I don’t understand the timing. Sometimes it is in March, sometimes in April. Is it ever in May? Christmas is always December 25th, except when the appliance stores or car dealers have a “Christmas in July” sale.
How do they set the date on Easter?
Here we go: Easter Saturday is always on the first Saturday after the first full moon after Spring equinox.
The date of Easter is set. In the West, it is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Eastern Orthodox churches include Passover in the calculation, so Orthodox Easter can be up to a month after the Roman feast.
This is what comes from trying to fit a lunar date into a solar calendar.
It’s got something to to with the first Sunday following Passover, which in turn is based on the first full-moon following the spring Equinox. Or something like that.
In the Western church, Easter is fixed according to the following rules. (1) Easter must be on a Sunday. (2) This Sunday must follow the 14th day of the paschal moon. (3) The paschal moon is that of which the 14th day (full moon) falls on or next follows the day of the vernal equinox. (4) The equinox is fixed in the calendar as March 21. Easter can never occur before March 22 or later than April 25.
What could be simpler?
Here are a couple of sites that will tell you (nearly) everything you need to know about determining the date of Easter and showing
extreme Easter dates.
>> Why can’t they get the date of Easter nailed down?
Sorry to disappoint you but they do have it nailed down.
>> I don’t understand the timing.
That’s a different thing alltogether. Easter was first set using the Jewish Lunar calendar and that is the reason it falls on different dates of our solar calendar.
If only it was so simple! Unfortunately the ‘official’ full moon used for calculating easter is not the astronomical full moon, but an inaccuratey calculated one.[sup][/sup] And the ‘official’ vernal equinox is also not the astronomical one. For all the gory details with Golden numbers and Epacts, look up 2.12.2 When is Easter? (Long answer)
For all your eastern (and other calendrical) questions, always go to the Calendar FAQ.
[sup][/sup]The FAQ linked to above mentions the following:
So how the hell does the Easter bunny figure all this out?
Is he checking his calandar?
Is this a rare case where the Orthodox Easter is calculated more accurately? Most of their dates are off because they use the old calendar that didn’t calculate in leap years and gradually drifted off target.
More accurately than what? Are you suggesting that the western method is in some sense wrong? By reference to what standard? What would an accurate calculation be?
Most of the Orthodox churches still use the Julian calendar, that does use leap yers. Rather too often as a matter of fact. Please read in the FAQ linked to in my previous post. It should cover most questions you could come up with regarding calendars.
I believe that the orthodox use the astronomical moon/equinox (Otherwise I can’t see why they wouldn’t have easter at the same time as the rest of the christian crowd.) I guess this could in some sense be called more ‘accurate’, but in general Easter is just an arbitrary point in time, and the most ‘correct’ value aught to be what most people use. And in that sense the orthodox lose.
I’m a little disappointed no one took me to task regarding the “nailed down” aspect of my question about Easter.
thanks anyway
OK, impatient one. You should read this mailbag item and this thread. It’d be the best thing the Romans ever did for you.
don’t worry…your pun wasn’t lost on all of us…
If you want a good book that takes you through all the twists and turns of this question I suggest reading Calendar: Humanity’s Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year by David Ewing Duncan.
Simple. He prepares for the occasion during Lent. When he sees more than a couple of people going to a mainstream church on Wednesday, he knows it’s Ash Wednesday, and begins work. Any rabbit who can get everywhere in the world early on a Sunday morning is quite capable of counting off forty days.
Oh, I see. I guess when your livelihood depends on it, you make sure you have a technique.
Remembering that he doesn’t count Sundays. (That movie title is my pet peeve of this spring.)
This may be a stupid question, but here goes:
Why isn’t Easter celebrated on a given date, instead of based on some lunar convolution? Jesus’ birth is celebrated on Dec 25 - why not pick a set date for his Resurrection celebration?
We have no idea what date Jesus was born, so we can pick a random date to celebrate his birth.
We do know when the resurrection happened - it’s tied to Passover, though we don’t know in what year (so we don’t know what date in the Gregorian calendar would the the anniversary). So our celebration of Easter is connected to the way in which Passover was fixed, which is by reference to a lunar calendar, not the Gregorian calendar.
I’m conscious that the Christian method of fixing Easter no longer coincides (if it ever did) with the Jewish method of fixed Passover, but that’s what it’s drawn from. As it is, different Christian traditions use different methods to fix Easter, and there is no prospect of their all agreeing on a new fixed date. All you would be doing is introducing one more method for fixing Easter.
Besides, what’s the big deal about a fixed date? As it is, we already move a lot of secular holdays around to ensure that they fall on the same day of the week every year - Monday - and clearly we don’t care about the fact that, as a result, they fall on different dates from year to year.