Determineing the time of Lent and easter?

[Montie_Claunch]

How does the church determine when Easter and Lent is? Why wouldn’t it be during the time when the Jews hold Passover, scince that was about the time that Jesus was crucifed and eavrything? Thanks and God bless.

 

[kleary]

Montie Claunch:

How does the church determine when Easter and Lent is? Why wouldn’t it be during the time when the Jews hold Passover, scince that was about the time that Jesus was crucifed and eavrything? Thanks and God bless.

The date of Easter is determined according to the lunar calendar, while the date of Christmas is fixed on the solar calendar. Before 325, there was no official celebration of the birth of Christ, and Easter was celebrated by some Christians on Passover (a lunar holiday) and by others the following Sunday. The rationale: Christ’s last supper took place on or around Passover, he was crucified on a Friday, and the festival of Easter celebrates his resurrection two days later.
In 325, church officials at the Council of Nicea formalized the date of Easter in an effort to get everyone to celebrate on the same day (and also, possibly, to dissociate it from the Jewish Passover feast). From then on, the holiday was celebrated on the Sunday following the first full moon after March 21, the start of spring.

At the same time, the council inaugurated Christmas by making Dec. 25 the Feast of the Nativity. Because Christmas was not directly related to a lunar holiday, and because it had never been celebrated before—the date of Christ’s birth is not mentioned in the Bible, and questions about it had been settled by a proclamation from the pope just five years earlier—the council was able to establish an unambiguous date for the celebration.

But Easter remained tough to pin down. The Julian calendar in use at the time relied on the leap year to keep seasons from drifting with respect to dates, but the correction only worked so well. By the mid-16th century, the vernal equinox was occurring more than a week before March 21.

In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII solved this problem by issuing a papal bull that eliminated 10 days from the calendar that year. Oct. 4, 1582, was followed immediately by Oct. 15, 1582. The start of the following spring occurred on March 21, and Easter was restored to its proper season. To avoid future problems, Pope Gregory abolished leap years for every year that is evenly divisible by 100, except those that are evenly divisible by 400. (So, the year 2000 had an extra day, but 1900 didn’t and 2100 won’t, either.)

In theory, Easter falls on the Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox In practice, the church’s methods are a bit imprecise, in part because the vernal equinox doesn’t always fall on March 21 and in part because the church uses traditional tables (rather than modern astronomy) to determine the dates of full moons.

Eastern Orthodox churches never adopted the Gregorian calendar, so their Easter remains on the Julian calendar. This year it will fall on May 1, five weeks after the Western Easter.

Hope this answers your question. Source taken from is here slate.com/id/2113321/

Ken

 

[Liberian]

Montie Claunch:

How does the church determine when Easter and Lent is? Why wouldn’t it be during the time when the Jews hold Passover, scince that was about the time that Jesus was crucifed and eavrything? Thanks and God bless.

Montie,

The Jews have (and ancient Israelites had) a combined lunar-solar calendar in which the months were marked from the new moon. Their calendar is, I think, unique in that the first month of the year comes in the springtime with the vernal equinox but they celebrate the Jewish New Year (Rosh ha-Shanah) in the fall. Since there are not exactly twelve lunar months in a year, they insert an extra one as needed, usually in five out of every nineteen years.

The Passover occurs on the fourteenth of the month of Aviv, or Nisan (the month has two names apparently). Since the month starts on the new moon, the fourteenth will be the full moon. Aviv (which is also Hebrew for “spring,” as in Tel Aviv–“Spring Hill”) is the month containing the vernal equinox.

Since Easter does indeed come at the time of the Passover, the rule for the date of Easter is that it is the first Sunday (Easter always occurring on a Sunday) after the first full moon after the spring equinox. There are some subtleties that I do not know, such as what happens when the full moon occurs on the spring equinox itself or when the full moon falls on that Sunday, but that is the gist of it.

Over the centuries, as the motions of the earth, moon, and sun got to be better known, people started calculating when these astronomical events would happen rather than going out actually to observe them. Two thousand years ago, the spring equinox came on March 25 or so (The winter solstice came on December 25, which has been retained as the date of Christmas.) By the time of the Council of Nicaea, which laid down the law for the date of Easter, the inaccuracies in the Julian calendar had caused the date of the equinox to shift to March 21, and that date was fixed as the official date of the spring equinox.

The Orthodox Churches still use the Julian calendar, incidentally, so their calculation of the date of Easter does not match that of the Catholic Church.

I hope this helps and is not Too Much Information.

• Liberian