So the old church fathers got round this by redefining what a full moon is. It had been decided that the vernal equinox would occur on 20 March (as it did at Nicaea) but that too varies. More recently there have been Mallen's Method, Marcos Montes Method, Carter's Method, Oudin's Method. There was a ruling by the First Council of Nicaea in 325 that Easter should be celebrated on the Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox but this was ignored for centuries, with even the church in Rome using its own methods until the 6th century. A century on, 84-year tables were introduced, which were still in use in parts of the British Isles as late as 931. In the 2nd century a Roman called Hippolytus devised an eight-year cycle. How many ways are there of calculating Easter?ĭozens. Scores of formulae have been devised to try to reconcile the two as a method of marking time. But the solar and lunar years diverge by 11 days every year. There have been various attempts to reconcile this, including the famous saltus lunae (the moon's jump) whereby one of the 30-day months in the lunar cycle gets arbitrarily shortened to 29 days. Calculating one against another is seriously complicated. The problem comes because a solar year (the length of time it takes the earth to move round the sun) is 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes, and 12 seconds whereas a lunar year is 354.37 days. So Christians wanted to have their feast day around the same time as the Jewish festival which was fixed by the first full moon following the vernal equinox – the spring day when night and day are exactly the same length. According to the gospels he was killed three days before the Resurrection, around the time of the Jewish Passover. Why do we still have to use both solar and lunar calendars?Įaster is the time when Christians celebrate the Resurrection of Christ. As a general rule, Easter falls on the first Sunday, following the first full moon after 21 March. The Jews had one based on the phases of the moon – as Islam does, which is why the month of Ramadan moves round the calendar and takes places at different times of the year each year, with Muslims waiting for sightings of the moon before they know what day it will begin.Įaster is one of the festivals which tries to harmonise the solar and lunar calendars. The Egyptians had one based on the movement of the sun, which was passed on through the Romans and Christian culture to become the modern world's standard. Because the ancient Egyptians and Hebrews used different calendars.
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