The date of Easter

 

Easter is Christianity’s original moveable feast, which means it is a feast or festival day that does not occur on the same date every year. It does occur on the same day — Sunday — but even that wandered in the beginning.

Originally, Easter was so closely associated with a Jewish holy day, Passover, that they were referred to by the same name: Pesach, a Hebrew word, or Pascha, the Greek equivalent.

The English name, Easter, was not applied to the Christian holiday until William Tyndale’s translation of the Bible into English in the early 1500s.

 

As early as the first century, disputes arose among Christians whether to commemorate Jesus’ crucifixion or his resurrection. The crucifixionists favored a fixed date, the day before Passover, 14 Nisan of the Jewish calendar, which fell on different days in different years, while the resurrectionists, including the bishop of Rome, preferred a fixed day, Sunday, which fell on different dates in different years.

The resurrectionists gained the ascendency, in part, because St. Paul’s teachings leaned heavily toward the view that Christianity rises or falls on the resurrection. In his First Letter to the Corinthians, verses 13-14, St. Paul wrote, “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.”

 

Eventually the matter of the date of Easter, called the Quartodeciman Controversy from the Latin word for 14th, was settled at the Council of Nicea in 325 — the same gathering of church dignitaries that composed the fundamental statement of Christian faith, the Nicene Creed; the council chose the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox.

Eastern and western churches have since devised their own interpretations of that formula. Eastern churches use the actual equinox and the full moon as seen from Jerusalem, while western churches decree March 21 to be the equinox and define an ecclesiastical full moon that may or may not coincide with any actual full moon.

 

As a result, Easter may fall on different days for orthodox and catholic Christians, as it does this year — March 23 in the West and April 27 in the East — or it may fall on the same date for both traditions, as it did on April 8 last year.

Orthodox Easter also invariably falls after Passover in recognition that the resurrection occurred after Passover. In the West, Easter may precede Passover by several weeks.