When is Easter?

An explanation of the date of Easter, and why it changes every year.
Intro and outro music is my original arrangement of "House of the Rising Sun".
Thanks to Theo Aldridge-Stone for checking out the script.
00:00 Intro
00:38 The Sun and the Moon
03:58 The Hebrew Calendar
05:54 The First Council of Nicaea
07:25 The Lies
10:31 Conclusion
IMAGE CREDITS
Full Moon in London: www.flickr.com/photos/anupsha...
Stonehenge: www.flickr.com/photos/garethw...
First Council of Nicaea: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
World Eastern Orthodox population map: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
(All images are licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)
SOURCES
www3.nd.edu/~pantsakl/Archive...
www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikis...
www.britannica.com/topic/Jewi...
#easter #2023

[@KieranBorovac]

THIS YEAR: Easter 2024 is on the 31st of March. CORRECTIONS: - The diagram at 7:43 is misleading; a more accurate reflection of the orbital mechanics would have the earth tilted at the same angle, but rotating *around the sun* until the tilt is perpendicular. Unfortunately I am not good enough at 3D graphics to properly illustrate this. - I wrote "21 March" at 10:25 when I should have written "21 April"

[@garyfrancis6193]

I use the Candy Calendar. Easter is three months after the Easter eggs show up in the stores. It’s pretty accurate.

[@alanhilder1883]

It's like the "Hot Cross Bun" calendar, but that one was destroyed by the shops doing them all year round.

[@MrGrumblier]

sounds legit.

[@mikebarlow214]

So, how do you properly calibrate the Candy Calendar with Easter not being on a fixed date? I mean, the time between Halloween and Christmas Eve is 54 days, and Christmas Day to Valentine's Day is 52 days. (If we decide to shut off Christmas Candy season on Dec. 23rd and start Valentine's Candy season on Christmas Eve. we could have a base of 53 days. Therefore, Easter under this formula would be fixed on the 53rd day after Valentine's Day, which would fall on April 8th (or 7th if you have a leap year). Congratulations if you made it this far! Monty Python couldn't have done any worse!!!

[@wombat4191]

I think that is a bit location dependent. I don't think it's a convention to start selling easter eggs right after christmas in every place.

[@alexlella8771]

I think you're confusing cause and effect there😂

[@SingABrightSong]

Friend of mine did Y2K testing back in 1999 or so and she mentioned that she was far more likely to crash a database, rather than by setting the date to January 1, 2000, setting it to February 29th. The Gregorian calendar reforms add a leap day every four years, except for every hundredth year, but there's an exception to that exception every four hundred years which many programmers were unaware of, so the very real date of February 29th 2000 threatened a range of important software.

[@johncochran8497]

Yea, I never liked the Gregorian calendar and it's surprising how many people don't understand the leap year rules. And for Y2K, I was surprised at how many people who simply thought "All years divisible by 4 are leap year". And of course, 2000 fits that incorrect rule as well as fits the correct Gregorian calendar rule. As for a leap year rule that I would like would be the two part rule of A leap year happens if the year is divisible by 4 and not divisible by 128. This would result in 31 leap days being added every 128 years which results in an error of approximately 0.2 seconds per year, while the Gregorian rules results in an error of approximately 27 seconds per year (over 100 times the error my preferred method has). But looking at the long term, the Gregorian calendar will be off by a single day after 3200 years, while my method would be off by a single day after 400 thousand years. Just a bit of a difference there.

[@mrbenwong86]

@@johncochran8497 You should be surprise the number of people that doesn't know anything about leap year, some doesn't even know which month has 31 days. let alone hundred year rules. Non of us was alive in 1900, and probably won't be alive in 2100, few people care or know because those exceptions are irrlevant to us.

[@mrbenwong86]

@@johncochran8497 128 years cycles may be good for computers, but not for human, doubt too many people know the next multiple of128 is 2048. No need to be accuate for too distant future, if human survive another 5000 years, we probably have technology to control the rotation or even the orbits.

[@erikutter9818]

@@mrbenwong86 um its 256, 2048 is a bit further on

[@DFYX]

@@erikutter9818 They meant the next year counting from today (2023) that is divisible by 128, which is indeed 2048. The last one before that was 1920.

[@maverick_monkey]

I see that the most crucial compliments have already been delivered, so I’ll just give an enthusiastic thumbs up for that lovely House of the Rising Sun intro and outro!

[@matthaxx7137]

👍Despite the fact that a song about a brothel is being used to accompany a video about a religious festival..

[@CAPITALOFFENSE]

HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN??? IF ONE BELIEVES THEY LIVE ON A SPHERE SHOULDN'T THE TITLE MATCH THIS REALITY? YES, THE TITLE SHOULD BE. 'HOUSE ON A SPINNING EARTH' - RIGHT? OR WAS THE COMPOSER TELLING US SOMETHING THAT WE HAVE ALL MISSED? TOO MANY DRUGS I SUPPOSE. .

[@othamneil8958]

​@@CAPITALOFFENSE It's just the name of the house. "There was a house in New Orleans, it's called the Rising Sun". It's not *on* the rising sun, it's *called* the rising sun.

[@GregPerham]

"Determining your position in a solar cycle requires specialized equipment" *Stonehenge* Literally lol 😆

[@PanglossDr]

This was really interesting. It reminded me of a number of Laws in Physics and Chemistry like Avogadro's Law which are commonly misquoted because they should be followed by the phrase 'at standard temperature and pressure'. The full definition for the date of Easter should be 'The first Sunday after the full Moon that occurs on or after the Spring Equinox, based on specific definitions of Equinox and Full Moon'.

[@JackEnneking]

If you're outsourcing the complexity anyway, you could just simplify to: “The first day that's Easter, based on a specific definition of Easter.”

[@TC-eu7gy]

@@JackEnneking or rather simple "easter is when easter"

[@strider_hiryu850]

the fact that Apollonios of Perga figured out the perfect calendar when he created what is now called the Antikythera Mechanism, twenty two hundred years ago is wildly impressive

[@goskascience]

10:27 The last (bottom right) date should be Sun 21 *Apr*, right?

[@KieranBorovac]

whoops, you're right! added a correction note, thanks :)

[@timothybarnett1006]

Alternatively the is the UK Parliament 1928 Easter Act that establishes Easter Sunday as the Sunday following the second Saturday in April, resulting in Easter Sunday being between 9 April and 15 April. It's never been enforced.

[@highpath4776]

that would be nicer , its cold in March normally, does that mash better with the Eastern date ?

[@TIMBOWERMAN]

The reason it was never enforced is there is a clause in said act that there has to be an agreement from the World Council of Churches; no such agreement has been forthcoming

[@nibbletrinnal2289]

for some god forsaken reason, despite being american, this is the definition i'd always heard? i'm seeing now, looking at the next few years' dates, that there's no way that could possibly be true, but i'm also not religious so i've never thought about it

[@pierremainstone-mitchell8290]

My late dad was an Anglican (Episcopalian) Priest and I remember amusing myself from time to time reading the pages in the Anglican (1662) Prayer Book detailing how to find the date of Easter and I could never really get mt head around it! Glad to see that I'm not alone in this! Btw - I roared with laughter at your comment about working out where you are in the Solar calendar requiring specialized equipment with a quick visual of Stonehenge! Nice one indeed!

[@michaelwright2986]

One summer (Southern Hemisphere) my wife and I were in the country and needed to plan the next year, and needed therefore to know the date of Easter. This was pre-internet (we didn't even have the telephone where we were), but we did have a copy of the Book of Common Prayer, so we settled down to work out the date of Easter from the tables (it was a very old copy, so didn't have pre-computed dates for the year in question). Much to our surprise, and after an hour of game-like activity, we got the answer.

[@pierremainstone-mitchell8290]

@@michaelwright2986 Well done indeed!

[@michaelwright2986]

@@pierremainstone-mitchell8290 At the time, we had had a certain engagement with the medieval Computus, or the arithmetic of the calculation of Easter (in which Bede was an expert, which is why the Synod of Whitby is presented in Bede's Ecclesiastical History as being all about the date of Easter). After grappling with, though not really comprehending, the Computus, I must confess that we were both delighted and surprised that the BCP ready reckoner worked, or perhaps that we could work it.

[@pierremainstone-mitchell8290]

@@michaelwright2986 Definitely very well done indeed! I gave up long before that I suspect and my Dad was "in the trade" as they say!

[@lonnieporter8566]

Your "House of the Rising Sun" arrangement is freaking killer! Love it, man; well done!

[@teebob21]

I want more piano

[@msheaver]

I agree, big time! It is really an incredible arrangement, and it should be shared wit5h the world! Will you post it to Spotify???

[@betaneptune]

Of course, the easiest way to determine the date of Easter is the following: Get yourself a calendar. Look for Easter in March and April. Whatever it says there, that's the date!

[@Voron_Aggrav]

mean yes, but if everyone does it that way, who puts it there to begin with

[@scaper8]

​@@Voron_Aggrav You see, that's where the Easter Bunny comes in. The whole "candy and egg" thing is just a cover story. He's actually one of the highest calendarists in the world. Probably _the_ most supreme, but I don't know of enough of their internal politics to really say one way or the other.

[@MissGaelSML]

I set up my book club's schedule, which meets on Friday and always avoids Good Friday. I used to have trouble finding the date of Easter far enough ahead, a year before the next calendars were published, before the internet and Google made it easy.

[@betaneptune]

@@Voron_Aggrav Well, that's not going to happen. Regardless, IT'S A JOKE. Some like it.

[@betaneptune]

@@MissGaelSML Yep. Pretty easy!

[@bearcubdaycare]

It's interesting that Christmas (birth of Christ) can just always be December 25, but Good Friday and Easter (death and resurrection of Christ) need a complicated formula. It raises the question of why not just pick a fixed date for Easter relative to the calendar, like for Christmas.

[@nowster]

Christmas is exactly nine months after the new year, which is coincidentally why the tax year starts on April 5th. Until a few centuries ago New Year's Day was March 25th. Yes, the year number changed on that day too. Add in the shift to the Gregorian calendar and a bit of jiggering by the treasury and you get to the current date. This is also why September, October, November and December are all numbered wrongly from a modern perspective.

[@katrinabryce]

Because Christmas was a Pagan mid-winter festival that was rebranded with a Christian theme, and doesn't correspond at all with the actual birth date of Jesus, which according to the Bible was some time during the lambing season.

[@nekotranslates]

@@katrinabryce Add to that that Easter is named after Eostur - the Goddess of Dawn, essentially (spelt her name wrong I think)

[@phillwainewright4221]

Jesus is a fictional character. He wasn't born, he didn't die - he was invented.

[@WinstonSmithGPT]

@@nekotranslates 😂😂😂 Found the person unaware other languages exist 🤣

[@thedreamorb1842]

"The ripeness of barley is not a precise astronomical measurement" is honestly a banger quote

[@occamraiser]

Fun fact: The formula for deciding on the date of Easter was decided in an international meeting (Synod of Whitby) in the 7th Century. The same Whitby that Dracula landed at and who's Abbey/Graveyard he took up residence. Frankly, Whitby is more well known for fictional Dracula than for it's contribution to the Western World's ecclesiastical calendar :)

[@jonathanwilliams1065]

It only decided how to do things in Britain, on the mainland the west celebrated one day while the east another, the Celtic Christians in Ireland also followed the eastern formula while the Saxons followed Rome The Synod of Whitby was called to resolve this but instead decided that the British Isles would follow Rome in ALL things, getting rid of Celtic Christianity all the time

[@timtranslates]

I just think of the excellent fish and chips!

[@samiraperi467]

Considering how vampires supposedly react to crosses, that's an odd choice.

[@duetopersonalreasonsaaaaaa]

Jokes on you I didn't know it for either of those things

[@JFHWM]

'Synchronize the incoherent to make rational approximations of irrational measurements', Great video and I enjoyed it thoroughly. It's interesting to see centuries of the evolution from insanity to a more and more sane system but to never be able to fully achieve it.

[@highpath4776]

does pi, e or sq rt2 come into any of this ( prob something to do with foci of a parabolic motion)

[@thevikingbear2343]

I use the Target calendar. Easter is the day I go grocery shopping and Target is closed. Works every year!

[@Meow_YT]

As a JavaScript programmer, I feel the pain in Dates and Times ... just from a different perspective.

[@ZlothZloth]

Boss: I want this nightly process to happen when nobody is working. There's a bunch of stuff going off at midnight, so you do your process at 1:30am. Me: OK, that means there will be one day every year where it runs twice. Boss: Whaaa.... Me: Daylight Savings. When it "falls behind" at 2am, it will become 1am again, so 1:30am happens twice. Boss: So let's use 2:30am... but then it won't run at all one day in the Spring!

[@friedlotto]

This complied beautifully with the BBC’s charter: to inform, educate and entertain. It also reminded me of Zain Rizvi’s delightful post entitled “Falsehoods programmers believe about time zones”, which I suspect @Kieran Borovac and anyone who enjoys his excellent content will find informative, educational and entertaining.

[@highpath4776]

didnt Tom Scott do something about Time measurement on computers (and basically came up with borrow the code from someone else )

[@7636kei]

​@@highpath4776That was he in Computerphile.

[@nowster]

The default daylight savings change date rule in the UK used to be "the Sunday after the fourth Saturday of March and October unless that Sunday is Easter in which case it will be the Sunday after". In practice the default rule was almost never invoked, with the dates being set by Statutory Instrument each year, except for a few times when that didn't happen. EU harmonization in the late 1990s fixed that to the more simple last Sunday in March/October rule we have now.

[@highpath4776]

with that be one of moggie's redundant EU laws that is going from the UK ?

[@nowster]

@@highpath4776 Nope. It's a UK law (as in a law for each of the three legal systems: England and Wales, another for Scotland and a third for Northern Ireland). There's never been such a thing as an EU law.

[@highpath4776]

@@nowster OK a legislative instrument of some kind following an EU Directive ?

[@MrJoeyWheeler]

@@nowster Nice gaslighting. The EU issues directives and mandates its members follow them within a set period. For all intents and purposes, that's "EU Law" to the layman. Not to mention they have their own criminal court system, which should also inform you as to whether they have their own law or not.

[@nowster]

@@MrJoeyWheeler What EU criminal court system? There's never ever been one of those. The UK could exercise its veto on any directive and could have refused to implement it.

[@JesseGraham-ey5cc]

Enjoyed the video, noticed that at 10:26: the bottom right value of the table should read Sun 21 Apr.

[@ytmadpoo]

I'm glad someone else noticed. Sorry, but I had to give the video a thumbs down because the text on screen didn't match what he was saying. I think he also reversed the dates on which Eastern Orthodox and others celebrate Easter on one of the slides. He shwed Orthodox Easter for 2023 as Apr 9th but that's actually when everyone else celebrated it, and Orthodox would be coming up soon on the 16th.

[@anniestumpy9918]

Yeah several people have pointed this out, he really could at least acknowledge it! Otherwise it was quite interesting a video.

[@DirkThys]

1:33 Stonehenge = "specialised equipment" 🤣 On second thought, yes, it is!

[@gunlovingliberal1706]

The piano playing House of the Rising Sun at the end was a great touch. 👍👍👍👍👍

[@TheFeaz]

This comment is a little abstract, but I hope some will appreciate it nonetheless... I often find myself in discussions with people on various topics, including politics, economics, and religion, where I have to explain the idea that many things that we take for granted (the economics of slavery, the ideologies of various religions and yes, the way in which the date for Easter is determined, as opposed to Christmas, for example.) People often assume that the answers to these questions have nice, pithy answers, as if though some Roman emperor, a pope, or some other figure of authority just decreed it so... "From this day hereforward, Christmas shall be on December 25!" And while on some very simplistic level, that may have indeed happened, the reality of the true historical context of these things is considerably more complex. I find the calendar particularly fascinating. I mean, most of us couldn't tell you what the weather was like last Tuesday, let along on this date last year... to say nothing of the trend over 100 years (considerably more than the typical human lifespan, even today). At least today we have Google and ubiquitous access to accurate historical records. That was not the case, especially before the invention of the printing press, when the vast majority of the population wasn't even literate. The very idea that people had enough presence of mind and fortitude to track the seasons accurately enough to notice the calendar was drifting by several days over an entire century is utterly amazing to me. I think historical context is interesting and important to truly understand and learn from history. That ubiquitous access to information that we enjoy today can be of tremendous benefit, but could also prove to be the greatest nemesis to the future evolution of human knowledge. We are excellent "consumers" of information, but we don't truly disseminate it anymore-- we want (and get) everything in answers of 144 characters or fewer. We really need THIS kind of learning to be impressed upon the next generation of students, or we (more accurately our great grandchildren) are likely to find themselves in a world surrounded by incredible technology that they don't truly understand and cannot maintain. Ironically, we could likely solve many of the world's problems (think environment and poverty) today, and yet all of that could completely devolve over a century or two if we fail to pass on the human inspiration to not just "learn", but more importantly to UNDERSTAND the mechanisms of the world around us, including and in particular our history-- how we did things, how we discovered things, and why we did things the way we did them. Understanding when something is wrong is not enough (be it the calculation of a calendar or an economic or human rights concept like slavery). We must understand WHY it's wrong, and how we got there. Understanding the reasoning behind the decisions made in history is vastly more important than criticizing it. After all, criticizing the mathematical or computational prowess of someone who calculated the Earth's orbit around the sun before even a pencil sharpener existed is (to me) about as pointless criticizing the morality or ethics of slavery in a time before the most masic of modern tools and machinery existed. The tremendous genius of human ingenuity is truly mind boggling, and I say that as an engineer who really does understand a lot of this stuff. Thank you for an extremely well-done presentation of this most interesting and relevant topic!

[@ryuquen]

Something funny is if you follow the Chinese Lunar Calendar (which is actually a lunisolar calendar seems more nutty than the hebrew calendar), the first sunday statement seems right on the money at least for recent years. We just had a 15th day (full moon is around this, plus or minus not more than 24h) of a leap 2nd month of this calendar at Apr 5.

[@maigowang]

In addition, a leap 2nd month is quite rare

[@jaybee1570]

When I’m 78 my oldest son’s birthday will be on Easter Sunday. I pray I live to spend that day with him and a son or two of his own. Only by God’s grace will I live that long.

[@rogerr4620]

Excellent video. Thanks!

[@fontagnus]

In addition to the "Sun 21 Mar" typo at 10:25 already mentioned by others, there are two other errors in the tables. 1. At 9:03, the two yellow labels of the first column should be permuted for the table to make sense. 2. At 10:23, in 2019, the "Observed" (= "ecclesiastical" the way you use the term) next full moon (= the computistical, calculated Paschal full moon), is not Sat 20 April, but two days earlier, Thu 18 April. You might be mixing it up with the next "astronomical" full moon after the 20 March one. The choice of the word "observed" in this video is unfortunate, ambiguous as it is ("astronomically observed" or "followed by convention"?). I’m afraid it will confuse a lot of people.

[@MaureenTheTemp]

Fascinating, and really well explained -- thank you!!!

[@alloydog613]

That ran like the intro to the old TV comedy, "Soap"! I was half expecting you to end with "Confused? You will be!" :D

[@phil_p]

Fun fact: My wife and I got married on Easter Saturday. Easter Saturday will never fall on the same date again in our lifetimes.

[@ben251]

Your content is incredible!

[@General12th]

Hi Kieran! I wish you'd include captions for your videos. They're useful for everyone, not just the hard of hearing.

[@KieranBorovac]

Working on it :)

[@robinbennett3531]

thanks for the subtitles

[@Tsukunea]

I always heard "the Sunday after the full moon after the first Wednesday after the Equinox" which I guess solves the 2019 problem

[@angelostsirimokos8104]

Not true. Easter can fall as early as March 22 -- it fell on March 23 in 2008.

[@jjcastaldo4125]

Informative and entertaining. Piano version of "House of the Rising sun" is a nice touch.

[@jtveg]

Thanks so much for sharing. 😉👌🏻

[@anitalmid]

A most brilliant work if I may say so...! Thank you...!

[@dingoniner5528]

Hey, this was a lot of fun to watch. And I'll ignore the typo at 10:26. :-) Thanks very much for the video, great job.

[@anniestumpy9918]

That's not exactly a typo A typo would be writing "Arpil" instead of "April". But he wrote the wrong month!

[@alexandertownsend3291]

This is more complicated than I thought it would have been.

[@oneilluminatus]

Likewise. My head is still spinning 😵‍💫

[@DAK4Blizzard]

Or should have been, for that matter.

[@VolguusZildrohar]

"When does nisan start?" Right after you buy one, then never again.

[@spng1881]

At 9:03 the dates are reversed. Western Easter is on April 9 and Orthodox Pascha (Easter) is on April 16.

[@finlaydunn3244]

Thank You!

[@andymouse]

Fascinating !....cheers.

[@jixpuzzle]

Amazing channel! Subscribed man.

[@OscarFerro]

7:57 I've got a slight correction: in fact the March Equinox never fell on March 25th in the Julian calendar, because when it was instituted in 45 BC the real march equinox already fell on March 23. The romans celebrated the equinox in March 25th because they had a weird system where all equinoxes and solstices fell 7 days before the Kalend of the following month. That's why Sol Invictus was December 25th, the Spring Equinox was March 25th, and the Summer Solstice and Autmnal Solstice were on the 24th of June and September (instead of the 25th) because those months had 30 days instead of 31 like December and March.

[@richardlittle6013]

. Thank you for your helpful video.

[@swinhudson4874]

Thank you for explaining the convoluted thoughts of a cloister of priests. I saw a slight error on the slide comparing astronomical to ecclesiastical calculations for 2019. I have never understood why Easter is when it is and normally used chocolate eggs in the supermarket as my guide.

[@MissGaelSML]

Enjoyed your video! In early March 2000, I gave a program for my book club on the calendar and started by saying that we had just had an event that happened only once every 400 years, which was followed by very puzzled looks. That was Feb. 29, 2000. No one realized how unusual that Leap Day was. I've had my fill of trying to schedule our meetings around Easter. I propose that Easter always be observed on the second Sunday of April. That would definitely be after the March equinox (remember, it's fall in the southern hemisphere). Who cares what the moon is doing at Easter if we're not going to strictly follow the Jewish observance of Passover! This year, Easter did fall on the Sunday after Passover, but some years it's a month off. Who is in charge of deciding when Easter is now?

[@skitraindance]

Amen

[@charanvantijn541]

Thanks. That was quite good. Next time I need to know the date of Easter, I'll ask my search engine.

[@kemasuk]

Your rendition of "House of the Rising Sun" is quite good.

[@rogerkearns8094]

That was interesting, thank you.

[@Andy-ju8bb]

What I was taught was that it depends if there are 12 or 13 full moons in a year. If there are 12 full moons, then Easter falls after the third full moon (like it does next year), but if there are 13 full moons then Easter falls after the fourth full moon (like it does this year). It was explained to me that when there are 13 full moons in a year, the third full moon will always precede the equinox.

[@johnjacobjinglehimerschmid3555]

So does this explanation follow and give the same future dates that he gives at the end of the video? Then all you need to do is learn how to determine the number of full moons in a given year.

[@KosstAmojan]

Fun fact: this is basically a variation of the Metonic cycle. The month is so named because it basically follows the cycle of the moon. So an extra full moon would mean an extra cycle, i.e. an extra month.

[@shawnbenson7696]

Rather than 3rd or 4th etc, just say always on ninth last in the year.

[@robertsmentkowski312]

thanks for showing the varios calendars

[@PeloquinDavid]

Fabulous. I REALLY appreciating new things - particularly when the story is one that resembles what Bismark (I think) said of governmental policy-making: it and sausage-making are two things you shouldn't have to see being done...

[@adrianbulete]

Mainly Catholics and Protestants believers will celebrate Easter this Sunday, on the 9th of April, 2023. Orthodox Easter will be celebrated only next week, on the 16th of April. Overall a nice and interesting presentation, with plenty of details, unfortunately with a somewhat misleading final sentence. All the best from Bucharest. 🙏 🕯

[@RicoMnc]

This is because the Orthodox have an additional requirement of "after the Jewish passover..." for the full moon, I think. It has nothing to do with Julian vs. Gregorian calendar, all Orthodox celebrate Pascha on the same day no matter which calendar they acknowledge. It is usually a week or two after the Roman Catholic date, sometimes on the same date, never earlier.

[@pawelzielinski1398]

@@RicoMnc so the orthodox christians 1) still rely on the Jews to determine their Easter 2) don't care about the full moon occuring near Easter, so are not in sync with Jewish calendar either. 3) their celebrations (any church services and religious celebration) last 2-3 times longer than catholic or protestant ones.

[@Erthradar]

@@RicoMnc The Orthodox do not have this requirement, this is a common misconception.

[@RicoMnc]

@@Erthradar Then what is your understanding of why the date is often different by several weeks for the Orthodox?

[@sydhenderson6753]

@@RicoMnc Because the Orthodox calendar uses the Julian calendar to calculate it.

[@MudakTheMultiplier]

The cover of "house of the rising sun" at the end was a great touch.

[@malteplath]

Excellent! I have always wondered why the proclaimed and the real date of Easter don't match - more than the inconsistency between the Roman and Orthodox Easter.

[@lorenzovalente05]

Very cool music

[@alessandrovilla6759]

So wish I could have read such a complete, well explained treaty about Easter date back in the late 1980s. I was then applying my (fairly new) programming skills to any of the subjects I was coming across; so I tried to develop an algorithm for Easter date (little part of a more complex personnel management program to deal with daily duties and festive days). That algorithm was the only part I could never hammer correctly, indeed had to resort to user inputting the right date instead. Which proved to me, science (to include computer science) is a thing, but human conventions can always find ways to fool around even what is straightest in scientific terms.

[@Camilo-ne1sx]

Wow, your videos are good. You have the Jan Misali vibe and I love it

[@tophat593]

Who would have thought that working out when you celebrate a man rising from the dead would get incoherent? Absolutely excellent video. A real hidden gem of a channel.

[@theabristlebroom4378]

Subbed. You are awesome!

[@garyp645]

Wonderful video! Just a note that there had been proposals to put Easter on a fixed Sunday (say the 2nd or 3rd Sunday of April). The Catholic Church is open to the idea. Vatican Council II (1963) stated: "The Sacred Council would not object if the feast of Easter were assigned to a particular Sunday of the Gregorian Calendar, provided that those whom it may concern, especially the brethren who are not in communion with the Apostolic See, give their assent." Thus far, there has not been agreement among Christians.

[@WORKERS.DREADNOUGHT]

There is only one way to solve theological disputes - the traditional way. FIGHT!

[@iamie153]

My head is also spinning. "If you are watching this in the future". Reasonably confident that everyone is. 🙂

[@earthlingjohn]

I plan on watching this again...in the future

[@Lornicopia]

I noticed this year that spring equinox was a week before the calendar equinox. I also observed this on the weather channel. Oh my!

[@angelostsirimokos8104]

What do you mean by "the spring equinox"? What most of us mean by this term occurred on March 20 this year, at 9:25 pm Greenwich Mean Time!

[@Lornicopia]

@@angelostsirimokos8104 Exactly. It was supposedly on March 20. But appeared to actually happen on the 13th. By the 20th the sun was rising and setting they were 12 hours and 10 minutes apart. On the 13th they were closer to 12 hours and 2 minutes. The way I Guage the equinoxes and solstice visually is by 2 large Leland cypresses planted in my neighbors yard. At the equinoxes the sun sets right behind the points in the middle for a few days. By the 20th it had moved to the North West. It then sets north west until summer solstice and then it moves south west until winter solstice. It sets in the middle again at fall equinox. Just from that observation it seems spring was on the 13th.

[@rayoflight62]

Question asked on Easter Day: "Is it Easter today?" "More or less, yes..."

[@wwjdtd1]

Hi! I'm a time traveler from April 2042 and I just wanted to say that while this video is really educational I'm disappointed you didn't include when Easter would be this year.

[@kevinmahernz]

Thank you for this, I did come across the Paschal calls when I was much younger. From my understanding, the earliest it can be is the 21st of Match and latest is 25th of April , which we'll see in 2038. IMHO, these days it could do with being disconnected from the moon and set as say the last Sunday in March or first Sunday in April - but that would take it away from its roots.

[@SimonClarkstone]

There are further complications: the Jewish calendar sometimes adds or removes days to arrange holy days relative to Saturdays, to avoid too many holy days in a row (due to food preparation rules). Every astronomical measurement is slowly changing for various reasons, including tidal friction.

[@billyswong]

The date of vernal equinox is timezone dependent. If you live in Moscow or somewhere further east, astronomical vernal equinox of 2023 *is* 21st March. Same for 2019.

[@gregkocher5352]

Wonderful. May I have another (video) please?

[@karinwolf3645]

Happy Bunny Day!! 💋💖🐰🕊🐇🎉😎😆

[@mastick5106]

The note about the date of the full moon depending on exactly where you are on the earth is one of the reasons that the ecclesiastical full moon is used instead of the actual full moon. There was a strong desire that all Christians should celebrate Easter (Pascha) on the same day, and this led to the use of formulas instead of astronomical observations to prevent discrepancies in determining the date. Not the only reason, certainly, but a major one.

[@Skeeter51244]

When you speak of lunar months, do you mean a lunar month relative to the earth and sun or relative to the earth and the rest of the galaxy or do we attempt to relate it to the universe?

[@PaulEKlein]

Happy: this video is great, as is your other one. Sad: you only have 2 videos??? Please make more :)

[@pixie99]

Thanks 😉

[@andrewg.carvill4596]

I heard once that, in the Catholic liturgical revisions of the 1960's the idea of fixing the celebration of Easter on the second Sunday of April was mooted, but Pope Paul VI was advised that, among other problems, the move would add to the divisions between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, so the idea was dropped.

[@brontewcat]

Really enjoyed your video. I added a like particularly as you didn’t ask.

[@meslud]

The switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar also didn't happen everywhere at the same time, which was especially confusing because of the 10 days lost. Basically, there would have been people, mostly in Switzerland, who had their children die before they were born, if they switched villages within 10 days of birth, since the Swiss had individual villages switch calendars over the course of a few hundred years.

[@MrHichammohsen1]

That is an amazing video! Will definitely subscribe. Can you please do a video on the arabic or islamique lunar calendar and compare it to this!?

[@tx2016]

7:43 The deffinition is actually "the moment the Ecliptic traverses the Equator" as the axis of rotation of the Earth is never perpendicular to the ecliptic as the Earth is tilted

[@tx2016]

@CipiRipi00 ahhh I see what you mean

[@diegocas33]

This threw me off, too. But, actually he didn't say the axis of rotation of the Earth is perpendicular to the ecliptic *plane*, he said it is perpendicular to the sun-earth *line*, which is true at the equinox

[@CR4TES-Media]

If you are short on time, jump to 10:30 and get the TL;DR. Thanks for the video!

[@alanhill769]

Bravo I really enjoyed your video. Remind me to never ever ask you a question again. I subscribed👍

[@ericjohnson6665]

It would make far more sense to have 13 months of 28 days each, with one day left over, that could be considered to not be in any month, but like the 0 (zero) on the Roulette Wheel, neither red nor black. A sort of leap day each year, with a second leap day every four years. That way, every month could start on Saturday or Sunday with 4 exact weeks each. (One downside of starting on Sunday would be that every month would have a Friday the 13th.) It would be close to a lunar calendar, without the record keeping drawbacks.

[@jakeaurod]

It would take a lot of energy to make the Moon comply.

[@angelostsirimokos8104]

'Close' to a lunar calendar is useless. If one 28-day month started on a New Moon, say, the tenth month after that would start on a Full Moon! And with 13 months in a year, there would be no quarters or semesters...

[@pietergeerkens6324]

Easter has fallen on my birthday three times so far in my life - but will probably not do so again in my lifetime.

[@josephshlanta8870]

Incredible video! Also, the equinox (/soltices?) being on the 25th in the julian is the reason why Christmas was placed on the 25th of December. This is also the reason why it shares that day with so many older pagan holidays, due to the significance of days started to get longer again after the winter solstice Also, a once prominent, but now obscure liturgical book, the Roman Martyrology (the list of (almost) every recorded saint, and when day their feast day is), takes great care to keep track of the day of each Lunar month

[@greggweber9967]

What year near the year 1 AD do both match the same day?

[@ronrice1931]

That was hysterical! Nice job on "House in New Orleans", by the way.

[@allanrichardson3135]

Clever choice of outro music: “The House of the Rising Sun!”

[@virgilpinkley2548]

thanks for this. i point out one display error, on the easter 2019 slide you have easter sunday on mar 21; should be apr 21

[@Ezzell_]

looking at the future easter list.....will there ever be two consecutive years with easter being in march ?

[@Ggdivhjkjl]

Where can we obtain such specialist equipment?

[@jerrykitich3318]

Happy Easter. Hail Caesar.

[@stuffnuns]

“The House Of The Rising Sun” as a theme song for a show about Easter is kinda sardonic, doncha think? Interesting video. Thank you.

[@sail2byzantium]

Much enjoyed your video, both in its contents and its vocal presentation, whose somewhat dry acerbic touch, highlighted by the nice English accent, made for much captivating entertainment and learning. However, I think there is a slight error in the video visuals: @ 10:28: On the "Observed" 2019 Easter table, shouldn't the "Next Sunday" be Sunday, April 21, instead of Sun. March 21 (since that would have a Thursday--and that next full moon acc. to the ecclesiastical calendar was Sat. Apr. 20)? I see as well that so far you have just two videos. Here's to a good many more. Subscribed.

[@leonardtramiel8704]

Nice video. One more complication is that there are at least three different kinds of years. You, and the calendars you reference, are using the tropical year which based on the seasons, not the location of the Earth around the Sun. The difference is caused by precession of the equinoxes.

[@thisnamewastakentoo_]

@10:25 last line. Sun 24 March vs Sun 21 March. How are the Sundays 3 days apart. Did I miss something?

[@angelostsirimokos8104]

The latter is probably a mistake for Sun 21 April, which is indeed the same day of the week as March 24 in any given year.

[@dabass438]

From the canons of Nicea 1, AD 325: Holy Pascha shall be the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. At that time the spring equinox fell on March 25 on the Roman calendar; the Pope of Alexandria pointed out that the sun had crossed the equator on March 21 that year, so the phrase "on March 21" was added to the formula, modifying "spring equinox".

[@archangel_one]

That does it, I say we attach giant parachutes to the moon until it syncs up with something.