During Easter Season, the theme of worship is the Resurrection
of Jesus Christ from the dead.
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.
Easter
is an English word derives from the name of a Germanic goddess, and
you won’t get any argument from me if you think the word should
be deprecated because of its association with pagan fertility
rites. On the other hand, the Old Testament book of Esther is
named after a Jewish heroine who bore the name of the goddess
Ishtar! In the ancient Church, the celebration of the
Resurrection was called Passover. Today, Orthodox Christians
call this holiday the Pasch
(as in paschal lamb),
which is the Greek word for Passover. In Anglican churches, the
designation Sunday of the Resurrection is often preferred over
Easter and in
Lutheran liturgy, it is called
The Resurrection of Our Lord.
The current ecumenical trend in English-speaking countries is to
use Easter for
the fifty-day season and
Easter Day for the day of the Resurrection.
Aside from English and German, the words for Passover and Easter
are the same in most languages.
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