• How Is Easter Determined In The Orthodox Church

Computus (Latin for 'computation') is a calculation that determines the calendar date of Easter. Because the date is based on a calendar-dependent equinox rather than the astronomical one, there are differences between calculations done according to the Julian calendar and the modern Gregorian calendar. The name has been used for this procedure since the early Middle Ages, as it was considered the most important computation of the age.

For most of their history Christians have calculated Easter independently of the Jewish calendar. In principle, Easter falls on the Sunday following the full moon on or after the northern spring equinox (the paschal full moon). However, the vernal equinox and the full moon are not determined by astronomical observation. The vernal equinox is fixed to fall on 21 March (previously it varied in different areas and in some areas Easter was allowed to fall before the equinox). The full moon is an ecclesiastical full moon determined by reference to a conventional cycle.^[1] While Easter now falls at the earliest on the 15th of the lunar month and at the latest on the 21st, in some areas it used to fall at the earliest on the 14th (the day of the paschal full moon) and at the latest on the 20th, or between the sixteenth and the 22nd. The last limit arises from the fact that the crucifixion was considered to have happened on the 14th (the eve of the Passover) and the resurrection therefore on the sixteenth. The 'computus' is the procedure of determining the first Sunday after the first ecclesiastical full moon falling on or after 21 March, and the difficulty arose from doing this over the span of centuries without accurate means of measuring the precise tropical year. The synodic month had already been measured to a high degree of accuracy. The schematic model that eventually was accepted is the Metonic cycle, which equates 19 tropical years to 235 synodic months.

In 1583, the Catholic Church began using 21 March under the Gregorian calendar to calculate the date of Easter, while the Eastern churches have continued to use 21 March under the Julian calendar. The Catholic and Protestant denominations thus use an ecclesiastical full moon that occurs four, five or thirty-four days earlier than the eastern one.

The Sunday after the first moon following the vernal equinox is the date that Easter falls on. For example, the first full moon after the vernal equinox in 2014 came on Tuesday, April 15. This means that in 2014, Easter fell on the following Sunday, April 20. Note whether or not the full moon falls on Sunday. The basic rule for determining the date for Easter is that it is on the first Sunday after the first ecclesiastical full moon that occurs on or after March 21st. The beginning date, March 21st, was chosen because it is usually the vernal equinox (generally, the first day of.

The earliest and latest dates for Easter are 22 March and 25 April,^[2] in the Gregorian calendar as those dates are commonly understood. However, in the Orthodox churches, while those dates are the same, they are reckoned using the Julian calendar; therefore, on the Gregorian calendar as of the 21st century, those dates are 4 April and 8 May.

• 3Tabular methods
  • 3.1Gregorian calendar
• 4Algorithms

History

Easter is the most important Christian feast, and the proper date of its celebration has been the subject of controversy as early as the meeting of Anicetus and Polycarp around 154. According to Eusebius's Church History, quoting Polycrates of Ephesus,^[3] churches in the Roman Province of Asia 'always observed the day when the people put away the leaven', namely Passover, the 14th of the lunar month of Nisan. The rest of the Christian world at that time, according to Eusebius, held to 'the view which still prevails,' of fixing Easter on Sunday. Eusebius does not say how the Sunday was decided. Other documents from the 3rd and 4th centuries reveal that the customary practice was for Christians to consult their Jewish neighbors to determine when the week of Passover would fall, and to set Easter on the Sunday that fell within that week.^[4][5]

By the end of the 3rd century some Christians had become dissatisfied with what they perceived as the disorderly state of the Jewish calendar. The chief complaint was that the Jewish practice sometimes set the 14th of Nisan before the spring equinox. This is implied by Dionysius, Bishop of Alexandria, in the mid-3rd century, who stated that 'at no time other than the spring equinox is it legitimate to celebrate Easter' (Eusebius, Church History 7.20); and by Anatolius of Alexandria (quoted in Eusebius, Church History, 7.32) who declared it a 'great mistake' to set the paschal lunar month when the sun is in the twelfth sign of the zodiac (i.e., before the equinox). And it was explicitly stated by Peter, bishop of Alexandria that 'the men of the present day now celebrate [Passover] before the [spring] equinox..through negligence and error.'^[6] Another objection to using the Jewish computation may have been that the Jewish calendar was not unified. Jews in one city might have a method for reckoning the Week of Unleavened Bread different from that used by the Jews of another city.^[7] Because of these perceived defects in the traditional practice, Christian computists began experimenting with systems for determining Easter that would be free of these defects. But these experiments themselves led to controversy, since some Christians held that the customary practice of holding Easter during the Jewish festival of Unleavened Bread should be continued, even if the Jewish computations were in error from the Christian point of view.^[8]

The First Council of Nicaea in 325 was primarily concerned with settling the Quartodeciman question (the practice of churches in the east of the empire of observing Easter on luna xiv, whichever day of the week it fell on). Probably because those churches which deferred the celebration to the following Sunday couldn't agree which Sunday to observe the Council thought it politic not to promulgate a canon on the matter but to come to an agreement. The terms of this agreement were set out by Constantine in a letter to those churches which were not represented.^[9][10][11] The calculation was to be independent of the Jews. It was noted: 'When the question relative to the sacred festival of Easter arose it was universally thought that it would be convenient that all should keep the feast on one day .. for to celebrate the passover twice in one year is totally inadmissible .. By the unanimous judgment of all, it has been decided that the most holy festival of Easter should be everywhere celebrated on one and the same day.'

Hefele, History of the Councils, Volume 1, pp. 328 et seq., notes that the difference between the Alexandrian and the Roman computation continued after the Council. A Council was convened at Sardica in AD 343 which secured agreement for a common date. This soon broke down. As time went on Rome generally deferred to Alexandria in the matter.

The Patriarchy of Alexandria celebrated Easter on the Sunday after the 14th day of the moon (computed using the Metonic cycle) that falls on or after the vernal equinox, which they placed on 21 March. However, the Patriarchy of Rome still regarded 25 March (Lady Day) as the equinox (until 342), and used a different cycle to compute the day of the moon.^[12] In the Alexandrian system, since the 14th day of the Easter moon could fall at earliest on 21 March its first day could fall no earlier than 8 March and no later than 5 April. This meant that Easter varied between 22 March and 25 April. In Rome, Easter was not allowed to fall later than 21 April, that being the day of the Parilia or birthday of Rome and a pagan festival. The first day of the Easter moon could fall no earlier than 5 March and no later than 2 April.

Easter was the Sunday after the 15th day of this moon, whose 14th day was allowed to precede the equinox. Where the two systems produced different dates there was generally a compromise so that both churches were able to celebrate on the same day. The process of working out the details generated still further controversies. The method from Alexandria became authoritative. In its developed form it was based on the epacts of a reckoned moon according to the 19 year Metonic cycle. Such a cycle was first proposed by Bishop Anatolius of Laodicea (in present-day Syria), c. 277.^[a] Alexandrian Easter tables were composed by Pope Theophilus about 390 and within the bishopric of his nephew Cyril about 444. In Constantinople, several computists were active over the centuries after Anatolius (and after the Nicaean Council), but their Easter dates coincided with those of the Alexandrians. The Alexandrian computus was converted from the Alexandrian calendar into the Julian calendar in Rome by Dionysius Exiguus, though only for 95 years. Dionysius introduced the Christian Era (counting years from the Incarnation of Christ) when he published new Easter tables in 525.^[15][16]

Dionysius's tables replaced earlier methods used by Rome. The earliest known Roman tables were devised in 222 by Hippolytus of Rome based on eight-year cycles. Then 84 year tables were introduced in Rome by Augustalis near the end of the 3rd century.^[b] A completely distinct 84 year cycle, the Insular latercus, was used in the British Isles.^[18] These old tables were used in Northumbria until 664, and by isolated monasteries as late as 931.^{[citation needed]} A modified 84 year cycle was adopted in Rome during the first half of the 4th century. Victorius of Aquitaine tried to adapt the Alexandrian method to Roman rules in 457 in the form of a 532 year table, but he introduced serious errors.^[19] These Victorian tables were used in Gaul (now France) and Spain until they were displaced by Dionysian tables at the end of the 8th century.

In the British Isles, Dionysius's and Victorius's tables conflicted with their traditional tables. These used an 84 year cycle because this made the dates of Easter repeat every 84 years – but an error made the full moons fall progressively too early.^[18] Add the fact that Easter could fall, at earliest, on the fourteenth day of the lunar month and thus Queen Eanfled sometime during AD 662–664 – who followed the Dionysian system – fasted on her Palm Sunday on the same day as her husband Oswy, king of Northumbria, feasted on his Easter Sunday.^[20]

As a result of the Irish Synod of Magh-Lene in 630, the southern Irish began to use the Dionysian tables,^[21] and the northern English Synod of Whitby in 664 adopted the Dionysian tables.^[22]Bede records that There happened an eclipse of the sun on the third of May, about ten o'clock in the morning.^[23] The time is correct but the date is two days late.^[c] This was done to conceal the inaccuracy that had accumulated in the new cycle since it was originally constructed.

The Dionysian reckoning was fully described by Bede in 725.^[24] It may have been adopted by Charlemagne for the Frankish Church as early as 782 from Alcuin, a follower of Bede. The Dionysian/Bedan computus remained in use in western Europe until the Gregorian calendar reform, and remains in use in most Eastern Churches, including the vast majority of Eastern Orthodox Churches and Non-Chalcedonian Churches.^[25] Having deviated from the Alexandrians during the 6th century, churches beyond the eastern frontier of the former Byzantine Empire, including the Assyrian Church of the East,^[26] now celebrate Easter on different dates from Eastern Orthodox Churches four times every 532 years.^[27]

Apart from these churches on the eastern fringes of the Roman empire, by the tenth century all had adopted the Alexandrian Easter, which still placed the vernal equinox on 21 March, although Bede had already noted its drift in 725 – it had drifted even further by the 16th century.^[d] Worse, the reckoned Moon that was used to compute Easter was fixed to the Julian year by the 19 year cycle. That approximation built up an error of one day every 310 years, so by the 16th century the lunar calendar was out of phase with the real Moon by four days.

The Gregorian Easter has been used since 1583 by the Roman Catholic Church and was adopted by most Protestant churches between 1753 and 1845. German Protestant states used an astronomical Easter based on the Rudolphine Tables of Johannes Kepler between 1700 and 1774, while Sweden used it from 1739 to 1844. This astronomical Easter was one week before the Gregorian Easter in 1724, 1744, 1778, 1798, etc.^[29]

Theory

The Easter cycle groups days into lunar months, which are either 29 or 30 days long. There is an exception. The month ending in March normally has thirty days, but if 29 February of a leap year falls within it, it contains 31. As these groups are based on the lunar cycle, over the long term the average month in the lunar calendar is a very good approximation of the synodic month, which is 29.53059 days long.^[30] There are 12 synodic months in a lunar year, totaling either 354 or 355 days. The lunar year is about 11 days shorter than the calendar year, which is either 365 or 366 days long. These days by which the solar year exceeds the lunar year are called epacts (Greek: ἐπακταὶ ἡμέραι, translit.epaktai hēmerai, lit. 'intercalary days').^[31][32] It is necessary to add them to the day of the solar year to obtain the correct day in the lunar year. Whenever the epact reaches or exceeds 30, an extra intercalary month (or embolismic month) of 30 days must be inserted into the lunar calendar: then 30 must be subtracted from the epact. The Rev. C. Wheatly^[33] provides the detail:

Thus beginning the year with March (for that was the ancient custom) they allowed thirty days for the moon [ending] in March, and twenty-nine for that [ending] in April; and thirty again for May, and twenty-nine for June &c. according to the old verses:

Impar luna pari, par fiet in impare mense;

In quo completur mensi lunatio detur.

'For the first, third, fifth, seventh, ninth, and eleventh months, which are called impares menses, or unequal months, have their moons according to computation of thirty days each, which are therefore called pares lunae, or equal moons: but the second, fourth, sixth, eighth, tenth, and twelfth months, which are called pares menses, or equal months, have their moons but twenty nine days each, which are called impares lunae, or unequal moons.

Thus the lunar month took the name of the Julian month in which it ended. The nineteen-year Metonic cycle assumes that 19 tropical years are as long as 235 synodic months. So after 19 years the lunations should fall the same way in the solar years, and the epacts should repeat. However, 19 × 11 = 209 ≡ 29 (mod 30), not 0 (mod 30); that is, 209 divided by 30 leaves a remainder of 29 instead of being a multiple of 30. So after 19 years, the epact must be corrected by one day for the cycle to repeat. This is the so-called saltus lunae ('leap of the moon'). The Julian calendar handles it by reducing the length of the lunar month that begins on 1 July in the last year of the cycle to 29 days. This makes three successive 29-day months.^[e] The saltus and the seven extra 30-day months were largely hidden by being located at the points where the Julian and lunar months begin at about the same time. The extra months commenced on 3 December (year 2), 2 September (year 5), 6 March (year 8), 4 December (year 10), 2 November (year 13), 2 August (year 16), and 5 March (year 19).^[34] The sequence number of the year in the 19-year cycle is called the 'golden number', and is given by the formula

GN = Y mod 19 + 1

That is, the remainder of the year number Y in the Christian era when divided by 19, plus one.^[f]

The paschal or Easter-month is the first one in the year to have its fourteenth day (its formal full moon) on or after 21 March. Easter is the Sunday after its 14th day (or, saying the same thing, the Sunday within its third week). The paschal lunar month always begins on a date in the 29-day period from 8 March to 5 April inclusive. Its fourteenth day, therefore, always falls on a date between 21 March and 18 April inclusive, and the following Sunday then necessarily falls on a date in the range 22 March to 25 April inclusive. In the solar calendar Easter is called a moveable feast since its date varies within a 35-day range. But in the lunar calendar, Easter is always the third Sunday in the paschal lunar month, and is no more 'moveable' than any holiday that is fixed to a particular day of the week and week within a month.

Tabular methods

Gregorian calendar

As reforming the computus was the primary motivation for the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in 1582, a corresponding computus methodology was introduced alongside the calendar.^[g] The general method of working was given by Clavius in the Six Canons (1582), and a full explanation followed in his Explicatio (1603).

Easter Sunday is the Sunday following the paschal full moon date. The paschal full moon date is the ecclesiastical full moon date on or after 21 March. The Gregorian method derives paschal full moon dates by determining the epact for each year.^[36] The epact can have a value from * (0 or 30) to 29 days. Theoretically a lunar month (epact 0) begins with the new moon, and the crescent moon is first visible on the first day of the month (epact 1).^[37] The 14th day of the lunar month is considered the day of the full moon.^[38]

Historically the paschal full moon date for a year was found from its sequence number in the Metonic cycle, called the golden number, which cycle repeats the lunar phase 1 January every 19 years.^[39] This method was abandoned in the Gregorian reform because the tabular dates go out of sync with reality after about two centuries, but from the epact method, a simplified table can be constructed that has a validity of one to three centuries.^{[citation needed]}

The epacts for the current Metonic cycle, which began in 2014, are:

The above table is valid from 1900 to 2199 inclusive. As an example of use, the golden number for 2038 is 6 (2038 ÷ 19 = 107 remainder 5, then +1 = 6). From the table, paschal full moon for golden number 6 is 18 April. From week table 18 April is Sunday. Easter Sunday is the following Sunday, 25 April.

The epacts are used to find the dates of the new moon in the following way: Write down a table of all 365 days of the year (the leap day is ignored). Then label all dates with a Roman numeral counting downwards, from '*' (0 or 30), 'xxix' (29), down to 'i' (1), starting from 1 January, and repeat this to the end of the year. However, in every second such period count only 29 days and label the date with xxv (25) also with xxiv (24). Treat the 13th period (last eleven days) as long, therefore, and assign the labels 'xxv' and 'xxiv' to sequential dates (26 and 27 December respectively). Finally, in addition, add the label '25' to the dates that have 'xxv' in the 30-day periods; but in 29-day periods (which have 'xxiv' together with 'xxv') add the label '25' to the date with 'xxvi'. The distribution of the lengths of the months and the length of the epact cycles is such that each civil calendar month starts and ends with the same epact label, except for February and for the epact labels 'xxv' and '25' in July and August. This table is called the calendarium. The ecclesiastical new moons for any year are those dates when the epact for the year is entered. If the epact for the year is for instance 27, then there is an ecclesiastical new moon on every date in that year that has the epact label 'xxvii' (27).

Also label all the dates in the table with letters 'A' to 'G', starting from 1 January, and repeat to the end of the year. If, for instance, the first Sunday of the year is on 5 January, which has letter 'E', then every date with the letter 'E' is a Sunday that year. Then 'E' is called the dominical letter for that year (from Latin: dies domini, day of the Lord). The dominical letter cycles backward one position every year. However, in leap years after 24 February the Sundays fall on the previous letter of the cycle, so leap years have two dominical letters: the first for before, the second for after the leap day.

In practice, for the purpose of calculating Easter, this need not be done for all 365 days of the year. For the epacts, March comes out exactly the same as January, so one need not calculate January or February. To also avoid the need to calculate the Dominical Letters for January and February, start with D for 1 March. You need the epacts only from 8 March to 5 April. This gives rise to the following table:

Example: If the epact is 27 (xxvii), an ecclesiastical new moon falls on every date labeled xxvii. The ecclesiastical full moon falls 13 days later. From the table above, this gives a new moon on 4 March and 3 April, and so a full moon on 17 March and 16 April.

Then Easter Day is the first Sunday after the first ecclesiastical full moon on or after 21 March. This definition uses 'on or after 21 March' to avoid ambiguity with historic meaning of the word 'after'. In modern language, this phrase simply means 'after 20 March'. The definition of 'on or after 21 March' is frequently incorrectly abbreviated to 'after 21 March' in published and web-based articles, resulting in incorrect Easter dates.

In the example, this paschal full moon is on 16 April. If the dominical letter is E, then Easter day is on 20 April.

The label '25' (as distinct from 'xxv') is used as follows: Within a Metonic cycle, years that are 11 years apart have epacts that differ by one day. A month beginning on a date having labels xxiv and xxv impacted together has either 29 or 30 days. If the epacts 24 and 25 both occur within one Metonic cycle, then the new (and full) moons would fall on the same dates for these two years. This is possible for the real moon^[h] but is inelegant in a schematic lunar calendar; the dates should repeat only after 19 years. To avoid this, in years that have epacts 25 and with a Golden Number larger than 11, the reckoned new moon falls on the date with the label 25 rather than xxv. Where the labels 25 and xxv are together, there is no problem since they are the same. This does not move the problem to the pair '25' and 'xxvi', because the earliest epact 26 could appear would be in year 23 of the cycle, which lasts only 19 years: there is a saltus lunae in between that makes the new moons fall on separate dates.

The Gregorian calendar has a correction to the tropical year by dropping three leap days in 400 years (always in a century year). This is a correction to the length of the tropical year, but should have no effect on the Metonic relation between years and lunations. Therefore, the epact is compensated for this (partially – see epact) by subtracting one in these century years. This is the so-called solar correction or 'solar equation' ('equation' being used in its medieval sense of 'correction').

However, 19 uncorrected Julian years are a little longer than 235 lunations. The difference accumulates to one day in about 310 years. Therefore, in the Gregorian calendar, the epact gets corrected by adding 1 eight times in 2,500 (Gregorian) years, always in a century year: this is the so-called lunar correction (historically called 'lunar equation'). The first one was applied in 1800, the next is in 2100, and will be applied every 300 years except for an interval of 400 years between 3900 and 4300, which starts a new cycle.

The solar and lunar corrections work in opposite directions, and in some century years (for example, 1800 and 2100) they cancel each other. The result is that the Gregorian lunar calendar uses an epact table that is valid for a period of from 100 to 300 years. The epact table listed above is valid for the period 1900 to 2199.

Details

This method of computation has several subtleties:

Every other lunar month has only 29 days, so one day must have two (of the 30) epact labels assigned to it. The reason for moving around the epact label 'xxv/25' rather than any other seems to be the following: According to Dionysius (in his introductory letter to Petronius), the Nicene council, on the authority of Eusebius, established that the first month of the ecclesiastical lunar year (the paschal month) should start between 8 March and 5 April inclusive, and the 14th day fall between 21 March and 18 April inclusive, thus spanning a period of (only) 29 days. A new moon on 7 March, which has epact label 'xxiv', has its 14th day (full moon) on 20 March, which is too early (not following 20 March). So years with an epact of 'xxiv', if the lunar month beginning on 7 March had 30 days, would have their paschal new moon on 6 April, which is too late: The full moon would fall on 19 April, and Easter could be as late as 26 April. In the Julian calendar the latest date of Easter was 25 April, and the Gregorian reform maintained that limit. So the paschal full moon must fall no later than 18 April and the new moon on 5 April, which has epact label 'xxv'. 5 April must therefore have its double epact labels 'xxiv' and 'xxv'. Then epact 'xxv' must be treated differently, as explained in the paragraph above.

As a consequence, 19 April is the date on which Easter falls most frequently in the Gregorian calendar: In about 3.87% of the years. 22 March is the least frequent, with 0.48%.

The relation between lunar and solar calendar dates is made independent of the leap day scheme for the solar year. Basically the Gregorian calendar still uses the Julian calendar with a leap day every four years, so a Metonic cycle of 19 years has 6,940 or 6,939 days with five or four leap days. Now the lunar cycle counts only 19 × 354 + 19 × 11 = 6,935 days. By not labeling and counting the leap day with an epact number, but having the next new moon fall on the same calendar date as without the leap day, the current lunation gets extended by a day,^[i] and the 235 lunations cover as many days as the 19 years. So the burden of synchronizing the calendar with the moon (intermediate-term accuracy) is shifted to the solar calendar, which may use any suitable intercalation scheme; all under the assumption that 19 solar years = 235 lunations (long-term inaccuracy). A consequence is that the reckoned age of the moon may be off by a day, and also that the lunations that contain the leap day may be 31 days long, which would never happen if the real moon were followed (short-term inaccuracies). This is the price for a regular fit to the solar calendar.

From the perspective of those who might wish to use the Gregorian Easter cycle as a calendar for the entire year, there are some flaws in the Gregorian lunar calendar^[43] (although they have no effect on the paschal month and the date of Easter):

1. Lunations of 31 (and sometimes 28) days occur.
2. If a year with Golden Number 19 happens to have epact 19, then the last ecclesiastical new moon falls on 2 December; the next would be due on 1 January. However, at the start of the new year, a saltus lunae increases the epact by another unit, and the new moon should have occurred on the previous day. So a new moon is missed. The calendarium of the Missale Romanum takes account of this by assigning epact label '19' instead of 'xx' to 31 December of such a year, making that date the new moon. It happened every 19 years when the original Gregorian epact table was in effect (for the last time in 1690), and next happens in 8511.
3. If the epact of a year is 20, an ecclesiastical new moon falls on 31 December. If that year falls before a century year, then in most cases, a solar correction reduces the epact for the new year by one: The resulting epact '*' means that another ecclesiastical new moon is counted on 1 January. So, formally, a lunation of one day has passed. This next happens in 4199–4200.
4. Other borderline cases occur (much) later, and if the rules are followed strictly and these cases are not specially treated, they generate successive new moon dates that are 1, 28, 59, or (very rarely) 58 days apart.

A careful analysis shows that through the way they are used and corrected in the Gregorian calendar, the epacts are actually fractions of a lunation (1/30, also known as a tithi) and not full days. See epact for a discussion.

The solar and lunar corrections repeat after 4 × 25 = 100 centuries. In that period, the epact has changed by a total of −1 × 3/4 × 100 + 1 × 8/25 × 100 = −43 ≡ 17 mod 30. This is prime to the 30 possible epacts, so it takes 100 × 30 = 3,000 centuries before the epacts repeat; and 3,000 × 19 = 57,000 centuries before the epacts repeat at the same golden number. This period has 5,700,000/19 × 235 − 43/30 × 57,000/100 = 70,499,183 lunations. So the Gregorian Easter dates repeat in exactly the same order only after 5,700,000 years, 70,499,183 lunations, or 2,081,882,250 days; the mean lunation length is then 29.53058690 days. However, the calendar must already have been adjusted after some millennia because of changes in the length of the tropical year, the synodic month, and the day.

This raises the question why the Gregorian lunar calendar has separate solar and lunar corrections, which sometimes cancel each other. Instead, the net 4 × 8 − 3 × 25 = 43 epact subtractions could be distributed evenly over 10,000 years (as has been proposed for example by Dr. Heiner Lichtenberg).^[44] Lilius' original work has not been preserved and Clavius does not explain this. However Lilius did say that the correction system he devised was to be a perfectly flexible tool in the hands of future calendar reformers, since the solar and lunar calendar could henceforth be corrected without mutual interference.^[45] If the corrections are combined, then the inaccuracies of the two cycles are also added and can not be corrected separately.

The 'solar corrections' approximately undo the effect of the Gregorian modifications to the leap days of the solar calendar on the lunar calendar: they (partially) bring the epact cycle back to the original Metonic relation between the Julian year and lunar month. The inherent mismatch between sun and moon in this basic 19 year cycle is then corrected every three or four centuries by the 'lunar correction' to the epacts. However, the epact corrections occur at the beginning of Gregorian centuries, not Julian centuries, and therefore the original Julian Metonic cycle is not fully restored.

The ratios of (mean solar) days per year and days per lunation change both because of intrinsic long-term variations in the orbits, and because the rotation of the Earth is slowing down due to tidal deceleration, so the Gregorian parameters become increasingly obsolete.

This does affect the date of the equinox, but it so happens that the interval between northward (northern hemisphere spring) equinoxes has been fairly stable over historical times, especially if measured in mean solar time (see,^[46] esp.^[47])

Also the drift in ecclesiastical full moons calculated by the Gregorian method compared to the true full moons is affected less than one would expect, because the increase in the length of the day is almost exactly compensated for by the increase in the length of the month, as tidal braking transfers angular momentum of the rotation of the Earth to orbital angular momentum of the Moon.

The Ptolemaic value of the length of the mean synodic month, established around the 4th century BCE by the Babylonians, is 29 days 12 hr 44 min 31/3 s (see Kidinnu); the current value is 0.46 s less (see New moon). In the same historic stretch of time the length of the mean tropical year has diminished by about 10 s (all values mean solar time).

British Calendar Act and Book of Common Prayer

The portion of the Tabular methods section above describes the historical arguments and methods by which the present dates of Easter Sunday were decided in the late 16th century by the Catholic Church. In Britain, where the Julian calendar was then still in use, Easter Sunday was defined, from 1662 to 1752 (in accordance with previous practice), by a simple table of dates in the AnglicanPrayer Book (decreed by the Act of Uniformity 1662). The table was indexed directly by the golden number and the Sunday letter, which (in the Easter section of the book) were presumed to be already known.

For the British Empire and colonies, the new determination of the Date of Easter Sunday was defined by what is now called the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750 with its Annexe. The method was chosen to give dates agreeing with the Gregorian rule already in use elsewhere. The Act required that it be put in the Book of Common Prayer, and therefore it is the general Anglican rule. The original Act can be seen in the British Statutes at Large 1765.^[48] The Annexe to the Act includes the definition: 'Easter-day (on which the rest depend) is always the first Sunday after the Full Moon, which happens upon, or next after the Twenty-first Day of March. And if the Full Moon happens upon a Sunday, Easter-day is the Sunday after.' The Annexe subsequently uses the terms 'Paschal Full Moon' and 'Ecclesiastical Full Moon', making it clear that they approximate to the real full moon.

The method is quite distinct from that described above in Gregorian calendar. For a general year, one first determines the golden number, then one uses three tables to determine the Sunday letter, a 'cypher', and the date of the paschal full moon, from which the date of Easter Sunday follows. The epact does not explicitly appear. Simpler tables can be used for limited periods (such as 1900–2199) during which the cypher (which represents the effect of the solar and lunar corrections) does not change. Clavius' details were employed in the construction of the method, but they play no subsequent part in its use.^[49][50]

J. R. Stockton shows his derivation of an efficient computer algorithm traceable to the tables in the Prayer Book and the Calendar Act (assuming that a description of how to use the Tables is at hand), and verifies its processes by computing matching Tables.^[51]

Julian calendar

The method for computing the date of the ecclesiastical full moon that was standard for the western Church before the Gregorian calendar reform, and is still used today by most eastern Christians, made use of an uncorrected repetition of the 19-year Metonic cycle in combination with the Julian calendar. In terms of the method of the epacts discussed above, it effectively used a single epact table starting with an epact of 0, which was never corrected. In this case, the epact was counted on 22 March, the earliest acceptable date for Easter. This repeats every 19 years, so there are only 19 possible dates for the paschal full moon from 21 March to 18 April inclusive.

Because there are no corrections as there are for the Gregorian calendar, the ecclesiastical full moon drifts away from the true full moon by more than three days every millennium. It is already a few days later. As a result, the eastern churches celebrate Easter one week later than the western churches about 50% of the time. (The eastern Easter is often four or five weeks later because the Julian calendar is 13 days behind the Gregorian in 1900–2099, and so the Gregorian paschal full moon is often before Julian 21 March.)

The sequence number of a year in the 19-year cycle is called its golden number. This term was first used in the computistic poem Massa Compoti by Alexander de Villa Dei in 1200. A later scribe added the golden number to tables originally composed by Abbo of Fleury in 988.

The claim by the Catholic Church in the 1582 papal bullInter gravissimas, which promulgated the Gregorian calendar, that it restored 'the celebration of Easter according to the rules fixed by .. the great ecumenical council of Nicaea'^[52] was based on a false claim by Dionysius Exiguus (525) that 'we determine the date of Easter Day .. in accordance with the proposal agreed upon by the 318 Fathers of the Church at the Council in Nicaea.'^[53] The First Council of Nicaea (325) only stated that all Christians must celebrate Easter on the same Sunday—it did not fix rules to determine which Sunday. The medieval computus was based on the Alexandrian computus, which was developed by the Church of Alexandria during the first decade of the 4th century using the Alexandrian calendar.^[54]:36 The eastern Roman Empire accepted it shortly after 380 after converting the computus to the Julian calendar.^[54]:48 Rome accepted it sometime between the sixth and ninth centuries. The British Isles accepted it during the eighth century except for a few monasteries. Francia (all of western Europe except Scandinavia (pagan), the British Isles, the Iberian peninsula, and southern Italy) accepted it during the last quarter of the eighth century. The last Celtic monastery to accept it, Iona, did so in 716, whereas the last English monastery to accept it did so in 931. Before these dates, other methods produced Easter Sunday dates that could differ by up to five weeks.

This is the table of paschal full moon dates for all Julian years since 931:

Example calculation using this table:

The golden number for 1573 is 16 (1573 + 1 = 1574; 1574 ÷ 19 = 82 remainder 16). From the table, the paschal full moon for golden number 16 is 21 March. From the week table 21 March is Saturday. Easter Sunday is the following Sunday, 22 March.

So for a given date of the ecclesiastical full moon, there are seven possible Easter dates. The cycle of Sunday letters, however, does not repeat in seven years: because of the interruptions of the leap day every four years, the full cycle in which weekdays recur in the calendar in the same way, is 4 × 7 = 28 years, the so-called solar cycle. So the Easter dates repeated in the same order after 4 × 7 × 19 = 532 years. This paschal cycle is also called the Victorian cycle, after Victorius of Aquitaine, who introduced it in Rome in 457. It is first known to have been used by Annianus of Alexandria at the beginning of the 5th century. It has also sometimes erroneously been called the Dionysian cycle, after Dionysius Exiguus, who prepared Easter tables that started in 532; but he apparently did not realize that the Alexandrian computus he described had a 532-year cycle, although he did realize that his 95-year table was not a true cycle. Venerable Bede (7th century) seems to have been the first to identify the solar cycle and explain the paschal cycle from the Metonic cycle and the solar cycle.

In medieval western Europe, the dates of the paschal full moon (14 Nisan) given above could be memorized with the help of a 19-line alliterative poem in Latin:^[55][56]

The first half-line of each line gives the date of the paschal full moon from the table above for each year in the 19-year cycle. The second half-line gives the ferial regular, or weekday displacement, of the day of that year's paschal full moon from the concurrent, or the weekday of 24 March.^[57] The ferial regular is repeated in Roman numerals in the third column.

Algorithms

Note on operations

When expressing Easter algorithms without using tables, it has been customary to employ only the integer operations addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, modulo, and assignment (plus minus times div mod assign). That is compatible with the use of simple mechanical or electronic calculators. But it is an undesirable restriction for computer programming, where conditional operators and statements, as well as look-up tables, are always available. One can easily see how conversion from day-of-March (22 to 56) to day-and-month (22 March to 25 April) can be done as (if DoM>31) {Day=DoM-31, Month=Apr} else {Day=DoM, Month=Mar}. More importantly, using such conditionals also simplifies the core of the Gregorian calculation.

Gauss's Easter algorithm

In 1800, the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss presented this algorithm for calculating the date of the Julian or Gregorian Easter.^[58][59] He corrected the expression for calculating the variable p in 1816.^[60] In 1800 he incorrectly stated p = floor (k/3) = ⌊k/3⌋. In 1807 he replaced the condition (11M + 11) mod 30 < 19 with the simpler a > 10. In 1811 he limited his algorithm to the 18th and 19th centuries only, and stated that 26 April is always replaced with 19 April and 25 April by 18 April. In 1816 he thanked his student Peter Paul Tittel for pointing out that p was wrong in the original version.^[61]

An analysis of the Gauss's Easter algorithm is divided into two parts. The first part is the approximate tracking of the lunar orbiting and the second one is the exact, deterministic offsetting to obtain a Sunday following the full moon.

The first part consists of determining the variable d, the number of days (counting from March 21) for the closest following full moon to occur. The formula for d contains the terms 19a and the constant M. a is the year's position in the 19-year lunar phase cycle, in which by assumption the moon's movement relative to earth repeats every 19 calendar years. In older times, 19 calendar years were equated to 235 lunar months (the Metonic cycle), which is remarkably close since 235 lunar months are approximately 6939.6813 days and 19 years are on average 6939.6075 days. The expression (19a + M) mod 30 repeats every 19 years within each century as M is determined per century. The 19-year cycle has nothing to do with the '19' in 19a, it is just a coincidence that another '19' appears. The '19' in 19a comes from correcting the mismatch between a calendar year and an integer number of lunar months. A calendar year (non-leap year) has 365 days and the closest you can come with an integer number of lunar months is 12 × 29.5 = 354 days. The difference is 11 days, which must be corrected for by moving the following year's occurrence of a full moon 11 days back. But in modulo 30 arithmetic, subtracting 11 is the same as adding 19, hence the addition of 19 for each year added, i.e. 19a.

The M in 19a + M serves to have a correct starting point at the start of each century. It is determined by a calculation taking the number of leap years up until that century where k inhibits a leap day every 100 years and q reinstalls it every 400 years, yielding (k − q) as the total number of inhibitions to the pattern of a leap day every four years. Thus we add (k − q) to correct for leap days that never occurred. p corrects for the lunar orbit not being fully describable in integer terms.

The range of days considered for the full moon to determine Easter are 21 March (the day of the ecclesislastical equinox of spring) to 19 April—a 30-day range mirrored in the mod 30 arithmetic of variable d and constant M, both of which can have integer values in the range 0 to 29. Once d is determined, this is the number of days to add to 21 March (the earliest possible full moon allowed, which is coincident with the ecclesiastical equinox of spring) to obtain the day of the full moon.

So the first allowable date of Easter is 21+d+1, as Easter is to celebrate the Sunday after the ecclesiastical full moon, that is if the full moon falls on Sunday 21 March Easter is to be celebrated 7 days after, while if the full moon falls on Saturday 21 March Easter is the following 22 March.

The second part is finding e, the additional offset days that must be added to the date offset d to make it arrive at a Sunday. Since the week has 7 days, the offset must be in the range 0 to 6 and determined by modulo 7 arithmetic. e is determined by calculating 2b + 4c + 6d + N mod 7. These constants may seem strange at first, but are quite easily explainable if we remember that we operate under mod 7 arithmetic. To begin with, 2b + 4c ensures that we take care of the fact that weekdays slide for each year. A normal year has 365 days, but 52 × 7 = 364, so 52 full weeks make up one day too little. Hence, each consecutive year, the weekday 'slides one day forward', meaning if May 6 was a Wednesday one year, it is a Thursday the following year (disregarding leap years). Both b and c increases by one for an advancement of one year (disregarding modulo effects). The expression 2b + 4c thus increases by 6—but remember that this is the same as subtracting 1 mod 7. And to subtract by 1 is exactly what is required for a normal year – since the weekday slips one day forward we should compensate one day less to arrive at the correct weekday (i.e. Sunday). For a leap year, b becomes 0 and 2b thus is 0 instead of 8—which under mod 7, is another subtraction by 1—i.e., a total subtraction by 2, as the weekdays after the leap day that year slides forward by two days.

The expression 6d works the same way. Increasing d by some number y indicates that the full moon occurs y days later this year, and hence we should compensate y days less. Adding 6d is mod 7 the same as subtracting d, which is the desired operation. Thus, again, we do subtraction by adding under modulo arithmetic. In total, the variable e contains the step from the day of the full moon to the nearest following Sunday, between 0 and 6 days ahead. The constant N provides the starting point for the calculations for each century and depends on where Jan 1, year 1 was implicitly located when the Gregorian calendar was constructed.

The expression d + e can yield offsets in the range 0 to 35 pointing to possible Easter Sundays on March 22 to April 26. For reasons of historical compatibility, all offsets of 35 and some of 34 are subtracted by 7, jumping one Sunday back to the day before the full moon (in effect using a negative e of −1). This means that 26 April is never Easter Sunday and that 19 April is overrepresented. These latter corrections are for historical reasons only and has nothing to do with the mathematical algorithm.

Using the Gauss's Easter algorithm for years prior to 1583 is historically pointless since the Gregorian calendar was not utilised for determining Easter before that year. Using the algorithm far into the future is questionable, since we know nothing about how different churches will define Easter that far ahead. Easter calculations are based on agreements and conventions, not on the actual celestial movements nor on indisputable facts of history.

Anonymous Gregorian algorithm

'A New York correspondent' submitted this algorithm for determining the Gregorian Easter to the journal Nature in 1876.^[61][62]It has been reprinted many times, e.g.,in 1877 by Samuel Butcher in The Ecclesiastical Calendar,^[63]:225 in 1916 by Arthur Downing in The Observatory,^[64]in 1922 by H. Spencer Jones in General Astronomy,^[65]in 1977 by the Journal of the British Astronomical Association,^[66]in 1977 by The Old Farmer's Almanac,in 1988 by Peter Duffett-Smith in Practical Astronomy with your Calculator,and in 1991 by Jean Meeus in Astronomical Algorithms.^[67]Because of the Meeus’ book citation, that is also called 'Meeus/Jones/Butcher' algorithm:

In 1961 the New Scientist published a version of the Nature algorithm incorporating a few changes.^[68] The variable g was calculated using Gauss' 1816 correction, resulting in the elimination of variable f. Some tidying results in the replacement of variable o (to which one must be added to obtain the date of Easter) with variable p, which gives the date directly.

Meeus's Julian algorithm

Jean Meeus, in his book Astronomical Algorithms (1991, p. 69), presents the following algorithm for calculating the Julian Easter on the Julian Calendar, which is not the Gregorian Calendar used throughout the contemporary world. To obtain the date of Eastern Orthodox Easter on the latter calendar, 13 days (as of 1900 through 2099) must be added to the Julian dates, producing the dates below, in the last row.

See also

Notes

1. ^The lunar cycle of Anatolius, according to the tables in De ratione paschali, included only two bissextile (leap) years every 19 years, so could not be used by anyone using the Julian calendar, which had four or five leap years per lunar cycle.^[13][14]
2. ^Although this is the dating of Augustalis by Bruno Krusch, see arguments for a 5th century date in^[17]
3. ^In that year, the Golden Number being 19, the ecclesiastical full moon (luna xiv) fell on 17 April. The Easter month has 29 days, so the next new moon fell sixteen days later, on 3 May.
4. ^For example, in the Julian calendar, at Rome in 1550, the March equinox occurred at 11 March 6:51 AM local mean time.^[28]
5. ^Although prior to the replacement of the Julian calendar in 1752 some printers of the Book of Common Prayer placed the saltus correctly, beginning the next month on 30 July, none of them continued the sequence correctly to the end of the year.
6. ^'the [Golden Number] of a year AD is found by adding one, dividing by 19, and taking the remainder (treating 0 as 19).' ^[35]
7. ^See especially the first,second,fourth, andsixth canon, and thecalendarium
8. ^In 2004 and again in 2015 there are full moons on 2 July and 31 July
9. ^Traditionally in the Christian West, this situation was handled by extending the first 29 day lunar month of the year to 30 days, and beginning the following lunar month one day later than otherwise if it was due to begin before the leap day.^[42]

Sources

1. ^Mosshammer, Alden A. (2008), The Easter Computus and the Origins of the Christian Era, Oxford Early Christian Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 40, ISBN978-0-19-954312-0
2. ^Caroline Wyatt (25 March 2016). 'Why can't the date of Easter be fixed'. BBC. Retrieved 13 April 2017.
3. ^'NPNF2-01. Eusebius Pamphilius: Church History, Life of Constantine, Oration in Praise of Constantine'. Ccel.org. Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Retrieved 9 August 2017.
4. ^Schwartz, E. (1905). Christliche und jüdische Ostertafeln. Berlin, DE. pp. 104 ff.
5. ^Gibson, Margaret Dunlop (1903). The Didascalia Apostolorum in Syriac. London, UK: Cambridge University Press. p. 100.
6. ^Peter of Alexandria, quoted in the preface to the Chronicon Paschale, Migne, PG 18, 512.
7. ^Stern, Sacha (2001). Calendar and Community: A history of the Jewish calendar second century BCE – tenth century CE. Oxford University Press. p. 72–79.
8. ^Epiphanius. Adversus Haereses. 3.1.10. quotes a version of the Apostolic Constitutions used by the sect of the Audiani, which advises Christians not to do their own calculation, but to use the Jewish computation even if the Jewish computation is in error.
9. ^Emperor Constantine. 'On the keeping of Easter (from the letter of the Emperor to all those not present at the Council, found in Eusebius, Vita Const., Lib. iii., 18-20'. Retrieved 7 May 2019.
10. ^Hefele, Charles Joseph (1883). A History of the Christian Councils. Translated by Clark, William R. pp. 322–325. ιδʹ is the Greek number 14, short for 14 Nisan
11. ^Mosshammer, Alden A. (2008). The Easter Computus and the Origins of the Christian Era. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 50–52. ISBN978-0-19-954312-0.
12. ^Pedersen, Olaf (1983). 'The Ecclesiastical Calendar and the Life of the Church'. In Coyne, G V; Hoskin, M A; Pedersen, O (eds.). Gregorian Reform of the Calendar: Proceedings of the Vatican conference to commemorate its 400th anniversary 1582-1989. Vatican City. pp. 42–43.
13. ^Turner, C.H. (1895). 'The Paschal Canon of Anatolius of Laodicea'. The English Historical Review. 10: 699–710.
14. ^McCarthy, Daniel (1995–1996). 'The Lunar and Paschal Tables of De ratione paschali Attributed to Anatolius of Laodicea'. Archive for History of Exact Sciences. 49: 285–320.
15. ^Audette, Rodolphe. 'Dionysius Exiguus - Liber de Paschate'. henk-reints.nl. Retrieved 9 August 2017.
16. ^For confirmation of Dionysius's role see Blackburn & Holford-Strevens p. 794.
17. ^Mosshammer, Alden A. (2008). The Easter Computus and the Origins of the Christian Era. Oxford University Press. pp. 217, 227–228. ISBN978-0-19-954312-0.
18. ^ ^abMcCarthy, Daniel (August 1993). 'Easter principles and a fifth-century lunar cycle used in the British Isles'. Journal for the History of Astronomy. 24(3) (76): 204–224. Retrieved 24 March 2019.
19. ^Blackburn & Holford-Strevens p. 793.
20. ^Bede (1907) [731], Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England, translated by Sellar, A. M.; Giles, J. A., Project Gutenberg, Book III, Chapter XXV, .. when the king, having ended his fast, was keeping Easter, the queen and her followers were still fasting, and celebrating Palm Sunday.
21. ^Jones, Charles W. (1943), 'Development of the Latin Ecclesiastical Calendar', Bedae Opera de Temporibus, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Mediaeval Academy of America, p. 90, The letter [of Cummian] is at once a report and an apology or justification to Abbot Seghine at Iona of a synod held at Campus Lenis (Magh-Lene), where the Easter question was considered. The direct result of the synod was an alteration in the observance among the southern Irish and the adoption of the Alexandrian reckoning.
22. ^Bede. Ecclesiastical History of England. Book III, Chapter XXV.
23. ^Bede. Ecclesiastical History of England. Book III, Chapter XXVII. There happened an eclipse of the sun on the third of May, about ten o'clock in the morning.
24. ^Bede (1999). Wallis, Faith (ed.). Bede: The Reckoning of Time. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press. pp. lix–lxiii.
25. ^Kekis, Theoharis. 'The Orthodox Church Calendar'(PDF). Cyprus Action Network of America.
26. ^'The Many Easters & Eosters for the Many: A Choice of Hallelujahs'. Revradiotowerofsong.org. Retrieved 9 August 2017.
27. ^'Loading'. Knowledgeonfingertips.com. Retrieved 9 August 2017.
28. ^'Seasons calculator'. Time and Date AS. 2014.
29. ^Lamont, Roscoe (1920). 'The reform of the Julian calendar'. Popular Astronomy. Vol. 28. pp. 18–31.
30. ^Richards, 2013, p. 587. The day consists of 86,400 SI seconds, and the same value is given for the years 500, 1000, 1500, and 2000.
31. ^ἐπακτός. Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert; A Greek–English Lexicon at the Perseus Project.
32. ^Harper, Douglas. 'epact'. Online Etymology Dictionary.
33. ^Rev C Wheatly, A Rational Illustration of the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England, Oxford 1794, p. 42.
34. ^Bede (tr. Faith Wallis) (1999). The Reckoning of Time. Liverpool. p. xlvi. ISBN978-0-85323-693-1.
35. ^Blackburn & Holford-Strevens p. 810.
36. ^Dershowitz & Reingold, 2008, pp. 113–117
37. ^Mosshammer, 2008, p. 76: 'Theoretically, the epact 30=0 represents the new moon at its conjunction with the sun. The epact of 1 represents the theoretical first visibility of the first crescent of the moon. It is from that point as day one that the fourteenth day of the moon is counted.'
38. ^Dershowitz & Reingold, 2008, pp. 114–115
39. ^Dershowitz & Reingold, 2008, p. 114
40. ^Can be verified by using Blackburn and Holford-Strevens, Table 7, p. 825
41. ^Weisstein (c. 2006) 'Paschal full moon' agrees with this line of table through 2009.
42. ^Blackburn, Bonnie; Holford-Stevens, Leofranc (1999). The Oxford Companion to the Year. Oxford University Press. p. 813.
43. ^Denis Roegel. 'Epact 19'(PDF). Loria.fr. Retrieved 28 October 2018.
44. ^Lichtenberg, Heiner (2003). 'Das anpassbar zyklische, solilunare Zeitzählungssystem des gregorianischen Kalenders'. Mathematische Semesterberichte. 50: 45–76.
45. ^de Kort, J. J. M. A. (September 1949). 'Astronomical appreciation of the Gregorian calendar'. Ricerche Astronomiche. 2 (6): 109–116. Bibcode:1949RA...2.109D.
46. ^'The Length of the Seasons'. U. Toronto. Canada.
47. ^'Mean Northward Equinoctial Year Length'(PDF). U. Toronto. Canada.
48. ^An act for regulating the commencement of the year; and for correcting the calendar now in useStatutes at Large 1765, with Easter tables
49. ^'Book of Common Prayer, and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church'. Joseph Bentham. 9 August 1765. Retrieved 9 August 2017 – via Google Books.
50. ^'Tables and Rules'. Eskimo.com. Retrieved 9 August 2017.
51. ^'merlyn.demon.co.uk'. Merlyn.demon.co.uk. Retrieved 9 August 2017.
52. ^'Inter Gravissimas'. Bluewaterarts.com. Retrieved 9 August 2017.
53. ^Gustav Teres,'Time computations and Dionysius Exiguus', Journal for the History of Astronomy15 (1984) 177–188, p.178.
54. ^ ^abV. Grumel, La chronologie (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1958). (in French)
55. ^Peter S. Baker and Michael Lapidge, eds., Byrhtferth's Enchiridion, Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 136–7, 320–322.
56. ^Domus Quaedam Vetus, Carmina Medii Aevi Maximam Partem Inedita 2009, p. 151.
57. ^Bede: The reckoning of time, tr. Faith Wallis (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999) p. xlvii, note 73.
58. ^'Gauß-CD'. webdoc.sub.gwdg.de. Retrieved 9 August 2017.
59. ^Kothe, Jochen. 'Göttinger Digitalisierungszentrum: Inhaltsverzeichnis'. gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de. Retrieved 9 August 2017.
60. ^Kothe, Jochen. 'Göttinger Digitalisierungszentrum: Inhaltsverzeichnis'. gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de. Retrieved 9 August 2017.
61. ^ ^abReinhold Bien, 'Gauß and Beyond: The Making of Easter Algorithms' Archive for History of Exact Sciences58/5 (July 2004) 439−452.
62. ^'A New York correspondent', 'To find Easter', Nature (20 April 1876) 487.
63. ^Samuel Butcher, The Ecclesiastical calendar: its theory and construction (Dublin, 1877)
64. ^Downing, A. M. W. (May, 1916). 'The date of Easter', The Observatory, 39 215–219.
65. ^H. Spencer Jones, General Astronomy (London: Longsman, Green, 1922) 73.
66. ^Journal of the British Astronomical Association88 (December, 1977) 91.
67. ^Jean Meeus, Astronomical Algorithms (Richmond, Virginia: Willmann-Bell, 1991) 67–68.
68. ^O'Beirne, T H (30 March 1961). 'How ten divisions lead to Easter'. New Scientist. 9 (228): 828.

References

• Blackburn, Bonnie, and Holford-Strevens, Leofranc. (2003). The Oxford Companion to the Year: An exploration of calendar customs and time-reckoning. (First published 1999, reprinted with corrections 2003.) Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Borst, Arno (1993). The Ordering of Time: From the Ancient Computus to the Modern Computer Trans. by Andrew Winnard. Cambridge: Polity Press; Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
• Clavius, Christopher (1603): Romani calendarij à Gregorio XIII. P. M. restituti explicatio. In the fifth volume of Opera Mathematica (1612). Opera Mathematica of Christoph Clavius includes page images of the Six Canons and the Explicatio (Go to page: Roman Calendar of Gregory XIII)
• Constantine the Great, Emperor (325): Letter to the bishops who did not attend the first Nicaean Council; from Eusebius' Vita Constantini. English translations: Documents from the First Council of Nicea, 'On the keeping of Easter' (near end) and Eusebius, Life of Constantine, Book III, Chapters XVIII–XIX
• Coyne, G. V., M. A. Hoskin, M. A., and Pedersen, O. (ed.) Gregorian reform of the calendar: Proceedings of the Vatican conference to commemorate its 400th anniversary, 1582–1982, (Vatican City: Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Specolo Vaticano, 1983).
• Dershowitz, N. & Reingold, E. M. (2008). Calendrical Calculations (3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
• Dionysius Exiguus (525): Liber de Paschate. On-line: (full Latin text) and (table with Argumenta in Latin, with English translation)
• Eusebius of Caesarea, The History of the Church, Translated by G. A. Williamson. Revised and edited with a new introduction by Andrew Louth. Penguin Books, London, 1989.
• Gibson, Margaret Dunlop, The Didascalia Apostolorum in Syriac, Cambridge University Press, London, 1903.
• Gregory XIII (Pope) and the calendar reform committee (1581): the Papal Bull Inter Gravissimas and the Six Canons. On-line under: 'Les textes fondateurs du calendrier grégorien', with some parts of Clavius's Explicatio
• Mosshammer, Alden A., The Easter Computus and the Origins of the Christian Era, Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Richards, E. G. (2013). Calendars. In S. E. Urban & P. K. Seidelmann (Eds.). Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Almanac (3rd ed., pp. 585–624). Mill Valley, CA: Univ Science Books.
• Schwartz, E., Christliche und jüdische Ostertafeln, (Abhandlungen der königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. Pilologisch-historische Klasse. Neue Folge, Band viii.) Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, Berlin, 1905.
• Stern, Sacha, Calendar and Community: A History of the Jewish Calendar Second Century BCE – Tenth Century CE, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001.
• Walker, George W, Easter Intervals, Popular Astronomy, April 1945, Vol. 53, pp. 162–178.
• Walker, George W, Easter Intervals (Continued), Popular Astronomy, May 1945, Vol. 53, pp. 218–232.
• Wallis, Faith., Bede: The Reckoning of Time, (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Pr., 1999), pp. lix–lxiii.
• Weisstein, Eric. (c. 2006) 'Paschal Full Moon' in World of Astronomy.

How Is Easter Determined In The Orthodox Church

Further reading

External links

• The Complete Works of Venerable Bede Vol. 6 (Contains De Temporibus and De Temporum Ratione.)
• (in German)An extensive calendar site and calendar and Easter calculator by Nikolaus A. Bär
• Dionysius Exiguus' Easter table
• Towards a Common Date for EasterWorld Council of Churches (Faith and Order) and Middle East Council of Churches consultation; Aleppo, Syria; 5–10 March 1997
• Text of the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750, British Act of Parliament introducing the Gregorian Calendar as amended to date. Contains tables for calculating Easter up until the year 8599. Contrast with the Act as passed.
• Computus.lat A database of medieval manuscripts containing Latin computistical algorithms, texts, tables, diagrams and calendars.

Easter,^{[nb 1]} also called Pascha (Greek, Latin)^{[nb 2]} or Resurrection Sunday,^[5][6] is a festival and holiday commemorating the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, described in the New Testament as having occurred on the third day after his burial following his crucifixion by the Romans at Calvaryc. 30 AD.^[7][8] It is the culmination of the Passion of Jesus, preceded by Lent (or Great Lent), a 40-day period of fasting, prayer, and penance.

Most Christians refer to the week before Easter as 'Holy Week', which contains the days of the Easter Triduum, including Maundy Thursday, commemorating the Maundy and Last Supper,^[9][10] as well as Good Friday, commemorating the crucifixion and death of Jesus.^[11] In Western Christianity, Eastertide, or the Easter Season, begins on Easter Sunday and lasts seven weeks, ending with the coming of the 50th day, Pentecost Sunday. In Eastern Christianity, the season of Pascha begins on Pascha and ends with the coming of the 40th day, the Feast of the Ascension.

Easter and the holidays that are related to it are moveable feasts which do not fall on a fixed date in the Gregorian or Julian calendars which follow only the cycle of the Sun; rather, its date is offset from the date of Passover and is therefore calculated based on a lunisolar calendar similar to the Hebrew calendar. The First Council of Nicaea (325) established two rules, independence of the Jewish calendar and worldwide uniformity, which were the only rules for Easter explicitly laid down by the council. No details for the computation were specified; these were worked out in practice, a process that took centuries and generated a number of controversies. It has come to be the first Sunday after the ecclesiastical full moon that occurs on or soonest after 21 March.^[12] Even if calculated on the basis of the more accurate Gregorian calendar, the date of that full moon sometimes differs from that of the astronomical first full moon after the March equinox.^[13]

Easter is linked to the Jewish Passover by much of its symbolism, as well as by its position in the calendar. In most European languages the feast is called by the words for passover in those languages; and in the older English versions of the Bible the term Easter was the term used to translate passover.^[14]Easter customs vary across the Christian world, and include sunrise services, exclaiming the Paschal greeting, clipping the church,^[15] and decorating Easter eggs (symbols of the empty tomb).^[16][17][18] The Easter lily, a symbol of the resurrection,^[19][20] traditionally decorates the chancel area of churches on this day and for the rest of Eastertide.^[21] Additional customs that have become associated with Easter and are observed by both Christians and some non-Christians include egg hunting, the Easter Bunny, and Easter parades.^[22][23][24] There are also various traditional Easter foods that vary regionally.

• 3History
  • 3.2Date
• 4Position in the church year
• 5Religious observance
• 7Easter celebrations around the world
• 11External links

Etymology

The modern English term Easter, cognate with modern Dutch ooster and German Ostern, developed from an Old English word that usually appears in the form Ēastrun, -on, or -an; but also as Ēastru, -o; and Ēastre or Ēostre.^{[nb 3]}Bede provides the only documentary source for the etymology of the word, in his Reckoning of Time. He wrote that Ēosturmōnaþ (Old English 'Month of Ēostre', translated in Bede's time as 'Paschal month') was an English month, corresponding to April, which he says 'was once called after a goddess of theirs named Ēostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month'.^[25]

In Latin and Greek, the Christian celebration was, and still is, called Pascha (Greek: Πάσχα), a word derived from Aramaic פסחא (Paskha), cognate to Hebrew פֶּסַח (Pesach). The word originally denoted the Jewish festival known in English as Passover, commemorating the Jewish Exodus from slavery in Egypt.^[26][27] As early as the 50s of the 1st century, Paul the Apostle, writing from Ephesus to the Christians in Corinth,^[28] applied the term to Christ, and it is unlikely that the Ephesian and Corinthian Christians were the first to hear Exodus 12 interpreted as speaking about the death of Jesus, not just about the Jewish Passover ritual.^[29] In most of the non-English speaking world, the feast is known by names derived from Greek and Latin Pascha.^[4][30] Pascha is also a name by which Jesus himself is remembered in the Orthodox Church, especially in connection with his resurrection and with the season of its celebration.^[31]

Theological significance

The New Testament states that the resurrection of Jesus, which Easter celebrates, is one of the chief tenets of the Christian faith.^[32] The resurrection established Jesus as the powerful Son of God^[33] and is cited as proof that God will righteously judge the world.^[34][35] For those who trust in Jesus' death and resurrection, 'death is swallowed up in victory.'^[36] Any person who chooses to follow Jesus receives 'a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead'.^[37] Through faith in the working of God those who follow Jesus are spiritually resurrected with him so that they may walk in a new way of life and receive eternal salvation, being physically resurrected to dwell in the Kingdom of Heaven.^[35][38][39]

Easter is linked to Passover and the Exodus from Egypt recorded in the Old Testament through the Last Supper, sufferings, and crucifixion of Jesus that preceded the resurrection.^[30] According to the New Testament, Jesus gave the Passover meal a new meaning, as in the upper room during the Last Supper he prepared himself and his disciples for his death.^[30] He identified the matzah and cup of wine as his body soon to be sacrificed and his blood soon to be shed. Paul states, 'Get rid of the old yeast that you may be a new batch without yeast—as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed';^[40] this refers to the Passover requirement to have no yeast in the house and to the allegory of Jesus as the Paschal lamb.^[41]

History

Early Christianity

The first Christians, Jewish and Gentile, were certainly aware of the Hebrew calendar.^{[nb 4]} Jewish Christians, the first to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, timed the observance in relation to Passover.

Direct evidence for a more fully formed Christian festival of Pascha (Easter) begins to appear in the mid-2nd century. Perhaps the earliest extant primary source referring to Easter is a mid-2nd-century Paschal homily attributed to Melito of Sardis, which characterizes the celebration as a well-established one.^[42] Evidence for another kind of annually recurring Christian festival, those commemorating the martyrs, began to appear at about the same time as the above homily.^[43]

While martyrs' days (usually the individual dates of martyrdom) were celebrated on fixed dates in the local solar calendar, the date of Easter was fixed by means of the local Jewish^[44]lunisolar calendar. This is consistent with the celebration of Easter having entered Christianity during its earliest, Jewish, period, but does not leave the question free of doubt.^[45]

The ecclesiastical historian Socrates Scholasticus attributes the observance of Easter by the church to the perpetuation of its custom, 'just as many other customs have been established', stating that neither Jesus nor his Apostles enjoined the keeping of this or any other festival. Although he describes the details of the Easter celebration as deriving from local custom, he insists the feast itself is universally observed.^[46]

Date

Easter and the holidays that are related to it are moveable feasts, in that they do not fall on a fixed date in the Gregorian or Julian calendars (both of which follow the cycle of the sun and the seasons). Instead, the date for Easter is determined on a lunisolar calendar similar to the Hebrew calendar. The First Council of Nicaea (325) established two rules, independence of the Jewish calendar and worldwide uniformity, which were the only rules for Easter explicitly laid down by the Council. No details for the computation were specified; these were worked out in practice, a process that took centuries and generated a number of controversies. (See also Computus and Reform of the date of Easter.) In particular, the Council did not decree that Easter must fall on Sunday. This was already the practice almost everywhere.^{[48][incomplete short citation]}

In Western Christianity, using the Gregorian calendar, Easter always falls on a Sunday between 22 March and 25 April^[49] inclusive, within about seven days after the astronomical full moon.^[50] The following day, Easter Monday, is a legal holiday in many countries with predominantly Christian traditions.

Eastern Christianity bases its calculations on the Julian Calendar. Because of the thirteen-day difference between the calendars between 1900 and 2099, 21 March corresponds, during the 21st century, to 3 April in the Gregorian Calendar. Easter therefore varies between 4 April and 8 May in the Gregorian calendar (the Julian calendar is no longer used as the civil calendar of the countries where Eastern Christian traditions predominate). Also, because the Julian 'full moon' is always several days after the astronomical full moon, the eastern Easter is often later, relative to the visible Moon's phases, than western Easter.

Among the Oriental Orthodox some churches have changed from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar and the date for Easter as for other fixed and moveable feasts is the same as in the Western church.^[51]

Computations

In 725, Bede succinctly wrote, 'The Sunday following the full Moon which falls on or after the equinox will give the lawful Easter.'^[52] However, this does not precisely reflect the ecclesiastical rules. The full moon referred to (called the Paschal full moon) is not an astronomical full moon, but the 14th day of a lunar month. Another difference is that the astronomical equinox is a natural astronomical phenomenon, which can fall on 19, 20 or 21 March,^[53] while the ecclesiastical date is fixed by convention on 21 March.^[54]

In applying the ecclesiastical rules, Christian churches use 21 March as the starting point in determining the date of Easter, from which they find the next full moon, etc. The Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches continue to use the Julian calendar. Their starting point in determining the date of Orthodox Easter is also 21 March but according to the Julian reckoning, which in the current century corresponds to 3 April in the Gregorian calendar.

In addition, the lunar tables of the Julian calendar are four days (sometimes five days) behind those of the Gregorian calendar. The 14th day of the lunar month according to the Gregorian system is figured as the ninth or tenth day according to the Julian. The result of this combination of solar and lunar discrepancies is divergence in the date of Easter in most years (see table).

Easter is determined on the basis of lunisolar cycles. The lunar year consists of 30-day and 29-day lunar months, generally alternating, with an embolismic month added periodically to bring the lunar cycle into line with the solar cycle. In each solar year (1 January to 31 December inclusive), the lunar month beginning with an ecclesiastical new moon falling in the 29-day period from 8 March to 5 April inclusive is designated as the paschal lunar month for that year.^[55]

Easter is the third Sunday in the paschal lunar month, or, in other words, the Sunday after the paschal lunar month's 14th day. The 14th of the paschal lunar month is designated by convention as the Paschal full moon, although the 14th of the lunar month may differ from the date of the astronomical full moon by up to two days.^[55] Since the ecclesiastical new moon falls on a date from 8 March to 5 April inclusive, the paschal full moon (the 14th of that lunar month) must fall on a date from 21 March to 18 April inclusive.

The Gregorian calculation of Easter was based on a method devised by the Calabrian doctor Aloysius Lilius (or Lilio) for adjusting the epacts of the Moon,^[56] and has been adopted by almost all Western Christians and by Western countries which celebrate national holidays at Easter. For the British Empire and colonies, a determination of the date of Easter Sunday using Golden Numbers and Sunday letters was defined by the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750 with its Annexe. This was designed to match exactly the Gregorian calculation.

Controversies over the date

The precise date of Easter has at times been a matter of contention. By the later 2nd century, it was widely accepted that the celebration of the holiday was a practice of the disciples and an undisputed tradition. The Quartodeciman controversy, the first of several Easter controversies, arose concerning the date on which the holiday should be celebrated.

The term 'Quartodeciman' refers to the practice of celebrating Easter on Nisan 14 of the Hebrew calendar, 'the LORD's passover' (Leviticus 23:5). According to the church historian Eusebius, the Quartodeciman Polycarp (bishop of Smyrna, by tradition a disciple of John the Apostle) debated the question with Anicetus (bishop of Rome). The Roman province of Asia was Quartodeciman, while the Roman and Alexandrian churches continued the fast until the Sunday following (the Sunday of Unleavened Bread), wishing to associate Easter with Sunday. Neither Polycarp nor Anicetus persuaded the other, but they did not consider the matter schismatic either, parting in peace and leaving the question unsettled.

Controversy arose when Victor, bishop of Rome a generation after Anicetus, attempted to excommunicate Polycrates of Ephesus and all other bishops of Asia for their Quartodecimanism. According to Eusebius, a number of synods were convened to deal with the controversy, which he regarded as all ruling in support of Easter on Sunday.^[57] Polycrates (circa 190), however, wrote to Victor defending the antiquity of Asian Quartodecimanism. Victor's attempted excommunication was apparently rescinded, and the two sides reconciled upon the intervention of bishop Irenaeus and others, who reminded Victor of the tolerant precedent of Anicetus.

Quartodecimanism seems to have lingered into the 4th century, when Socrates of Constantinople recorded that some Quartodecimans were deprived of their churches by John Chrysostom^[58] and that some were harassed by Nestorius.^[59]

It is not known how long the Nisan 14 practice continued. But both those who followed the Nisan 14 custom, and those who set Easter to the following Sunday had in common the custom of consulting their Jewish neighbors to learn when the month of Nisan would fall, and setting their festival accordingly. By the later 3rd century, however, some Christians began to express dissatisfaction with the custom of relying on the Jewish community to determine the date of Easter. The chief complaint was that the Jewish communities sometimes erred in setting Passover to fall before the Northern Hemisphere spring equinox.^[60][61] The Sardica paschal table^[62] confirms these complaints, for it indicates that the Jews of some eastern Mediterranean city (possibly Antioch) fixed Nisan 14 on dates well before the spring equinox on multiple occasions.^[63]

Because of this dissatisfaction with reliance on the Jewish calendar, some Christians began to experiment with independent computations.^{[nb 5]} Others, however, believed that the customary practice of consulting Jews should continue, even if the Jewish computations were in error.

First Council of Nicaea (325 AD)

This controversy between those who advocated independent computations, and those who wished to continue the custom of relying on the Jewish calendar, was formally resolved by the First Council of Nicaea in 325, which endorsed changing to an independent computation by the Christian community in order to celebrate in common. This effectively required the abandonment of the old custom of consulting the Jewish community in those places where it was still used. Epiphanius of Salamis wrote in the mid-4th century:

the emperor .. convened a council of 318 bishops .. in the city of Nicea .. They passed certain ecclesiastical canons at the council besides, and at the same time decreed in regard to the Passover that there must be one unanimous concord on the celebration of God's holy and supremely excellent day. For it was variously observed by people^[66]

That the older custom (called 'protopaschite' by historians) did not at once die out, but persisted for a time, is indicated by the existence of canons^[67] and sermons^[68] against it.

Dionysius Exiguus, and others following him, maintained that the 318 Bishops assembled at the Nicene Council had specified a particular method of determining the date of Easter; subsequent scholarship has refuted this tradition.^[69] In any case, in the years following the council, the computational system that was worked out by the church of Alexandria came to be normative. It took a while for the Alexandrian rules to be adopted throughout Christian Europe, however. The 8-year cycle originally employed was replaced by (or by the time of) Augustalis's treatise on the measurement of Easter, after which Rome used his 84-year lunisolar calendar cycle until 457. It then switched to an adaptation by Victorius of the Alexandrian rules.^[70][71]

Because this Victorian cycle differed from the Alexandrian cycle in the dates of some of the Paschal Full Moons, and because it tried to respect the Roman custom of fixing Easter to the Sunday in the week of the 16th to the 22nd of the lunar month (rather than the 15th to the 21st as at Alexandria), by providing alternative 'Latin' and 'Greek' dates in some years, occasional differences in the date of Easter as fixed by Alexandrian rules continued.^[70][71] The Alexandrian rules were adopted in the West following the tables of Dionysius Exiguus in 525. From this time, therefore, all discrepancies between Alexandria and Rome as to the correct date for Easter cease, as both churches were using identical tables.

Early Christians in Britain and Ireland also used an 84-year cycle. From the 5th century onward this cycle set its equinox to 25 March and fixed Easter to the Sunday falling in the 14th to the 20th of the lunar month inclusive.^[72][73] This 84-year cycle was replaced by the Alexandrian method in the course of the 7th and 8th centuries. Churches in western continental Europe used a late Roman method until the late 8th century during the reign of Charlemagne, when they finally adopted the Alexandrian method. Since 1582, when the Catholic Church adopted the Gregorian calendar while the Eastern Orthodox and most Oriental Orthodox Churches retained the Julian calendar, the date on which Easter is celebrated has again differed.

The Greek island of Syros, whose population is divided almost equally between Catholics and Orthodox, is one of the few places where the two Churches share a common date for Easter, with the Catholics accepting the Orthodox date—a practice helping considerably in maintaining good relations between the two communities.^[74]

Reform of the date

In the 20th century, some individuals and institutions have propounded a fixed date for Easter, the most prominent proposal being the Sunday after the second Saturday in April. Despite having some support, proposals to reform the date have not been implemented.^[75] An Orthodox congress of Eastern Orthodox bishops, which included representatives mostly from the Patriarch of Constantinople and the Serbian Patriarch, met in Constantinople in 1923, where the bishops agreed to the Revised Julian calendar.^[76]

The original form of this calendar would have determined Easter using precise astronomical calculations based on the meridian of Jerusalem.^[77][78] However, all the Eastern Orthodox countries that subsequently adopted the Revised Julian calendar adopted only that part of the revised calendar that applied to festivals falling on fixed dates in the Julian calendar. The revised Easter computation that had been part of the original 1923 agreement was never permanently implemented in any Orthodox diocese.^[76]

In the United Kingdom, the Easter Act 1928 set out legislation to allow the date of Easter to be fixed as the first Sunday after the second Saturday in April (or, in other words, the Sunday in the period from 9 to 15 April). However, the legislation has not been implemented, although it remains on the Statute book and could be implemented subject to approval by the various Christian churches.^[79]

At a summit in Aleppo, Syria, in 1997, the World Council of Churches (WCC) proposed a reform in the calculation of Easter which would have replaced the present divergent practices of calculating Easter with modern scientific knowledge taking into account actual astronomical instances of the spring equinox and full moon based on the meridian of Jerusalem, while also following the Council of Nicea position of Easter being on the Sunday following the full moon.^[80] The recommended World Council of Churches changes would have sidestepped the calendar issues and eliminated the difference in date between the Eastern and Western churches. The reform was proposed for implementation starting in 2001, but it was not ultimately adopted by any member body.

In January 2016, Christian churches again considered the idea of a fixed and unified date of Easter, probably either the second or third Sunday in April.^[81]

Table of the dates of Easter

The WCC presented comparative data of the relationships:

[Note: Jewish Passover is on Nisan 15 of its calendar.]

Notes: 1. Astronomical Easter is the first Sunday after the Astronomical full moon at to the meridian of Jerusalem according to this WCC proposal.
2. Passover commences at sunset preceding the date indicated (as does Easter in many traditions).

Position in the church year

Western Christianity

In Western Christianity, Easter is preceded by Lent, a period of fasting and penitence in preparation for Easter, which begins on Ash Wednesday and lasts 40 days (not counting Sundays). The week before Easter, known as Holy Week, is very special in the Christian tradition. The Sunday before Easter is Palm Sunday, with the Wednesday before Easter being known as Spy Wednesday. The last three days before Easter are Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday (sometimes referred to as Silent Saturday).

Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday respectively commemorate Jesus' entry in Jerusalem, the Last Supper and the Crucifixion. Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday are sometimes referred to as the Easter Triduum (Latin for 'Three Days'). Many churches begin celebrating Easter late in the evening of Holy Saturday at a service called the Easter Vigil.

The week beginning with Easter Sunday is called Easter Week or the Octave of Easter, and each day is prefaced with 'Easter', e.g. Easter Monday (a public holiday in many countries), Easter Tuesday (a much less widespread public holiday), etc. Easter Saturday is therefore the Saturday after Easter Sunday. The day before Easter is properly called Holy Saturday. Eastertide, or Paschaltide, the season of Easter, begins on Easter Sunday and lasts until the day of Pentecost, seven weeks later.

Eastern Christianity

In Eastern Christianity, the spiritual preparation for Easter begins with Great Lent, which starts on Clean Monday and lasts for 40 continuous days (including Sundays). The last week of Great Lent (following the fifth Sunday of Great Lent) is called Palm Week, and ends with Lazarus Saturday. The Vespers which begins Lazarus Saturday officially brings Great Lent to a close, although the fast continues through the following week. After Lazarus Saturday comes Palm Sunday, Holy Week, and finally Easter itself, and the fast is broken immediately after the Paschal Divine Liturgy.

The Paschal Vigil begins with the Midnight Office, which is the last service of the Lenten Triodion and is timed so that it ends a little before midnight on Holy Saturday night. At the stroke of midnight the Paschal celebration itself begins, consisting of Paschal Matins, Paschal Hours, and Paschal Divine Liturgy.^[83] Placing the Paschal Divine Liturgy at midnight guarantees that no Divine Liturgy will come earlier in the morning, ensuring its place as the pre-eminent 'Feast of Feasts' in the liturgical year.

The liturgical season from Easter to the Sunday of All Saints (the Sunday after Pentecost) is known as the Pentecostarion (the '50 days'). The week which begins on Easter Sunday is called Bright Week, during which there is no fasting, even on Wednesday and Friday. The Afterfeast of Easter lasts 39 days, with its Apodosis (leave-taking) on the day before Ascension. Pentecost Sunday is the 50th day from Easter (counted inclusively).^[84]

Religious observance

Western Christianity

The Easter festival is kept in many different ways among Western Christians. The traditional, liturgical observation of Easter, as practised among Roman Catholics, Lutherans,^[85] and some Anglicans begins on the night of Holy Saturday with the Easter Vigil which follows an ancient liturgy involving symbols of light, candles and water and numerous readings form the Old and New Testament.^[86]

Services continue on Easter Sunday and in a number of countries on Easter Monday. In Protestant churches there is a tradition of Easter Sunrise Services^[87] often starting on cemeteries^[88] in remembrance of the Bibllical narrative in the Gospels, or other places in the open where the sunrise is visible.^[89]

Eastern Christianity

Eastern Catholics and Byzantine Rite Lutherans have a similar emphasis on Easter in their calendars, and many of their liturgical customs are very similar.^[90]

Preparation for Easter begins with the season of Great Lent, which begins on Clean Monday.^[91] While the end of Lent is Lazarus Saturday, fasting does not end until Easter Sunday.^[92] The Orthodox service begins late Saturday evening, observing the Jewish tradition that evening is the start of liturgical holy days.^[92]

The church is darkened, then the priest lights a candle at midnight, representing the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Altar servers light additional candles, with a procession which moves three times around the church to represent the three days in the tomb.^[92] The service continues early into Sunday morning, with a feast to end the fasting. An additional service is held later that day on Easter Sunday.^[92]

Non-observing Christian groups

Many Puritans saw traditional feasts of the established Anglican Church, such as All Saints' Day and Easter, as an abomination.^[93] The Puritan rejection of Easter traditions was (and is) based partly upon their interpretation of 2 Corinthians 6:14–16 and partly upon a more general belief that, if a religious practice or celebration is not actually written in the Christian Bible, then that practice/celebration must be a later development and cannot be considered an authentic part of Christian practice or belief—so at best simply unnecessary, at worst actually sinful.

Members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), as part of their historic testimony against times and seasons, do not celebrate or observe Easter or any traditional feast days of the established Church, believing instead that 'every day is the Lord's day',^[94] and that elevation of one day above others suggests that it is acceptable to do un-Christian acts on other days.^[95] During the 17th and 18th centuries, Quakers were persecuted for this non-observance of Holy Days.^[96]

Groups such as the Restored Church of God reject the celebration of Easter, seeing it as originating in a pagan spring festival taken over by the 'Roman' Catholic Church.^[97]

Jehovah's Witnesses maintain a similar view, observing a yearly commemorative service of the Last Supper and the subsequent execution of Christ on the evening of Nisan 14 (as they calculate the dates derived from the lunar Hebrew Calendar). It is commonly referred to by many Witnesses as simply 'The Memorial'.^[98] Jehovah's Witnesses believe that such verses as Luke 22:19–20 and 1 Corinthians 11:26 constitute a commandment to remember the death of Christ though not the resurrection,^[98] and they do so on a yearly basis just as Passover is celebrated annually by the Jews.

Some Christian groups feel that Easter is something to be regarded with great joy: not marking the day itself, but remembering and rejoicing in the event it commemorates—the miracle of Christ's resurrection. In this spirit, these Christians teach that each day and all Sabbaths should be kept holy, in Christ's teachings. Hebrew-Christian, Sacred Name, and Armstrong movement churches (such as the Living Church of God) usually reject Easter in favor of Nisan 14 observance and celebration of the Christian Passover. This is especially true of Christian groups that celebrate the New Moons or annual High Sabbaths in addition to seventh-day Sabbath. They support this textually with reference to the letter to the Colossians: 'Let no one .. pass judgment on you in matters of food and drink or with regard to a festival or new moon or sabbath. These are shadows of things to come; the reality belongs to Christ.' (Col. 2:16–17, NAB)

Easter celebrations around the world

In countries where Christianity is a state religion, or where the country has large Christian population, Easter is often a public holiday. As Easter is always a Sunday, many countries in the world also have Easter Monday as a public holiday. Some retail stores, shopping malls, and restaurants are closed on Easter Sunday. Good Friday, which occurs two days before Easter Sunday, is also a public holiday in many countries, as well as in 12 U.S. states. Even in states where Good Friday is not a holiday, many financial institutions, stock markets, and public schools are closed. Few banks that are normally open on regular Sundays are closed on Easter.

In the Nordic countries Good Friday, Easter Sunday and Easter Monday are public holidays,^[99] and Good Friday and Easter Monday are bank holidays.^[100] In Denmark, Iceland and Norway Maundy Thursday is also a public holiday. It is a holiday for most workers except some shopping malls which keep open for a half-day. Many businesses give their employees almost a week off, called Easter break.^[101] Schools are closed between Palm Sunday and Easter Monday. According to a 2014 poll, 6 of 10 Norwegians travel during Easter, often to a countryside cottage; 3 of 10 said their typical Easter included skiing.^[102]

In the Netherlands both Easter Sunday and Easter Monday are national holidays. Wwe raw mp4 video free download. Like first and second Christmas Day, they are both considered Sundays, which results in a first and a second Easter Sunday, after which the week continues to a Tuesday.^[103] Even though Good Friday is an official national holiday, it is not a mandatory day off for commercial companies.

In Commonwealth nations Easter Day is rarely a public holiday, as is the case for celebrations which fall on a Sunday. In the United Kingdom both Good Friday and Easter Monday are bank holidays.^[104] However, in Canada Easter Sunday is a public holiday, along with Easter Monday. In the Canadian province of Quebec, either Good Friday or Easter Monday are statutory holidays (although most companies give both). In some countries Good Friday is a public holiday as well.

In Australia, because of its location in the southern hemisphere, Easter takes place in autumn. Hence, Australian Easter is associated with harvest time, rather than with the coming of spring as in the northern hemisphere. The religious aspect of Easter remains the same.^[105] Good Friday and Easter Monday are public holidays across all states and territories. 'Easter Saturday' (the Saturday before Easter Sunday) is a public holiday in every state except Tasmania and Western Australia, while Easter Sunday itself is a public holiday only in New South Wales. Easter Tuesday is additionally a conditional public holiday in Tasmania, varying between award, and was also a public holiday in Victoria until 1994.^[106]

In the United States, because Easter falls on a Sunday, which is already a non-working day for federal and state employees, it has not been designated as a federal or state holiday. Easter parades are held in many American cities, involving festive strolling processions,^[107] with the New York City parade being the best known.

Easter eggs

The egg is an ancient symbol of new life and rebirth. In Christianity it became associated with Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection.^[108] The custom of the Easter egg originated in the early Christian community of Mesopotamia, who stained eggs red in memory of the blood of Christ, shed at his crucifixion.^[109][110] As such, for Christians, the Easter egg is a symbol of the empty tomb.^[17][18] The oldest tradition is to use dyed chicken eggs, but a modern custom is to substitute decorated chocolate, or plastic eggs filled with candy such as jellybeans.

A custom originating in Germany, the Easter Bunny is a popular legendary anthropomorphic Easter gift-giving character analogous to Santa Claus in American culture. Many children around the world follow the tradition of coloring hard-boiled eggs and giving baskets of candy. Since the rabbit is a pest in Australia, the Easter Bilby is available as an alternative. Manufacturing their first Easter egg in 1875, British chocolate company Cadbury sponsors the annual Easter egg hunt which takes place in over 250 National Trust locations in the United Kingdom.^[111][112] On Easter Monday, the President of the United States holds an annual Easter egg roll on the White House lawn for young children.^[113]

Easter eggs are a widely popular symbol of new life in Poland and other Slavic countries' folk traditions. A batik-like decorating process known as pisanka produces intricate, brilliantly-colored eggs. The celebrated House of Fabergé workshops created exquisite jewelled Easter eggs for the Russian Imperial family from 1885 to 1916.^[114]

See also

• Greek words (wiktionary): Πάσχα (Easter) vs πάσχα (Passover) vs πάσχω (to suffer).

Footnotes

1. ^Traditional names for the feast in English are 'Easter Day', as in the Book of Common Prayer; 'Easter Sunday', used by James Ussher (The Whole Works of the Most Rev. James Ussher, Volume 4) and Samuel Pepys (The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Volume 2) and just the word 'Easter', as in books printed in 1575, 1584, 1586
2. ^In the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Greek word Pascha is used for the celebration; in English, the analogous word is Pasch.^[3][4]
3. ^Old English pronunciation: [ˈæːɑstre, ˈeːostre]
4. ^Acts 2:1; 12:3; 20:6; 27:9, 1 Cor 16:8
5. ^Eusebius reports that Dionysius, Bishop of Alexandria, proposed an 8-year Easter cycle, and quotes a letter from Anatolius, Bishop of Laodicea, that refers to a 19-year cycle.^[64] An 8-year cycle has been found inscribed on a statue unearthed in Rome in the 17th century, and since dated to the 3rd century.^[65]

References

1. ^Selected Christian Observances, 2019, U.S. Naval Observatory Astronomical Applications Department
2. ^When is Orthodox Easter?, Calendarpedia
3. ^Ferguson, Everett (2009). Baptism in the Early Church: History, Theology, and Liturgy in the First Five Centuries. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. p. 351. ISBN978-0802827487. Retrieved 23 April 2014. The practices are usually interpreted in terms of baptism at the pasch (Easter), for which compare Tertullian, but the text does not specify this season, only that it was done on Sunday, and the instructions may apply to whenever the baptism was to be performed.
4. ^ ^abNorman Davies (1998). Europe: A History. HarperCollins. ISBN978-0060974688. In most European languages Easter is called by some variant of the late Latin word Pascha, which in turn derives from the Hebrew pesach, meaning passover.
5. ^Gamman, Andrew; Bindon, Caroline (2014). Stations for Lent and Easter. Kereru Publishing Limited. p. 7. ISBN978-0473276812. Easter Day, also known as Resurrection Sunday, marks the high point of the Christian year. It is the day that we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
6. ^Boda, Mark J.; Smith, Gordon T. (2006). Repentance in Christian Theology. Liturgical Press. p. 316. ISBN978-0814651759. Retrieved 19 April 2014. Orthodox, Catholic, and all Reformed churches in the Middle East celebrate Easter according to the Eastern calendar, calling this holy day 'Resurrection Sunday,' not Easter.
7. ^Bernard Trawicky; Ruth Wilhelme Gregory (2000). Anniversaries and Holidays. American Library Association. ISBN978-0838906958. Easter is the central celebration of the Christian liturgical year. It is the oldest and most important Christian feast, celebrating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. The date of Easter determines the dates of all movable feasts except those of Advent.
8. ^Aveni, Anthony (2004). 'The Easter/Passover Season: Connecting Time's Broken Circle', The Book of the Year: A Brief History of Our Seasonal Holidays. Oxford University Press. pp. 64–78. ISBN0-19-517154-3.
9. ^Peter C. Bower (2003). The Companion to the Book of Common Worship. Geneva Press. ISBN978-0664502324. Retrieved 11 April 2009. Maundy Thursday (or le mandé; Thursday of the Mandatum, Latin, commandment). The name is taken from the first few words sung at the ceremony of the washing of the feet, 'I give you a new commandment' (John 13:34); also from the commandment of Christ that we should imitate His loving humility in the washing of the feet (John 13:14–17). The term mandatum (maundy), therefore, was applied to the rite of foot-washing on this day.
10. ^Gail Ramshaw (2004). Three Day Feast: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter. Augsburg Books. ISBN978-1451408164. Retrieved 11 April 2009. In the liturgies of the Three Days, the service for Maundy Thursday includes both, telling the story of Jesus' last supper and enacting the footwashing.
11. ^Leonard Stuart (1909). New century reference library of the world's most important knowledge: complete, thorough, practical, Volume 3. Syndicate Pub. Co. Retrieved 11 April 2009. Holy Week, or Passion Week, the week which immediately precedes Easter, and is devoted especially to commemorating the passion of our Lord. The Days more especially solemnized during it are Holy Wednesday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday.
12. ^'Frequently asked questions about the date of Easter'.
13. ^Clarence E. Woodman, 'Easter and the Ecclesiastical Calendar' in Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, Vol. 17, p.141
14. ^Weiser, Francis X. (1958). Handbook of Christian Feasts and Customs. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. p. 214. ISBN0-15-138435-5.
15. ^'clipping the church'. Oxford Reference. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acref/9780198607663.001.0001. Retrieved 30 March 2013.
16. ^ ^abAnne Jordan (2000). Christianity. Nelson Thornes. ISBN978-0748753208. Retrieved 7 April 2012. Easter eggs are used as a Christian symbol to represent the empty tomb. The outside of the egg looks dead but inside there is new life, which is going to break out. The Easter egg is a reminder that Jesus will rise from His tomb and bring new life. Eastern Orthodox Christians dye boiled eggs red to represent the blood of Christ shed for the sins of the world.
17. ^ ^abThe Guardian, Volume 29. H. Harbaugh. 1878. Retrieved 7 April 2012. Just so, on that first Easter morning, Jesus came to life and walked out of the tomb, and left it, as it were, an empty shell. Just so, too, when the Christian dies, the body is left in the grave, an empty shell, but the soul takes wings and flies away to be with God. Thus you see that though an egg seems to be as dead as a sone, yet it really has life in it; and also it is like Christ's dead body, which was raised to life again. This is the reason we use eggs on Easter. (In olden times they used to color the eggs red, so as to show the kind of death by which Christ died, – a bloody death.)
18. ^ ^abGordon Geddes, Jane Griffiths (2002). Christian belief and practice. Heinemann. ISBN978-0435306915. Retrieved 7 April 2012. Red eggs are given to Orthodox Christians after the Easter Liturgy. They crack their eggs against each other's. The cracking of the eggs symbolizes a wish to break away from the bonds of sin and misery and enter the new life issuing from Christ's resurrection.
19. ^Collins, Cynthia (19 April 2014). 'Easter Lily Tradition and History'. The Guardian. Retrieved 20 April 2014. The Easter Lily is symbolic of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Churches of all denominations, large and small, are filled with floral arrangements of these white flowers with their trumpet-like shape on Easter morning.
20. ^Schell, Stanley (1916). Easter Celebrations. Werner & Company. p. 84. We associate the lily with Easter, as pre-eminently the symbol of the Resurrection.
21. ^Luther League Review: 1936–1937. Luther League of America. 1936.
22. ^Vicki K. Black (2004). The Church Standard, Volume 74. Church Publishing, Inc. ISBN978-0819225757. Retrieved 7 April 2012. In parts of Europe, the eggs were dyed red and were then cracked together when people exchanged Easter greetings. Many congregations today continue to have Easter egg hunts for the children after the services on Easter Day.
23. ^The Church Standard, Volume 74. Walter N. Hering. 1897. Retrieved 7 April 2012. When the custom was carrierd over into Christian practice the Easter eggs were usually sent to the priests to be blessed and sprinked with holy water. In later times the coloring and decorating of eggs was introduced, and in a royal roll of the time of Edward I., which is preserved in the Tower of London, there is an entry of 18d. for 400 eggs, to be used for Easter gifts.
24. ^Brown, Eleanor Cooper (2010). From Preparation to Passion. ISBN978-1609577650. Retrieved 7 April 2012. So what preparations do most Christians and non-Christians make? Shopping for new clothing often signifies the belief that Spring has arrived, and it is a time of renewal. Preparations for the Easter Egg Hunts and the Easter Ham for the Sunday dinner are high on the list too.
25. ^Wallis, Faith (1999). Bede: The Reckoning of Time. Liverpool University Press. p. 54. ISBN0853236933.
26. ^'History of Easter'. The History Channel website. A&E Television Networks. Retrieved 9 March 2013.
27. ^Karl Gerlach (1998). The Antenicene Pascha: A Rhetorical History. Peeters Publishers. p. xviii. ISBN978-9042905702. The second century equivalent of easter and the paschal Triduum was called by both Greek and Latin writers 'Pascha (πάσχα)', a Greek transliteration of the Aramaic form of the Hebrew פֶּסַח, the Passover feast of Ex. 12.
28. ^1 Corinthians 5:7
29. ^Karl Gerlach (1998). The Antenicene Pascha: A Rhetorical History. Peters Publishers. p. 21. ISBN978-9042905702. For while it is from Ephesus that Paul writes, 'Christ our Pascha has been sacrificed for us,' Ephesian Christians were not likely the first to hear that Ex 12 did not speak about the rituals of Pesach, but the death of Jesus of Nazareth.
30. ^ ^abcdVicki K. Black (1 July 2004). Welcome to the Church Year: An Introduction to the Seasons of the Episcopal Church. Church Publishing, Inc. ISBN978-0819219664. Easter is still called by its older Greek name, Pascha, which means 'Passover', and it is this meaning as the Christian Passover-the celebration of Jesus' triumph over death and entrance into resurrected life-that is the heart of Easter in the church. For the early church, Jesus Christ was the fulfillment of the Jewish Passover feast: through Jesus, we have been freed from slavery of sin and granted to the Promised Land of everlasting life.
31. ^Orthros of Holy Pascha, Stichera: 'Today the sacred Pascha is revealed to us. The new and holy Pascha, the mystical Pascha. The all-venerable Pascha. The Pascha which is Christ the Redeemer. The spotless Pascha. The great Pascha. The Pascha of the faithful. The Pascha which has opened unto us the gates of Paradise. The Pascha which sanctifies all faithful.'
32. ^1 Corinthians 15:12–20
    Torrey, Reuben Archer (1897). 'The Resurrection of Christ'. Torrey's New Topical Textbook. Retrieved 31 March 2013. (interprets primary source references in this section as applying to the Resurrection)
    'The Letter of Paul to the Corinthians'. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 10 March 2013.
33. ^Romans 1:4
34. ^Acts 17:31
35. ^ ^ab'Jesus Christ'. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 11 March 2013.
36. ^1 Corinthians 15:20–26, 1 Corinthians 15:54–57
37. ^1 Peter 1:3
38. ^Romans 6:1–9
39. ^1 Peter 1:3–4
40. ^1 Corinthians 5:7
41. ^John 1:29, Revelation 5:6, 1 Peter 1:19, 1 Peter 1:2, and the associated notes and Passion Week table in Barker, Kenneth, ed. (2002). Zondervan NIV Study Bible. Grand Rapids: Zondervan. p. 1520. ISBN0-310-92955-5.
    Karl Gerlach (1998). The Antenicene Pascha: A Rhetorical History. Peeters Publishers. pp. 32, 56. ISBN978-9042905702.
42. ^Melito of Sardis. 'Homily on the Pascha'. Kerux. Northwest Theological Seminary. Archived from the original on 12 March 2007. Retrieved 28 March 2007.
43. ^Cheslyn Jones, Geoffrey Wainwright, Edward Yarnold, and Paul Bradshaw, Eds., The Study of Liturgy, Revised Edition, Oxford University Press, New York, 1992, p. 474.
44. ^Genung, Charles Harvey (1904). 'The Reform of the Calendar'. The North American Review. 179 (575): 569–583. JSTOR25105305.
45. ^Cheslyn Jones, Geoffrey Wainwright, Edward Yarnold, and Paul Bradshaw, Eds., The Study of Liturgy, Revised Edition, Oxford University Press, New York, 1992, p. 459:'[Easter] is the only feast of the Christian Year that can plausibly claim to go back to apostolic times .. [It] must derive from a time when Jewish influence was effective .. because it depends on the lunar calendar (every other feast depends on the solar calendar).'
46. ^Socrates, Church History, 5.22, in Schaff, Philip (13 July 2005). 'The Author's Views respecting the Celebration of Easter, Baptism, Fasting, Marriage, the Eucharist, and Other Ecclesiastical Rites'. Socrates and Sozomenus Ecclesiastical Histories. Calvin College Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Retrieved 28 March 2007.
47. ^Karl Gerlach (1998). The Antenicene Pascha: A Rhetorical History. Peeters Publishers. p. 21. ISBN978-9042905702. Long before this controversy, Ex 12 as a story of origins and its ritual expression had been firmly fixed in the Christian imagination. Though before the final decades of the 2nd century only accessible as an exegetical tradition, already in the Pauline letters the Exodus saga is deeply involved with the celebration of bath and meal. Even here, this relationship does not suddenly appear, but represents developments in ritual narrative that mus have begun at the very inception of the Christian message. Jesus of Nazareth was crucified during Pesach-Mazzot, an event that a new covenant people of Jews and Gentiles both saw as definitive and defining. Ex 12 is thus one of the few reliable guides for tracing the synergism among ritual, text, and kerygma before the Council of Nicaea.
48. ^Sozomen, Book 7, Chapter 18
49. ^Caroline Wyatt (25 March 2016). 'Why can't the date of Easter be fixed'. BBC. Retrieved 13 April 2017.
50. ^The Date of Easter. Article from United States Naval Observatory (27 March 2007).
51. ^'The Church in Malankara switched entirely to the Gregorian calendar in 1953, following Encyclical No. 620 from Patriarch Mor Ignatius Aphrem I, dt. December 1952.' Calendars of the Syriac Orthodox Church. Retrieved 22 April 2009
52. ^Wallis, Faith (1999). Bede: The Reckoning of Time. Liverpool University Press. p. 148. ISBN0853236933.
53. ^Why is Easter so early this year?, EarthSky, Bruce McClure in Astronomy Essentials, March 30, 2018.
54. ^Paragraph 7 of Inter gravissimasISO.org to 'the vernal equinox, which was fixed by the fathers of the [first] Nicene Council at XII calends April [21 March]'. This definition can be traced at least back to chapters 6 & 59 of Bede's De temporum ratione (725).
55. ^ ^abMontes, Marcos J. 'Calculation of the Ecclesiastical Calendar'Archived 3 November 2008 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 12 January 2008.
56. ^G Moyer (1983), 'Aloisius Lilius and the 'Compendium novae rationis restituendi kalendarium', pp. 171–188 in G.V. Coyne (ed.).
57. ^Eusebius, Church History 5.23.
58. ^Socrates, Church History, 6.11, at Schaff, Philip (13 July 2005). 'Of Severian and Antiochus: their Disagreement from John'. Socrates and Sozomenus Ecclesiastical Histories. Calvin College Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Retrieved 28 March 2009.
59. ^Socrates, Church History 7.29, at Schaff, Philip (13 July 2005). 'Nestorius of Antioch promoted to the See of Constantinople. His Persecution of the Heretics'. Socrates and Sozomenus Ecclesiastical Histories. Calvin College Christian Classics Ethereal Librar. Retrieved 28 March 2009.
60. ^Eusebius, Church History, 7.32.
61. ^Peter of Alexandria, quoted in the Chronicon Paschale. In Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds., Ante-Nicene Christian Library, Volume 14: The Writings of Methodius, Alexander of Lycopolis, Peter of Alexandria, And Several Fragments, Edinburgh, 1869, p. 326, at Donaldson, Alexander (1 June 2005). 'That Up to the Time of the Destruction of Jerusalem, the Jews Rightly Appointed the Fourteenth Day of the First Lunar Month'. Gregory Thaumaturgus, Dionysius the Great, Julius Africanus, Anatolius and Minor Writers, Methodius, Arnobius. Calvin College Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Retrieved 28 March 2009.
62. ^MS Verona, Biblioteca Capitolare LX(58) folios 79v–80v.
63. ^Sacha Stern, Calendar and Community: A History of the Jewish Calendar Second Century BCE – Tenth Century CE, Oxford, 2001, pp. 124–132.
64. ^Eusebius, Church History, 7.20, 7.31.
65. ^Allen Brent, Hippolytus and the Roman Church in the Third Century, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995.
66. ^Epiphanius, Adversus Haereses, Heresy 69, 11,1, in Willams, F. (1994). The Panarion of Epiphianus of Salamis Books II and III. Leiden: E.J. Brill. p. 331.
67. ^Apostolic Canon 7: 'If any bishop, presbyter, or deacon shall celebrate the holy day of Easter before the vernal equinox with the Jews, let him be deposed.' A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Second Series, Volume 14: The Seven Ecumenical Councils, Eerdmans, 1956, p. 594.
68. ^St. John Chrysostom, 'Against those who keep the first Passover', in Saint John Chrysostom: Discourses against Judaizing Christians, translated by Paul W. Harkins, Washington, DC, 1979, pp. 47ff.
69. ^Mosshammer, Alden A. (2008). The Easter Computus and the Origins of the Christian Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 50–52, 62–65. ISBN978-0-19-954312-0.
70. ^ ^abMosshammer, Alden A. (2008). The Easter Computus and the Origins of the Christian Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 239–244. ISBN978-0-19-954312-0.
71. ^ ^abHolford-Strevens, Leofranc, and Blackburn, Bonnie (1999). The Oxford Companion to the Year. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 808–809. ISBN0-19-214231-3.
72. ^Mosshammer, Alden A. (2008). The Easter Computus and the Origins of the Christian Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 223–224. ISBN978-0-19-954312-0.
73. ^Holford-Strevens, Leofranc, and Blackburn, Bonnie (1999). The Oxford Companion to the Year. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 870–875. ISBN0-19-214231-3.
74. ^'Easter: A date with God'. The Economist. 20 April 2011. Retrieved 23 April 2011. Only in a handful of places do Easter celebrants alter their own arrangements to take account of their neighbours. Finland's Orthodox Christians mark Easter on the Western date. And on the Greek island of Syros, a Papist stronghold, Catholics and Orthodox alike march to Orthodox time. The spectacular public commemorations, involving flower-strewn funeral biers on Good Friday and fireworks on Saturday night, bring the islanders together, rather than highlighting division.
75. ^'Easter (holiday)'. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 9 March 2013.
76. ^ ^abHieromonk Cassian, A Scientific Examination of the Orthodox Church Calendar, Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 1998, pp. 51–52, ISBN0-911165-31-2.
77. ^M. Milankovitch, 'Das Ende des julianischen Kalenders und der neue Kalender der orientalischen Kirchen', Astronomische Nachrichten 200, 379–384 (1924).
78. ^Miriam Nancy Shields, 'The new calendar of the Eastern churches', Popular Astronomy32 (1924) 407–411 (page 411). This is a translation of M. Milankovitch, 'The end of the Julian calendar and the new calendar of the Eastern churches', Astronomische Nachrichten No. 5279 (1924).
79. ^'Hansard Reports, April 2005, regarding the Easter Act of 1928'. United Kingdom Parliament. Retrieved 14 March 2010.
80. ^WCC: Towards a common date for EasterArchived 13 December 2007 at the Wayback Machine
81. ^'Christian Churches to Fix Common Date for Easter' (18 January 2016). CathNews.com. Retrieved 18 September 2018.
82. ^'Towards a Common Date for Easter'. Aleppo, Syria: World Council of Churches (WCC) / Middle East Council of Churches Consultation (MECC). 10 March 1997.
83. ^Lash, Ephrem (Archimandrite) (25 January 2007). 'On the Holy and Great Sunday of Pascha'. Monastery of Saint Andrew the First Called, Manchester, England. Archived from the original on 9 April 2007. Retrieved 27 March 2007.
84. ^'Pentecost Sunday'. About.com. Retrieved 28 March 2013.
85. ^Notes for the Easter Vigil, website of Lutheran pastor Weitzel
86. ^Catholic Activity: Easter Vigil, entry on catholicculture.org
87. ^Easter observed at Sunrise Celebration, report of Washington Post April 2012
88. ^Sunrise Service At Abington Cemetery Is An Easter Tradition, report of Hartford Courant newspaper of Apr. 4, 2016
89. ^Easter sunrise services: A celebration of resurrection, website of US–United Methodist church
90. ^Moroz, Vladimir (10 May 2016). 'Лютерани східного обряду: такі є лише в Україні' (in Ukrainian). РІСУ – Релігійно-інформаційна служба України. Retrieved 19 September 2018. В українських лютеран, як і в ортодоксальних Церквах, напередодні Великодня є Великий Піст або Чотиридесятниця.
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95. ^See Quaker Faith & practice of Britain Yearly Meeting, Paragraph 27:42
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97. ^Pack, David. 'The True Origin of Easter'. The Restored Church of God. Archived from the original on 26 April 2011. Retrieved 24 March 2011.
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External links

Liturgical

• Holy Pascha: The Resurrection of Our Lord (Orthodox icon and synaxarion)

Traditions

• Roman Catholic View of Easter (from the Catholic Encyclopedia)

Calculating

• A Perpetual Easter and Passover Calculator Julian and Gregorian Easter for any year plus other info
• Almanac – The Christian Year Julian or Gregorian Easter and associated festivals for any year
• Orthodox Paschal Calculator Julian Easter and associated festivals in Gregorian calendar 1583–4099