Did you know the date of Easter even changed our calendar?
In 45 BC, Julius Caesar wanted to unify the Roman world with a common calendar to be used in all the countries conquered by Romans.
He switched their various lunar calendars, based on the monthly cycles of the moon, to a solar calendar of 365 days with a leap day every four years. He moved the beginning of the year from March 1st to January 1st.
In the 4th century, Emperor Constantine stopped the persecution of the Christians and made Christianity the defacto state religion.
Like Julius Caesar, Constantine wanted to unify the Christian Roman world by having a common date to celebrate Easter. And he wanted it to be on a Sunday.
This would settle the “Quarto-deciman Controversy.
Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th edition) explained how the “Quarto-deciman Controversy” ended with the switching of Easter from the traditional Jewish Passover to a particular Sunday determined by a new formula:
“Polycarp, the disciple of St. John the Evangelist and bishop of Smyrna, visited Rome in 159 to confer with Anicetus, the bishop of that see, on the subject; and urged the tradition, which he had received from the apostle, of observing the fourteenth day (of the Jewish month of Nisan) …
A final settlement of the dispute was one among the other reasons which led Constantine to summon the Council of Nicaea in 325 …
The decision of the council was unanimous that Easter was to be kept on Sunday, and on the same Sunday throughout the world, and ‘that none should hereafter follow the blindness of the Jews’.”
This ended the tradition of asking Jewish rabbis when Passover would be. Constantine then adopted a new formula for determining the date of Easter, namely, the first Sunday after first full moon after Spring Equinox.
Peter Schaff wrote in History of the Christian Church:
“At Nicaea … the Roman and Alexandrian usage with respect to Easter triumphed, and the Judaizing practice of the Quarto-decimanians, who always celebrated Easter on the fourteenth of Nisan [Passover] became thenceforth a heresy.”
This was a defining split between the Jewish Christian Church — as Jesus and his disciples were Jewish — and the emerging Gentile Christian Church.
Church scholars compiled precise tables of when future dates of Easter would be.
Not everyone was quick to use the new church tables, particularly the Irish.
This was because in 433 AD, the night before Easter, according to the old calendar, Saint Patrick confronted the Druid chieftain King Leary, resulting in thousands of Irish converting.
In 567 AD, the Council of Tours moved the beginning of the year back to March 25, as Julius Caesar’s January 1st was considered pagan.
During the Middle Ages, France celebrated New Year Day on Easter.
The Church’s table of dates based on the Julian Calendar had a slight discrepancy of 11 minutes per year.
After a thousand years, in 1582, the church tables made Easter ten days ahead of Constantine’s formula — the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox — and even further from its origins in the Jewish Passover.
Pope Gregory XIII decided to fix the problem by eliminating ten days from the calendar and skipping a leap day in years divisible by 100 and also divisible by 400.
It sounds complicated, but it is so accurate that the Gregorian Calendar is still the calendar used internationally today.
The Gregorian Calendar also returned the beginning of the new year from March 25 back to January 1st.
Thus, setting the date of Easter is the reason the world is using the Gregorian Calendar!
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Image Credits: Public Domain; Description: Icon of the Resurrection; Date: December 11, 2009; Source: Author Surgun100; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Resurrection_(24).jpg
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