Doggett, L.E. (1992). Seidelmann, P.Kenneth (ed.). Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Almanac. Washington: U.S. Naval Observatory. p.582. ISBN 0-935702-68-7. Fish is the traditional food of choice for Good Friday suppers, while some devout Christians opt to fast instead in memory of the sacrifice given by Jesus Christ. The Ptolemaic value of the length of the mean synodic month, established around the 4thcenturyBCE by the Babylonians, is 29 days 12 hr 44 min 3 + 1 / 3 s (see Kidinnu); the current value is 0.46s less (see New moon). In the same historic stretch of time the length of the mean tropical year has diminished by about 10s (all values mean solar time). Nothaft, C. Philipp E. (2018). Scandalous Error: Calendar Reform and Calendrical Astronomy in Medieval Europe. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-879955-9. Archived from the original on 9 April 2023 . Retrieved 27 November 2020. Two modern astronomical Easters were proposed but never used by any Church. The first was proposed as part of the Revised Julian calendar at a Synod in Constantinople in 1923 and the second was proposed by a 1997 World Council of Churches Consultation in Aleppo in 1997. Both used the same rule as the German and Swedish versions but used modern astronomical calculations and Jerusalem time ( TT + 2 h 21 m) without the Nisan 15 rule. The 1923 version would have placed the astronomical Easter one month before the Gregorian Easter in 1924, 1943, and 1962, but one week after it in 1927, 1954, and 1967. [28] The 1997 version would have placed the astronomical Easter on the same Sunday as the Gregorian Easter for 2000–2025 except for 2019, when it would have been one month earlier. [29] Theory [ edit ]

Being able to eat eggs once again was a really big deal. That's when people started the custom of decorating eggs," Kizenko said.

In his Kalendarium of 1474, Regiomontanus computed the exact time of all conjunctions of the Sun and Moon for the longitude of Nuremberg according to the Alfonsine Tables for the period from 1475 to 1531. In his work he tabulated 30 instances where the Easter of the Julian computus disagreed with Easter computed using astronomical New Moon. In eighteen cases the date differed by a week, in seven cases by 35 days, and in five cases by 28 days. [66] Early Christians celebrated, therefore,every Sunday like it was Easter. There was no annual commemoration of Easter early on, but by the second and third centuries, there comes to be an annual celebration of Easter,"O'Malley continued, adding that the celebration later grew. The eastern Roman Empire accepted it shortly after 380 after converting the computus to the Julian calendar. [62] Rome accepted it sometime between the sixth and ninth centuries. The British Isles accepted it during the eighth century except for a few monasteries. [ citation needed] Francia (all of western Europe except Scandinavia (pagan), the British Isles, the Iberian peninsula, and southern Italy) accepted it during the last quarter of the eighth century. [ citation needed] Find sources: "Date of Easter"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( July 2020) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Mosshammer, Alden A. (2008). The Easter Computus and the Origins of the Christian Era. Oxford: University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-954312-0. Archived from the original on 9 April 2023 . Retrieved 9 June 2021.

A possible consequence of this intercalation is that 14 Nisan could occur before the equinox, which some third-century Christians considered unacceptable (this cannot happen in the fixed calendar in use today). [10] Consequently, it was decided to separate the dating of Easter from the Hebrew calendar, by identifying the first full moon following the March equinox. By the time of the First Council of Nicaea (AD325), the Church of Alexandria had designated 21 March as an ecclesiastical date for the equinox, irrespective of actual astronomical observation. In 395, Theophilus published a table of future dates for Easter, validating the Alexandrian criteria. [11] Thereafter, the computus would be the procedure of determining the first Sunday after the first ecclesiastical full moon falling on or after 21 March. While the net 4 × 8 − 3 × 25 = 43 epact subtractions could be distributed evenly over 10,000years (as has been proposed for example by Lichtenberg 2003, pp.45–76) if the corrections are combined, then the inaccuracies of the two cycles are also added and cannot be corrected separately. The frequency distribution for the date of Easter is ill-defined, because every 100 to 300 years the mapping from golden number to epact changes, and the long-term frequency distribution is only valid over a period of millions of years (see below), whereas the system will certainly not be used for that long. The expression 6 d works the same way. Increasing d by some number y indicates that the full moon occurs y days later this year, and hence we should compensate y days less. Adding 6 d is mod 7 the same as subtracting d, which is the desired operation. Thus, again, we do subtraction by adding under modulo arithmetic. In total, the variable e contains the step from the day after the day of the full moon to the nearest following Sunday, between 0 and 6 days ahead. The constant N provides the starting point for the calculations for each century and depends on where 1 January, year 1 was implicitly located when the Gregorian calendar was constructed.

Holy Week

The English word Easter, which parallels the German word Ostern, is of uncertain origin. One view, expounded by the Venerable Bede in the 8th century, was that it derived from Eostre, or Eostrae, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring and fertility. This view presumes—as does the view associating the origin of Christmas on December 25 with pagan celebrations of the winter solstice—that Christians appropriated pagan names and holidays for their highest festivals. Given the determination with which Christians combated all forms of paganism (the belief in multiple deities), this appears a rather dubious presumption. There is now widespread consensus that the word derives from the Christian designation of Easter week as in albis, a Latin phrase that was understood as the plural of alba (“dawn”) and became eostarum in Old High German, the precursor of the modern German and English term. The Latin and Greek Pascha (“Passover”) provides the root for Pâques, the French word for Easter. The date of Easter and its controversies As a result of the Irish Synod of Magh-Lene in 630, the southern Irish began to use the Dionysian tables, [21] and the northern English followed suit after the Synod of Whitby in 664. [22]

Although prior to the replacement of the Julian calendar in 1752 some printers of the Book of Common Prayer placed the saltus correctly, beginning the next month on 30 July, none of them continued the sequence correctly to the end of the year. Thus the lunar month took the name of the Julian month in which it ended. The nineteen-year Metonic cycle assumes that 19 tropical years are as long as 235 synodic months. So after 19 years the lunations should fall the same way in the solar years, and the epacts should repeat. Over 19 years the epact increases by 19 × 11 = 209 ≡ 29 ( mod 30), not 0 (mod 30). That is, 209 divided by 30 leaves a remainder of 29 instead of being a multiple of 30. This is a problem if compensation is only done by adding months of 30 days. [e] The Easter cycle groups days into lunar months, which are either 29 or 30 days long. There is an exception. The month ending in March normally has thirty days, but if 29 February of a leap year falls within it, it contains 31. As these groups are based on the lunar cycle, over the long term the average month in the lunar calendar is a very good approximation of the synodic month, which is 29.530 59 days long. [30] As an example, if the epact is 27 (xxvii), an ecclesiastical new moon falls on every date labeled xxvii. The ecclesiastical full moon falls 13 days later. From the table above, this gives a new moon on 4 March and 3 April, and so a full moon on 17 March and 16 April.

The First Council of Nicaea (325) did not, however, provide any explicit rules to determine that date, but only wrote "all our brethren in the East who formerly followed the custom of the Jews are henceforth to celebrate the said most sacred feast of Easter at the same time with the Romans and yourselves [the Church of Alexandria] and all those who have observed Easter from the beginning." [60] The medieval computus was based on the Alexandrian computus, which was developed by the Church of Alexandria during the first decade of the 4th century using the Alexandrian calendar. [61] Audette, Rodolphe (9 December 2007). "Dionysius Exiguus – Liber de Paschate". Archived from the original on 15 April 2021 . Retrieved 26 June 2021. Easter mass is one of the longest sessions of the Catholic mass. For some, the Easter Vigil begins after sunset on Saturday night or early Sunday morning into the sunrise of Easter. With more readings, songs and rituals, mass can be anywhere from two to three hours. Hot cross buns are traditionally eaten on Good Friday. Traditionally, the bread serves as a reminder of Jesus dying for our sins due to the shape of the cross that appears across the top of the bun. They are generally consumed as a breakfast food and come straight from the oven.

From the perspective of those who might wish to use the Gregorian Easter cycle as a calendar for the entire year, there are some flaws in the Gregorian lunar calendar [46] (although they have no effect on the paschal month and the date of Easter): The range of days considered for the full moon to determine Easter are 21 March (the day of the ecclesiastical equinox of spring) to 18 April—a 29-day range. However, in the mod 30 arithmetic of variable d and constant M, both of which can have integer values in the range 0 to 29, the range is 30. Therefore, adjustments are made in critical cases. Once d is determined, this is the number of days to add to 22 March (the day after the earliest possible full moon allowed, which is coincident with the ecclesiastical equinox of spring) to obtain the date of the day after the full moon. The date of Easter is calculated from the first Sunday after the first full moon following the Spring equinox in March.

Background

A simplified method for determining the date of Easter for all years 326 to 4099 by Ronald W. Mallen The sequence number of a year in the 19-year cycle is called its golden number. This term was first used in the computistic poem Massa Compoti by Alexander de Villa Dei in 1200. A later scribe added the golden number to tables originally composed by Abbo of Fleury in 988. Zeyer, Klaus Peter (2020). "Häufigkeit von Osterparadoxien: Negative Äquinoktialparadoxien der Jahre 2353 und 2372 als seltenste Variante". Regiomontanusbote. 33: 5–10. Seasons calculator". Time and Date AS. 2014. Archived from the original on 23 March 2019 . Retrieved 23 March 2019. To be honest, I find (this tradition to be) a little less creepy than a giant bunny coming into my house to deliver candy," O'Malley joked."The bells leave the churches and drop candy everywhere."