Church Matters: Retrieving the Great Tradition

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Easter in Christian Liturgy, continued

they kept Easter either on the Sunday following the Jewish festival or (in Asia) on the actual Jewish festival day. However, since this dependence aroused Jewish mockery, in the 3rd century Christians began to fix Easter independently, by astronomical calculation. The problem they faced was to reconcile the Jewish lunar year with the standard solar year of the Roman Empire. For this purpose the Roman church used a doubled 8-year cycle, and later an 84-year cycle, while the Alexandrian church used the Metonic cycle of 19 years, which was the most accurate of the three, and ultimately prevailed everywhere. In the meantime, however, the second great Easter controversy arose, between those who had begun to fix Easter astronomically, and those who continued to be guided by Jewish practice, and to hold it on the Sunday after the Passover. This controversy (often confused with the Quartodeciman, causing Quartodecimanism to be thought more lasting and widespread than it was) was resolved in principle by the Council of Nicaea in 325, the decision being in favour of the new method. The dissidents this time were not the church of Asia but the churches of Syria, Cilicia and Mesopotamia. The subsequent Easter controversies arose from the different methods of calculating Easter. The 7th-century controversy over the Celtic Easter was due to the Celtic churches having retained the 84-year cycle after Rome had abandoned it. The controversy extending from the 16th century to our own day over the Julian and Gregorian calendars is due to the slight but accumulating inaccuracy in the Roman solar year, as established by Julius Caesar. By 1582 this had become significant enough for Pope Gregory XIII to have it corrected, but churches out of communion with Rome were naturally slow in adopting his reform. It was not adopted in England until 1752, when new Easter tables were introduced into the “Book of Common Prayer”; many of the Eastern churches have still not adopted it. Since Easter is a movable festival, related to the moon, it coincides in the Julian and Gregorian calendars about once every three years; but the fixed festivals, such as Christmas, now fall thirteen days later in the Julian calendar than in the Gregorian. The modern secular concept of a fixed Easter, which would mean abandoning the Jewish lunar year altogether, has met with some degree of favour in the Western churches but none in the Eastern, where the only interest is in an agreed Easter.