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A dove flies over the pallium of Our Lady of Sorrows during a penitential procession of Holy Week in Seville, Spain. (Jose Manuel Vidal / EPA-EFE / REX / Shutterstock)
The religious debate was lively: more than 300 bishops representing different factions of the Christian church gathered in the 4th century in present-day Turkey.
One of the topics on the table was Easter.
The early Christians were not in agreement as to whether Easter, the most important theological festival, should be celebrated alongside the Jewish Pbadover holiday. The Syrian churches, who wanted the holidays to fall on the same day, were in the minority.
The bishops gathered at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD attempted to resolve the dispute. All churches would determine the date of Easter using the method of the Christians of Rome and Alexandria, Egypt, wrote the bishops to the churches of Alexandria after the meeting.
The letter, however, left a key question unresolved.
"It does not tell you how to do the math," said Susan Wessel, professor of theology and religious studies at the Catholic University.
Pope Francis celebrates Palm Sunday Mbad on St. Peter's Square at the Vatican, just as the Catholic Church was entering Holy Week. (Gregorio Borgia / AP)
The end result was another gap between Christians. Catholics and Protestants now celebrate Easter on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the Spring Equinox, placing the holiday from March 22 to April 25.
While most churches calculate the date with the Gregorian calendar created by Pope Gregory XIII, the Orthodox churches use the older Julian calendar established by Julius Caesar. Orthodox Christians celebrate Easter between April 4 and May 8.
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As a result, anyone trying to plan an egg hunt or calculating when stores will store chocolate bunnies should take a fresh look at the calendar each spring to find the right dates. Easter falls late in the year, with most churches celebrating it on April 21 and Orthodox Christians recognizing it a week later.
The initial disagreement between the bishops on when to recognize the holiday was focused on the direct link between Easter and Pbadover, when Jews celebrate their liberation from slavery in ancient Egypt. In the biblical story, God inflicted epidemics on the Egyptians. The Jews who marked their doors with lamb blood had gone unnoticed and did not suffer the scourge of the death of their eldest son.
A Palm Sunday procession in Debrecen, Hungary. (Zsolt Czegledi / EPA-EFE / REX / Shutterstock)
The early Christians in Syria, who lived near the Jews, wanted to maintain the theological link between Easter and Easter, said Wessel. They made a parallel between the sacrificial lambs of the Pbadover and the figurative lamb of Jesus Christ, who, according to them, died on the cross to repair the sins of humanity.
Roman and Alexandrian Christians, for their part, think that Easter should be a Sunday because of the Christian belief that Jesus was raised from the dead that day. This group also tried to differentiate itself from Judaism, said Wessel, and did not want to link Easter directly to Pbadover.
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The Roman church was beginning to be considered the epicenter of faith and its ideas bore their weight, said Wessel. This influence, combined with negotiations to make sure the Alexandria church was on her side, helped her win the debate.
The exact reasoning of early Christians to decide that Easter should be Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox remains somewhat elusive. The importance of the full moon is related to how the date of Pbadover is determined, said Wessel. The date of this "Easter full moon" is calculated on the basis of lunar cycles and may differ slightly from the full moon, wrote Panos Antsaklis, professor of engineering at the University of Notre Dame, in an article of 2005.
The importance of the spring equinox may be its badociation with rebirth, Wessel said, but there is no evidence that the bishops referenced it for this reason.
Even after this method of finding the Easter date was created, the disagreement did not die completely.
"In any case, from the Council of Nicaea, everything is established and everything is the same," said Wessel.
In the middle of the fifth century, she declared, Pope Leo I acknowledged that Alexandria had moved away from Rome and began to calculate the date of Easter using a different calendar. The realization triggered tensions, said Wessel, but factions have kept their systems separate.
The method of calculating the date is periodically challenged to date. The bishops at the Second Vatican Council of 1963 proposed to set the date of Easter on a particular Sunday, in accordance with one of the constitutions of the council. In 1997, the World Council of Churches also tried unsuccessfully to standardize the process.
"It's an ongoing debate because of the complexity of the calculations," said Wessel. "Nobody really knows how the other does it and the reasons for it."
According to Wessel, however, this probably suits modern churches. In the grand scheme of religious debates, she said, the date of Easter is one of the topics on which Christians can agree not to agree.
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