevalence of lunar dates in the Syriac Martyr Acts (see
above). As I have argued elsewhere, analysis of these lunar dates suggests that
not all local calendars conformed anymore, in this period, to the standard
Babylonian calendar of earlier times: although some calendars were probably
based on empirical new moon sightings, others began the month around the
time of the conjunction (which suggests the use of schematic calendars); and
whereas in some calendars Nisan was post-equinoctial, in others Nisan could
begin well before the spring equinox.43
The Christian Easter cycles
Christian Easter cycles, although based on a lunar computation, did not directly
derive from the standard Babylonian calendar; their origins and history were
quite different, therefore, from the Jewish and other local calendars in
Babylonia of late Antiquity. Nevertheless, their importance to Christians in late
antique Babylonia needs also to be considered.
The Christian celebration of Easter draws its origins from the Jewish
Passover, from which, originally, it was hardly distinguished. But although the
earliest followers of Jesus celebrated this Biblical festival in the same way as all
other Jews, very early on – I would venture to surmise, already at the first
Passover after the Crucifixion – the festival was invested with a distinctive,
‘Christian’ new meaning: it became the anniversary and commemoration of the
42
As argued out more fully ibid. 263-75.
Stern 2004. Further evidence of the survival of lunar calendars in late antique Babylonia
may be the liturgical calendar of the Manichaeans, which in the Middle Ages at least (most
notably, according to an-Nadīm in his Fihrist, 333.28 – 334.1, mid tenth cent.) was based on
the phases of the moon and thus implicitly on a lunar calendar: see W. B. Henning (with
notes by S. H. Taqizadeh), ‘The Manichean Fasts’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 77,
1945, 146-64, and F. de Blois in id. and N. Sims-Williams (eds.), Dictionary of Manichaean
Texts, vol.2. Texts from Iraq and Iran (Texts in Syriac, Arabic, Persian, and Zoroastrian
Middle Persian), Corpus Fontium Manichaeorum: Subsidia (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 60.
Further afield, al-Biruni (writing in c.1000) describes the calendar of the ‘Sabians’ or heathens
of Harrān (a city in Upper Mesopotamia) as lunar, with months beginning two or three days after
the conjunction, and with intercalations of an additional Adhar (The Chronology of Ancient
Nations, trans. C. E. Sachau (London: W. H. Allen, 1879), 314-19; an intercalated lunar
calendar is also ascribed by Biruni, as one would expect, to the pre-Islamic Arabs: ibid. 321,
324). I am grateful to François de Blois for these suggestions.
43
16
Passion of the Jesus. This new interpretation of the festival gradually drew away
the Christian Easter from the Jewish Passover, and soon had an impact on the date
of the festival.44 By the late second century CE, the established custom in most
Christian communities was to celebrate Easter no longer on the date of Passover
but on the Sunday following it, to commemorate the Sunday of the Resurrection.
This date, however, was still reckoned with reference to the Jewish Passover, and
there is evidence that still in the late second century, Christians were observing
when Jews were actually celebrating Passover, in order to determine the following
Sunday as the date of Easter.45
A major change occurred, however, in the early third century, when
Christians began to determine the date of Passover (i.e. the lunar date of 14th
Nisan) independently of the Jews, on the basis of pre-calculated tables or cycles.
The first of these cycles was devised in the West, more specifically in Rome, and
is attributed to Hippolytus; it consists of a table of 112 years starting from 222 CE,
which is presumably near the time when the table was composed.46 This cycle,
grossly inaccurate, was modified and updated in pseudo-Cyprian’s De Pascha
Computus, a treatise on the calculation of the date of Easter written perhaps in
Africa in 243 CE.47 The extent to which these cycles were ever used in practice,
however, remains unknown.48 They were later superseded in Rome by the far
more accurate 84-year cycles, perhaps already sometime in the third century. The
most important of these was the so-called supputatio romana, which was probably
conceived in the early fourth century, as its 84-year cycle started in 298 CE; it was
probably in use in Rome by the 340s, and became standard among Roman
Christians until the mid fifth century.49
I use the English name ‘Easter’ to refer specifically to the Christian festival, although
ancient Greek, Latin, and Syriac generally use the same name, Pascha, for both the Jewish
and the Christian festivals.
45
Stern 2001, 222-3. Thus Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus in the 190s, describes the 14th of the
moon as ‘the day when the people (i.e. the Jews) dispose of the leaven’ (Eusebius, Historia
Ecclesiastica 5:24:6), i.e. when the Jews prepared for the festival of Unleavened Bread (which
began on the 15th) by throwing out all leaven from their homes. This reference to a real-life
Jewish practice, indeed a public, outdoor activity that he and other Christians in Ephesus
could easily have observed, rather than for example the sacrifice of the paschal lamb (on the
14th) which in this period would have been a purely theoretical, biblical notion, suggests that it
was the actual, observable practices of real Jews that determined, for him and other Christians,
the date of the 14th of the month. Still in 243 CE, the African computist pseudo-Cyprian
criticizes Christians who ‘walk in blindness and stupidity behind the Jews, as if not knowing on
which day Easter should occur’ (more on this at the end of this section).
46
A. A. Mosshammer, The Easter Computus and the Origins of the Christian Era (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008), 116-25.
47
Ibid. 125-7.
48
M. Richard, ‘Notes sur le comput de cent-douze ans’, Revue des Etudes Byzantines, 24
(1966), 257-77; repr. in id., Opera Minor (Turnhout: Brepols, 1976), vol.1, no.20.
49
Mosshammer 2008, 206-16, 238; Stern 2012, ch.6.
44
17
In the East, Easter cycles took a bit longer to emerge. The earliest known
cycle is that of Anatolius of Laodicea (western Syria), a 19-year cycle designed
in about 270 CE but which is most unlikely ever to have been used in practice.50
It was followed, however, by the so-called Alexandrian cycle, a highly accurate
19-year cycle which may have been conceived at the beginning of the fourth
century, and which was well in use in Alexandria and other parts of the Roman
East by the middle of the century.51 By the mid fifth century, this cycle was also
adopted, with modifications, in Rome and most other parts of the Roman
West.52 From this point onwards, the Alexandrian cycle (or adaptations of it,
sometimes with minor variations) became the mainstream, orthodox
computation of the date of Easter.
The Alexandrian 19-year cycle was not borrowed from, or modelled
upon, the standard Babylonian calendar, but rather from a Greek tradition
stretching back to the fifth century BCE. A 19-year cycle beginning in 432 BCE
was first devised by the Athenian astronomer Meton (or one of his
contemporaries);53 it was later refined by the Athenian astronomer Callippus
with a 76-year cycle (consisting of four 19-year Metonic cycles minus one day),
beginning in 330 BCE.54 Unlike the standard Babylonian calendar, where
months are established empirically on the basis of new moon sightings, the
Callippic scheme determines in advance the exact length of every month within
the whole cycle (generally by alternating 29- and 30-day months). A similar,
pre-calculated calendar of this kind is implicit in the Alexandrian Easter cycle
of the fourth century (even though its explicit purpose is only to determine the
date of Easter), and this underlying lunar calendar becomes more explicit in
expositions of the Alexandrian cycle in later centuries. Another feature of the
Alexandrian Easter cycle in common with the Greek tradition of lunar calendar
schemes is that its months begin around the time of the conjunction, in contrast
50
D. P. Mc Carthy and A. Breen, The Ante-Nicene Christian Pasch: De Ratione Paschali. The
Paschal Tract of Anatolius, Bishop of Laodicea (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003).
51
The evidence, Athanasius’ Festal Letters, is however complex and not entirely conclusive:
see Mosshammer ibid. 165, 178-82; Stern ibid. ch.7.
52
Mosshammer ibid. 62-3.
53
On Meton, the 19-year cycle attributed to him or one of his contemporaries, and the
possible relationship between it and its Babylonian equivalent, see A. C. Bowen and B. R.
Goldstein, ‘Meton of Athens and astronomy in the late fifth century BC’, in E. Leichty et al.
(eds), A Scientific Humanist: Studies in Memory of Abraham Sachs (Philadelphia: University
Museum, 1988), 39-81, and R. Hannah, Greek and Roman Calendars: Constructions of Time
in the Classical World (London: Duckworth, 2005), 54-7. Even if the Greek astronomers
borrowed the 19-year cycle from the Babylonians (a proposition that remains very debatable),
the calendars which they produced were very different from the standard Babylonian
calendar, as I explain here.
54
The Callippic calendar (alongside earlier cycles) is described in some detail by Geminus,
Elem. Astr. 8:26-60 (first century BCE). See most importantly A. Jones, ‘Calendrica I: new
Callipic dates’, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, 129 (2000), 141-58.
18
with the standard Babylonian calendar where months began when the new
moon is first visible.55
Further east, the dissemination of the Alexandrian cycle among Christians
in the Sassanian Empire was slower and more gradual than in the Roman
Empire. Although the Alexandrian cycle, or rather an adaptation of it, was later
to become the standard Easter computation in Eastern Christianity (just as in the
West), it is possibly not before the sixth century that it was formally adopted by
the Churches under Sassanian rule.56
There are several possible reasons for this delay. Firstly, Easter cycles
were specifically designed for users of the Julian or Alexandrian calendars, i.e.
the calendars of the Roman Empire (the Alexandrian calendar was the calendar
of Roman Egypt, consisting, like the Julian calendar, of a 365-day year with an
extra day every four years); the purpose of these cycles, indeed, was to convert
the lunar dates of Easter into Julian (or Alexandrian) equivalents. In the
Sassanian Empire, however, this would have been far less a necessity, as the
Julian calendar was not an official imperial calendar, and furthermore, local
lunar calendars appear to have been in prevalent use. Although, as we have seen
above, the Julian calendar was used by Christians for liturgical purposes as well
as for the dating of martyrdoms and of the synods, lunar calendars were also
available and used by Christians (for example, for martyrdom dates). In a
society where lunar calendars were the norm, the conversion of Easter dates
from lunar to Julian would have been quite superfluous.
Secondly, the computation of the date of Easter on the basis of fixed, precalculated cycles ran counter to a custom that was probably observed in the East
through most of late Antiquity: that is, the custom of ‘following the Jews’ or
observing Easter ‘with the Jews’, i.e. on the date when the Jews happened to
observe Passover (or more precisely, on the following Sunday). As we have
On ‘conjunction’ and new moon visibility, see above near n.35. Another feature of the
Alexandrian cycle that differed from the standard Babylonian calendar, though not clearly
due to any Greek tradition (but rather, in fact, to Alexandrian Jewish traditions of the second
century BCE: Stern 2001, 50-3), was the rule of the equinox. The Alexandrian cycle was
constructed in such a way that Passover, the 14th day of the first lunar month (Nisan), always
occurred after the vernal equinox, which was taken to be 21 March. This means that Nisan
itself could often begin well before the equinox, whereas in the standard Babylonian calendar
it always began thereafter.
56
An indication of this may be that the Easter cycle of the Nestorians is known, from later
sources, to have begun in 562 CE (V. Grumel, La Chronologie. Traités d’Etudes Byzantines,
vol.1 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958), 54 and 98-102); this epoch is clearly
related to the treaty between the Roman and Persian Empires of the same year, when Nestorians
in the Sassanian Empire were granted certain rights, but it also suggests that the Easter cycle was
not used beforehand. At the synod of Mar Isaac in 410 CE, a decision was recorded – in line
with the Council of Nicaea – that Easter be celebrated by all on the same date (Chabot 1902, 20
and 258; see above, n.20); but in true Nicene fashion, it was not explained how this common
date was to be established or observed.
55
19
seen above, this had been the custom of all early Christians, before the rise of
Easter cycles in the third-century West. This custom was maintained and
vigorously upheld in the Near East, with the Didascalia (a text originally
written in the third century, perhaps in northern Syria, and preserved in full in a
fourth-century Syriac version) enjoining Christians to ‘begin (the fast) when
your brethren who are of the people [i.e. the Jews] perform the Passover’, and
‘when therefore that people performs the Passover, do you fast’, 57 or according
to another version, cited by Epiphanius (370s CE), ‘reckon ye not [i.e. on the
basis of a fixed Easter cycle], but celebrate when your brethren of the
circumcision do; celebrate with them’, and ‘when they feast, mourn ye for them
with fasting, for they crucified Christ on the day of the feast; and when they
mourn on the Day of Unleavened Bread and eat with bitter herbs, then feast
ye’.58 This resistance to ‘reckoning’ the date of Easter on the basis of fixed
cycles, and insistence instead on following the Jews, remained dominant in the
Near East throughout the fourth century, in spite of the Council of Nicaea’s
opposition to it.59 This would explain the late introduction of Easter cycles in
the Near East.
Eventually, however, perhaps in the sixth century, Easter cycles were
adopted by Christians in the East. In this respect, the Christian, lunar calendar of
Easter developed in the same way as other lunar calendars in the Near East,
Jewish and local Babylonian: in late Antiquity, they all evolved from flexible
and empirical methods of time reckoning into schematic and fixed calendars.
Influence, shared culture, and other paradigms
The evolution of lunar calendars in Babylonia from empirical methods to fixed
schemes occurred for a variety of reasons, specific to each of the individual
calendars; and yet, we should ask whether their common history was not, in a
certain way, interrelated.
The reason why the rabbinic calendar shifted, during the third-fifth
centuries CE, to an increasingly fixed scheme with alternating 29- and 30day months and other rigid rules, was (as I have argued elsewhere) the
outcome of the unique relationship between the Palestinian and Babylonian
rabbinic communities. These communities considered it essential to observe
57
Didascalia 21, in A. Vööbus, The Didascalia Apostolorum in Syriac, 4 vols. Corpus
Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 401-402, 407-408: Scriptores Syri 175-176, 179-180
(Leuven: CSCO 1979), ii. 23*, 27-8*, iv. 196, 202.
58
Epiphanius, Panarion 70:10:2 and 11:3 (F. Williams,The Panarion of Epiphanius of
Salamis, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1987-1994), ii. 412-3).
59
Evidence of this custom in late Antiquity comes mainly from Roman Syria, but it may be
assumed to have extended to the whole of Mesopotamia. Aphrahat, writing in Persian
Mesopotamia in c.344CE, implies it in his twelfth Demonstration, although the evidence is not
entirely conclusive (Stern 2001, 69, n.68).
20
festivals and fasts, and generally to reckon the calendar, on exactly the same
dates – a quest for unanimity that was unique to the rabbinic movement, and
never pursued elsewhere in the variegated Jewish Diaspora world. Because
of the impossibility of communicating the results of empirical new moon
sightings from Palestine to Babylonia and thus of ensuring the observance of
festivals in both communities on the same dates, it became a necessity –
especially at a time when the rabbinic community in Babylonia began to
develop, from the third century CE – to increase the predictability of the
Palestinian rabbinic calendar by restricting it with fixed rules. The gradual
fixation of the rabbinic calendar was thus the result of an attempt to unify
and standardize the calendar of the rabbinic communities of Palestine and
Babylonia. Even within the Jewish world, this phenomenon was very
specific to the rabbinic movement.60
On the Christian side, the development of Easter cycles in the thirdfourth centuries was motivated by very different reasons. The common
scholarly view is that the purpose of the first Easter cycles was to enable all
churches to observe Easter on the same dates, and thus to eradicate calendar
diversity61 – not unlike the explanation put forward above for the rabbinic
calendar. In actual fact, however, this motivation did not take shape before
the fourth century, when Constantine attempted to enforce a single date of
Easter for all Christians in the Roman Empire.62 Before Constantine, the
motivation explicitly stated by one of the earliest computists, the pseudoCyprian (writing in 243 CE), was ‘to show that it is possible for Christians
never to stray from the way of truth and walk in blindness and stupidity behind
the Jews, as if not knowing on which day Easter should occur’.63 As the author
explains, the introduction of a fixed Easter cycle would enable Christians to
become independent from the Jews, by no longer relying on the Jews and their
Passover for establishing the date of Easter. This suggests that Easter cycles in
the early third century responded to a need for Christians to dissociate
themselves from Jews and their Jewish origins and thus ‘part ways’ from
Judaism.64 This motivation was still live in the late seventh century, when we
find it in a treatise on Easter by Ananias of Shirak, whose purpose was to
promote a new Easter cycle in Armenia; Ananias attributes this motivation,
rightly or wrongly, to Constantine, but also clearly shares it himself.65
60
Stern 2001, 232-56.
E.g. Mosshammer 2008, 52, 55.
62
As I argue in Stern 2012, ch.7.
63
Ps-Cyprian, De Pascha Computus, 1 (G. Ogg, The Pseudo-Cyprianic De Pascha Computus
(London: SPCK, 1955), 1).
64
Stern 2001, 223-26. For further motivations, see Stern 2012, ch.7.
65
F. C. Conybeare, ‘Ananias of Shirak, “Autobiography”, “His tract on Easter”’,
Byzantinische Zeitschrift 6 (1897), 572-584, on p.578: ‘[the early Christians] kept the feast
61
21
As to local Babylonian calendars, the waning of the standard
Babylonian calendar and the diversification of local calendars, with some
adopting less empirical, more schematic features (as can be inferred, at least,
from the dates of some of the martyrdoms – see above, near n.43), was most
likely the result of the collapse of the Parthian kingdom in the early third
century, which had used the standard Babylonian calendar (or something very
similar to it) for official imperial purposes, and the rise instead of the Sassanian
dynasty that used instead the Persian-Zoroastrian calendar. In the absence of
any central authority, in the Sassanian period, to impose and control a single
lunar calendar, the cities of Mesopotamia drifted into calendar diversity and
particularism. As conformity to an imperial lunar calendar was no longer
required, cities and other localities were free to adopt a variety of lunar
calendar schemes.
But the switch of some local Babylonian calendars to schematic lunar
calendars, with new months beginning at the conjunction rather than at the first
appearance of the new moon – in total departure from earlier Mesopotamian
tradition – raises the possibility of Hellenistic influence, mediated perhaps
through the Jews or (more likely) the Christians and their Easter cycles. At this
stage, therefore, we need to consider whether in spite of their separate origins,
motivations, and histories, the lunar calendars of late antique Babylonia did not
exert influences on one another.
The lines of influence between Jewish, Christian, and other local
Babylonian calendars can be drawn, potentially, in almost any direction (I use the
term ‘influence’ in a rather general and imprecise manner, to include all forms of
cultural transfer and exchange – see my remarks in the introduction to this
paper) . As I have suggested already elsewhere, the fixed rabbinic calendar may
have developed under the influence of Christian Easter cycles, which
chronologically preceded it. In common with Easter cycles, indeed, the fixed
rabbinic calendar alternated 29- and 30-day months, began the month at the
conjunction, and followed a rule of the equinox, whereby Passover cannot occur
before the spring equinox.66 The fixation of the rabbinic calendar may thus be
simultaneously with the Jews – a miscellaneous and unclean least – until the days of the
blessed Constantine and the holy council of Nicaea. And then it was prescribed by the
emperor that they should not any longer after that keep a feast in impure agreement with the
Lord-slaying race of Jews. So he issued an edict that they should adopt the nineteen years
lunar cycle of Easters ...; and that they should take pupils from among all Christian nations
and teach them the calendar; and so separate the Christians from the Jewish (observance)’.
66
The rule of the equinox, of Alexandrian Jewish origins (see above, n.55) was promoted in
the 270s by Anatolius of Laodicea (who, it should be noted, came originally from Alexandria;
see above, n.50), and by the early fourth century became one of the principles of the
Alexandrian Easter computation (see Stern 2001, 66-7, 72-4). A similar rule then makes its
first appearance in the Babylonian Talmud, bRosh Hashanah 21a, where it is attributed to a
fourth-century Palestinian sage, though still only as a guideline rather than as a firm rule
22
interpreted as an outcome of the Christianization of the Roman Empire, and
more particularly of Palestine, in the fourth century CE: rabbis and other Jews
in this period would have appropriated the lunar calendar principles which the
Christians had adopted already earlier in their Easter cycles, even if the latter’s
purpose, paradoxically, had been precisely to distance themselves from the
Jewish calendar.67
In the context of the Near East, however, the same line of influence can
be reversed with the argument that it is the Jewish calendar that is more likely to
have influenced Christian practice. Indeed, if the general practice of Christians
in late antique Syria and Babylonia was to ‘follow the Jews’ and observe Easter
‘with the Jews’ (as explained above), the Jewish calendar would have played a
determinative role upon the Christian liturgical calendar.
Then, we must consider further lines of influence. As has been noted
above, some local Babylonian calendars, which originally corresponded to the
standard Babylonian calendar, appear to have become adapted in late Antiquity
to the Christian Easter cycles; this may have involved the adoption of complete
lunar schemes like those assumed in Easter cycles (with months beginning at
the conjunction, alternation of 29- and 30-day months, etc.), or more minimally,
an adjustment of the calendar – still dependent, perhaps, on new moon sightings
– to ensure that the month of Nisan would coincide with the month of the
Jewish Passover and Christian Easter (which frequently began, as noted above,
before the equinox). The adaptation of local lunar calendars to the Easter cycles,
and thus to the Christian liturgical year, is most likely to have occurred in
localities with predominantly Christian populations.
By the same token, it may be reasonable to expect – although we have no
evidence to support this – that in localities with predominantly Jewish
populations, the Jewish calendar would have exerted an influence on the local
calendars. Likewise, the possibility that local Babylonian calendars influenced,
in their own right, the Jewish calendar or the Christian date of Easter, cannot be
ruled out: for it would have been most convenient for Jews and Christians to use
the local lunar calendars that were already available and in public use. If Jews
and Christians reckoned their lunar calendars on their own, differences between
them are bound to have arisen, which – even if involving discrepancies of only
one day – would have led to considerable confusion. In some localities,
therefore, Jews and Christians may have regarded it an advantage simply to
follow the local, Babylonian lunar calendar.
(ibid. 167-70). The 19-year cycle, however, perhaps the most important characteristic of
Alexandrian computus, is not attested in the rabbinic calendar before the eighth century (ibid.
196-200).
67
Ibid. 222-6 (on the rabbinic calendar). However, this interpretation lends itself even better
to the Jewish calendar of the Serdica document (ibid. 141-3; see above, near n.36).
23
It is important to stress that the concept of ‘influence’ (or any other
process of cultural transfer) is not invoked here as a pre-conceived assumption:
Jews, Christians, and others in late antique Babylonia did not influence one
another simply by virtue of living in mutual proximity. As discussed in the
introduction to this paper, the social context and processes through which
influence occurred need to be investigated and explained. What I am arguing,
accordingly, is that the practical convenience of following existing, local
calendars, together with specific traditions such as the Christian custom of
observing Easter ‘with the Jews’, provided a social context conducive to the
transfer and exchange of principles and methods of lunar reckoning between
these groups, and in broader terms, to the development of the different lunar
calendars in similar directions, towards increasingly fixed schemes.
This said, the lines of influence were so multidirectional, and the
potential for cultural transfer so extensive, that boundaries between calendars
could easily become blurred. As we have seen above (near n.14), for example, a
passage in the Babylonian Talmud (bAvodah Zarah 11b) seems not to
distinguish clearly between Jewish and local (or ‘pagan’) Babylonian months,
or even to be aware of any difference. Inasmuch as Jews, Christians, and others
in late antique Babylonia all used lunar calendars with the same (or very
similar) month names, the question must be raised whether or to what extent
their calendars were actually different or distinguished from one another.68 A
variety of lunar calendars must surely have existed, as can be demonstrated
from the lunar dates within even a single literary corpus, the Syriac Martyr
Acts; but this variety may well have reflected regional or local differences
rather than differences between Jews, Christians, and other religious groups,
whose lunar calendars are never contrasted with one another in any of the
sources, and may often have been difficult to distinguish. For this reason, we
may be justified in moving away somewhat from the paradigm of ‘influence’ to
one of ‘shared culture’ or of ‘the same culture in different variants’ (above, n.3).
In theory, the paradigms of influence and shared culture are mutually
incompatible, the former assuming distinct identities and groups, and the latter
assuming a single, common identity and group. Indeed, the very distinct origins,
histories, and identities of Jewish calendars, local Babylonian calendars, and
Christian Easter cycles cannot easily be reconciled with the notion of a single,
shared lunar calendar, evolving at one, through late Antiquity, from empirical
methods to fixed schemes. In this context, however, both paradigms appear to
be simultaneously true; the least we can say is that the configuration of lunar
calendars in late antique Babylonian society was too complex for simple
choices to be made between ‘influence’ and ‘shared culture’. Perhaps we should
68
Zoroastrians are not included in this discussion, because their month names were different
and their calendar was patently not lunar.
24
aim, therefore, at a more complex paradigm involving at once shared culture
and divided identities, where historical change or history itself is generated
through the corroboration or the convergence of very different and independent
processes – some affecting individual identity groups in isolation, others
involving their mutual interaction and influence, others engaging the whole of
society as a shared culture – which happen to produce a common result. It was
perhaps the congruence of these diverse processes – the independent histories of
the individual calendars, their reciprocal influences, and the shared Babylonian
culture of lunar calendars – which successfully brought about the general
emergence of fixed calendars in late antique Babylonian society.
A telling example of the complex relationship between these independent,
mutually corroborative processes was the adoption of Easter cycles by the
Church of the East, an event which occurred perhaps in the mid sixth century.
Christian leaders were most probably motivated not only by loyalty to the
Christians of the Roman Empire, but also by a desire to ‘part ways’ from the
Jews and no longer depend on them for the date of Easter or observe the
festival, as hitherto, ‘with the Jews’.69 Yet the rabbinic calendar had become by
then largely schematic – perhaps under the influence, at an earlier stage in
history, of the very same Easter cycles – and thus very similar to the lunar
calendar implicit in the Easter cycle that was being adopted, at this later stage,
by Christians in the East in an attempt to part way from the Jews. This circular
paradox, involving at once rival motivations and shared outcomes, epitomizes
the complexity of calendars and identities in late antique Babylonia, and the
inadequacy of adopting simple models for explaining their rich history.
69
Above, near nn.57-9 and 63-5.
25
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