Red-Letter Day
also known as Great Friday, Holy Friday, Great and Holy Friday
Good Friday is the day the church keeps in memory of the crucifixion and death of Jesus Christ, observed on the Friday of Holy Week, between Maundy Thursday and the Easter Vigil. It is kept by fasting and by a liturgy unlike any other in the year. Its shape in the West is ancient, attested at Jerusalem by the late fourth century, and its keeping is nearly universal among Christians, East and West.
Before the day had a settled name, it had a fast. The earliest Christians did not eat on the Friday of the Passover week, and did not eat on the Saturday that followed, and the church's early orders of discipline record that abstinence as something already customary rather than newly imposed. The fast came first. The liturgy grew up inside it.
What the fast held open was a memory the church would not let go: that on a Friday, outside Jerusalem, Jesus of Nazareth was crucified and died. Everything the day does is arranged around that. It does not celebrate in the ordinary sense. It reads the Passion, it prays for the world, it comes near the cross, and it does these things in a church stripped of its ornament.
The first person to describe the day in detail is a pilgrim. Egeria, a woman from the Latin West who travelled to Jerusalem and wrote home about what she saw there, set down an account of the Holy Week observances she witnessed between 381 and 384, and her description of the Friday is the earliest eyewitness record of the day being kept as the church now recognises it. Before her there is the institutional evidence of the fourth century and the older fast behind it; after her the shape spreads west, though by what hand nobody has been able to say.
Nothing about the day resolves on the day itself. That is deliberate. The church keeps a Friday that it already knows the end of, and keeps it anyway, refusing to hurry, because the death is not a stage to be passed through but the thing itself, loved and looked at. The fast breaks at Easter. It was always going to.
You may find that this is the one day of the year when the church asks nothing of you except that you stay. There is no achievement here, no resolution to make, nothing to bring. The oldest thing Christians did on this day was to go without a meal and wait, and the waiting was the whole of it. If you have spent the year measuring your faith by what you have managed to do with it, this day will not reward you and will not accuse you either. It will simply hold you in front of a death that was undergone on your account. What would it change in you to spend one day a year not working at your faith, but standing still inside it?
The source base for Good Friday is unusually good on the fourth century and unusually poor on everything before it. The earliest evidence is not for the day as such but for the fast that surrounds it: an abstinence on Friday and Saturday of the Passover week, recorded in the early church orders as established practice. The Didascalia Apostolorum is the earliest concrete witness to Friday being treated as liturgically distinct in its own right, though it has been read here only through secondary summary and should not be leaned on until a primary reading is done. The Apostolic Constitutions witness the same discipline; canon 50 of Laodicea, sometimes recruited here, in fact legislates the Holy Thursday fast and the Lenten diet of dry foods, not the paschal two-day fast.
The honest limit is a bracket, not a date. There is no single attested moment at which Good Friday begins. The Council of Nicaea in 325 supplies an institutional frame for the paschal reckoning but says nothing about the day in its canons, a point worth stating plainly because it is often assumed otherwise. Egeria's account, written between 381 and 384, supplies the first eyewitness description. Between those two points the evidence is silent, and the transmission of the Jerusalem observance westward to Rome, generally placed in the seventh and eighth centuries, has no named pope, synod, or agent attached to it in any source consulted. Pilgrimage, stational liturgy, and Byzantine influence are all plausible routes and none of them is documented.
The names are better evidenced than the origins. The Greek tradition calls the day Holy and Great Friday. Latin and the Romance languages inherit Parasceve, from the Greek paraskeuē, the day of preparation, and the Romance names are calques on it. German has Karfreitag, from Middle High German karvritac, the kar- element descending from Old High German chara, lament; the older spelling Charfreitag preserves that root more visibly. The English "Good" is most probably an older sense of the word meaning holy or pious, attested from around 1300; the popular explanation that it is a worn-down "God's Friday" was run down and found unsupported. A second widespread gloss deserves the same correction: the reading of Jesus's last word from the cross as a commercial receipt, a debt marked paid in full, could not be substantiated from the sources consulted and should not be repeated as though it were established.
The English Middle Ages knew the day as Long Friday, a usage attributed to Ælfric writing around 1005 to 1010, though this too rests on secondary report rather than a primary reading.
The Western liturgy of Good Friday settled into three parts: the reading of the Passion, a set of solemn intercessions descending from the medieval prayers, and the veneration of the cross. The Roman rite's Holy Week, including this day, was substantially revised under Pius XII in 1955. Anglican practice keeps the same threefold shape, and its collects descend from the same medieval stock.
In the Byzantine churches the day carries its own distinct observances: the service of the Twelve Gospels, the Apokathelosis or taking down from the cross, and the Epitaphios, the embroidered image of the buried Christ, whose development from the liturgical aer is documented across the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries.
Two Western customs deserve separate mention. Tenebrae, the office of gathering darkness, is well attested. The Improperia, the Reproaches sung at the veneration of the cross, have a manuscript history reaching back to the early medieval period and remain in use, in their traditional wording, in Roman practice and beyond. They have drawn lasting criticism for the anti-Jewish reading they invite: in 1977 the American bishops, through their liturgy secretariat, recommended that parishes not use them, exercising the rubric of other suitable songs already in the books. The great polyphonic settings composed for them are also sung in their own right. Bach's Passion settings belong to this same devotional stream. Modern Roman canon law retains Good Friday as a day of both fast and abstinence.
Almighty God, we beseech you graciously to behold this your family, for whom our Lord Jesus Christ was willing to be betrayed and given into the hands of sinners, and to suffer death upon the Cross; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
No quotation appears in the prose above, so no quotation apparatus is carried here. The principal witnesses named in the text are these. Egeria's account of the Jerusalem Holy Week, written between 381 and 384, is the earliest eyewitness description; the relevant material stands at chapter XXXVII, and the English translation most often cited is that of McClure and Feltoe. The Apostolic Constitutions supply the fourth-century evidence for the fast; canon 50 of Laodicea, sometimes cited alongside them, legislates the Holy Thursday fast instead. The Didascalia Apostolorum and Ælfric's Letter to Wulfsige are cited above at second hand and are marked as such. Edition details, internal locations, and deep links for each of these were not supplied to this draft and must be filled by a human hand before publication.
Genesis 22:1–18 or Isaiah 52:13–53:12Psalm 22:1–11(12–21)v or Psalm 40:1–16v or Psalm 69:1–22vHebrews 10:1–25John (18:1–40) 19:1–37
British (Received Pronunciation): Apostolorum /əˌpɒstəˈlɔːrəm/