| During
Easter Season, the theme of worship is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ
from the dead.
Throughout this discussion,
please note that Easter and Passover are the same thing. They fall on different
dates,for reasons you will shortly learn, and they have different names
only because this article is in English.
According to scripture, Jesus
rose from the dead on the first Sunday following Passover. See Matthew
28:1, Mark 16:1-3, Luke 23:56-24:3, and John 20:1. For this reason, ancient
Christians celebrated Easter (which they called Passover) on the first
Sunday after the Jewish Passover, which is 14 Nisan on the Jewish calendar.
The only exceptions were in Syria and Mesopotamia, where ancient Christians
celebrated Easter on 14 Nisan, no matter which day of the week it happened
to be.
No one in ancient times denied
that the Resurrection took place on a Sunday.
According to scripture, the
month of Nisan—and therefore the date of Passover—is linked to the spring
harvest in Palestine. (See Exodus 12:1-3, Leviticus 23:9-14, and Numbers
28:16.) However, the Romans banished all Jews from Palestine after the
rebellion of Simon Bar Kochba in AD 135, making it difficult for the rabbis
to determine the proper date for Passover. So sometime around AD 200, the
rabbis reformed the Jewish calendar. Relative to the Julian calendar, which
was the Roman civil calendar, the new Jewish calendar allowed Passover
to precede the spring equinox and it allowed two Passovers in the same
twelve-month period. Obviously, the spring harvest cannot precede the spring
equinox! Shortly after AD 300, the rabbis revised the Jewish calendar again,
but it was still possible to have two Passovers in one twelve-month period,
as defined by the Julian calendar.
By this time, the vast majority
of Christians had long since given up using the Jewish calendar to determine
the date of Easter. Instead, they figured it independently. They reasoned
that at the time of the Last Supper, Nisan began with the new moon after
the spring equinox. The full moon occurs on the fourteenth day, which would
have been the Jewish Passover. According to Scripture, Jesus rose from
the grave on the Sunday that immediately followed. So they celebrated the
Resurrection on the first Sunday after the first full moon that followed
the spring equinox. However, since there was no standard way to calculate
the spring equinox, it was still possible for different regions to celebrate
Easter on different Sundays. This was a problem, because Christians who
lived on the edges of these regions got into unseemly disputes, and intellectual
pagans derided Christians for not being able to figure out their own holy
days. In those days, of course, Christianity was a minority religion for
which the public did noT have much respect and disputes about Easter weren't
helping evangelism.
Meanwhile, the churches in
Syria and Mesopotamia were still celebrating Easter on 14 Nisan as determined
by the current Jewish calendar, regardless of the day of the week. They
believed they had apostolic direction to celebrate Easter on the same day
that the Jews celebrate Passover, even if the Jews calculated the date
incorrectly.
In AD 325, the Council of
Nicea was convened to deal with Arianism and to standardize the date of
Easter. The Council of Nicea, noting that Syria and Mesopotamia represented
a small minority, required them to conform to the practice of the majority.
The bishops from Syria and Mesopotamia readily agreed to this ruling and
their
churches complied with it.
The Council of Nicea also ruled that all churches must celebrate Easter
on the same day. This clearly implies that they instituted a standard method
for calculating the date of the full moon after the spring equinox, but
the documentary evidence for it has not survived. Some ancient writers,
notably Ambrose, felt that the Council of Nicea prescribed the mathematical
formula that we presently use to fix the date of Easter, but we can no
longer prove it.
The Western Church applies
the Nicene formula to the calendar as reformed by Pope Gregory in 1582.
(This calendar reform resulted in the Gregorian calendar that we use today
for secular purposes.) The Eastern Church applies the Nicene formula to
the old Julian Calendar, which was instituted by Julius Caesar and served
as the civil calendar of the Roman Empire before the birth of Christ. The
Eastern Church also applies the formula in such a way that Easter always
falls after the Jewish Passover.
There are at least two serious
proposals to standardize the date of Easter. One is to institute a new
method of calculating the lunar cycle, based on the moon as it appears
over Jerusalem, so that eastern and western Easter would always fall on
the same date. The other proposal is to fix Easter as the second Sunday
in April. |
