Easter is the holiest of holidays for Christendom. Since the time of the early church, determining the date of Easter has been a matter of argument. The date of Easter is calculated to be on the Sunday immediately following the Paschal Full Moon of the year. The date of the Paschal Full Moon is determined from historical tables, and does not correspond to lunar events. Most of Christendom, including the Armenian Church (except in Jerusalem), follows the Gregorian calendar. Eastern Orthodox churches still use the Julian calendar (for calculating the date of Easter). This is partly why the dates are rarely the same. The date for Easter in the Armenian Church can range from March 22 to April 25.
There have been a number of attempts to unify the Easter dates. In 1965 the World Council of Churches (WCC) began a discussion on the topic that continued for a number of years. In 1997 the WCC and the Middle East Council of Churches hosted a meeting in Aleppo, Syria, and they came up with a suggestion not for a fixed date, but a fixed formula. The churches could not come to an agreement. And although it is generally agreed that the Last Supper was the Passover meal, Passover and Easter do not always coincide, because the date for Passover is calculated according to the Hebrew calendar.
Posted from Eastern Prelacy’s weekly Crossroads E-Newsletter
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