About a Common Date for the Holy Feast of Resurrection
By Frieda Haddad Abs
Should we come to consider the church calendars showing the date of the feasts that we celebrate, both according to the Eastern as well as well as according to the Western Church Traditions, we will find out that they all show a period of 18 to 19 weeks revolving around the celebration of Easter. And should we take a closer look, we would realize that the date of the celebration of the Feast of Easter changes from one year to another.
At the outset of our present inquiry over the discrepancies that exist between the Eastern and the Western Church calendars, we would like to suggest that we stop for a while and try to free ourselves and get rid in our searching from the constraints that have perhaps been imposed upon us by our respective cultural traditions to the point that they have locked up our minds in the stifling complex mold of the science of astrology, and this in order for us to be enabled to partake of a commonly inherited life- giving water Spring that lies out there for us in our yearning for the path of an all-embracing Christ-centric quest.
Let us stop for a while then as we begin our probings, and let us allow the Word of God to be our guide as it clearly points out to us the fact that Easter as a life-giving Event is a freely offered “Pascha” to all of us for it is the “Lord’s Passover”, a “Sabbath to the LORD” (Exodus 12: 11 and Leviticus 23 :4-5 ).
Is it not true that we do not celebrate Easter for the mere aim of reckoning an ordinary day in our calendar? We rather approach the whole Easter Season with the words of Saint Paul engraved in our hearts as he admonishes us saying: “let us keep the Festival, …. with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth for the sake of the Lord who is our Pascha” (I Corinthians 5: 7). Moreover, as Philip Pfatteicher points out to us in his admirable book Journey to the Heart of God,[i] we are in need of being constantly reminded of who we are called to be: people on the Way to His Glorious Resurrection in our midst today, not as one of our historical heroes but as our ever Incarnate Lord present among us in an everlasting Today.
The Liturgical Calendar
It has deep-seated roots in the Hebrew Liturgical Law
Let us at the outset define what we mean by the “Year Liturgical Calendar”[ii]:
The roots of the calendar of the Liturgical Year delve deep into the primitive human impulse to celebrate special occurrences in time that bear a sacral significance. As such these occurrences contributed to the development of the form of worship. The calendar is made up of the singling out by the human mind of a series of specific time-events that surface into its consciousness and that reflect the inscrutable and obscure forces behind the swaying of time intervals between day and night, between being awake fully engaged in work and lying down for rest, between spells of coming to life and stints of death and oblivion.
Two such series of time-events got linked together to form what we have come to designate as the liturgical ordo, one being the universal cycle of nature that gives rise to light and darkness related to the circling of the moon around the earth as well as to the moving of the earth around the sun, and the other one being the cycle of the seasons indicating times of sowing as well as of harvesting. Both cycles are related to the mystery of coming to life and to the mystery of stints of death and oblivion.
The Christian Liturgical calendar has adopted these two series of time-events on which the Hebrews had based the development of their ordo of worship as they moved from a tribal bedouin- type existence into a sedentary existence.
We know from the New Testament that Jesus' death and resurrection happened around the time of the Jewish feast of Passover. According to Matthew, Mark and Luke's Gospels, the last meal Jesus shared with his disciples was a Passover meal, while John's Gospel says that Jesus died on the feast of Passover itself. In those days, the Jews celebrated Passover on the "14th day of the first month" in accordance with the Bible's commands (Leviticus 23:5, Numbers 28:16, Joshua 5:11). The months of the Jewish calendar each began at new moon, so the 14th day would be the day of the full moon. The first month, Nisan, was the month that began from the spring new moon. In other words, the Passover was celebrated on the first full moon following the vernal equinox and was therefore a movable feast.
Later on, when the Hebrews adopted a sedentary life in the cities of Canaan, they added to their calendar a new feast, the Feast of the Tabernacles .
The Feast of Tabernacles extended over seven weeks during which they established booths for themselves in the agricultural lands around cities and moved to live in them until the whole crops were gathered. It led to the Feast of Weeks. On the first day of the Feast of Weeks they would carry their first crop to the city offering it to the members of the clergy to be distributed to the poor as well as to constitute a source of livelihood for those who served the house of worship.
So it was, that before their kingship form of administration developed, i.e., between the eleventh and the sixth century BC, they had come to follow a weekly calendar in which the week was constituted of seven days, six days of work and the seventh day for rest. Gradually the seventh day came to be clothed with a sacral meaning and became known as a day of worship and thanksgiving to God.
This carries us to the first century AD when the calendar had moved from its basic agricultural tone. Grafted onto it were dates for the remembrance of historical “happenings” starting from the event of the creation of the world, passing through times of slavery and of deliverance in the thirteenth century BC as related to us in the book of Exodus. Following this period came their wanderings in the desert (Exodus 12 :1-20, Leviticus 23, and Numbers 16:1-17). Thus, the calendar came to mention salvific events in expectation of a final deliverance on the Last Day, a “Day” or era in which all bondage would cease and a final full participation in the very Life of God would become manifest. This was expressed clearly by Gamaliel, the first century teacher of the Law contemporary of Jesus, who is quoted in the Mishna -or the recorded oral sayings of the Hebrew teachers of the Law- to have said:” Each one of us in all generations should consider himself freed from the bondage of Egypt”.[iii]
The development of the Christian Liturgical Calendar
Jesus followed the Hebrew liturgical calendar as it had been developed in the First Century. However, he gave it a new meaning in his life and teachings as he announced the advent of a “New Age”, the age in which God’s Kingdom was manifest and in which the prophecies of the Old Age announced in the Old Testament found their fulfillment. This he did by preaching for the abandonment of a literal understanding of the old liturgical practices by clothing them with a new meaning:” “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2 :27). Moreover, he was arrested as he was celebrating the Paschal supper with His disciples just like it had been ordered by the Hebrew ordo. And following this last supper with his followers he was led to be judged, he was crucified, and he died on the cross.
His first followers believed that the New Age that he had promised was fulfilled “On the first day of the week” (Matthew 28:1, Mark 16 :2 and John 20 :1). In the event of His Resurrection the Law and the prophets had been fulfilled and every day was a day of resurrection and of victory over death. Moreover, and despite the fact that a great many of the Lord’s disciples continued to stick to the old Hebrew ordo, the new believers considered it to be redundant. We therefore read in saint Paul’s letter to the Church of Rome:” One person considers one day more sacred than another; another considers every day alike. Each of them should be fully convinced in their own mind. Whoever regards one day as special does so to the Lord” (Romans 14:5-9). He then comes to write a note of warning to the new converts saying:” Do not let anyone judge you in regard …to the matter of a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath day."(Colossians: 2 :16).
Furthermore, we find the growing Church adopting as of its early birth the Hebrew weekly seven-day reckoning, and towards the end of the apostolic era at the end of the first century AD, the first day of the week- that is Sunday-was considered as set apart for the celebration of communal prayer announcing the Lord’s resurrection (Acts 20:7 and I Corinthians 2:16). As a matter of fact, the whole Greco-Roman world had adopted the seven-day week that had been then ushered in by astronomers.
Moreover, the newly growing Christian literature of the time had come to consider Sunday as the “Day of the Lord”, and a great number of instituted Churches had come to consider the Sunday that followed the Hebrew Passover as Easter day in their calendars. The remembrance of the martyrdom of saints had also come to be celebrated on Sundays as martyrdom was considered a “birth into the era of the Kingdom”, martyrs being witnesses to the Resurrection of the Lord who had conquered death by death. The newly evolving calendar of the day also celebrated the fiftieth day after the Easter Celebration as the day on which the Holy Spirit descended on the Church assembled thus “baptizing the end of the seven weeks celebrations of the Feast of the Tabernacles on which the Hebrews also remembered God’s giving of the Tablets of the Law to Moses on mount Sinai.
The Church calendar thus came to follow this reckoning of salvific events as ushering the fulfillment of the “New Time” in the Incarnation of Jesus in expectation of His Second Coming in Glory, the day on which those who believe in Him will receive their awaited inheritance of everlasting joy.
This newly developed calendar was ushered by the official recognition of Christianity as the religion of the State under emperor Constantine the Great in the year 312 AD. The new ordo also resulted in the introduction of the preparatory period to Great Lent as a time set apart for the instruction of new converts into the faith and their preparation to baptism as well as for the counseling of those who had been excluded from communion with the brethren as they had committed acts reprimanded by the Church so that they may be led to repentance and accepted back into the community of believers.
The Calendar also witnessed the introduction of a preparatory period for the celebration of Christmas. Christian chronographers of the 3rd century believed that the creation of the world took place at the spring equinox, then reckoned as March 25. Hence, the new creation in the Incarnation (i.e., the conception) and death of Christ must therefore have occurred on the same day, with his birth following nine months later at the winter solstice, on December 25 as well as on February 6 in the Northern Hemisphere.
The oldest notice of a feast of Christ’s Nativity occurs in a Roman almanac (the Chronographer of 354, or Philocalian Calendar), which indicates that the festival was observed by the Church in Rome by the year 336.
Many have posited the theory that the feast of Christ’s Nativity, the birthday of “the sun of righteousness” (Malachi 4:2), was instituted in Rome, or possibly North Africa, as a Christian rival to the pagan festival of the Unconquered Sun at the winter solstice and resulted into a growing heresy that was later on subdued by the Church[iv] .
Nevertheless, the preparatory period for the celebration of the birthday of Christ witnessed the gradual grafting onto it of several feast days of saints as well as of several other celebrations commemorating the dedication of churches and of shrines of saints and of the days of the moving of their relics to specific sites.
Before we consider the controversies that arose and that are still with us today pertaining to the date of Easter, we would like to affirm in this section of our inquiry that sought to investigate the origin of the Church Ordo as well as its development, that the Church calendar had not been set up based on the reckoning of events pertaining to Divine Revelation as it broke through human history similar to the process that had taken place in the development of the Hebrew calendar, despite the fact that it had been closely inspired by it. The Christian calendar rather came to be set up according to a growing cultural heritage into which local Church Law introduced several changes. Within such a framework, several local Christ-centric communities introduced amendments that befitted adjustments made necessary by local pastoral needs. To mention one or two such contemporary adjustments as mere examples and not as exclusive events, let us note the fact that in the local town of Dhour-el-Chweir in Lebanon, and with the approval of the various church administrations both Eastern and Western, the local community has undertaken to celebrate the Feast of Easter according to the reckoning indicated in the Eastern Orthodox Ordo. A similar agreement was reached by the concerted decision of the various Christian communities in the Royal Kingdom of Jordan that came to celebrate the Feast of the Nativity according to the stipulations of the Western heritage (i.e., on December 25) whereas the celebration of the Easter Feast is celebrated according to the movable date as set up in the Eastern tradition. These are but two exceptions that followed the concerted decision of the local church communities with the approval of the local civic authorities. We say that these are exceptions as we note that the reaching of a general agreement between East and West on a common unified date for Easter got more complicated by the contemporary discoveries of astrological science pertaining to the solar and lunar reckonings, coupled by four overlapping adjustments introduced over the years here and there into the calendar.
The World Council of Churches however took the initiative of convening a world consultation of the churches that was held in the town of Aleppo in the Syrian Arab Republic in the month of March of the year 1997 in order for the Christ-centric communities to come together and study the matter. We will replicate in a summary form the various question marks that were raised in the Aleppo consultation in the following section of our document[v].
Question Marks Raised by the 1997 Aleppo World Consultation
Q.1. Why does Easter not fall on the same date every year - like Christmas, for instance?
A. The short answer is that in the 4th century it was decided that Easter would fall after the first full moon following the vernal or spring equinox. (The equinox is a day in the year on which daytime and night-time are of equal length. This happens twice a year, once in spring and once in autumn.)
A more detailed answer would be this:
As we pointed out in our section above, we know from the New Testament that Jesus' death and resurrection happened around the time of the Jewish feast of Passover. According to Matthew, Mark and Luke's Gospels, the last meal Jesus shared with his disciples was a Passover meal, while John's Gospel says that Jesus died on the feast of Passover itself. In those days, the Jews celebrated Passover on the "14th day of the first month" in accordance with the Bible's commands (see Leviticus 23:5, Numbers 28:16, Joshua 5:11). The months of the Jewish calendar each began at new moon, so the 14th day would be the day of the full moon. The first month, Nisan, was the month that began from the spring new moon. In other words, the Passover was celebrated on the first full moon following the vernal equinox and was therefore a movable feast.
Early sources tell us that this very soon led to Christians in different parts of the world celebrating Easter on different dates. As early as the end of the 2nd century, some churches were celebrating Easter on the day of Passover itself, whether it was a Sunday or not, while others would celebrate it on the Sunday that followed it. By the end of the 4th century there were four different methods of calculating the date of Easter. In the year 325, the Council of Nicaea attempted to bring in a unified solution that would retain the link with the date of Passover as celebrated in Jesus' time. Eventually, therefore, Easter's date was established as movable.
Based on this fact, the references that reached down to us from early church records point out to a situation in which the various Christ-centric communities differed in their reckoning of the date of the Easter Feast. And as early as the second century many local churches opted for the decision to place the date of Easter on their calendar on a day that would coincide as nearly as possible to the date of the Hebrew feast of the Passover and this whether this feast fell on a Sunday or on any other day of the week. The decision of the Council of Nicaea led to various readings with the result that by the end of sixteenth century four different church ordos had been developed as follows:[vi]
1. The old Roman Calendar :
The Roman Empire started out its time reckoning by using a ten-months year in which most of the months got their names, but it reverted later on to a mixed cycle of the sun-ordo and the moon- ordo with a resulting year of 355 days repartitioned into 12 months, each month made up of 29 or 30 days of the moon- cycle alternating with a 22 or 23 days-month, a fact that extended the year to 377days for a regular year and 378 days for a leap year.
This resulted in a successive group of four years instituted by the Roman Emperor Numa comprising each alternatively of 355+377+355+378 days in order to join the cycle in which the earth revolved around the sun. The overall historical cycle started in the year 753 BC marking the date of the foundation of the city of Rome. However, this reckoning allowed for many manipulations as some months were extended to 31 days to the detriment of other months in order to accommodate the names of specific emperors.
2. The Julian Calendar
It is associated with the name of Julius Caesar who adopted the reckoning of the Egyptian astrologist Socignio and replaced the Old Roman Calendar by a calendar according to the ecliptic plane or earth’s orbit about the sun, fixing the year of the foundation of Rome to 709 BC. The Julian calendar counts 365 days to which are added 25 days divided over 12 months, which require a leap year comprising 366 days every four years. Moreover, months alternately counted 30 or 31 days with the exception of the month of February that showed 20 days in ordinary years and 29 days in a leap year.
The Julian Calendar thus lacked preciseness and was replaced in the 16th century by the Gregorian Calendar.
The Julian Calendar was adopted by the Orthodox Churches as of 1923 with the resulting discrepancy of its present lag of 13 days behind the Western calendar and this until the year 2099.However the Julian calendar is still followed up till today by the monastic community of Mount Athos.
3. The Gregorian calendar
The Julian calendar had considered the beginning of historical reckoning based on the foundation of the city of Rome in the year 753BC.However in mid-16th century, an Armenian monk by the name of Dionysius Exigonus suggested that the birth of Christ mark the beginning of the Christian Ordo. His suggestion was put into effect as of the year 532
4.The New Gregorian calendar
It was instituted by Gregorious 13 Bishop of Rome in the 16th century who decreed that the Spring Equinox fell on March 11 rather than on March 21 and with the help of the monk Allisios Lilios he decreed to amend the Julian calendar accordingly with the stipulation of dropping 3 days from the yearly calendar every 400 years with the corneal year(which is the multiple of 100) being preserved should it be divided by 400.And so it was that the church population, reclining to sleep on Thursday October 4 of the year 1582 AD woke up the next Friday morning with their calendar marking October 15 of the same year 1582 AD
Q.2. Why, then, despite the universal rule laid down at Nicaea, do different parts of the Church still celebrate Christ's resurrection on different dates?
A. The first thing to remember is that, even after the Council of Nicaea, differences in the date of Easter remained, since the Council had said nothing about the methods to be used to calculate the timing of the full moon or the vernal equinox.
But the real problem behind the situation we have today arose in the 16th Century, when the Julian calendar, which had been established in 46 BC, was superseded by the Gregorian calendar. It took some time for the new calendar to be adopted by all countries (it did not happen in Greece until the start of the 20th Century). However, the Orthodox churches still use the Julian calendar to this day to calculate the vernal equinox and the full moon that follows it. This is why they calculate a different date.
Q.3. Why did the Gregorian calendar reform happen at all? Was it necessary?
A. The calendar reform established by Pope Gregory XIII was necessary because the Julian calendar used in those days had begun to lag behind astronomical reality - which is to say that by the time 21 March came around on the calendar, the actual, astronomical vernal equinox had already happened.
The fundamental problem behind this is that the astronomical year - that is, the time the earth takes to make its journey round the sun - is not exactly 365 days: it is actually 365 days, five hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds. However, as the year has to be divided into equal portions for practical purposes, leap years have to be introduced to resolve the problem.
The difference between the Gregorian and the Julian calendars lies precisely in how they resolve this problem. The Julian calendar's solution was to add a leap day every four years, with the end result that the Julian calendar year was an average of 11 minutes and 14 seconds longer than the earth's actual journey around the sun. This meant that the astronomical facts and the calendar calculations would eventually be out by one day in every 128 years. The real equinox, for instance, would then happen one day earlier than the date given on the calendar. The Gregorian calendar attempted to correct this by shortening the average calendar year. It introduced the additional rule that, in contrast to the Julian calendar's leap-year rule, there would be no leap day in years whose number could be divided directly by 100 but not by 400. Thanks to this reduced number of leap years, the Gregorian calendar comes closer to astronomical reality - although it, too, is not "exact" - but the difference between the facts of astronomy and the calendar date is now only 26 seconds a year. It takes 3,600 years to develop a lag of one day. At present, the Julian calendar is running 13 days "slow" of the Gregorian; by the year 2100, the difference will be 14 days. This means that the vernal equinox, which is established as 21 March and on which the date of Easter depends, falls in the Julian calendar on a day which under the Gregorian calendar is 3 April. This helps us understand the present difference of 28 days between the reckoning of the date of Easter in the Eastern calendar and its reckoning in the Western calendar in 2021.
Q.4. So, are the two dates always two weeks apart?
A. No. The gap between the two Easters is different every year. It can be as much as five weeks. Besides the fact that the dates of the vernal equinox lie 13 days apart, we also have to consider when the full moon falls. So, if the full moon falls within the 13 days between the Gregorian and Julian equinoxes, Orthodox Easter will be later.
There is another complication here, which is that, alongside the equinox, the sun and moon have a part to play as well. Under the Julian calendar, the full moon is calculated using a 19-year cycle under which the phases of the moon fall on the same date every 19 years. However, this calculation is not astronomically accurate either, so it, too, leads to the dates shifting out of place. When this is added to the discrepancy between the Julian and Gregorian equinoxes, it can lead to a difference of up to five weeks between the Orthodox and Western dates for Easter.
The Nicaea ruling contains one other provision that is extremely important for the Orthodox churches. It states that Easter should not be celebrated "with" (Greek "meta") the Jews. Today's theologians are no longer entirely certain what was meant by this, but Orthodox Easter still cannot fall on the same day as Passover. If it does, it is postponed by a week.
Q.5.In the year 2007, both Easters coincided on the same date. When does this happen?
A. The two dates coincide when the full moon following the equinox comes so late that it counts as the first full moon after 21 March in the Julian calendar as well as the Gregorian. This is not a regular occurrence, but it has happened more frequently in recent years - in 2001, 2004 and 2007. In the near future, it will also take place in 2010, 2011, 2014 and 2017, but, after that, not again until 2034.
Q.6. Are there any efforts to bring the two Easters together?
A. There were several attempts that had been made before the Ecumenical Consultation in Aleppo in 1997 as well as after it:
The World Council of Churches (WCC) took up the issue surveying its member churches in 1965 and 1967. It found out that all churches would be willing to celebrate Easter on the same day. However, while most Western churches preferred a fixed date, the Orthodox churches wanted a common movable date based on the Nicaea rule. In 1975, the matter was placed on the agenda of the WCC General Assembly in Nairobi, for the churches to undertake something together on the issue at the General Assembly. Another survey was made of Council's member churches, which echoed the results of the first survey. It became abundantly clear at the General Assembly that a decision could only be reached by the churches themselves, not by the WCC. It was decided that, at that stage, specific proposals would not be helpful, but that work into the issue ought to continue.
The 1997 Aleppo Consultation came up with a recommendation approved unanimously by all. It pointed out to the necessity of adopting the ruling of the Council of Nicaea while considering it in the light of modern astrological findings in order to come to agreement on the exact date of the first day of the vernal equinox each year
Q.7. Why has this solution still not been put into practice?
A. The problem is that, while the use of the astronomical calculations will mean hardly any change for those churches that use the Gregorian calendar, churches that still use the Julian calendar have had painful experiences in the past with schisms resulting from calendar reforms and are therefore very cautious about them.
However, a proposal circulating in Ecumenical circles today admonishes the Western churches to move their Easter to coincide with the Orthodox date while agreeing on December 25 for the celebration of the Feast of the Nativity
By way of a Conclusion
We will end by mentioning a practice in the Easter Liturgy of the Orthodox Church that may sustain us as we consult up-to date astronomical findings. It is the sight of the swinging chandeliers that faces us as we follow the celebrant of the Easter Liturgical service in the Byzantine Orthodox rite after he reads the Gospel passage of the day announcing Christ’s Resurrection, and enter into the church building that we had left plunged in darkness. Each one of us carries a lighted candle with its light flickering on his/her face as well as on the faces of those around us. As we enter the building it suddenly becomes flooded with light with the swinging chandeliers indicating the swinging of the church calendar while we all sing in one voice:” Christ is risen from the dead trampling down death by death “.
No matter how the date of the feast changes in the calendar swinging us from the beginning of February as it heralds the Lenten Season and carrying us to the beginning of the month of June as we linger in the blessings of Easter day, let us ever keep before our eyes the swinging of light and darkness that the Easter chandeliers usher for us until we reach together in our pilgrimage the day which we all yearn for, the day when what we now know in part disappears and when we shall know fully as we are known (I Corinthians 13: 9 -12 ).
Beirut 3/29/2021
Communication and Public Relations Department
[i] We are in need of being reminded of who we are called to be: people on the Way. The Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church (1962-1965) renewed attention to the image of the pilgrim Church. The Constitution on the Liturgy, the first document approved by the Council, says, In the earthly liturgy, by way of foretaste, we share in that heavenly liturgy which is celebrated in the holy city of Jerusalem toward which we journey as pilgrims. . .. Philip H. Pfatteicher. 2013. Journey into the Heart of God: Living the Liturgical Year (Oxford University Press), p.3
[ii] Massey H. Shepherd (Hodges Professor Emeritus of Liturgics, Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Berkeley, California), Church Year, https: www.britanniva.com/topic/church-year#ref67654k downloaded on 3/27/2021
[iii] Mishna, Pesaḥim 10:5
[iv] This syncretistic cult that leaned toward monotheism had been given official recognition by the emperor Aurelian in 274. It was popular in the armies of the Illyrian (Balkan) emperors of the late 3rd century, including Constantine’s father. Constantine himself was an adherent before his conversion to Christianity in 312. There is, however, no evidence of any intervention by him to promote the Christian festival. ( The Major Church Calendars op.cit.)
[v] Details pertaining to the Aleppo Conference could be found by consulting the following sites:
www.oikoumene.org › ressources › documents › freque...
http://orthodoxinfo.com/ecumenism/commoneaster.aspx
[vi] https://www.antiochpatriarchate.org/ar/page/726/