One never quite remembers year to year when it will be
April 16, 2024
Back on April 16, 2019, I posted an article about Easter which, that year, was on April 21st.
I’ve decided – even though Easter was sixteen days ago – to repost the article since I think people sometimes forget how convoluted a formula it takes to figure it out each year and what they can look forward to next year.
When I was a child and began to understand the concept of time and dates, I was fascinated with how this one holiday could be on a different day – heck, month even – from year to year.
And so I learned that you could figure out the date of Easter with the following:
“The first Sunday following the first full moon after the vernal equinox.”
Even this requires that one knows what a vernal and an equinox might be.
Vernal is a fancy word for things related to ‘spring’ and an ‘equinox,’ according to Dictionary.com, is “the time when the sun crosses the plane of the earth’s equator, making night and day of approximately equal length all over the earth and occurring about March 21 (vernal equinox, or spring equinox ) and September 22 (autumnal equinox ).”
While all of this is, in today’s world, is seemingly straight forward, for Christians throughout the world – and as early as 325 AD with the first council of Nicea – the date on which Easter is celebrated has been disputed.
According to the Infallible Wikipedia:
“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, but calculations vary.”
One might think that setting out a fairly straight forward calculation would end the debate but, over the centuries, it’s become more confusing.
Things really went sideways when, in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII decreed that the Julian calendar was way off and introduced his own calendar. The Gregorian calendar is the one we still use today. I wrote about it here: https://barbaradevore.com/2022/10/11/october-1582/
So what does that have to do with Easter and how to calculate the date? There are people in the world who still – over 400 years later – like the Julian calendar and use it to determine the date on which Easter is celebrated.
There’s also the whole question of the equinox. Back in the fourth century there was no modern science used to calculate the exact moment of the equinox. Instead it was determined based on the above mentioned lunisolar calendar. Which is a fancy way of saying that the people who use such calendars needed a way to adjust the dates based on what was happening around them. Think of it as the spring equinox begins 14 days AFTER the new moon or, approximately, with the full moon of the season.
According to religious rules about Easter, then, the holiday is not truly based on it being on the first Sunday following the full moon after the vernal equinox. No, the calculation is based on it occurring on the first Sunday following the full moon AFTER March 21.
In 2019, Easter fell on April 21. But should it have? The full moon and the vernal equinox both occurred on March 20 – a mere 3 hours and 45 minutes apart – with the equinox crossing the finish line first at 2:58 pm (PDT). The moon was full at 6:43 p.m. So by scientific calculation, Easter SHOULD have happened on March 24.
Instead, the rule – for those who follow the Gregorian calendar – is to think of March 21 as the hard and fast equinox which places Easter on this coming Sunday. In the Infallible Wikipedia article, there’s an interesting table which shows the calculated dates of Easter for each competing calendar.
Note that in 2019, there is a column for Astronomical Easter giving that year three different dates from which to choose. The chart is also incorrect as we know the scientific full moon occurred on March 20 and not the 21.
And for the record? The most common date for Easter to occur since the inception of the Gregorian calendar through the year 3000 is April 16. You will be happy to note that in four years April 16th is, once again, the date of Easter on both the Gregorian and Julian calendars.
One of these days I’m certain the whole controversy will be settled. In 1997 a movement was afoot to make a change. Also from the Infallible Wikipedia:
“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. 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.”
And so it goes. All I know is that hunting for Easter Eggs is usually much more pleasant the third weekend of April than it is in late March. But what’s stopping us from boiling a pot of eggs, coloring them, and then hiding them among the grass on our likely too long lawns? Nothing. Think of it as second Easter for when the weather is, we hope, nicer.
The links!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter
https://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~gent0113/easter/easter_text2b.htm
Barbara DeVore 