Easter?
@madtownsweety (418)
United States
February 12, 2007 7:43am CST
Ok everyone knows about Easter or almost everyone does. Who decides when Easter is? Why is it that some years it really early in march and other years it late in April. How is this decided? I know this year that ash wednesday is Feb. 21st isn't that kind of early? Any insight into this would be helpful I'm really stumped here!
1 response
@madmax2crazy (1569)
• United States
12 Feb 07
In Western Christianity, Easter always falls on a Sunday from March 22 to April 25 inclusive. The following day, Easter Monday, is a legal holiday in many countries with predominantly Christian traditions. In Eastern Christianity, Easter falls between April 4 and May 8 between 1900 and 2100 based on the Gregorian date.
Easter and the holidays that are related to it are moveable feasts, in that they do not fall on a fixed date in the Gregorian or Julian calendars (which follow the motion of the sun and the seasons). Instead, they are based on a lunar calendar similar—but not identical—to the Hebrew Calendar. The precise date of Easter has often been a matter for contention.
The calculations for the date of Easter are somewhat complicated. See computus for a discussion covering both the traditional tabular methods and more exclusively mathematical algorithms such as the one developed by mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss.
In the Western Church, Easter has not fallen on the earliest of the 35 possible dates, March 22, since 1818, and will not do so again until 2285. It will, however, fall on March 23, just one day after its earliest possible date, in 2008. Easter last fell on the latest possible date, April 25 in 1943, and will next fall on that date in 2038. However, it will fall on April 24, just one day before this latest possible date, in 2011.
2 people like this
@madtownsweety (418)
• United States
15 Feb 07
Thank you for your very informative and thorough answer. That makes me understand it a whole lot more!