Very few people seem to understand how the date of Easter is calculated, or why.\u00a0 I am not among that select group!\u00a0 I am deeply ignorant of the details.\u00a0 But I thought that I would share what I do understand, because most people don’t even know as much as I do.\u00a0 And it is Good Friday, and an Easter post seems appropriate.<\/p>\n
Easter is the anniversary of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.\u00a0 The following is the sequence of events:<\/p>\n
As we can see, the date of the resurrection is very closely connected with the Jewish festivals.\u00a0 Because Jesus was a Jew, and was carrying out and fulfilling the Jewish law, you do want to connect your anniversary with these events.<\/p>\n
The problem is, you can’t.\u00a0 And it’s the Jews’ fault, and you can’t fix this unless the Jews change their calendar.<\/p>\n
This is because the Jewish calendar is a lunar<\/em> calendar.\u00a0 It doesn’t relate to the solar calendar that we have.\u00a0 It has 13 months.\u00a0 So any date on that lunar calendar moves around, by about a month,\u00a0when you look at it on our solar\u00a0calendar.\u00a0 This is why Easter keeps moving around between March and April in our (solar) calendar.<\/p>\n In fact the Jewish calendar\u00a0doesn’t even relate that well to itself.\u00a0 Because the Sabbath is on a Saturday.\u00a0 But the passover moves around on days of the week.\u00a0 Thus the passover does not usually start on Thursday night, immediately before the sabbath.<\/p>\n Now the date of passover,\u00a0which is specified in Leviticus, is the 14th of the Jewish month of Nisan.\u00a0 This\u00a0should be on the first full moon\u00a0of spring (note the lunar element to this).\u00a0 The first full moon of spring is defined as being the full moon after the\u00a0spring equinox.\u00a0 And the spring equinox is the day on which the day and night are of the same length.<\/p>\n But even so the calendar doesn’t really work.\u00a0 Sometimes an extra month is inserted.\u00a0 I am told that, in fact, sometimes the rabbis had to adjust the calendar manually to get the passover to appear in the spring at the right point.<\/p>\n So the Jewish calendar\u00a0is a pain\u00a0to use.\u00a0 On the other hand … if you don’t use it, you lose the connection with passover.<\/p>\n Now the decisions had to be made back in the first century AD.\u00a0 At that time, the situation on calendars was not as simple as it is today.<\/p>\n Firstly,\u00a0the Jewish calendar is a very ancient thing.\u00a0 Defective as it is – as all calendars of that period were – it was used wherever the Jews had a synagogue, and so in every city in the Roman world.\u00a0 It was universal.\u00a0 So you could follow it anywhere in the Roman empire, or indeed outside.\u00a0 Your local synagogue would provide the dates.<\/p>\n You could, if you wanted, use the\u00a0Roman calendar instead.\u00a0 You’d always know when Sunday was.\u00a0 But the Roman solar calendar – the Julian calendar – was not used nearly as universally.\u00a0 Cities would often use the Macedonian months, instead of the Roman ones.\u00a0 The year would start\u00a0and stop at different dates.\u00a0 The main means of dating an event was from the election of annual magistrates.\u00a0 So in your city, you might not have the choice of saying “23 March”; if, locally, nobody used March to reckon time.\u00a0 In the east, indeed, nobody did<\/em> use the Roman months.<\/p>\n The Christians of the 1st and 2nd century AD therefore faced some difficult decisions.<\/p>\n In this awful situation, what are the options?<\/p>\n You can celebrate the Sunday, on the Julian calendar, always on the same solar date.\u00a0 This is simple – so long as your city uses the Julian calendar!\u00a0–\u00a0but then you lose all the connections with the Jewish passover.\u00a0 This isn’t good, because passover is what Jesus was actually doing when he was arrested and executed.\u00a0 Passover is the first holy communion.\u00a0 Jesus sacrificed himself, as a perfect passover sacrifice for sin, once for all.\u00a0 You want these links, because the meaning of Easter is about that sacrifice.<\/p>\n Or\u00a0you can follow the Jewish pattern, and have the Easter celebration based on passover.\u00a0 That’s simple enough; you hold it on 14 Nisan, and ask your local rabbi when that is.\u00a0\u00a0 But in that case, it won’t be on a Sunday.\u00a0 And the resurrection did actually happen on a\u00a0Sunday, the day after the Sabbath.\u00a0 So you lose\u00a0your anniversary.\u00a0 Worse\u00a0yet, your celebration date is being determined by some Jewish rabbi.\u00a0\u00a0Now Christianity is illegal.\u00a0 That rabbi probably hates you all.\u00a0 He may even have denounced you to the authorities a few months earlier.\u00a0 How can you possibly have someone like that deciding when Easter is?<\/p>\n So it’s really difficult.<\/p>\n Stepping back a little from this, the anniversary is the anniversary, not of Jesus’ death, on the passover, but of his resurrection.\u00a0 If you have to choose, surely that is the more important?<\/p>\n Well, the ancients took a\u00a0middle path between all this, and tried to hold to as much as they could.\u00a0 They decided that the anniversary of the resurrection would be celebrated on the first Sunday after the date on which the passover should happen; and if the passover was on a Sunday, then Easter would be the next Sunday.<\/p>\n They also decided that they were just as capable of working out when the passover ought to occur as any Jewish rabbi, so they did their own calculation of this.\u00a0 It wasn’t good for Christians – an illegal group – to be that much at the mercy of the hostile Jewish establishment.<\/p>\n Based on this, the early Christians worked out the calculation that we use today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Very few people seem to understand how the date of Easter is calculated, or why.\u00a0 I am not among that select group!\u00a0 I am deeply ignorant of the details.\u00a0 But I thought that I would share what I do understand, because most people don’t even know as much as I do.\u00a0 And it is Good […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[19],"tags":[614],"class_list":["post-15721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-my-diary-announcements","tag-easter"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15721\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}