ABSTRACT
Of course, we could have started our enquiry with the celebration of life and death in the early Church. It is alleged that ‘independent of the New Testament the earliest evidences about the Easter events are encountered in the liturgical tradition’. 1 Our reading of this kind of evidence is, however, easily tainted by our own liturgical upbringing and deeply rooted routine. One often connects with the existing evidence what is subconsciously already known. Similarities are stressed, although we have to reckon with very different meanings of liturgical acts, meanings that derive from a distant past and from dissimilar religious, cultural and historical environments. To avoid potentially anachronistic retrospectives we began not with the liturgical life of the early Christians, but with the Gospels, Paul’s own letters and texts of the Pauline and non-Pauline tradition, to return in this chapter to ‘the earliest evidence about the Easter events’ in the ‘liturgical’ traditions.
