Parasceve, the Latin equivalent of
paraskeue, preparation (i.e. the preparation that was made on the sixth day for the Sabbath; see
Mark 15:42), came by metonymy to signify the day on which the preparation was made; but while the Greeks retained this use of the word as applied to every Friday, the Latins confined its application to one Friday.
Irenaeus and
Tertullian speak of Good Friday as the day of the Pasch; but later writers distinguish between the
Pascha staurosimon (the passage to death), and the
Pascha anastasimon (the passage to life, i.e. the
Resurrection). At present the word
Pasch is used exclusively in the latter sense. The two Paschs are the oldest feasts in the calendar. From the earliest times the
Christians kept every Friday as a
feast day; and the obvious reasons for those usages explain why
Easter is the
Sunday par excellence, and why the Friday which marks the anniversary of
Christ’s death came to be called the Great or the Holy or the Good Friday. The origin of the term
Good is not clear. Some say it is from “God’s Friday” (
Gottes Freitag); others maintain that it is from the German
Gute Freitag, and not specially English. Sometimes, too, the day was called
Long Friday by the Anglo-Saxons; so today in Denmark.
