Why is Easter out of synch w/ Passover?
Article linked below discusses the once-in-a-many-many-lifetime convergence of several major religious holidays tomorrow: Good Friday, Purim, Narouz, and Eid Milad an Nabi.
This is all very interesting, of course, but what has me currently stumped is this: why is Easter out of synch with Passover this year? Passover isn't until April 20! I knew that Easter was a "movable feast," and the same article below gives the basic calculation for setting its date: he Sunday after the first full moon on or after the day of the vernal equinox.
OK... but isn't about 80% of the symbolism of Christ's death depend on the fact of it be *on* passover? That is, He became the final passover lamb?
So why would our celebration of one be out of sync with the other? Did the Jewish and Christian calendars get out of sync sometime in the last several hundred years and never re-aligned?
Link: Happy Everything
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Annette, Thursday, 3-20-08 10:06 PM
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re: Why is Easter out of synch w/ Passover?
blame it on leap year...
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Ben, Friday, 3-21-08 12:15 PM
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re: Why is Easter out of synch w/ Passover?
OK, so of course I couldn't let it lie: turns out that the Eastern Orthodox church does celebrate Easter at roughly the same time as Passover. The difference is we're using a fixed but non-astronomically accurate date for the equinox in order to make prediction of the Easter date easier in advance. They're doing it closer to "right," and also closer to the ways the Jews manage Passover dates.
If anyone cares, there's a nice long article about it below
Link: A Tale of Two Easters
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Annette, Friday, 3-21-08 3:32 PM
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