Did Polycarp argue against changing the day of the Passover Seder from 14 Nisan to Sunday?
What did the body of believers across Asia Minor celebrate, following Jesus's lead, and Polycarp cite as something not to be changed to coincide with a pagan feast day?
The night before Jesus offered Himself on the Cross, He celebrated the Passover with His disciples. Would He, as a sinless Jew, have offered any blood, actual blood for His disciples to drink, violating the Levitical Law against such?
What did Jesus do to connect the Passover Seder to Him and what He was about to do for us, on that night before He went to the cross?
Would it be Passover Seder if in the service an act which violated the Levitical law from God was performed?
When Polycarp, as an old man, journeyed to Rome, He argued that throughout Asia Minor in the churches established there, the members of the Body of Christ celebrated the Passover on 14 Nisan, not on a Sunday. The Bishop in Rome sought to change the Passover celebration to always in every year on Sunday, which would cause that remembrance to happen only rarely on 14 Nisan. Polycarp opposed this, and as it happened several heresies coming from people who were thriving in Rome, like Marcion.
Polycarp's argument against changing the day to always be on the Sunday rather than 14 Nisan was that up until that time (around 155AD?) all the 'churches' in Asia Minor were celebrating the Passover Seder in remembrance of the Cross of Christ. Serving a cup of blood at the Passover Seder would profane that memorial. Jesus would not have violated the Law on the night before He went to the Cross as the sinless sacrifice for our sins.
Not a jot or tittle was to pass from the Law “until all [was] accomplished.” Most point to Jesus’ “It is finished” as that point.
The context of how the Law even came to be imposed is significant here. The Hebrews had a chance to agree with Moses that it would be impossible for them to keep; but they insisted that it was not and said they would accept the Law, leading to a long long saga that proved Moses was right about that and that they weren’t.
One could make a case for greater freedom after that point, but there’s an excellent observation here that to bring blood in BEFORE it, would at the very BEST be too early.
No — this was a symbol. The Jewish Passover traditions that date almost as far back as gospel times are emphatic about the symbolic nature of the foods partaken of. Church tradition, desirous of control, claimed too much.
Did Polycarp argue against changing the day of the Passover Seder from 14 Nisan to Sunday?
Yes he did. There was disagreement regarding the Passover Seder, but the two bishops did not break off communion with each other, and Anicetus allowed Polycarp to celebrate the Eucharist in his church. Ponder that for a moment. Anicetus would not have allowed Polycarp to celebrate the Eucharist in his church if Polycarp did not agree that the body and blood of Christ were present in the Eucharist.
See:
According to Irenaeus, during the time his fellow Syrian, Anicetus, was the Bishop of Rome, in the 150s or 160, Polycarp visited Rome to discuss the differences that existed between Asia and Rome “with regard to certain things” and especially about the time of the Easter festivals. Irenaeus said that on certain things the two bishops speedily came to an understanding, while as to the time of Easter, each adhered to his own custom, without breaking off communion with the other. Polycarp followed the eastern practice of celebrating the feast on the 14th of Nisan, the day of the Jewish Passover, regardless of what day of the week it fell on. Anicetus followed the western practice of celebrating the feast on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring equinox (March 21). Pope Anicetus—the Roman sources offering it as a mark of special honor—allowed Polycarp to celebrate the Eucharist in his own church.[12]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucharist
Oh, but you are under the impression that Catholicism holds that the bread and wine are literally transformed into human flesh and blood, which they consume, so that scientific investigation would find it to be actual flesh and blood. That perception is easy to be had in the light of statements by Caths to that effect, and with their insistent emphasis upon "actual," "truly," and "really" and statements such as "The bread again is at first common bread; but when the mystery sanctifies it, it is called and actually becomes the Body of Christ," (St. Gregory of Nyssa Sermon on the Day of Lights or on The Baptism of Christ) and of the claimed miracles of this the b+w literally being actual literal human flesh and blood. But in contrast, as the apostate evangelical now RC priest Dwight Longenecker explains (along with others), "If you took the consecrated host to a laboratory it would be chemically shown to be bread, not human flesh."
Instead, what the theory of transubstantiation means by "substance" is distinct from what properties and the normal meaning of substance, and require pagan philosophy to explain it*. Longenecker continues:
The word “transubstantiation” means “substance across” and to understand what this means we must first understand what the medieval philosophers like St Thomas Aquinas meant by the word “substance”. They meant by this word almost exactly the opposite of what we mean by it. When we say something is “substantial” we mean it is solid, real, physical and concrete. The medieval philosophers however, used the word “substance” to indicate the invisible and eternal quality of a thing.
But faced with the objection that "If the physical aspect is not transformed in some way, then some Catholics argue, the transformation is just an ethereal or spiritual presence sort of floating about and around the bread and wine," it is denied that this immaterial substance can exist "separately from the physical aspect. Therefore, inasmuch as the substance is changed there is also some sort of change in the physical aspect." "Therefore we must go a bit further than the medieval philosophical explanation and posit that the real presence of the Lord’s Body Blood Soul and Divinity in the sacrament is also, in some way, physical. We could say the inner quality of the physical Christ is present, but not extended in space...Through the transubstantiation Christ is also present physically within the substance."
However, "This does not mean that the bread and wine become human flesh and blood, and it is this misapprehension that we need to be careful to correct." (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/standingonmyhead/2014/07/explaining-transubstantiation.html)
Which leads to such things as asserting that those in Heaven are not really persons, save for Mary. And much weight is placed upon the RC-defined "Real Presence," but what it means is that, unlike all other miracles of physical change, from water to wine to healing, and contrary to what the Jews in Jn. 6 would have assumed the Lord was teaching if He was speaking literally, instead of an actual physical change which would have shown, for instance, that the water actually became wine, somehow there is an utterly undetectable, undiscernible change in which the elements look, taste, and would test as bread and wine, while the Lord "really" and "truly" was in the apostles stomachs while as yet He sat in His incarnated body before them. If only the Jews of Jn. 6 had understood this while no doubt Caths will argue that the kosher apostles basically implicitly somehow understood this "transubstantiation," without the usual questions and Petrine protestation.
But in contrast, they would have been familiar with the metaphorical use of eating and drinking in Scripture, from David clearly calling actual water to be the sacrificial blood of men and refusing to drink it, but pouring it out as an offering unto the Lord, (2 Samuel 23:16-17) to the Canaanite being called bread for Israel, (Num. 14:9) to Jeremiah eating the word of God, (Jer. 15:16) and the Law being sweeter than honey (Psalms 19:10) to the believers mouth, (Ps. 119:103) to the Lord teaching that eating and drinking Him so as to live by Him was like how He lived by the Father, (Jn. 6:57) by living by His word and the doing of it being His meat. And in the light of this and the place and description of the Lord's Supper in the life of the church, and the function of the NT pastors, then it is abundantly manifest that it is only the metaphorical explanation that conflates with the rest of Scripture and easily so, while nowhere was spiritual life obtained by literally eating anything, nor were NT pastors a distinctive class of sacerdotal priests offering up the elements of the Lord's Supper as sacrifice for sin.
* In Sacred Games: A History of Christian Worship, Bernhard Lang argues that, “When in late antiquity the religious elite of the Roman Empire rethought religion and ritual, the choice was not one between Mithraism and Christianity (as Ernest Renan suggested in the 19th century) but between pagan Neoplatonism and Neoplatonic Christianity.”
“In the third century CE, under the leadership of Plotinus, Plato’s philosophy enjoyed a renaissance that was to continue throughout late antiquity. This school of thought had much in common with Christianity: it believed in one God (the “One”), in the necessity of ritual, and in the saving contact with deities that were distinct from the ineffable One and stood closer to humanity. Like Judaism and Christianity, it also had its sacred books–the writings of Plato, and, in its later phase, also the Chaldean Oracles. In fact, major early Christian theologians–Origen, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysus–can at the same time be considered major representatives of the Neoplatonic school of thought.” - (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/cosmostheinlost/2014/04/08/early-churchs-choice-between-neoplatonism)
From a RC monk and defender:
Neoplatonic thought or at least conceptual terms are clearly interwoven with Christian theology long before the 13th century...
The doctrine of transubstantiation completely reverses the usual distinction between being and appearance, where being is held to be unchanging and appearance is constantly changing. Transubstantiation maintains instead that being or substance changes while appearance remains unchanged. Such reversals in the order of things are affronts to reason and require much, not little, to affirm philosophically. Moreover, transubstantiation seem to go far beyond the simple distinction between appearance and reality. It would be one thing if the body and blood of Christ simply appeared to be bread and wine. But I don’t think that is what is claimed with “transubstantiation.”
Aristotle picked up just such common-sense concepts as “what-it-is-to-be-X” and tried to explain rather complex philosophical problems with them. Thus, to take a “common-sense” concept like substance–even if one could maintain that it were somehow purified of Aristotelian provenance—and have it do paradoxical conceptual gymnastics in order to explain transubstantiation seems not to be not so anti-Aristotelian in spirit after all...
That the bread and wine are somehow really the body and blood of Christ is an ancient Christian belief—but using the concept of “substance” to talk about this necessarily involves Greek philosophy (Br. Dennis Beach, OSB, monk of St. John’s Abbey; doctorate in philosophy from Penn State; http://www.praytellblog.com/index.php/2010/05/30/transubstantiation-and-aristotle-warning-heavy-philosophy)