When is Easter?

Although today there are problems in determining the date of Easter every year, the first Easter is something we can more accurately date. The exact year is unknown, although most scholars agree it happened sometime in the early 30's CE. 33 CE is a commonly given date.

With the information given to us from the Gospels, we know that the Last Supper occurred on a Passover Thursday. (There is some discrepancy here with the Gospel of John, however, which says that the Last Supper took place the day before the Passover seder meal, disagreeing with the Synoptic Gospels). Christ was crucified on Friday and buried. Because the next day was Saturday, the Sabbath, it was not until Sunday that Mary Magdalene and the women first went to visit Christ's tomb only to find that he was gone, resurrected: the first Easter.

In the Bible, then, the first Easter is a Sunday that occurred three days after the celebration of the Jewish Passover. The fact that it was a Sunday was significant: the early Christians hold Sunday as the holiest day of the week, the Lord's Day, because this was the day on which Christ was resurrected. They differ in this from the Jews, who celebrate Saturday as their holy day, the Sabbath.

Problems With Dating Easter

Should it Always be Easter Sunday?

From the earliest years of the Christian church there were problems with when to celebrate Easter. Some wanted to celebrate Easter three days after the Passover. It could be a Sunday, a Monday, a Friday, it didn't matter which day of the week it was. Others wanted to make sure that Easter was always celebrated on a Sunday.

Problems with Calendars

If this were not problem enough, there is also the difference between the Christian and Jewish calendars. By the end of the 1st Century CE, Christians had completely split from the Jewish religion in which they had originated. The majority of new converts, originally Jewish in origin were now pagans.

These pagans, and soon the Christian church as a whole, used the Julian calendar, a modified version of which we still use today. It is based off of the solar year and has 365 days save for leap years, which have 366. Although the name month still has its origins in the word moon, its length is not directly determined by lunar cycles.

Jews, on the other hand, follow their own calendar, a lunar one. This is a 12 month calendar based directly on the lunar cycle. That said, it also tries to keep in line with the solar calendar, so it has its own leap years that occur every three years. A Jewish leap year, however, has a whole extra month rather than just an extra day.

While this keeps the Jewish calendar more in line with the Julian one, it can make things complicated for figuring out when to have Easter, who were basing their celebration off the Jewish date of Passover. In the Jewish calendar Passover always occurs on the same day: the 14th of Nissan, which always comes on a full moon.

The Council of Nicea 325 CE

By 325 CE, major changes had occurred in the Roman world. Constantine, Emperor of Rome had become a Christian, Christianity was legalized within the Empire and was on its way to becoming the Empire's official religion. In 325 Constantine ordered a Council to bring the disparate groups of Christians that had arisen over the years together in one cohesive unit.

One of the many problems discussed at this Council was the dating of Easter. For the first time in Christian history an official method of dating was given. It said that Easter would fall on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox (March 21), unless that Sunday was the full moon (which would make it Passover). This was the official definition throughout Christendom until the 16th Century.

The East-West Split

As time wore on, however, it was discovered that the Julian calendar, first put in place by Julius Caesar, was not entirely accurate. Because the year is just a little over 3.25 years long, although leap years worked in the short run over time calendar dates would move away from their exact positioning with the movement of the Sun. By the 16th Century, then, the vernal equinox was falling 4 days before March 21st.

To correct the error, Pope Gregory XIII (for whom our modern Gregorian calendar is named), decided to make a couple of changes. Firstly he corrected the error that was already in the calendar by adding 10 days. Thus 4 October 1582 was directly followed by 15 October 1582. Beyond that, there would be 3 leap years removed from every 400 year period. (Although 2000 was a leap year, 2100, 2200 and 2300 will not be).

These corrections were never made in the Jewish calendar. Under the new Gregorian calendar, then, it was possible for the celebration of Easter to actually occur before the celebration of Passover. This occurs quite frequently in fact, last occurring in 2005 when Easter fell on March 27th but Passover fell on April 23rd.

The Eastern Orthodox Church believed that Easter could not occur until after Passover, thus they did not accept the Gregorian changes in calculating Easter. They continue to follow the original Nicene dating method of Easter, making sure that Easter never falls on or precedes Passover. This leads to differences of up to over a month between eastern and western Easters, which only aligns on the same day every few years.

In recent years there has been a growing movement to realign the eastern and western Easters, but to this day no such realignment has taken place. For the foreseeable future they will continue to use different calculations. In 2006 the western Easter will take place on April 16th, in the east it will not be until April 23rd. 2007 they will both fall on the same date: April 8th. In 2008 they will go back to different dates: March 23rd in the west and April 27th in the east.