Language Studies

Aramaic Thoughts

A Break for Easter

I thought it would be fun to take a week or two and talk about something timely, though not necessarily relevant. That is, the date for Easter, and Easter’s relationship to Passover. Apparently, according to the gospel accounts, the Passover meal took place on Thursday. Passover marks the beginning of the Feast of Unleavened Bread. The resurrection of Jesus took place on the Sunday following that Thursday, which would have been also the date of the Offering of Firstfruits (see Leviticus 23:4-14). I say “apparently” because if one consults the commentaries, one will discover that there is no end of controversy about the timeline of “Holy Week.” In fact, the latest issue of Biblical Archaeology Review (March/April 2008, p. 28) includes an article by Bruce Chilton titled, “Should Palm Sunday be Celebrated in the Fall?” In this article Chilton argues the, “The identification of the Last Supper with the Passover Seder is implausible.”

All of those debates aside; however, one would assume that Easter regular followed the observance of Passover, and that the two were thus linked in the date of their observance each year. However, this year Easter occured on March 23, while Passover occurs on April 19. How did that happen? First, the modern method of calculating the date for Easter does not derive from the earliest years of the church. The modern calculation is that Easter Sunday is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. That means that Easter can be as early as March 22 and as late as April 25. However, that only holds true for the Western church. Because the Eastern Church follows the Julian calendar, even though they use the same definition for the date, the date of their Easter observance generally ends up being different from that of the Western church. This year, for example, Eastern Christianity will observe Easter on April 27.

Just a couple of curiosities about actual occurrences of earliest and latest dates: Easter has not occurred on the earliest possible date (March 22) since 1818, and it won’t happen again until 2285. Easter hasn’t occurred on the latest possible date (April 25) since 1943, and will not do so again until 2038. Easter occured on March 23 this year (the second-earliest possible date, but will not do so again until 2160. In 2011, Easter will occur on April 24 (the second-to-latest possible date). The fact that those two extremes occur so closely together is just one of those weird statistical anomalies. (Thanks to the Wikipedia article on Easter for the information in this last paragraph.)

The reader may have noticed that the definition for the date of Easter involves both the solar calendar (spring equinox) and the lunar calendar (date of full moon). This is the main consideration that results in the frequent separation between the observance of Easter and the observance of Passover. The Jewish calendar is a lunar calendar, and Passover is specified in Exodus as the fifteenth day of the first month. In the modern Jewish calendar, this month is Nissan. We’ll explain more about the Jewish calendar and methods of calculation next week.

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