I read an article the other day that proposed that Christmas should always be on a Wednesday. It listed a number of reasons why that would be a good day to celebrate Christmas every year, such as it wouldn’t be too close to weekend Masses, it would enable people to get good deals on weekend travel discounts, etc.
Well, that got me to thinking….
Pretty much everyone agrees no one really knows the real birthday of Jesus. But most historians and scholars agree that He was not born on December 25. Something I’ve always wondered about, is why is Christmas always on December 25 and the date for Easter different every year? Christmas is the day of Jesus’ birth and Easter is a celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus. Both events are described in the Bible — why is one fixed and the other variable?
Well, I’m not sure my extensive research clears it up much, but here goes….
In all likelihood, Jesus wasn’t born on December 25 — that date was chosen because it corresponded to pagan events that took place at the same time, like the Day of The Birth of the Unconquered Sun. This was a festival of the sun god Mithras that saw the winter solstice as the rebirth of the sun as it began to win the battle over darkness. Also, Saturnalia, a Roman festival in honor of the god Saturn that involved feasts, giving gifts and a carnival atmosphere, took place around the same time.
By putting a Christian festival on the same date as a pagan festival, the Church made it easy for people to covert to Christianity and give up their old beliefs. That’s at least one explanation for picking December 25 for Christmas.
It’s fairly easy to pick a day for a birth, but apparently picking a day for Resurrection is a bit more complicated….
The Gospels, the accounts of the life, death and Resurrection of Jesus included in the Bible, place the date of the Crucifixion as Friday, April 3. So, if we know Jesus died on April 3, why is the date of Easter different every year?
The reason, according to scholars — is that the date varies because the last week in the life of Jesus, a period known as the Passion, includes a series of connected events that must fall in the right place on the calendar.
The events include the Last Supper (on what’s now known as Maundy Thursday) and the Crucifixion (on what we call Good Friday.) That was followed two days later by the Resurrection, when Jesus rose from the dead — on Easter Sunday.
The Last Supper was at or around the time of Passover, the Jewish holiday celebrating the Israelites being freed from slavery in Egypt. Passover begins at the full moon. If Easter was on a fixed date, then Good Friday might not fall on a Friday and the other related dates would be in the wrong place too. So there needed to be a system to work out where the events should be every year.
“Originally” there was no consensus on the date of Easter, but during the First Council of Nicea, in 325 AD, a group of bishops laid down the rules on how it should be worked out. They decided that Easter must always be a Sunday. It had to be the first Sunday following the full moon at Passover, the time of the Last Supper. But because the full moon can fall on different days in different time zones, it was decided that the date would always be taken as the 14th day of the lunar month, and it must always be the next full moon after the Spring Equinox. This is now called the Paschal Full Moon, and it can vary by as much as two days from the actual full moon. Once that date is known, the the Easter holidays can be given their place on the calendar.
Logically, this doesn’t completely make sense to me, but religion, in general, doesn’t really lend itself to logic. That’s where faith comes in… you don’t logically try to figure religion out — you either have faith, or you don’t.
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