Why is Easter Sunday a movable feast?
From Somewhere on the Web
Easter is an annual festival observed throughout the Christian world. The date for Easter shifts every year within the Gregorian Calendar. The Gregorian Calendar is the standard international calendar for civil use. In addition, it regulates the ceremonial cycle of the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches. The current Gregorian ecclesiastical rules that determine the date of Easter trace back to 325 CE at the First Council of Nicaea convened by the Roman Emperor Constantine. At that time the Roman world used the Julian Calendar (put in place by Julius Caesar). The Council decided to keep Easter on a Sunday, the same Sunday throughout the world. To fix incontrovertibly the date for Easter, and to make it determinable indefinitely in advance, the Council constructed special tables to compute the date. These tables were revised in the following few centuries resulting eventually in the tables constructed by the 6th century Abbot of Scythia, Dionysis Exiguus. Nonetheless, different means of calculations continued in use throughout the Christian world.
In 1582 Gregory XIII (Pope of the Roman Catholic Church) completed a reconstruction of the Julian calendar and produced new Easter tables. One major difference between the Julian and Gregorian Calendar is the "leap year rule". Universal adoption of this Gregorian calendar occurred slowly. By the 1700's, though, most of western Europe had adopted the Gregorian Calendar. The Eastern Christian churches still determine the Easter dates using the older Julian Calendar method. The usual statement, that Easter Day is the first Sunday after the full moon that occurs next after the vernal equinox, is not a precise statement of the actual ecclesiastical rules. The full moon involved is not the astronomical Full Moon but an ecclesiastical moon (determined from tables) that keeps, more or less, in step with the astronomical Moon.
The ecclesiastical rules are:
Easter falls on the first Sunday following the first ecclesiastical full moon that occurs on or after the day of the vernal equinox; this particular ecclesiastical full moon is the 14th day of a tabular lunation (new moon); and the vernal equinox is fixed as March 21.
Thus resulting in that Easter can never occur before March 22 or later than April 25. The Gregorian dates for the ecclesiastical full moon come from the Gregorian tables. Therefore, the civil date of Easter depends upon which tables - Gregorian or pre-Gregorian - are used. The western (Roman Catholic and Protestant) Christian churches use the Gregorian tables; many eastern (Orthodox) Christian churches use the older tables based on the Julian Calendar. In a congress held in 1923, the eastern churches adopted a modified Gregorian Calendar and decided to set the date of Easter according to the astronomical Full Moon for the meridian of Jerusalem. However, a variety of practices remain among the eastern churches.
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4 comments:
Seems overly complicated, any idea why they didn't say 'it's the Xth Sunday in the year', or the first Sunday in April etc?
That was my very thought dave. No such complication in working out Christmas... so why all the fuss about Easter?
Simple enough - it's because the New Testament explicitly tells us that Jesus was crucified and resurrected over Passover (in fact in most non-English languages the words for Passover and Easter are the same), and Passover is a fixed date in the Jewish calendar, which is basically a lunar one (with some modifications). Christianity adopted the Roman calendar in preference to the Jewish one fairly early on however, in which the date of Passover and hence Easter wanders around over March and April. The calculations are designed to bring some predictability to this process by providing a logical method of mapping Passover onto the Roman calendar without forcing people to learn two calendars. The formula doesn't always get it exactly right (Passover and Easter don't always coincide, although they're rarely if ever more than a week or two apart), though it has this year.
The reason why this sort of thing doesn't happen with Christmas and other such festivals is that they, unlike Easter, were never originally Jewish holidays. For that matter I'm sure it would be perfectly possible to work out when Passover fell on the Roman calendar in 33AD and designate that as the fixed date of Easter, but maintaining the link with Passover (and hence the NT account of the Crucifixion) has always seemed important to the Church.
It just seems very stange to me that if Easter/Passover is meant to celebrate a certain historical event - which presumably happened on a certain date... that it keeps moving around depending on phases of the moon. I find it all rather bizarre.
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