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conjunction of three different cycles: the solar cycle of the year (to which the
vernal equinox belongs), the lunar cycle of the month (to which the full moon
belongs), and the weekly cycle (to which Sunday belongs). The idea of bringing
together these three cycles, and placing Christ at their centre, or conjunction,
seems to me to have profound implications.
Let us go back to calendars. Nowadays we take them for granted, but
there are many ways of ordering time: the time chosen for the New Year, the
length of the months, unless you keep to strictly lunar months—these are
matters on which there can be different decisions, on which there needs to be
general agreement. The Jewish calendar and the Muslim calendar keep to lunar
months, which are about 29 and a half days long. Twelve lunar months are
shorter than the solar year (by about eleven days); thirteen months too long.
The Jews adopted a system of intercalating a month, round about the time of
the vernal equinox, every two or three years. The Muslims adopt a lunar ‘year’
of twelve lunar months, which means that the beginning of the year (and feasts
celebrated through the year) are about eleven days earlier each year: that is why
it is difficult to work out the correspondence between the Muslim reckoning
from the year of the Hijra (AH), the departure of the prophet Muhammad
from Mecca, and the Christian reckoning from the year of the Lord (AD); the
Hijra took place in AD 622, but the year AH cannot be calculated by
subtracting 622 from the year AD. Nor is there any correspondence between
the months of the Muslim year and the seasons, for all feasts and fasts can
occur in any of the seasons. It was, one imagines, for this reason that the Jews
adopted the method of correcting their lunar year, so that the month
corresponded more or less to the seasons: many of the Jewish feasts are bound
up with seasonal activity, sowing and harvesting, as with the Christian year. The
Muslim year is, it would appear, deliberately acosmic; while the Jewish and
Christian years, again deliberately, retain a link between the calendar and the
seasons.
Christians, however, made no attempt to create their own religious
calendar; when they fashioned their calendar or calendars, they very rarely
worked from scratch. They adopted the calendar—the secular calendar—of the
people among whom they lived, and for most this was the Roman Empire. The
calendar that Christians followed was therefore the Julian Calendar, introduced
by Julius Caesar in 45 BC (actually it was not quite as simple as that—in
matters calendrical things rarely are—and for further detail you should consult
that wonderful book, The Oxford Companion to the Year, by Bonnie Blackburn

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