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determined the year. There are other cycles associated with these fundamental
cycles. The year, for instance, is broken down in the sequence of the seasons:
spring, summer, autumn and winter. The Jewish tradition, as we find it in the
Scriptures, adds another cycle: the cycle of the week, consisting of seven days
from Sunday to Saturday. As we have seen, these various cycles do not fit into
each other in any tidy way: the month is bit more than four weeks; the year a
bit more than twelve lunar months. It is this that makes the calendar a
complicated business; even by the time of late antiquity centuries of human
ingenuity had gone into bringing these cycles into some sort of conjunction.
There are two ways of doing this, and the Christian calendar
incorporates both of them. The Julian calendar, adopted, as we have seen, by
the Christians of the Roman Empire, is one way of bringing the solar year and
the lunar year into conjunction (I am going to use our modern way of referring
to these, though I suppose, historically, I should say the sidereal year): the
twelve months of the lunar year are extended by two or three days (except for
February) so that the twelve months encompass 365 days. This means that the
months are no longer lunar; the full moon shifts about each month, and one
can even have two moons in a single calendar month; lunar time is, if you like,
subordinated to solar time. The Christian Church, however, remained attached
to the lunar year, for one reason: the celebration of Easter, or Pascha, the
Christian Passover. As the name ‘Pascha’ makes clear, the Christian feast is
based on the Jewish Passover, Pesach, or Pasch; or rather it is the Christian
Pascha or Passover. The way the Hebrews worked out the date of Passover
involved bringing lunar and solar time into some kind of conjunction. For the
Jews, as we have seen, every so often an extra lunar month is intercalated, so
that the Jewish year corresponds roughly to the solar year, and the months
relate to the seasons of the year. Passover was held on 14 Nisan, the date of the
full moon after, or around, the spring equinox. Based on that, Christians by the
end of the second century were determining Easter as the Sunday after the first
full moon after the Spring Equinox (as the equinox was judged to be 20/21
March, Easter could occur on any date between 22 March and 25 April). This
brings into conjunction three of the cycles mentioned: the week, the (lunar)
month and the (solar) year. Easter is the first day of the week (Sunday),
occurring in the middle of the lunar month, after the full moon, in Spring, the
season in which the earth comes to life.
The revolution of these cycles—their conjunction and disjunction—
gives shape to the sequence of time, which would otherwise be—as it has
perhaps largely become in the secular West—a sequence of otherwise

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