Reading the “when is Easter” got me thinking. My birthday is 4-13-63. I have never had my B-day fall on Easter. However, my brother who was born three years earlier on 4-11 has had several. I also know it’s fallen on the 12th and 14th. My question is will my birthday ever fall on Easter? I used to think it wouldn’t but now I’m not so sure.
Yes, in 2031. And you’ll then only have to wait another five years after that for it to come round again.
http://www.smart.net/~mmontes/freq3.html#LBD
Is this the report you’re refering to?
Isn’t Easter scheduled on the Sunday following a new moon, not a full moon?
Welcome, kanderson. But, no. It’s full moon.
But Cecil can be nitpicked on this topic. See http://users.chariot.net.au/~gmarts/easter.htm In Australia (where as the linked page mentions, it is decidedly not the vernal equinox) Easter is a common time to go camping, partly because the nights are so bright.
OKAY, I see where my confusion is. Easter is based on the timing of the Jewish passover, which is the middle of the Jewish month which begins on the new moon, and the middle is the 14th or 15th day after the new moon, which is always directly after the full moon. So my confusion based on jewish-family-turned-Christian.
I found these interesting sites that discuss the origin and timing of Easter:
http://woody.us.es/~aluque/proy/easter.html
Yeah, I thought Cecil’s reply was a bit incomplete. But, I guess he had less space in 1978.
About.com has a great site on the history of Easter.
howdy kids,
cecil left out the fact that the eastern orthodox church is so anti-semitic, that they couldn’t bare easter falling on the passover(which sometimes happens in the western churches), so they created a different formula for calculating easter, which is so ludicrous that easter(or “pasca”) sometimes occurs mid-summer.
rock on,
ritchie 
No.
A) The Eastern Church uses the same calculation that the Western Church did before the Gregorian Calendar (aside from those Eastern churches that have adopted the last).
B) All Christian churches, for well over a thousand years, have calculated Easter so as to fall after (not on) Passover. However, both Christians and Jews use mathematical average moons, and the Jewish calculation is different from the Western (Gregorian) calculation, so it is possible for Jewish Passover to fall after Western Christian theoretical Passover, and therefore it is possible for Passover and Western Easter to coincide.
C) Eastern Easter falls between March 22 and April 25 on the Julian Calendar, which, from 1900 to 2099, coincides with April 4 to May 8, Gregorian, hardly “summer”.
yes,
but the reasons for thge original calculation had more to do with anti-semitism than accurate time keeping.
ditto the use of leavened bread for the eucharist, the tradition of pork as the easter meal, the abolition of fasting on the sabbath, etc., etc…
incidentally, i’m a recovering orthodox.
rock on,
ritchie
p.s. doubt the accuracy of my claims? try attending an orthodox liturgy from the beginning and pay careful attention to the chanters.
p.p.s. the webmaster of this site needs to put down the glass pipe. i had to type this twice.
for ritchiepage
I cannot connect to your statement about “fasting on the sabbath” as being one of the anti-semitic aspects of the rituals, since Jews are specifically forbidden from fasting on the sabbath (except for Yom Kippur). Can you expand?
The pre-Gregorian calculation of Easter dates back to well before there were distinct Western and Eastern churches, and the Quartodeciman sect, which actually celebrated Easter on Passover every year (whether or not Sunday), was geographically eastern. (Actually, if one were to attempt to prove that Rome was always looked to as the central authority of the universal Church, the calculation of the date of Easter might very well be the strongest piece of evidence.)
And there is no logically necessary anti-Semitism in the notion that Easter should come after Passover, anyway; the Resurrection occured after Passover.
All of which is not to say that Christianity in general, and Eastern Christianity in particular, does not carry an historical burden of anti-Semitism. But your history is sorely fuddled.
yes, there was only one catholic church until 1054
yes,
the whole church once celebrated the ressurection according to the old calendar. and yes, that has jack-shit to do with why they did so. geez, you’re awfully impressed with how much you think you know about the orthodox church, but i still remember my catechism like it was yesterday, and the orthodox church makes no apologies for their universal condemnation of the jewish religion and the hebrew race.
the fact is that the church was originally a sect of judaism, but by the time of the last jewish revolt the majority of christians were gentiles(goyem). once the jews once again fell out of favor with the emperor and became the targets for widespread sanctioned persecution suddenly all those gentile christians didn’t want to be identified with the jews anymore.
picture the “far side” cartoon with the bear in the crosshairs grinning and pointing at another bear, and well, you get the picture.
anywho, a whole lot of antisemitism suddenly found it’s way into christian theology and practice.
at least the roman church has repented. the vatican doesn’t even blame the jews for the crucifixion any longer, which wasn’t historically accurate anyway…
i’m getting bored now.
ritchie
I understand that the calculation of easter actually has nothing to do with the moon as an astronomical body.
``the Church at the Council of Nicea decided to define Easter with respect to an imaginary moon - known as the “ecclesiastic moon”. Also, the date of equinox was fixed at March 21 even though it can vary slightly from this date. With this definition, the date of Easter can be determined in advance without further astronomical knowledge.’’
In other words, we could blast the moon out of its orbit, it wouldn’t change the date of easter.
BTW: here is what the Catholic Encyclopedia has to say:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05480b.htm
The Passover side of the matter…
Passover starts on the night of the first full moon following the vernal equinox, which is 15 Nisan.
Interestingly, Passover cannot fall on any day of the week. A quirk of the calendar locks the third day of Passover to the same day of the week as the first day of Rosh Hashanah – which can be Thursday, Saturday, Monday, or Tuesday. Thus (counting backwards), Passover can start on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, or Sunday. (As always, the holiday actually starts the evening before.)
ritchiepage seems to have a point. From the about.com site:
(BTW: Welcome to the SDMB, ritchie!)
The day of the week for the start of Passover is indeed completely variable. Rosh Hashanah is limited to four days of the week, but the months of Heshvan and Kislev (the two months immediately after the month of Rosh Hashanah have variable lengths (29 or 30 days) and there is an entire optional month of Adar that can occur just before the month of Passover. So Passover is not fixed to the day of the week of Rosh Hashanah.
Chava
A) If you concede that the old celebration of Easter is pre-1054, then it is not logical to pick out the Eastern Church as being responsible for it, especially since the main impetus actually came from Rome.
B) Jews, as such, were not persecuted by pagan Rome, because they were a legally recognized ethnic minority; the Jewish wars were, from Rome’s viewpoint, a political dispute over the Province of Judea. Christians, on the other hand, were not an ethnic group, and enjoyed no such protection – which they had had for as long as they were regarded as a Jewish sect.
C) The mathematical average moon and equinox were chosen for practical reasons: it took far more than one day to transmit news across the Christian world. (To this day, most Jewish holidays are celebrated over two days outside of the State of Israel, on the traditional assumption that the courier from Jerusalem needs time to arrive.)
My source is a Rabbi’s seminar (in place of a sermon) on the Jewish calendar. I remember that he spoke of a mnemonic that started “taph-shin-resh,” (reverse Hebrew alphabet) as a way to determine days of the week of upcoming holidays – with the taph placed on the first day of Passover.
Taph - Tishah b’Av
Shin - Shavuot
Resh - Rosh Hashanah
A quick check of my calendar shows:
2002 (5762-63): Passover started Thursday, 3/28. Tishah b’Av was on Thursday 7/18; Shavuot on Friday 5/17-18; Rosh Hashanah on Saturday 9/7-8.
2003 (5763-64): Same days of the week. Passover starts Thurs 4/17; Tishah b’Av 8/7; Shavuot Fri 6/6; Rosh Hashanah Sat 9/27.
That’s just one data point, maybe two points. I welcome counter-examples.
IIRC, and this is a BIG if, the summer months Nisan through Av do not have variable lengths, and Elul can vary only to move Rosh Hashanah to an acceptable day. So the calendric “lock” between Passover, Tishah b’Av, and the following Rosh Hashanah (if correct) is just a quirk. Chava is still correct, though, that there are no restrictions on Passover’s start day of week.
But the lock between Passover and Shavuot is a design feature. Shavuot by definition falls fifty days after the first day of Passover. And 50 mod 7 = 1.
in sunday school at an orthodox church, we learned that pascha cannot precede or coincide with passover. the reason given is not to set christian against jew, but to follow what was written in the bible.
friday, the day of jesus death, one is to prepare for the sabbath. that year the sabbath was also the last day of passover ending sundown on saturday. christ rose at some point sunday am. the jewish passover ends before christ’s passover begins.
orthodox churches will go on a sunday where passover ends on saturday. they will not go on a sunday if passover ends on that sunday or after. in 2003 orthodox pashca will be a week after the western.
i quote again from hapgood’s:
pascha is the first sunday after the full moon which happens upon or next after the 21st of march. the council of nicea (325ad) was where the rule that christian pascha shall never either precede or coincide with the jewish passover, but must follow it, was laid down.
pascha cannot fall earlier than march 23rd julian, or later than april 25th julian. (those date go: april 4th and may 7 in gregorian)
the full moon in computing the date is the 14th day of a lunar month according to the ancient ecclesiastical computation.
the date was calculated until the year 2000 way back when. as 2000 approached the orthodox church had to get out calculators and 3 calendars and figure out the days from there.
for quite some time in the extremely early church people celebrated both the jewish holy days and the holy days of jesus. the apostles as well as jesus’ mom didn’t just toss out their jewish beliefs, they just added jesus’ teachings to them. it took quite a few generations and many non jewish converts to stop celebrating jewish holy days.
I think it’s worth noting that the development and adoption of the Gregorian calendar by the Western Church in 1582 was motivated in part by the need to put Easter back “on track” with the cosmos.
The Julian calendar was a welcome advance in time-keeping, relative to the methods previously used by the Romans et al., but compared to the actual length of the solar year, it is still too long to the tune of one full day ~128 years. (The Julian calendar assumes the length of the solar year to be 365.25 days, but the correct value is 365.2422 days – about 11 min shorter.)
When the Julian calendar went into use in 46 BCE, the vernal equinox – as an astronomical phenomenon – occurred on March 25th. By the late 16th-century, the event had slipped back to March 12th. This presented a problem in the observance of Easter and related liturgical events (Lent, Ascension, Pentecost) if a full moon occurred between March 12th and 25th. Which equinox date was the “correct” one? When was Easter properly observed? In a cosmology which decreed “as above, so below”, this was no small issue. Celebrate Easter on the wrong date, and the Earth is “out of sync” with Heaven.
In 1582 Pope Gregory XIII instituted the so-called Gregorian calendar and it was adopted immediately by Catholic countries in Western Europe, and by Protestant regions more slowly. England and the American colonies continued to use the Julian calendar until the middle of the 18th-century. The calendar did two things:
(1) like the Julian, it added an extra day to the calendar every four years, but not in centenary years which were not divisible by 400. Thus the Gregorian calendar is shorter than the Julian by 3 days every 400 years, or about 1 full day every 133 years. Note that this compensates quite nicely for the 1 day in 128 years by which the Julian is too long relative to the solar year. (The Gregorian calendar assumes the length of the year to be 365.2425 days.)
(2) it dropped ten days from the calendar in 1582, so that the vernal equinox actually occurred on March 21st, just as it did at the time of the Council of Nicaea (325 CE).
Since then the vernal equinox has occurred on March 21st (or 20th, in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; and the gap between the Julian and Gregorian calendar dates has since widened from 10 to 13 days, so that the equinox (as an astronomical event) occurs on March 9th in the Julian calendar.