Easter marks one of the two high points of the church calendar. As Christmas celebrates the advent and birth of the Messiah, so does Easter commemorate his death and resurrection. And yet Easter is one of those odd holidays that moves around each year seemingly by the arbitrary hand of some higher power.
What is not so commonly known today is that the date of Easter proved to be the subject of bitter, and sometimes violent debate in the history of the church, with implications both political and cultural.
Etymology
But first an etymology.
As most know, Easter is the Christian reinvention of the Jewish holiday of Passover (פֶּסַח - Pesach). Passover was instituted in Exodus 12 at the culmination of the Ten Plagues in Egypt where the angel of death would pass over the households of Egypt and slaughter the firstborn of each household, except for those households of Israel who painted lamb's blood upon the doorway. This symbolizes not only the fulfillment of liberation of slavery but also protection from death through the blood of an innocent sacrifice.
The parallels with Christ's sacrifice are striking, and it is not without reason that it was ordained that Christ was tried and put to death on Passover weekend.
The Hebrew name of Pesach was thus used to refer to the celebration and for most Western languages continues to be used so today.
The Greeks transliterated it into Πάσχα and the Romans carried the name into Latin as Pascha.
This name for Easter is maintained in modern Romance languages as Pâques in French, Pascua in Spanish, and Pasqua in Italian.
Even many Germanic languages have maintained this name with Dutch using Pasen and Swedish using Påsk.
Strangely, English and German are the two outliers which do not use the same "Passover" name for Easter.
For English, we first see reference to this Easter name in the chronicler Bede's De Temporum (725) where Bede refers to the Saxon name for what we call April as "Eosturmonath". He claims that the name "Eostur" refers to the ancient Saxon goddess "Eostre". This seems plausible at first sight as so many of our months and day names come from Germanic pagan deities. However, there simply is no other reference to or mention of this goddess in any other literature or archeological sources. It is completely possible that Bede merely speculates on this.
Another possible explanation is that Easter occurs around the time of the spring equinox. Because spring equinox festivities generally focus on longer daylight hours and earlier sunrises, and the sun rises in the East, the name is merely a reference to this. Like how the date of Christmas is tied to winter solstice festivals. This idea can be corroborated with a comparison to German who call the holiday Ostern and East Ost, both from the High German word ōstarun.
The First Easter Controversy - Quartodecimanism
The first Easter controversy emerged very early on in the history of Christianity, during the apostolic generation, and was concerned with the question whether the celebration of Christ's death and resurrection should happen on the day of his death (the Passover) or on the Sunday of his resurrection. Those who pushed for the Passover date were referred to as Quartodecimanism, because Passover is celebrated on the fourteenth (quarta decima) of the Jewish month Nisan.
The very first mention of Easter as a holiday in fact comes from the 2nd century when Melito of Sardis wrote an essay "On the Pascha" arguing for this Passover celebration date. The Western tradition, the generation following the apostolic ministry of Peter and Paul tended toward the Sunday celebration while Eastern Christians following the Apostle John tended toward the Friday date.
It became such a tenuous issue that Eusebius attests (V.23-24) the early church father Polycarp traveled from Anatolia to Rome in part to hold discussions with his Western counterparts on this Easter date issue. However, at the time they decided to practice their customs separately but remain reconciled within a single faith.
At a high level, the issue boils down to questions of theme and identity.
The first few generations of Christianity struggled to establish itself as an independent faith not attached to Judaism. Many external writers of the time referred to Christianity as a Jewish sect (as there were many), and even within the first generation Christ-followers would attend synagogue in cities where there was no establish presence.
This led to an internal tension within Christian communities as to the degree to which Christianity should be a Jewish faith. This is a large theme in the Pauline epistles, as he strove to disconnect Christian practice from "Judaizing" influence which he argued re-introduced legalism that undermined the very core of Christian doctrine.
By celebrating Easter in the same way as the Jewish faith, Christianity seemed to merely be a subset of Judaism.
On the other hand, other Christians felt it extremely important to reclaim the theme of Passover and definitively state that Christ's death is a repetition of the original Jewish Passover tradition. To disconnect the holiday from this historic event was to undermine the definitive theological connection between the two and also to deny that Christ was reclaiming and reinventing the Passover tradition through the new covenant, as much of the Christian tradition frames itself as a new iteration against the old version of Judaism.
Eventually, this conflict came to a head by the close of the 2nd century as several synods were convened to rule on the question of the date of Easter. As Eusebius recounts, these synods ruled that Sunday would be the official day of Easter, placing greater emphasis on the resurrection of Christ and his triumph over death as the real essence of the holiday.
Those who remained stoutly in favor of Quartodecimanism such as Polycrates of Ephesus were briefly excommunicated by Pope Victor I until other Western bishops such as Irenaeus pressed the Pope to re-admit Quartodecimans. We have other testimonies of others like John Chrysostom simply denying Quartodecimans admittance to church at all. This was an issue not taken lightly.
What is not clear after is what point Christians all shifted to celebrating the Easter date on Sunday, though we do know this was very nearly universally adopted following the Council of Nicaea if not before then. However, Nicaea was itself concerned with another aspect of the Easter controversy.
The Second Easter Controversy - Jewish or Roman Calendar
So it had been established by the end of the second century that doctrinally at least Easter should be celebrated on Sunday. But this did not quite settle the issue as there were different calendars at play here.
The Hebrew calendar is lunisolar, consisting of 29-30 days each month, with an extra lunar month added each year to average out the days.
By contrast, the Julian calendar introudced by Julius Caesar is a purely solar calendar of 365 days with a leap day every fourth year.
So while Christians were agreed that Easter would fall upon the "Sunday" following Passover, it was not definitively clear whether this meant adherence to the Jewish calendar for reckoning the date of Passover or if some corollary date in the Roman calendar should be used.
This again sparked dispute and debate depending on the apostolic heritage of various church communities.
In fact, it was of such significance that it was a primary point of discussion during the first ecumenical council of Nicaea which is known today for "writing the book" on core Christian doctrine across various branches and denominations, with regard to the divine and human nature of Christ, and other key theological questions.
Emperor Constantine I took more executive action in this decision and ruled that the date of Easter simply could not be celebrated according to the Jewish calendar because that meant that there would be some years in the Roman calendar where Easter would be celebrated twice.
It was determined that Easter should be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon following spring equinox and that decision in 325 AD is how we still determine the date of Easter today. This was based on the Alexandrian method of measuring years, as Alexandria was one of the largest scientific centers of the period and was seen as most precise in calculating time. This ensured that Easter would follow a 19-year cycle before it was celebrated on the same day again, as it continues to this day.
The Third Easter Controversy - Ireland versus Rome
However, this did not mark the end of Easter's controversies, as trouble reared its head again a few centuries later.
This third one originates with St. Patrick, whose own festival is just now behind us. While we generally picture the spread of Christianity across early medieval Europe as the emanation of concentric circles going from France to England and Germany and from there to Scandinavia and Poland, etc. there are exceptions to this rule.
Ireland is one such exception as one extremely early adopter of Christianity for the region, especially as it was never occupied or controlled by the Romans. St. Patrick is notable for establishing one of the only centers of Christianity north of Mediterranean that was so completely independent of Rome.
Because Ireland was such as an early adopter, Irish missionaries would cross the Irish Sea to evangelize peoples of England. We even have the Irish monk Columbanus traveling to modern-day Belgium as a missionary and founding one of the most popular centers of monastic learning and teaching on the European continent, Luxeuil Abbey in France and Bobbio Abbey in Italy being among them.
On the other hand, we have the famous missionary St. Augustine (no connection to Confessions Augustine, the bishop of Hippo) who was sent from Rome to evangelize England. Because of this there were two separate Christian influences in Saxon England, the Celtic and the Roman strain.
This was not problematic earlier on as they shared the common goal of converting pagans on the British Isles to Christianity. However as paganism began to disappear from English shores, the cultural tensions between the Celtic and Roman variants became more pronounced, as is only natural when two cultures come in contact with one another.
Ironically, the one single issue which was the breaking point between these two Christian elements was the date of Easter.
Because Ireland never had a Roman presence, it never had adopted the Roman calendar. Irish monks at the isle of Iona had adopted the practice of celebrating Easter on an 84-year cycle which had been the general practice in Celtic Gaul and even for some Romans prior to the Council of Nicaea. However, this clashed with the 19-year cycle ruling established by the Council of Nicaea.
This proved one of the most politically significant disputes in the episodes of Easter controversies as bishops, priests, and even political appointees were chosen, passed over, dismissed, and even exiled based on their positions on this issue in medieval English lands.
The most notable of these situations involves the kingdom of Northumbria, in Northern England today. While Roman Christianity had gained a strong foothold in Northumbria, a man named Oswald gained the throne in 633, and he was incidentally educated and raised in part by Irish monks. Oswald invited many Irish monks to positions of prestige and influence in his kingdom, and he was one of the most proactive rulers of Northumbria to promote a general conversion to Christinaity.
Following Oswald's death, Oswiu came to power in Northumbria which had grown very largely divided between Celtic and Roman Christianity. The issue of the date of Easter was coming to a head not only because it proved logistically challenging for lords to arrange feast days in mixed communities, but also because it was an indicator of which side possessed true hegemony, and neither side wished to back down.
To resolve this, Oswiu called the Synod of Whitby in 664 AD to rule once and for all on this date of Easter question. The other prime issue of this synod was whether monks were to shave their heads (tonsure) in the Irish or Roman style. After long and tenuous debate, it was ruled that Northumbria would align itself with Roman Catholicism on both issues. By all accounts, Oswiu merely attended and presided over the synod without intervening directly, but this was also politically convenient for him to align himself with Roman Christianity as it gave him more leverage to wage war against the Britons to the West and the Scottish peoples of the North who were more Celtic than Roman.
In either case, this synod incidentally spelled the beginning of the end for Celtic Christianity as a cultural hegemon as the major English kingdom of Northumbria swung to the side of Rome, and over time all of the British Isles would slowly align themselves to Roman Catholicism for the following centuries until the Reformation came nearly a millennium following the Synod of Whitby.
The Date of Easter Today
One would think the matter definitively settled by this age, considering how many controversies have existed over the date of Easter.
However, many Eastern Orthodox churches celebrate Easter on a different day than Western churches. Again this boils down to the divergence of calendars.
The Julian calendar was the universal Christian calendar for quite some time, but it is not the calendar we use today.
In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII, the central pope of the Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent, also implemented a new reformed calendar that added precision to the Julian Calendar. This Gregorian Calendar added exceptions to leap years in order to keep the calendar better aligned with the solar cycle. For the Gregorian Calendar, leap years would be celebrated every four years except on a century year unless that century year was divisible by 400. So for example while 1600 and 2000 were leap years, the years 1800 and 1900 were not. 2100 will also not be a leap year.
The adoption of the Gregorian calendar was very gradual and unique to each country, but it was adopted across the British Empire in 1752 when a few days were "erased" from history. This also is one of the last British reforms to have taken root in colonial America before the American Revolution severed ties between the two states.
So while the Western world today celebrates Easter according to the Gregorian calendar, the Eastern Orthodox church uses the original Julian calendar and Alexandrian method as ruled by the Council of Nicaea. However, with the Western and Eastern churches already split by the time of this divergence, there was no need for further controversy.
--
One cannot help but reflect that this was certainly was one of Christ's chief concerns when he died on the cross and rose again, and one can only hope that Heaven is keeping its calendar in line with ours, lest there should prove to be a Fourth Easter Controversy when Christ returns and there is a calendar desync between the new heavens and new earth.