The moon, sun, equinox, and Easter's elusive dating

By Michael Hill Sun reporter
March 23, 2008

If the youngsters are shivering in their new Easter finery - instead of basking in the gentle April sun most of us are accustomed to - you can blame it on the stars.

Actually, on the moon.

This year's March 23 Easter is almost as early as the holiday can get for the Western churches - the product of an arcane set of rules dating to the first millennium.

For the record, it is possible to have Easter on March 22. That last happened in 1818 and will occur again in 2285 - unless the rules are changed between now and then. The March 23 date, by the way, won't pop up again until 2160.

For the record, it is possible to have Easter on March 22. That last happened in 1818 and will occur again in 2285 - unless the rules are changed between now and then. The March 23 date, by the way, won't pop up again until 2160.

As the Rev. Dr. Joseph Pagano, rector of Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Baltimore, explains it, many early Christians celebrated what has become Easter on the same days Jews celebrated Passover, the 15th day of Nissan, the first month of the Jewish year - which is based on a lunar calendar.

"But that could be any day of the week," Pagano said. "So the first thing they sorted out was that Easter had to be on a Sunday. Then they had to figure out which Sunday.

"Much of this was figured out at the Council of Nicea in the year 325. Famed for the Nicene Creed, the council also tried to standardize the date of Easter as the 14th day of the Paschal moon, the first moon of spring. They let the astronomical scholars in Alexandria, Egypt, work out the details.

That basically set the current rules for determining Easter - the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. But all sorts of complications cropped up in the ensuing millennia.

For starters, consider what Easter celebrates - the Resurrection of Christ after his Crucifixion. The Gospels report that these events - the Passion - took place around Passover, which is why the early church linked the two. But there is considerable dispute, even in the gospel reports, about the exact relationship between Easter and Passover.

P. Kyle McCarter, a professor of Near Eastern Studies at the Johns Hopkins University, notes that the Gospel of John says Jesus was crucified on the eve of Passover, while the other Gospels report that he celebrated the Passover seder with his disciples."

"The favorite way to deal with this problem in contemporary scholarship is to assume that Jesus was following a different calendar than the one followed by the priests in charge of the Temple," McCarter wrote in an e-mail.

"More specifically, scholars surmise that Jesus and his disciples celebrated the Passover supper according to an Essene calendar, like the one followed by the community at Qumran and followed, therefore, in the Dead Sea scrolls."

There were also theological and cultural reasons for breaking of the specific link between the dates of Easter and Passover.

"I expect something big happened in the church when that break occurred, in the ways in which people understood Easter," Pagano said. "This is speculation on my part, but the breaking of Easter from the Jewish calendar, from Passover, really represented, I would imagine, a major shift in the symbolic understanding of what Easter meant."

No longer was Easter, along with the Christian church, a younger version of its elders in Judaism. With that break, the church stood on its own, as did Easter, as a celebration of Christ's Resurrection.

The actual break was based on the Christian church's following the solar-based calendar used in Rome, while Jewish authorities stuck with their lunar calendar. That calendar celebrates Passover very late this year - from April 19 to April 27.

The fact that the date of Easter in is still dependent on a full moon is something of a vestigal remnant of its lunar origins linked to Passover.

split within the Christian Church occurred in the 16th century when papal authorities, noticing that the March 21 vernal equinox specfied by the Council of Nicea was getting further and further away from the actual equinox, removed 10 days from the calendar and made a few more adjustments to come up with what became known as the Gregorian calendar, in honor of Pope Gregory XIII.

There are further complications: For purposes of Easter calculations, March 21 is the spring equinox, even when it's not. And the full moon is determined as occurring 14 days after the new moon, even when it is not actually full on that day.

The Orthodox Church did not go along. According to the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America and other Orthodox sources, it stuck with the vernal equinox date of March 21 in the Julian calendar, the equivalent of an early April date in the Gregorian calendar (which means that the Orthodox Church can never have a March Easter).

Add to that a different table for calculating full moons, and in most years there will be two Easter dates in Christianity. The Orthodox Easter is likely to be much warmer this year, since it comes on April 27.

Pagano said he likes Easter as a moveable feast - and not just another date on the conventional calendar, as Christmas is.

"It helps if people experience liturgial time, religious time, as something different than ordinary time," Pagano said. "There is a certain sense of value when Easter comes real early as it does this year and surprises us.

michael.hill@baltsun.com

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