Dear Collin Donovan, I know that Christmas is always on the 25th of December, but what determines what date Easter is each year? Thanks and God Bless. DG

Jesus rose from the dead on the day after Passover, which Jews celebrate on the 14th of their month of Nisan, which works out to the first full moon of spring (i.e the full moon on or after March 21st each year).

In the early Church some effort seems to have been made initially to maintain the relation with the dating of Passover, but this eventually proved unsatisfactory, in part because Jewish communities in the diaspora proved unreliable calculators of the date of Passover. However, efforts to calculate it independantly of Passover also depends on the accuracy of calculating lunar and solar cylces, and different parts of the Church adopted different mathematical solutions. In the West a norm based on the more accurate Gregorian Calendar was adopted by Catholics in the 1580s, whereas, Eastern Orthodox Christians continue to use the Julian Calendar, attributed to Julius casaer (c. 50 BC). For this reason Catholic and Orthodox Easters may be a week or more apart.

The rule used to calculate Easter determines first what is called the Pascal Month, which begins with the new moon falling between March 8th and April 15th. Easter is the third Sunday, or Sunday after the 14th day, of that month. By this rule Easter will always fall between March 22nd and April 25th. Because the rabbis use a lunar calendar to calculate Passover, and Eastern Christians the Julian Calendar, the dates of Passover and the two Easters sometimes are close, but can also be several weeks apart.

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