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Á¦¸ñ ºÎÈ°Àý ³¯Â¥ Á¤Çϱâ/Determining the date of Easter
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ÇÁ¶û¼Ò¾Æ ·¹³× ½ÅºÎ


 Determining the date of Easter


Father, how did the early Christians determine the day of Easter? Well, from the Bible, the death of Jesus happened the day before Passover. So by right, maybe the early Christians observe Easter celebration by following the Jewish calendar, the day after Passover festival. But when I check the Hebrew calendar, their Passover festival this year is too far from the date of our Easter celebration. In what century our Church started to have our own calculation for determining the date of Easter? Why we didn¡¯t rely solely on astronomical observation (observing and calculating when will be the full moon etc. like the Jewish did when they want to determine their Passover) but instead relied on the occurrence of equinox?


 ¡°The Jewish Passover was on the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox. It can fall on any day of the week. ¡° The first month, the fourteenth day of the month at evening, is the Passover of the Lord:¡± (Lev. 23:5).


This year, from Jewish sites, they celebrate the Passover on 23rd April, starting on 22nd April evening after sunset. 22nd April (at 05:24UTC) was the full moon, but the 2nd after the equinox.


I really do not know why the Jews are celebrating one month too late this year, since the vernal equinox falls on the 20th March (at 04:30 UTC=Greenwich time= 5:30 Rome¡¯s time = 6:30 Jerusalem time) and the first fool moon after it was on 23rd March (at 12:05UTC), not 22nd April!


Our Lord died on the very evening of the Passover, when all the pascal lambs were being immolated in order to eat the Passover meal! The Passover itself was on the Saturday of that year. Christ rose on the Sunday AFTER Passover. So from the time of the Apostles themselves – certainly by their authority – the Christian Passover was fixed to ¡°the first Sunday AFTER the Jewish Passover¡±, i.e. after the full moon of spring, i.e. the first full moon on or after the equinox of spring. The Council of Nicea fixed that rule.


Now the ancient Hebrew used to reckon the months and such feast by simple observation: they would look for the first crescent of the moon and then blow the sacred trumpets in the temple to announce the ¡°neomenia¡± = the festival of the new moon, on which the Old Testament Law prescribed certain sacrifices (Numbers 28:11). Then over the years, it was not difficult to find certain regularity and a method of calculation. Alexandria had been the place of great astrological knowledge and in particular in the mid second century a great scholar called Ptolemy wrote the ¡°Almagest¡±, which was for centuries the best treaty on the movement of the stars and planets before the invention of the telescope! Such treaties were often mixture of true science (geometry and astronomy) with astrology, horoscopes and the worship of stars: this mixture of science with superstitions caused the downfall of true science (St Augustine even has a small treaty ¡°contra mathematicos!¡± which is not against mathematics as a science, but against all these superstitions: he writes: ¡°they want to sell our souls to the stars!¡±)

At Alexandria they eventually found a ¡°cycle of 19 years¡± for the moon, which has less than one day of error per hundred years. The Council of Nicea therefore set the above rule for the date of Easter (first Sunday after the full moon on or after the equinox of spring), together with the method of calculation using that cycle of 19 years.


However in the 16th century, after more than 1200 years since the Council of Nicea the little error of the cycle of 19 years had accumulated in several days, so that Easter would often fall after the second full moon on or after the equinox of spring, thus being a full month off from the definition of Nicea. Hence the Popes asked some Catholic scientists to make a correction and this was promulgated by Pope Gregory XIII, and is now known as the GREGORIAN CALENDAR, universally used all over the earth. The Julian calendar had one ¡°leap year¡± every four years, adding one day to the 365 usual days per year; the Gregorian calendar corrects this by suppressing 3 out of 4 such leap year per 400 years: when the century itself is not divisible by four: thus 1600 and 2000 were leap years, but 1700, 1800, 1900 were not and 2100 will not be.


 Also there is a similar correction on the turn of the century for the moon cycle, which makes that this calendar is good for the next 1000 years!


Some non-Catholic countries refused to take it, but then became the laughing stock of the scientist community, and so quietly adopted it sometimes later, some even more than a century later. Still today the Orthodox (=non-Catholic eastern churches) still keep the Julian calendar for their liturgy, thus having Christmas, Easter etc. off from the Catholic date. This is being attached to the ¡°Julian Calendar¡± = of Julius Cesar, a pagan emperor! And being de facto unfaithful to the definition of the Council of Nicea concerning the date of Easter, as given above.


Fr. F. Laisney