ANOTHER devastating thing that happened at Nicaea was the amalgamation of the Christian calendar and the Roman calendar.
The first Christians were the Judeans and they used a lunar or moon calendar based on that of Israel.
The Romans had their own solar calendar which was based on sun worship.
These calendars and their festivals rarely coincided except for the springtime festivals which, by reason of seasonal change, fell in the same period.
The Christians had used the moon to identify the time to observe the Passover festival.
According to John 18 verse 28, Christ was crucified on the day of the Passover meal.
Thus Christians used to remember the martyrdom of Christ during this Passover period.
As we discussed last week, in springtime the Romans like the Assyrians, Babylonians and Canaanites, celebrated fertility and the goddess of heaven Ishta or Astati.
Hebrew festivals were often frowned upon by the colonial regimes of Judea.
The outlawing of Israelite festivals had begun in the Greek period that predated the Romans.
The Greeks had tried to Hellenise the Judeans since over 300 years before Christ existed.
But because of a guerilla style resistance that is now remembered as the Maccabean Revolution, they failed.
The Greeks had sought to break all linguistic, cultural, religious and ideological differences among its colonies and chose to impose the Greek lifestyle as the only way and this process was known as Hellenising.
When this failed, the Greek invaders sought to make a religion that all in Judea would follow and this was the root of the religion called Judaism.
In this period originated the scribes and Pharisees in place of the Levite priesthood that was followed since the time of Moses.
A lot of mixing of Greek and Hebrew culture took place and they are these foreign traits that the likes of John and Christ had been killed for rebelling against.
When Rome colonised Judea, they made the scribes and Pharisees the chief authorities because of their Greek origins and the common Judeans were under them.
Inter-marriage was practised between the Greeks and sellout Judeans and this was one of the reasons Mattathias, his sons and grandsons partook of the Maccabean Revolution.
After the crucifixion of Christ that was conspired by the Pharisees and executed by the Romans who were in power, many Judeans began refusing the false religion of the Pharisees and started what would eventually be called Christianity.
The Romans reacted to this mass insubordination to the Pharisees by way of violence and killing the activists in Judea.
Many of Christ’s disciples, including Peter and later apostoles like Paul, were also killed by the Romans.
In 70 CE, the temple that was built by Solomon was burnt by the Romans and all Judeans were scattered or killed, leaving only the Pharisees as the only people being officially recognised as Jews.
Only non-rebellious groups survived like the Serphavaim who had been planted in the land from Babylon when the 10 tribes of Israel were scattered by Shalmaneser the Assyrian King around 750 BCE.
All these would be taken to Babylon under the protection of the Roman Empire in 135CE.
There they compiled the Talmud and the religion of Judaism was fully established.
The Judeans, like the rest of the Israelites before them, scattered into Africa and Arabia and were mostly Christian.
The Roman Empire viciously worked against them.
With the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine to Christianity came an end to the persecution that the Christians had gone through for centuries.
During the Nicaea Conference, a compromise similar to that done by the Greeks was achieved in favour of the Romans.
This compromise entailed legalising the once outlawed Christian religion but under the condition that they would all decide on one set of rules that they would all follow.
There was enough wiggle room for Constantine to fit in the most important Roman festival of Easter with the Passover.
This was achieved by setting the Passover observance aside and focusing on the remembrance of Christ’s crucifixion and rebirth.
This was not difficult because many of the attendants were Syrian and Egyptian blacks who probably did not observe the Passover prior to the Nicaea Conference.
Christ was killed on a Sabbath day.
This does not mean it was a Saturday because the Passover and Sabbath dates were determined by the moon not the sun.
It was believed that he ressurected on the third day and this was the day the Christians honoured most.
On the current day Christian or Gregorian calendar, this day would fall on a Monday but this would not have served the Romans well.
The first day of the week to the Romans was dedicated to the sun because they held the sun most sacred.
It was called dies Solis in Latin, Domingo in Spanish, Dimanche in French, Dominica in Italian and all these mean Sunday; the day of the sun. Choosing this day as the most holy day of the week was a Nicaea Conference decision which greatly pleased the Romans.
Setting Friday as the day of Christ’s crucifixion was a cunning way to let the third day fall on the Roman day of the sun.
For this reason, the Christians who attended the Nicaea conference and signed the Nicene Treaty hold their sermons and services on Sunday.
It was the supposed day of Christ’s ressurection that they held most sacred.
And why would they call it good Friday if it was the supposed day Christ was killed?
What is so good about the day of one’s execution?
Such a day is only good to the executors who were the Romans because they would have rid themselves of a threat to their colonial regime.
As for the Passover, Constantine said of it: “For it is unbecoming beyond measure that on this holiest of festivals we should follow the customs of the Jews. Henceforward let us have nothing in common with this odious (rebellious) people. Our saviour has shown us another path. It would indeed be absurd if the Jews were able to boast that we are not in a position to celebrate the Passover without the aid of their rules or time calculations.”
In conclusion, the Conference agreed to observe Easter on a day before Sabbath at the beginning of springtime.
The solar calendar involves counting 30 days a month and does not involve calculating the moon phases.
If Christ was crucified on the day of the Passover feast, the moon would have to be full as the festival is held exactly 14 days after the new moon of spring. Thus the Passover would be a good indicator of the memorial of Christ.
Because of the forsaking of the lunar calendar and the removal of the Passover as a Christian festival, the Easter dates and days always change.
Seasons do not wait for our 30 day a month speculations.
Rather they vary and only the moon has a certain path which can be calculated very accurately.
So now the Romans simply await the first Friday, Saturday and Sunday during the beginning of spring in the northern hemisphere to observe the Easter festival as a Passover replacement.
So Easter is inappropriate for Christians to observe because it has pagan origins in the worship of Ishta the so called goddess of heaven. Unlike, the lunar based Passover, Easter also does not mark the exact day on which Christ was crucified.
The festival has no connection with Hebrew or African beliefs.
Traits like Easter bunnies, Easter eggs and so on are Western and were in no way prescribed by the scriptures.