Pentecost

Pentecost is a Greek numeral, and what it numbers is a Jewish agricultural festival.

Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, is fixed in Leviticus by counting: from the day after the sabbath of Passover week, count seven complete weeks, and on the fiftieth day bring a new grain offering. Fifty in Greek is pentekoste, and the Greek-speaking Jewish diaspora used that name for the festival. The Christian feast inherits both the name and the count, fifty days after Easter, which is why it moves with Easter and why it always falls on a Sunday.

The event narrated in Acts happens at the festival, in Jerusalem, with the city full of pilgrims from across the diaspora, and the list of nationalities who hear their own languages is doing exactly that work: the audience for the sign is the assembled Jewish world.

There is an old calendrical dispute inside the counting. The instruction says to count from the day after the sabbath, and what "the sabbath" means was contested in the Second Temple period: rabbinic tradition took it as the first festival day of Passover, giving a fixed date, while the Sadducees and the Qumran community took it as the weekly sabbath, giving a date that always falls on a Sunday. The rabbinic reading prevailed in Judaism, which is why Shavuot now has a fixed date, the sixth of Sivan, and does not always fall on a Sunday.

Christian Pentecost, by inheriting the count rather than the date, effectively preserves the other reading.

In English the feast was for centuries Whitsunday, and the seventh week after Easter was Whitsuntide, one of the three great holiday periods of the English year alongside Christmas and Easter.

The name is usually derived from white Sunday, referring to the garments of those baptised at the feast, baptism at Pentecost was a northern European custom, the Mediterranean churches preferring Easter, plausibly because of the weather. An alternative derivation from a word for wisdom has been proposed and is generally rejected.

Whit Monday was a public holiday in Britain until 1971, when it was replaced by a fixed late May bank holiday, which detached the holiday from the church calendar entirely. The Whit walks of northern English towns, the Whitsun ales, and the cheese rolling at Cooper's Hill are survivals or revivals of that older complex. Whit Monday remains a public holiday in much of continental Europe.

The feast's modern religious weight comes largely from a movement that took its name from it. Pentecostalism, dating from the first years of the twentieth century and associated with the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles from 1906, takes the Acts narrative, the wind, the fire, the speaking in tongues, as a pattern for present experience rather than a founding event only. Together with the later charismatic movement, which carried the same emphases into existing denominations, it now accounts for something like a quarter of the world's Christians.

A feast that had faded into a bank holiday in England named the fastest-growing form of the religion.