When Is Easter?
It is easy to predict most Western festivals because they fall on the same date each and every year, or at fixed positions like on "the first Sunday". However, Easter does not conform to such methodology and is what is known as a moveable festival because the date changes every year. One would thus need to find out each year when is Easter, as it may fall on any date beginning with March 22 and ending on April 25.
Origins Are In Pagan Festivals
There are certain reasons why one need to calculate when is Easter, and these depend on its origins in pagan festivals of yore. The date of when is Easter can be found out from the lunar calendar rather than the normal solar calendar. There have also been some attempts made to change the date of when is Easter away from the pagan lunar calendar, but these have mostly failed due to the low support they were given.
To find out, through calculations, when Easter is, a method known as "computus" is followed. Computus is nothing more than the Latin equivalent for the term computation, and the method can become quite complex.
Computus was used from the middle ages and was one of the most important computations of that time. According to the canonical rule, Easter Sunday falls on the first Sunday after the 14th day of the lunar month that falls on or later than March 21, which is nominally the day of the vernal equinox.
Finding out when is Easter is very important to Christians, and the proper date has been subject to much controversy, at least from the time that the bishop of Rome and the bishop of Smyrna met. The problem was that if the Roman civil Julian calendar was used, the resurrection of Jesus fell on the Jewish feast of Passover, which was celebrated according to Hebrew lunisolar calendar. It was thus later decided that Christians would use a common method to find when is Easter that would be independent of the Jewish method.
Using present day calculations to find out when is Easter, one can expect the Western date for 2007 Easter Sunday to fall on April 8th and for the next few years it would fall on March 23, 2008, April 12, 2009 and on April 14, 2010. These dates pertain to the Western Easter Sunday and not the Eastern Easter Sunday.
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