The Calendar Controversies Behind Easter

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Key points:

  • Christians historically have disagreed on when to celebrate Christ’s resurrection.
  • Even now, churches in Western and Eastern traditions use different calendars for their faith’s most sacred holiday.
  • Depending on where they live, United Methodists also may celebrate the resurrection on different dates.
  • But efforts continue to get all Christians on the same page, especially with plans underway to celebrate the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea next year.

One of the disputes that split the early church was over Christ’s resurrection — not whether it happened but when to celebrate it.

Some of the faithful in Jerusalem and Asia Minor insisted on observing Christianity’s holiest day on 14 Nisan, the day of Passover preparations on the Jewish lunar calendar.

These Christians — called Quartodecimans (from the Latin for 14) — commemorated both the crucifixion and resurrection on 14 Nisan regardless of what day of the week it fell.

Meanwhile, a growing number of gentile Christians celebrated the empty tomb on the Sunday after 14 Nisan, while using the preceding Friday to remember Christ’s crucifixion.

The conflict came to a head in A.D. 197 when Pope Victor I excommunicated the Quartodecimans — aiming to distance Christianity from Judaism and make Christian practices consistent. But Christianity’s calendar debate continued.

“Many of us have this assumption that there was this standard practice of Jesus and the apostles … and any kind of differences we see in the early church were divergences from that original pure practice. But it didn’t work that way at all,” said the Rev. L. Edward Phillips. He is an ordained United Methodist elder and associate professor of historical theology and Christian worship at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology in Atlanta.

“The way it worked was that as Christianity spread, it always interacted with local practices. And it just gradually occurred to Christians to start doing certain kinds of things, but it was more local than it was original practice.”

When and how Christians mark the passion and resurrection of Jesus still varies around the globe. Christians in the Western church — namely Catholics and Protestants — use a different calendar than their Eastern Orthodox Christian siblings. They also have different names for their Resurrection festivities.

So while English-speaking Catholics and Protestants will celebrate Easter on March 31 this year, Eastern Orthodox look forward to honoring Pascha (from the Greek word for Passover) on May 5. Depending on where they live, even United Methodists can differ on the date when they sing out Charles Wesley’s beloved hymn, “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today.”

None of these variations alter Christians’ shared faith that “Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again.” But the disparate traditions offer insight into the tensions that have shaped Christianity since the beginning and the way Christians have managed to share ministry together despite those tensions.

“Rather than thinking of the history of the church as a river flowing into a delta with all these divergent streams,” Phillips said, “it was more like a tree in which you have all these roots that gradually become consolidated into a trunk.”

Now, that tree of Christianity has grown branches — including The United Methodist Church — that have spread the faith around the globe.

What the Bible says

On the question of when Christians should celebrate Easter, the Bible itself offers limited guidance.

Paul provides the New Testament’s earliest account of the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, writing simply “that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.”

The four Gospels, written later, all say the crucifixion and resurrection took place around the Jewish festival of Passover but differ slightly in the exact timing. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke (called synoptic because they look similar) place the crucifixion on the day after the Passover meal. However, the Gospel of John sets Christ’s death on the day the paschal lambs were sacrificed for Passover, 14 Nisan.

All the Gospels agree that Mary Magdalene and other women disciples discovered the empty tomb on the first day of the week: Sunday.

That is why Christians began the tradition of worshipping on Sundays, rather than the Sabbath, which is on the seventh day of the week, Saturday.

It should be noted than in the Jewish calendar, all days begin at nightfall — which is why the Jewish people honor the Sabbath from sundown Friday through the sundown Saturday. In the same vein, some early Christians — and many Catholics to this day — hold worship on Saturday evenings.

In any case, each Sunday came to be viewed as a little Easter in itself, which is why the season of Lent does not include them in its 40-day count. Instead, Sundays became the day that marked both the first day of creation in Genesis and the day of the new creation in Christ.

Setting the Easter formula

Still, disputes persisted over when to celebrate the Resurrection feast day itself. From the get-go, a source of tension among early Christians was just how closely they should follow Jewish law and tradition. In the case of Easter, the disagreement was over whether the Christian observance should be in line with the Jewish calendar’s timing of Passover.

What’s in a name?

The Eastern Orthodox name for the celebration of the risen Christ is fairly self-explanatory.

Pascha is the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew word Pesach, which means Passover. The name also serves as a reminder that Christ — like the paschal lambs of old — sacrificed himself and is the lamb of God.

The origin of the word Easter is a bit trickier to determine. The Venerable Bede, an English monk writing in the eighth century, claimed the name came from Eostre, a pagan goddess whose festival Anglo Saxons celebrated at the time of the vernal equinox. But some scholars question the monk’s account. The Venerable Bede provides the only record that people ever worshipped a goddess by that name.

English and German speakers are unusual in that they don’t use a word related to Passover for their Resurrection celebrations. Ostern, the German name for the holiday, may offer another possible etymology. Eostre and Ostern may both be related to the German word for east as well as the word for dawn in multiple languages.

That makes sense since dawn is when the women disciples first found the tomb empty and heard the good news that Christ had conquered death. For them and all Christian disciples, Christ’s resurrection meant a new day had arrived.

Watch The Importance of the Egg: Children and Easter

In the fourth century, Roman Emperor Constantine got involved. After legalizing Christianity, the emperor wanted the leaders of this growing and influential religion to resolve their fiercest quarrels. So it was that the head of the imperial power that had crucified Christ ended up shaping the Christian faith.

In A.D. 325, Constantine summoned bishops and deacons from across the Roman Empire to the first Council of Nicaea in what is today Iznik, Turkey. During the world’s first ecumenical council, the Christian leaders sought to address the biggest controversy of their day: the divinity of Christ. The council ultimately affirmed the Christian faith in the Triune God and approved a statement that Jesus was “of one being with the Father,” a phrase that eventually became part of the Nicene Creed.

The council also decided that Christ’s resurrection should be celebrated independent of the Jewish calendar and on a uniform date.

Already a general consensus was developing that Easter should occur on the Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox. The fourth-century Christians decided they would use their own astronomical computations to determine when that date fell.

But at a time when pastors couldn’t just check their daily planners for that year’s holidays, it was up to bishops to send a letter each year to notify their flocks when to celebrate Christianity’s most prominent moveable feast.

One of those letters proved to be historically significant. While still a deacon, Athanasius had been one of the outspoken defenders of Christ’s divinity at Nicaea. Later in a festal letter sent in A.D. 367, Athanasius — then bishop of Alexandria — included the first recorded list of all 27 books that now comprise the New Testament.

“In these alone the teaching of godliness is proclaimed,” he wrote. “No one may add to them, and nothing may be taken away from them.”

For that reason, Athanasius is sometimes credited with establishing the canon. But scholars tend to think that’s overstating the case.

“The anthology of writings that we call the New Testament was not pulled out of thin air,” said J. Warren Smith, professor of historical theology at Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina. “They were ones that had already been a part of Christian practice. … So, I think he’s largely repeating stuff that already had been part of practice, whether in Alexandria or elsewhere.”

Nevertheless, what Athanasius does provide is a window into Christian practice when traditions start to become much more uniform.

Calendar drift

Even with a set formula for fixing the date of Easter, discrepancies eventually would appear.

One of the challenges faced by all three Abrahamic faiths — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — is that they all, to some extent, rely on a lunar calendar. But the revolutions of the moon around the Earth do not line up well with the Earth’s trip around the sun. 

Because their faith began in the Roman Empire, Christians used the Julian calendar established by Julius Caesar in 46 B.C. The Julian calendar calculated that the earth takes 365¼ days to circle the sun and added a leap year every four years that added a day to the calendar to make up the difference.

But the solar year is not exactly 365¼ days — it’s about 11 minutes less. By the 16th century, astronomers realized what the Julian calendar identified as the vernal equinox was about 10 days off from the actual vernal equinox — the date when day and night are of equal length.

Pope Gregory XIII commissioned a new calendar to adjust for this equinox drift because it was so fundamental to the calculation of Easter. He established this new Gregorian calendar in 1582, and so people — at least those who paid attention to papal bulls — went to bed on Oct. 4 and awoke on Oct. 15 that year.

Only trouble was that by the 16th century, a significant portion of Christianity was not paying attention to the pope.

In the year 1054, the Eastern Christians (led by the patriarch in Constantinople) and Western Christians (led by the pope) mutually excommunicated each other. Those excommunications remained on the books until 1965.   

In 1517, the Protestant Reformation began, further splintering the church. In fact, European countries that were dominated by Protestants only slowly began to adopt the Gregorian calendar in the 18th century.

Britain and its American colonies began using the Gregorian calendar in September 1752. By then, the adjustment required 11 days to move to the actual equinox. The shift also meant the birthday of Methodism’s founder John Wesley moved from June 17 to June 28 just before he turned 50.

Greece became the last European country to adopt the Gregorian calendar for commercial purposes in 1923.

Impact on United Methodists

But even now, Greek Orthodox and other Orthodox Christians continue to use the Julian calendar in setting their dates for Lent and Pascha, the Orthodox Easter celebration.

Among other things, it means that Pascha will always come either after or at the end of Passover in the Jewish calendar. Christians who use the Gregorian calendar don’t have that synchronicity. This year, Passover begins at sundown April 23 and ends at sundown April 30. 

Incidentally, the Russian Orthodox Church uses the Julian calendar year-round, which is why the church’s Christmas celebrations on their liturgical calendar’s Dec. 25 correspond with Jan. 7 on the Gregorian calendar.

All of this has bearing on how United Methodists worship. In countries where Eastern Orthodox Christianity is predominant, United Methodists often will wait to celebrate Christ’s resurrection alongside their Orthodox neighbors.

Romanian United Methodists, for example, typically celebrate on Pascha, said Sarah Putnam, a United Methodist missionary working in the country.

“For Eastern Europeans, we generally all follow the Orthodox calendar with the exception of some Hungarians and Slovak-speaking churches from Serbia, who celebrate on both days,” she said.

Getting on the same page

The World Council of Churches, founded in 1948 in the wake of World War II, brings together Orthodox Christians and Protestants to bear witness to their common faith in Christ. What is now The United Methodist Church was among the ecumenical fellowship’s founding members.

WCC leaders spend much of their time in the work of peacemaking and justice to address crises around the world. However, the fellowship also seeks to foster renewal in unity and worship — including working to get Christians on the same calendar.

“Calendar divergence affects very practical aspects of the living relations between the churches,” said Andrej Jeftić, director of the WCC’s Faith and Order Commission and an Eastern Orthodox theologian. “For instance, organizing work schedules and coordinating meetings are affected by this divergence. Additionally, it raises a set of theological questions about our unity and witness in the world.”

In 1997, the World Council of Churches proposed a calendar reform that gained no traction. But next year offers a unique opportunity, Jeftić said, for “aligning our ecclesial biorhythms.”

An important anniversary

Next year will mark the 1,700th anniversary of that First Council of Nicaea when Christians first formalized the goal of a uniform date for celebrating the resurrection.

As it happens, 2025 also will see the Julian and Gregorian calendars line up so that both Easter and Pascha will both be on April 20. Passover will also conclude at sundown that same day.

The WCC is planning a yearlong series of events to commemorate Nicaea, including the sixth World Conference on Faith and Order in October 2025.

“Given that the common celebration of Easter was a major focus of the Council of Nicaea 325 A.D., this commemoration presents an opportunity to reexamine the issue at the Faith and Order World Conference and assess the progress made in discussions surrounding it,” Jeftić said.

“The symbolic convergence of Easter celebrations across churches in 2025, alongside the Nicaea commemoration, provides a unique momentum to highlight the significance of this matter and revisit theological discussions concerning it.”

United Methodist Bishop Sally Dyck is co-moderator of the WCC’s Permanent Committee on Consensus and Collaboration. Earlier in March, she attended the committee’s inaugural meeting in Istanbul, where the host was Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, Archbishop of Constantinople and spiritual leader of Eastern Orthodox Christians around the globe.

“It was mentioned several times that in 2025 (in addition to the 1,700th anniversary celebration of Nicaea, which will be in Turkey), the Julian and Gregorian calendars have Easter on the same day — April 20th,” Dyck, the ecumenical officer of the Council of Bishops, said by email.

“A little conversation ensued that it would be ‘nice’ if we could celebrate Easter on the same day after that.”

Heather Hahn is assistant news editor for UM News.