Passover

Being raised by an extremely religious woman, I've always been fairly curious about all religions. I know the basics of the various Christian religions, and now I'm figuring out some of the others. Thanks to some friends at NU, I now know a little about Mormons. I also know the basic differences between Judaism and Christianity, but I still don't really know the Jewish holidays. I always hoped that Corey would be able to help in this area, but she usually didn't know herself.

Passover was this past week and this peaked my curiosity again. Digging back to the years spent in Sunday school, I thought that Easter was based off of Passover because Jesus was killed at the end of it, or something like that. To validate by theory, I've asked about everyone I've talked to over the past couple of days. Sadly enough, no one was able to help. I find this disturbing for several reasons.

1. That people follow their own faith without knowing details or reasons
   
2. That people follow their faith without exploring other religions
   
3. That for some reason I am the only one interested in this - as in, what is wrong with me that I even care?

But, I do care. So here is the answer for anyone else who is interested:

The Last Supper was indeed the Passover; thus Holy Thursday, in the year that Christ was crucified, fell on Passover. That made Easter, the day that Christ rose from the dead, the Sunday after Passover.

Because Christians in different areas were celebrating Easter on different days, the Council of Nicaea, in A.D. 325, established a formula for calculating the date of Easter. That formula was designed to place Easter at the same point in the astronomical cycle every year; if followed, it would always place Easter on a Sunday after Passover. And indeed, that formula is still followed today.

Why, then, will Jews celebrate Passover beginning on April 19, 2008, while Western Christians will celebrate Easter on March 23?

The answer, is that, since the standardization of the Hebrew calendar in the fourth century A.D., "actual observations of celestial events no longer played a part in the determination of the date of Passover." Thus, "the rule for Passover, which was originally intended to track the vernal equinox, has gotten a few days off."

The same thing has happened with the Eastern Orthodox calculation of the date of Easter. Because the Eastern Orthodox still use the astronomically incorrect Julian calendar, rather than the Gregorian calendar that was adopted in the West in 1582, the Orthodox will celebrate Easter this year on April 27.

With the adoption of the Gregorian calendar, the West brought the calculation of Easter back into sync with the astronomical calendar. In other words, the Western date of Easter is the most closely aligned to the astronomical cycles on which the date of Passover is supposed to be based.