HISTORY OF THE EASTER DATE
If you are an ardent follower of this page, then you have come across my posts on the Council of Nicea, convened by Emperor Constantine in 325AD. It is at this council that the divinity of Christ was confirmed and Doctrine of the Trinity established.
But the council failed to establish a couple of things, the most important one being a uniform date for Easter.
(Source)The early church celebrated the anniversary of Jesus' resurrection every year and they often called it the Christian Passover. (Paschal in Greek). Christians of the day also moved their day of worship to Sunday because Christ had risen from the grave on the first day of the week.
In the second century a debate arose over when to celebrate the resurrection. Most churches held the festival on the Sunday closest to the Jewish Passover. Sometimes there was doubt as to which of the two nearest Sundays should be observed. The churches in Asia Minor frequently observed the resurrection on the date of the Jewish Passover, even when it was not on a Sunday.
When Constantine became emperor and Christianity was no longer illegal in the empire, the church considered it important to settle the Easter date, and this was one of the agendas of the Council of Nicea.
Constantine did not want Easter to be celebrated on the Jewish Passover. He said it was a Christian "duty to have nothing in common with the murderers of our Lord".
The Council accordingly required the feast of the resurrection to be celebrated on a Sunday and never on the day of the Jewish Passover. Easter was to be on the Sunday after the first full moon following the Spring equinox. This meant the date of Easter would always fall between March 22nd and April 25th. Today, March 22, is the earliest date on which Easter can fall. Since there is seldom a full moon on March 21st, Easter does not often fall on the 22nd. The last time it did was in 1818. In the twentieth century, it never fell on this day.
The ruling of the Council was not immediately accepted everywhere. It did not sit well with those who had been celebrating the resurrection on Passover to suddenly learn they were being called heretics. Confusion was also caused because Rome and Alexandria fixed the Spring equinox (the day in the Spring when day and night are equal) by different methods. Eventually however, the ruling of the Council of Nicea was accepted by all of the western church following the Synod of Whitby in 664.
After the Gregorian reform of the calendar by promulgation in 1582, the Roman Catholic Church continued to follow the same method for computing the date of Easter but the resulting date differed from that computed using the Julian Calendar due to the difference in time regarding when the vernal equinox was deemed to occur and when the relevant full moon fell. The Protestant churches of the Christian West all eventually adopted the Gregorian Calendar at various later stages. The Eastern Orthodox Church and the majority of the Christian East continue the older practice aligned to the Julian calendar.
Several attempts have sought to achieve a common method for computing the date of Easter.
In 1997 the World Council of Churches proposed a reform of the method of determining the date of Easter at a summit in Aleppo, Syria: Easter would be defined as the first Sunday following the first astronomical full moon following the astronomical vernal equinox, as determined from the meridian of Jerusalem. The reform would have been implemented starting in 2001, since in that year the Eastern and Western dates of Easter would coincide. But this reform was never implemented.
I am certain most of you did not know that the moon plays a role in Church practice and traditions 😃
