Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Easter Controversy

Starting point is 00:00:00 The following is an encore presentation of everything everywhere daily. Every year Christians around the world celebrate Easter. However, when they celebrate Easter can vary dramatically. In fact, the possible dates of Easter can vary by over a month. What most people don't know is that setting the date for Easter was one of the biggest controversies in the early Christian church. In fact, it was a major reason behind one of the most important councils in history. Learn more about the Easter controversy, aka Cordodescent,

Starting point is 00:00:33 on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. Holidays roughly fall into two categories.

Starting point is 00:01:18 The first are holidays which are always on a particular date. For example, New Year's Day is always January 1st, regardless of what day of the week that might be. Another type of holiday is always celebrated on a certain day of the week. For example, American Thanksgiving is always celebrated on the 4th Thursday of November, regardless of what the date might be. The major question which faced Easter early on was, what kind of holiday was it going to be? Was it going to be tied to a date?

Starting point is 00:01:47 or was it going to be tied to a day of the week? And that's actually an oversimplification, as you'll soon see. Plus, there's the whole issue about calendars and the moon. Just a refresher, Easter is a religious celebration by Christians to commemorate the day they believe Jesus rose from the dead. It's the most important day of the year for Christians, and the importance of the date is the major reason why there was such a big controversy surrounding it. The date of the event was never in question,

Starting point is 00:02:15 because it was tied to the Jewish celebration of Passover. Passover was always celebrated on the 14th of Nissan in the Jewish calendar, and the events of Easter took place three days after that. As an aside, Passover today is celebrated on the 15th of Nissan, but I will leave the discussion of the dates of Passover for a future episode. So the date of Easter was never questioned by anyone in the first few centuries of Christianity. When Christianity spread in the first and second centuries, it wasn't very organized. There were disparate communities that developed their own practices and traditions.

Starting point is 00:02:49 In particular, the celebration of Easter was celebrated on different dates in different places. In parts of Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey, Christians would celebrate Easter on the first day of Passover, the same day that Saders were held. Other communities would celebrate Easter on the first Sunday after the start of Passover. And here I need to explain why Sunday is important Christians. The very first Christians were ethnically. and culturally Jewish. They honored the Sabbath, which was on Saturday. However, as they believe Jesus was resurrected on a Sunday, they would keep the Sabbath and then worship on Sunday, which was

Starting point is 00:03:26 called the Lord's Day. As Christianity spread, more Gentiles became Christians who didn't observe the Sabbath. Their day of worship, which recognized the resurrection, was on Sunday. There was another problem. These new Gentile Christians didn't use the Jewish calendar on which Passover was calculated. The Gentiles in the Roman Empire use the Julian calendar, which is a solar calendar. The Jewish calendar is a loony solar calendar, which uses an entire leap month every several years. So you can't just map dates from one calendar to the other. Other communities didn't use the Jewish calendar at all and began to celebrate it on the first Sunday after the first full moon of the spring equinox. The lack of a single date to celebrate the most important day on the Christian

Starting point is 00:04:14 calendar became a huge issue in the second century. There were two primary camps. Those who advocated for celebrating Easter on the 14th of Nissan were known as Quortodeciminism. Quartodeciminism is just Latin for 14th. The church historian Eusebius of Caesarea wrote, quote, the question of no small importance arose at that time, the time of Pope Victor I, around 190. The diocese of all Asia, according to an ancient tradition, held that the 14th day, on the day which the Jews were commanded to sacrifice the Lamb, should always be observed as the feast of the life-giving Posh, contending that the fast ought to end on that day, whatever day of the week that might happen to be. However, it was not the custom of the churches in the rest of the world to end it at this point,

Starting point is 00:05:00 as they observed the practice from which apostolic tradition has prevailed to the present time, of our terminating the fast on no other day than that of the resurrection of our Savior. End quote. One of the advocates for celebrating on the 14th of Nissan was the Bishop of Smyrna Polycarp. The argument was that Polycarp had gotten the belief directly from John the Apostle, which carried a lot of weight. On the other side were those who wanted Easter to be celebrated on a Sunday. To solve the problems of different dates being used for Easter and to address other issues, the Emperor Constantine called the First Council of Nicaa in 325.

Starting point is 00:05:37 Prominent bishops from around the Christian world descended on the city of Nicaea, which is today the city of Isnik in Turkey. Going into the council, there were only two goals that Constantine had set regarding the dates of Easter. The first was to create a uniform date that could be observed by all Christians. The second was to pick a date that wasn't reliant on the Jewish calendar anymore. The reasons for eliminating the Jewish calendar were severalfold. The obvious one was that they didn't want to rely on another religion to determine the dates for Christianity's holiest day. The greater argument, however, was that there was reason to believe

Starting point is 00:06:13 that the Jewish calendar was wrong. Somewhere along the way, an error was made, and the calendar in the fourth century was now off. In particular, the contemporary Jewish calendar at that time was now celebrating the 14th of Nissan before the spring equinox, which was something that had never happened before. In eliminating the use of the Jewish calendar, the goal was to create a new Christian Nissan, Easter couldn't come before the equinox. Confirming these two general principles were really the only things regarding Easter that came out of the Council of Nicaea. Unfortunately, they never selected an actual method of determining the date of Easter, which means that they couldn't get everyone on the same page for using the same date. One place that had a method of selecting the date of Easter that did

Starting point is 00:06:59 satisfy the request of the Council of Nicaea was the church in Alexandria. Alexandria was still the Center for Learning in the world at that time, and had the best astronomers. In Alexandria, they calculated Easter using a system that didn't require the Jewish calendar, and also ensured that Easter wouldn't fall before the Equinox. The Alexandrian Computus, as it became known, was a table that calculated the date of Easter as being the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. This gave Easter a range of 35 days on which it could occur. However, the date of the equinox isn't the astronomical equinox. Rather, they set March 21st as the ecclesiastical equinox. The seemingly minor detail is important because the astronomical equinox is a single

Starting point is 00:07:49 moment that occurs at different clock times around the world on potentially different dates. For example, in 1905, the Vernal equinox occurred in Greenwich, England at 7 a.m., Tuesday, March 21st. It occurred in San Francisco, California at 11 p.m. Monday, March 20th. Similarly, the true astronomical full moon for that time of year happened in Greenwich on March 21st just after the Equinox, and in San Francisco it happened on March 20th just before the equinox. Had the real moon been the guide in each location, Easter would have been kept on March 26th in Greenwich, and on April 23rd in San Francisco. However, the ecclesiastical full moon,

Starting point is 00:08:33 occurred everywhere on Wednesday, April 19th, and hence Easter was the Sunday after April 23rd. The Alexandrian system caught on in the decades following the Council of Nicaa. In fact, many people think that the Council of Nicaa created this system, but they actually did not. By the 8th century, the Alexandrian system for calculating Easter was almost universal amongst Christian churches. For several centuries, everything was good on the dating of Easter front. However, there were other problems with the calendar that I've talked about on past episodes. The Julian calendar was off by a small amount, and over the centuries, those errors piled up. To correct this in 1582, Pope Gregory the 13th announced a new calendar that corrected the drift which had set in with the Julian calendar.

Starting point is 00:09:20 Catholic countries adopted the new calendar rather quickly, and eventually Protestant countries did as well. By the end of the 18th century, almost all of Western Europe was using the new Gregorian calendar. However, the Orthodox churches in the East didn't take to calendar reform, which was instituted by a Catholic Pope. They continued to use the Julian calendar, which was now off by almost two weeks from the Gregorian calendar. This resulted in Orthodox Easter, usually being one week after the celebration of Easter in the West. The Orthodox system of determining Easter is the same as that used in the West. It's just that they use a different calendar. This isn't always the case. In some years, Easter is celebrated on the same day. This was the case in 2017, and it will be the case again

Starting point is 00:10:05 in 2025. In other years, Orthodox Easter might occur five weeks after Western Easter. In 2024, for example, Western Easter is on March 31st, and Orthodox Easter is on May 5th. This difference in dates means that the Easter controversy still isn't over, and there are still efforts underway today to create a single unified date for Easter. In 1963, the Catholic Church held the second Vatican Council. One of the things that came out of it was an agreement to accept a fixed Sunday for Easter if other churches agreed to the change. One proposal would be to simplify it by just using the second or third Sunday every April. In 1997, the World Council of Churches held a summit in Aleppo, Syria, and they made a proposal for the change in Easter. They proposed using the timing of the

Starting point is 00:10:55 astronomical full moon and the astronomical equinox at the Jerusalem meridian. This way, it wouldn't matter what calendar was being used, as it would just eliminate the concept of an ecclesiastical equinox. The plan was to implement the new system in 2001, when both Easters would fall on the same date. However, because this system uses astronomical observations and because the Gregorian calendar is more accurate, this would have resulted in the Orthodox churches having to change their calendar more in the first few years. years, and the proposal was never adopted. This was not the last effort to try to get a unified date for Easter. There were proposals made in 2008 and 2015. There seems to be a desire on the part of

Starting point is 00:11:37 everyone to come up with some sort of solution, but to date, nothing has been agreed upon. The relevant parties had better get to work. Given the way the Julian calendar slowly loses time relative to the seasons, the last year that both Easter's will fall on the same date will be in the year 2700. And that means there's just a little under seven centuries to figure everything out. And for all of you observing Easter, have a happy one, regardless of what day you might be celebrating it. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Kiever.

Starting point is 00:12:15 I want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon, including the show's producers. Your support helps me put out a show every single day. And also, Patreon is currently the only place where Everything Everywhere Daily merchandise is a business, is available to the top tier of supporters. If you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and members of the Completionist Club,

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Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Easter Controversy

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