Page 13 - Easter The Untold Story

the Passover service focuses on that truth. "Now that you know these things," Jesus declared, "you will be blessed if you do them" (John 13:17).
DID JESUS OBSERVE LENT?
Many people do not realize that Lent, a 40-day period of fasting or abstinence from certain foods, is not of apostolic origin. Lent is nowhere to be found in the Bible. It entered the Christianity of the Roman world in the second century.
Scripture records that Jesus fasted “forty days and forty nights" (Matthew 4:2). But this fast (Luke 4:2) was not the kind of fast people observe at Lent, nor did Jesus command his faithful disciples to fast these 40 days.
The New Testament Church did not observe Lent: “As long as the perfection of the primitive church [the New Testament Church] remained inviolable,” wrote Cassian, a Catholic prelate of the fifth century, “there was no observance of Lent, but when men began to decline from the apostolical fervour of devotion . . . then the priests in general agreed to recall them from secular cares by a canonical indiction of fasting” (Antiquities of the Christian Church, book 21, chapter 1).