The date of Easter

Easter was the most important feast of the Christian church, and its place in the calendar determined the position of the rest of the church’s movable feasts (see church year). Because its timing depended on both the Moon’s phases and the vernal equinox, ecclesiastical authorities had to seek some way of reconciling lunar and solar calendars. Some simple form of computation, usable by nonastronomers in remote places, was desirable. There was no easy or obvious solution, and to make things more difficult there was no unanimous agreement on the way in which Easter should be calculated, even in a lunar calendar.

Easter, being the festival of the Resurrection, had to depend on the dating of the Crucifixion, which occurred three days earlier and just before the Jewish Passover. The Passover was celebrated on the 14th day of Nisan, the first month in the Jewish religious year—that is, the lunar month the 14th day of which falls on or next after the vernal equinox. The Christian churches in the eastern Mediterranean area celebrated Easter on the 14th of Nisan on whatever day of the week it might fall, but the rest of Christendom adopted a more elaborate reckoning to ensure that it was celebrated on a Sunday in the Passover week.

To determine precisely how the Resurrection and Easter Day should be dated, reference was made to the Gospels; but, even as early as the 2nd century ce, difficulties had arisen, because the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) appeared to give a different date from the Gospel According to John for the Crucifixion. This difference led to controversy that was later exacerbated by another difficulty caused by the Jewish reckoning of a day from sunset to sunset. The question arose of how the evening of the 14th day should be calculated, and some—the Quintodecimans—claimed that it meant one particular evening, but others—the Quartodecimans—claimed that it meant the evening before, since sunset heralded a new day. Both sides had their protagonists, the Eastern churches supporting the Quartodecimans, the Western churches the Quintodecimans. The question was finally decided by the Western church in favor of the Quintodecimans, though there is debate whether this was at the Council of Nicaea in 325 or later. The Eastern churches decided to retain the Quartodeciman position, and the church in Britain, which had few links with European churches at this time, retained the Quartodeciman position until Roman missionaries arrived in the 6th century, when a change was made. The dating of Easter in the Gregorian calendar was based on the decision of the Western church, which decreed that Easter should be celebrated on the Sunday immediately following the (Paschal) full moon that fell on or after the vernal equinox, which they took as March 21. The church also ordered that if this full moon fell on a Sunday, the festival should be held seven days later.

With these provisions in mind, the problem could be broken down into two parts: first, devising a simple but effective way of calculating the days of the week for any date in the year and, second, determining the date of the full moons in any year. The first part was solved by the use of a letter code derived from a similar Roman system adopted for determining market days. For ecclesiastical use, the code gave what was known as the Sunday, or dominical, letter.

The seven letters A through G are each assigned to a day, consecutively from January 1 so that January 1 appears as A, January 2 as B, to January 7 which appears as G, the cycle then continuing with January 8 as A, January 9 as B, and so on. Then in any year the first Sunday is bound to be assigned to one of the letters A–G in the first cycle, and all Sundays in the year possess that dominical letter. For example, if the first Sunday falls on January 3, C will be the dominical letter for the whole year. No dominical letter is placed against the intercalary day, February 29, but, since it is still counted as a weekday and given a name, the series of letters moves back one day every leap year after intercalation. Thus, a leap year beginning with the dominical letter C will change to a year with the dominical letter B on March 1; and in lists of dominical letters, all leap years are given a double letter notation, in the example just quoted, CB. It is not difficult to see what dominical letter or letters apply to any particular year, and it is also a comparatively simple matter to draw up a table of dominical letters for use in determining Easter Sunday. The possible dates on which Easter Sunday can fall are written down—they run from March 22 through April 25—and against them the dominical letters for a cycle of seven years. Once the dominical letter for a year is known, the possible Sundays for celebrating Easter can be read directly from the table. This system does not, of course, completely determine Easter; to do so, additional information is required.

This must provide dates for full moons throughout the year, and for this a lunar cycle like the Metonic cycle was originally used. Tables were prepared, again using the range of dates on which Easter Sunday could appear, and against each date a number from one through 19 was placed. This number indicated which of the 19 years of the lunar cycle would give a full moon on that day. From medieval times these were known as golden numbers, possibly from a name used by the Greeks for the numbers on the Metonic cycle or because gold is the color used for them in manuscript calendars.

The system of golden numbers was introduced in 530, but the numbers were arranged as they should have been if adopted at the Council of Nicaea two centuries earlier; and the cycle was taken to begin in a year when the new moon fell on January 1. Working backward, chronologers found that this date had occurred in the year preceding 1 ce, and therefore the golden number for any year is found by adding one to the year and dividing that sum by 19. The golden number is the remainder or, if there is no remainder, 19.

To compute the date of Easter, the medieval chronologer computed the golden number for the year and then consulted his table to see by which date this number lay. Having found this date, that of the first full moon after March 20, he consulted his table of dominical letters and saw the next date against which the dominical letter for that year appeared; this was the Sunday to be designated Easter. The method, modified for dropping centennial leap years as practiced in the Gregorian calendar, is still given in the English prayer book, although it was officially discarded when the Gregorian calendar was introduced.

The system of golden numbers was eventually rejected because the astronomical full moon could differ by as much as two days from the date they indicated. It was Lilius who had proposed a more accurate system based on one that had already been in use unofficially while the Julian calendar was still in force. Called the epact—the word is derived from the Greek epagein, meaning “to intercalate”—this was again a system of numbers concerned with the Moon’s phases, but now indicating the age of the Moon on the first day of the year, from which the age of the Moon on any day of the year may be found, at least approximately, by counting, using alternately months of 29 and 30 days.

The epact as previously used was not, however, completely accurate because, like the golden number, it had been based on the Metonic cycle. This 19-year cycle was in error, the discrepancy amounting to eight days every 2,500 years. A one-day change on certain centennial years was then instituted by making the computed age of the Moon one day later seven times, at 300-year intervals, and an eighth time after a subsequent 400 years. This operation was known as the lunar correction, but it was not the only correction required; there was another.

Because the Gregorian calendar used a more accurate value for the tropical year than the Julian calendar and achieved this by omitting most centennial leap years, Clavius decided that, when the cycle of epacts reached an ordinary centennial year, the number of the epact should be reduced by one; this reduction became known as the solar correction.

One advantage of the epact number was that it showed the age of the Moon on January 1 and so permitted a simple calculation of the dates of new moon and full moon for the ensuing year. Another was that it lent itself to the construction of cycles of 30 epact numbers, each diminishing by one from the previous cycle, so that, when it became necessary at certain centennial years to shift from one cycle to another, there would still be a cycle ready that retained a correct relationship between dates and new moons.

For determining Easter, a table was prepared of the golden numbers, one through 19, and below them the cycles of epacts for about 7,000 years; after this time, all the epact cycles are repeated. A second table was then drawn up, giving the dates of Easter full moons for different epact numbers. Once the epact for the year was known, the date of the Easter full moon could be immediately obtained, while consultation of a table of dominical letters showed which was the next Sunday. Thus, the Gregorian system of epacts, while more accurate than the old golden numbers, still forced the chronologer to consult complex astronomical tables.

Adoption in various countries

The derivation of the term style for a type of calendar seems to have originated sometime soon after the 6th century as a result of developments in calendar computation in the previous 200 years. In 463 ce Victorius (or Victorinus) of Aquitaine, who had been appointed by Pope Hilarius to undertake calendar revision, devised the Great Paschal (i.e., Passover) period, sometimes later referred to as the Victorian period. It was a combination of the solar cycle of 28 years and the Metonic 19-year cycle, bringing the full moon back to the same day of the month, and amounted to 28 × 19, or 532 years. In the 6th century this period was used by Dionysius Exiguus (Denis the Little) in computing the date of Easter, because it gave the day of the week for any day in any year, and so it also became known as the Dionysian period. Dionysius took the year now called 532 ce as the first year of a new Great Paschal period and the year now designated 1 bce as the beginning of the previous cycle. In the 6th century it was the general belief that this was the year of Christ’s birth, and because of this Dionysius introduced the concept of numbering years consecutively through the Christian era. The method was adopted by some scholars but seems only to have become widely used after its popularization by the Venerable Bede of Jarrow (673?–735), whose reputation for scholarship was very high in Western Christendom in the 8th century. This system of bce/ce numbering threw into relief the different practices, or styles, of reckoning the beginning of the year then in use. When the Gregorian calendar firmly established January 1 as the beginning of its year, it was widely referred to as the New Style calendar, with the Julian the Old Style calendar. In Britain, under the Julian calendar, the year had first begun on December 25 and then, from the 14th century onward, on March 25.

Because of the division of the Eastern and Western Christian churches and of Protestants and Roman Catholics, the obvious advantages of the Gregorian calendar were not accepted everywhere, and in some places adoption was extremely slow. In France, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal, and Spain, the New Style calendar was adopted in 1582, and it was in use by most of the German Roman Catholic states as well as by Belgium and part of the Netherlands by 1584. Switzerland’s change was gradual, on the other hand, beginning in 1583 and being completed only in 1812. Hungary adopted the New Style in 1587, and then there was a pause of more than a century before the first Protestant countries made the transition from the Old Style calendar. In 1699–1700, Denmark and the Dutch and German Protestant states embraced the New Style, although the Germans declined to adopt the rules laid down for determining Easter. The Germans preferred to rely instead on astronomical tables and specified the use of the Tabulae Rudolphinae (1627; “Rudolphine Tables”), based on the 16th-century observations of Tycho Brahe. They acceded to the Gregorian calendar rules for Easter only in 1776. Britain adopted the New Style in 1752 and Sweden in 1753, although the Swedes, because they had in 1740 followed the German Protestants in using their astronomical methods for determining Easter, declined to adopt the Gregorian calendar rules until 1844. Japan adopted the New Style in 1873; Egypt adopted it in 1875; and between 1912 and 1917 it was accepted by Albania, Bulgaria, China, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Turkey. The now-defunct Soviet Union adopted the New Style in 1918, and Greece in 1923.

In Britain and the British dominions, the change was made when the difference between the New and Old Style calendars amounted to 11 days: the lag was covered by naming the day after September 2, 1752, as September 14, 1752. There was widespread misunderstanding among the public, however, even though legislation authorizing the change had been framed to avoid injustice and financial hardship. The Alaskan territory retained the Old Style calendar until 1867, when it was transferred from Russia to the United States.