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I have a burning need to know stuff and I love asking awkward questions.

Sunday, April 08, 2007

Why is Easter a Movable Feast?

To be honest Easter confuses me – OK quite a lot about Christianity confuses me but Easter really does. I mean, Easter is supposed to be a celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus right? So why does the date keep moving from year to year? According to Wikipedia:

It celebrates the resurrection of Jesus, which his followers believe occurred on the third day (counting inclusively) after his death by crucifixion some time in the period AD 27 to 33.

I can’t help presuming that like his birthday on 25th December (even if that’s his official birthday rather than his actual birthday) the date of Jesus’s execution on the Cross and his subsequent Resurrection should have an actual date. If such an exact date is unknown (which seems to be the case) then why not pick an official date and declare it doctrine? Having a moving date for Easter makes no sense – at least to me. What makes even less sense is how Easter is calculated. This again from Wikipedia:

At the First Council of Nicaea in 325 it was decided that Easter would be celebrated on the same Sunday throughout the Church, but it is probable that no method was specified by the Council. (No contemporary account of the Council's decisions has survived.) Instead, the matter seems to have been referred to the church of Alexandria, which city had the best reputation for scholarship at the time……. The practice of those following Alexandria was to celebrate Easter on the first Sunday after the earliest fourteenth day of a lunar month that occurred on or after March 21. While since the Middle Ages this practice has sometimes been more succinctly phrased as Easter is observed on the Sunday after the first full moon on or after the day of the vernal equinox, this does not reflect the actual ecclesiastical rules precisely…… The ecclesiastical rules are:

Easter falls on the first Sunday following the first ecclesiastical full moon that occurs on or after March 21 (the day of the ecclesiastical vernal equinox).

This particular ecclesiastical full moon is the 14th day of a tabular lunation (new moon).

THAT certainly makes a whole lot of sense to me [not]. The word arbitary springs to mind doesn’t it? Then of course there is the origin of Easter itself. Yet again from Wikipedia:

The English and German names, "Easter" and "Ostern," are not etymologically derived from Pesach and according to the 8th century Christian monk and historian Bede are instead related to ancient name for the Anglo Saxon goddess, Eostre, who was celebrated during Eosturmonath, equivalent to April/Aprilis. Bede wrote - "Eosturmonath, which is now interpreted as the paschal month, was formerly named after the goddess Eostre, and has given its name to the festival."

Sounds like the typical Christian hi-jacking of an existing pagan festival doesn’t it?

Of course Easter is a very important, indeed arguable vital, part of the Christian belief system. Paul himself said as much in his letter to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 15:14-17):

"And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that He raised up Christ: whom He raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not. For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised: And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins."

So… if the Resurrection hadn’t happened Christianity would be a false faith? Is that what Paul meant? No wonder people get fired up over claims that the remains of Christ’s body have been found. If he died and his body was buried here, on Earth, then doesn’t that undermine a fundamental pillar of Christianity – indeed maybe the fundamental pillar? Without the Resurrection would Christianity survive? It’s an interesting question to ponder this Easter.

12 comments:

Sadie Lou said...

Yes. Without Christ being raised from the dead--Christianity would be nothing--we would still be unforgiven and God would have not made good on his promises--we won't be going to heaven to fellowship with the Father if his Son died and never rose again.
But he did.
Our Lord lives.
Christ sits at the right hand of the Father and we are going to be with him in eternity.
Amen!
The issue about Easter is just as confusing to me. I wish the Catholics would have just left the pagan holiday alone and the church should have selected a specific date to observe the ressurrection. We shouldn't be mixing the whole eggs/candy/ Easter Bunny thing with Christ's ressurrection--it's bad form but it's not going to change so we make the best of it.
Gotta go! I'm in charge of making a potato cassarole for the dinner tonight--bye!

CyberKitten said...

Sadie said: Without Christ being raised from the dead--Christianity would be nothing--we would still be unforgiven and God would have not made good on his promises--we won't be going to heaven to fellowship with the Father if his Son died and never rose again.
But he did. Our Lord lives.

So you say [grin].

Sadie said: I wish the Catholics would have just left the pagan holiday alone and the church should have selected a specific date to observe the ressurrection. We shouldn't be mixing the whole eggs/candy/ Easter Bunny thing with Christ's ressurrection--it's bad form but it's not going to change so we make the best of it.

It was actually a pretty smart move. You co-opt other religious holidays and re-brand them as your own. That means the locals can still celebrate their pagan holidays... but their *children* will celebrate the Christian one! It does cause confusion for later generations though!

Hope your celebrations are going to plan!

Laura said...

Actually, it makes sense to co-opt existing holidays. One, you can convert the masses pretty easily. Two, and more rarely said, it allows an "out" for the masses who choose not to convert b/c it's hard to tell who's celebrating what. Third, they really do have similar undertones - Oestara/Equinox is about the re-birth of all the plants and trees the 'resurrection' of the earth from it's time of darkness if you will.

The US Navy (for what reason? I don't know) has a site that explains how Easter moves, but now I agree with you, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

What makes even less sense is a friend of mine who's Catholic and said he had to do the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday between 12-3pm because that's when Christ was killed. Uh... 1-how do you know and 2- shouldn't that be 12-3pm Israel time??

JR said...

I hate never knowing when Easter will be. I think they should have just picked a date and be done with it. As for us, we did the egg thing, being the heathens we are, and ate a great meal. My son asked what Easter was for the Catholics, because his friend had to go to mass and wasn't available for the Easter egg hunt. My kids both preferred the egg hunt to sitting in church.

CyberKitten said...

There's actually a bit of software you can download which will tell you when Easter is years in advance. Just search for "Calculating Easter" on Google & you should find it pretty easily.

Skywolf said...

Sounds like the typical Christian hi-jacking of an existing pagan festival doesn’t it?

Yep. That's exactly what it is. I have no problem with Christians wanting to celebrate such an important event in their religious year, but the blatant highjacking of what was considered a 'heathen' festival really grates on me. Yeah, I know, this has nothing to do with modern Christians and I'm sure nothing's going to change after so long, but I personally have a lot more time for the pagan celebrations of new life, so I'll celebrate Easter for that reason alone. (Come on, early Christians didn't even bother changing the name of this festival!)

And did you know that Oestre (or Eostre, or whichever spelling's in use), who was actually the goddess of fertility, was represented by a rabbit? Hence the Easter Bunny. It's also where the word oestrogen comes from (fertility and all that...). I find all this stuff quite fascinating.

Random said...

A couple of things - firstly, yes it is known on what day Christ was crucfied, and secondly it has nothing to do with any pagan festivals (and certainly not Eostre - Christianity had been around for centuries before that particular minor teutonic deity came to the attention of the Church - in fact the first mention of her is in a *Christian* book). As is clear in the New Testament, Jesus was crucified over Passover, which is a fixed date (15th Nisan) in the Jewish calendar. The Jewish calendar is however a lunar one, not a solar one like the Roman calendar that the Christian church inherited. The moveable nature of Easter (and the calculations associated with it) is nothing other than an attempt to ensure that it tracks as closely as possible with passover.

There's no great secret about this - it's gone into in some detail in the paragraph before the one you site in an attempt to "prove" Easter is a hijacked pagan festival. It should be noted that, contrary to the impression you are trying to give, virtually every language other than English or German uses a variant of the Hebrew Pesach for the holiday.

Laura said...

So Easter doesn't include pagan elements then? I wonder, where do the eggs and bunnies fit in the Biblical accounts? I know...Eddie Izzard must have been right - the color of the chocolate matches the color of the wood on the cross, right?

A friend of mine whose family is from Ukraine still celebrates the agrarian parts of Easter that were never quite squelched in that part of the country. They celebrate Easter along side the peasant customs of the spring festivals (complete with beautifully painted eggs). It just shows that the two can be celebrated in a complimentary, rather than antagonistic manner.

Skywolf said...

Yes, they can... and there's no doubt that the Christian celebration of Christ's resurrection (new life) fits in very well with the pagan celebrations of new life in spring. Both have similar elements that go well together. But Easter was celebrated by the ancient Saxons long before Christianity came along. It's coincidence that they both occur at roughly the same time of year due to Passover, but the quiet usurping of pagan festivals with Christian ones was a safe way for early Christians to hold their religious festivals without attracting persecution, and to attempt to convert pagans at the same time.

I just don't think we should forget that there are other 'reasons for the season' besides Jesus. If some of us want to celebrate new life in general rather than in one specific instance, it shouldn't be forgotten that those reasons to celebrate have been around a lot longer than Christ.

Laura said...

Skywolf. I was being sarcastic. It still amuses me that some folks get their panties in a bunch when someone suggests a christian holiday might have older roots.

Random said...

Laura, please reread my post - I never denied Easter had pre-christian elements, I just pointed out that for the most part they were Jewish in origin. To take one piece of evidence that you are so fond of, a flavoured egg is part of the traditional passover meal (though the idea of decorating it may either be a borrowing from Persian customs or a Christian innovation - the first easter eggs tended to be painted red to symbolise the blood of Christ). What really amuses me is the way neopagans get their knickers in a twist insisting that everything distinctive about Christianity must have pagan roots, as though that somehow justifies neopagan eccentricities or discredits Christian ones (or even both at the same time).

As for Eostre, please read the wikipedia article on her -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eostre -

to see just how thin the evidence is that such a goodess was ever even worshipped, never mind was sufficiently significant to take credit for a major festival in another religion that was being celebrated for centuries before any record was made of her existence.

Skywolf said...

Skywolf. I was being sarcastic.

Yeees... I know. I was agreeing with you.