Is it in the Bible somewhere?
It’s not in any Bible I’ve read.
Try reading “Acts of the Apostles”. That discusses the very, very early Christian Church, which bears little resemblance to any Christian religion today in its organization, but that’s because there weren’t many adherents.
I would imagine the changes just happened over time. Some Jewish holidays were changed into Christian ones. Others were dropped. Roman and other European holidays were adapted to into Christian ones.
The Council of Jerusalem in 49-50 ACE discussed the issue of how Jewish law should apply to gentiles (non-Jewish converts to Christianity). Acts 15 gives the details; the council recommended that converts not be bound by Mosaic law except with regard to idolatry, drinking blood, eating strangled animals, and fornication. This decision has since been interpreted to include Rabbinic law, which includes the designation of the calendar and Jewish holidays.
In practice, Christianity quickly moved beyond the Jewish world, thanks in part to eliminating the requirements of Jewish law, particularly circumcision (surprisingly, not many men outside of Judaea were interested in adopting a religion that required the removal of their foreskin). As it became cosmopolitan, Christianity had less in common with Judaea than it did with Rome.
Not only were the holidays themselves repudiated; even their tangential impact on Christianity was officially purged. One example comes from Constantine the Great’s letter from the Council of Nicaea (early 4th century) . In discussing the proper date for the celebration of Easter (the Gospels indicate the Crucifixion and Resurrection occurred during or just after Passover), the emperor states that the council unanimously adopted a formula for calculating the date that does not rely on calculating Passover: “It was declared to be particularly unworthy for this, the holiest of festivals to follow the customs (the calculation) of the Jews.” (EusebiuVita Const., III.18-20).
IIRC, there are some Christian groups that still celebrate or at least honor the Jewish holidays; anyone have examples?
I’ve been to a Baptist sermon that celebrated Passover before.
The Christian and Jewish holidays commemorated quite distinct events, so it was not the custom to merge one into the other (exception: Pentecost, about which more later).
The weekly Sabbath observance was in remembrance of the setting apart of the Sabbath as the day of rest and worship for the Jews. Obviously, early followers of Christ who were Jews would keep the Sabbath, not in a legalistic mode, but out of love for God. But all Christians, Jewish and Gentile alike, gathered on the first day for a weekly commemoration of the Resurrection – which became the primary holy day for Christians. Likewise, the Passover was the time of Christ’s atoning self-sacrifice, but the key point was not His death, but His resurrection, a couple of days later, again on the first day. Christmas was not a significant feast until well into Roman times; its observance as a principal feast day of Christians is a later add-on.
The Feast of First Fruits, half of the Jewish harvest festival suite (the other half being Shavuoth, some months later), fell 50 days after Passover, and it was the date on which the Holy Spirit came upon the early Church, as the “firstfruits of the Kingdom” in a metaphoric way. So that one minor Jewish feast became a moderately important Christian feast. Shavuoth, on the other hand, had no significance for Christians, except that it is said to have always carried a sort of eschatological baggage – being the harvest festival, it was also a sort of looking forward to the fulfillment of God’s promises. (One of the board’s Jews can speak a bit more to this; what I report is merely what I’ve learned in various studies of Church history as a sort of sidelight on the issue.) And the Feast of the Transfiguration falls approximately on Shavuoth, carrying on that minor theme. Note that Rosh Hashonah and Yom Kippur are in no way a part of the Christian feast concept, even in the exceedingly minor way that Shavuoth is.
But the Jewish Sabbath and festivals were not so much discarded as simply falling into desuetude as commemorations of events not of major interest to the predominantly Gentile Church, which tended to focus on the life of Christ and in particular the events of the Atonement, Resurrection, and Pentecost. The modern interest in the Old Testament in its own right, largely Protestant in nature, is not a part of the early Church’s experience. Certainly predominantly Jewish congregations would have preserved the Jewish feasts – but they were only a small part of the Roman Empire-period Church, and most were extinguished with the coming of Islam to the Middle East.
Contemplate the modern use of “cross-quarter” feasts – important in the Middle Ages, these four feasts fell in the middle of each calendar season. Of them, only Hallowe’en is important to moderns, and that due to All Saints Day on the one hand and the fun of the secular celebration on the other. We commemorate Candlemas only by reports about rodents from Punxsatawney, PA, largely ignore May Day, and make so little of Midsummer that there isn’t even a secular holiday associated with it. Yet these were important Middle Ages feasts, breaking the monotony of daily life. They produce a parallel to the early Church attitude toward Jewish feasts – nobody “threw them out,” but rather simply made little or nothing of them because there were more important things to celebrate.
The Judaic Christians and Judaism permanently turned their backs on each other in A.D. 66, during an active Jewish revolt against Rome, when the Judaic Christians retired to the far side of the Jordan rather than join the revolt. Up to that time, the Judaic Christians considered themselves observant Jews, and regularly visited the Temple in Jerusalem.
The historian Will Durant writes in Caesar and Christ: