HAPPY EASTER

Happy Easter to ALL our Readers

No, I’ve not gone completely mad; it’s still Eastertide for all Christians, despite the strangeness of Orthodox Christians celebrating the resurrection of Christ five weeks later than the rest of us. Eastertide lasts until the Feast of Pentecost, Whitsunday, the fiftieth day after Easter, so we’re still just in it, though that’s a recent recovery of an ancient notion, because in our parents’ days Eastertide was assumed to finish with Ascension Day (last Thursday). But our Ethiopian Orthodox colleagues, who use St.Peter’s, were keeping Maundy Thursday only a week before we kept Ascension Day, which was very unsettling. Two years ago our Easter celebrations coincided, but this year, they kept the Great Feast on 1^st May.

People sometimes ask me to explain why Orthodox Easter is different from ours, and my stock answer has been, “It’s complicated” but that was mostly to gloss over the fact that I wasn’t clear myself, but this year, with renewed public interest in fixing a date for Easter, I have set myself to understand the conundrum. Here goes.

Lunar Months and Solar Years

Obviously, the basis of all calendar problems is that we use a solar year (the earth takes about three hundred and sixty-five and a quarter days to go round the sun) and a lunar month (the moon takes twenty nine and a bit days to go round the earth); hence twelve lunar months don’t actually make up a solar year, so we lengthen our months to fudge it, and then add in a leap day every four years to make up for the quarter of a day (except when the year is divisible by 400). The particular Easter problem is further confounded by the fact that we want it to approximate to Passover, which is (broadly speaking) the first full moon after the (northern hemisphere) spring equinox, so combining lunar and solar calculations. In the Gospels it is clear that Jesus was crucified and rose again around Passover time, so that is when Easter should be.

Quartodeciman or Not

So the Church’s earliest argument over the date of Easter was whether it should be on a Sunday, or whether it should simply follow Passover on the 14^th of the Jewish month Nisan. Since the Jewish calendar was (and is) simply a lunar one there is a problem of that date jumping forward by 11 days or so every (solar) year, and so quite quickly it will predate the equinox (which the Jews also regard as important, as Passover is a spring festival). The Jewish solution is to add in an intercalary month before Nisan in years when Passover would come before the equinox. This was felt unsatisfactory by the Fathers of the Church, who also felt that the symbolism of Sunday was vital, since Sunday had been the initial celebration of the resurrection. Hence from the end of the 3^rd century Christians had to find a method of calculating their own date. 

Julius or Gregory

So it was agreed at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 that Easter Day should be celebrated everywhere on the same day, but without definition. This came to be the Sunday after the first full moon following the equinox, which was defined as 21^st March. Therein lies the problem. The Orthodox churches insist on continuing to use the Julian calendar, which was in use at that time, (invented by Julius Caesar) and so tie their calculation of Easter to 21^st March in the Julian calendar, rather than the actual equinox. To be fair, none of us want to be bothered with real astronomical observations (notice the problems that Muslims get into over the start and finish of Ramadan, over the question of whether or not a new moon has been observed where they are) and so all Easter calculations are based on notional events in order to be predictable. The Julian calendar is too long, compared to the actual solar year, by 3 days every 400 years, and so eventually the Gregorian calendar was introduced, (by Pope Gregory XIII) which corrects that error. Rome adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1582, England (always progressive) in 1752. In our century, the Julian calendar is 13 days behind the Gregorian, and so the starting point for the Orthodox calculation is 13 days later than the starting point for ours.

But Not Just Thirteen Days

Unlike Orthodox Christmas, which is simply 13 days after western Christmas, Easter might be only a week later, or it might be 5 weeks later, or it might even be the same, and that’s of course because the theoretical full moon intervenes in the calculation. Matters are made more obscure by the fact that there are different methods for calculating the theoretical lunar cycles, and of course the Orthodox use a different (and older) method from the west. If you were, like me, taken to church as a child where the Book of Common Prayer was in use, you may remember the Golden Numbers and the inexplicable tables that were printed in the back of that volume to enable you to calculate the date of Easter, well that’s how complex it is! I don’t pretend to understand all that, nor why the variation between the western date and the Orthodox date is almost never 3 or 4 weeks. There are, in the end, things that can remain a mystery!