Why Is Orthodox Easter on a Different Date?

What you'll notice

Every spring someone at work says, "Wait, didn't you already have Easter?" Some years you didn't; some years it's the same day; and some years Orthodox Pascha comes weeks after the chocolate bunnies have gone on clearance. Then there's Christmas. Some Orthodox celebrate it on December 25 and some on January 7, and both are perfectly Orthodox.

What it's called

Pascha's date is set by the Paschalion (the Church's table for calculating Pascha). Fixed feasts follow either the Revised Julian calendar (the "New Calendar") or the Julian calendar (the "Old Calendar"). Western churches use the Gregorian calendar for both.

What's actually happening

East and West use the same basic rule. Pascha falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox; Hapgood's 1906 service book states the rule in almost those words and notes that the Western Church uses it too.¹ The difference is in which equinox and which moon each side uses.

• The West has used the Gregorian calendar since 1582 and fixes the equinox at March 21 on that calendar. It also corrected the tables it uses to estimate the full moon.
• The Orthodox compute Pascha on the older Julian calendar, which now runs thirteen days behind; the gap has been thirteen days since March 1900 and will stay so until 2100 (Hapgood, writing in 1906, dates it from 1901).² The equinox is still "March 21," but on the Julian calendar, which is April 3 on everyone's phone. And the full moon in the tables isn't the one in the sky. It's the fourteenth day of a lunar month by "the ancient Ecclesiastical computation, and not the real Astronomical Full Moon," as Hapgood puts it.³ Those ancient nineteen-year tables were never updated, and they now run a few days behind the real moon.⁴

So the Orthodox Pascha is usually later, sometimes by a week and sometimes by several, and some years the two calculations land on the same Sunday. Hapgood's book already said so in 1906: "At times this coincides with its date in the Western Church."⁵ You don't need to do the arithmetic yourself; the parish calendar has done it.

Why it matters

The Orthodox have kept the old calculation mostly because it's what the whole Orthodox Church shares. A Greek, a Russian, and an Arab Orthodox Christian sing "Christ is risen" on the same night, whatever their calendars say about Christmas. Changing that would take the whole Church agreeing, and the whole Church agreeing takes time.

Field Note: "Pascha has to come after Passover." You'll hear this a lot, and the honest answer is that Orthodox writers disagree about it. Here are the pieces. The Council of Nicaea in 325 decided that all Christians should keep Pascha "on one and the same day," and Constantine's letter after the council tells the churches not to depend on the Jews' practice to set it.⁶ Apostolic Canon 7 deposes a cleric who keeps Easter "before the vernal equinox, with the Jews," and the Council of Antioch (341), canon 1, deposes clergy who set aside Nicaea's decree by "observing Easter [at the same time] with the Jews."⁷ Neither says "after." On one side, the Rudder, the standard Greek canonical commentary, reads Apostolic Canon 7 as requiring Pascha to follow the Jewish Passover,⁸ and Hapgood's 1906 service book says the Eastern Church keeps the rule "that the Christian Easter shall never either precede or coincide with the Jewish Passover, but must always follow it," which it credits to Nicaea.⁹ On the other side, Father Andrew Stephen Damick traces the "always after Passover" reading to the twelfth-century canonist John Zonaras, who admitted that "no such canon is found in the canons of the Nicene synod," and calls the Passover explanation an urban legend.¹⁰ What's safe to say: the gap in dates comes from the old tables, and the Passover question is argued, not settled.

Where it came from

The Julian calendar, from Julius Caesar's reform in 46 BC, runs about eleven minutes too long each year. By the sixteenth century it had drifted ten days from the sun. Pope Gregory XIII fixed that in 1582: Thursday, October 4 was followed by Friday, October 15.¹¹ The Orthodox didn't adopt it. A Pope had issued it, and the East had its own reasons for caution.

In 1923 an Inter-Orthodox Congress in Constantinople, called by Ecumenical Patriarch Meletios IV, proposed the Revised Julian calendar, a Serbian proposal refined by the astronomer Milutin Milanković. It matches the Gregorian calendar for fixed dates from 1600 to 2800. The congress was thin: only Cyprus, Greece, Romania, and Serbia sent delegates, and Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, and Russia stayed home. It also floated an astronomical date for Pascha, which went almost nowhere; the old Paschalion stayed. Greece switched in March 1924, and the rest came one at a time over the next century. A 1997 ecumenical consultation at Aleppo said plainly that the change "unfortunately led to several schisms."¹² Today:

• The Revised Julian calendar for fixed feasts: Constantinople, Cyprus, and Greece (1924), Romania (1924), Alexandria and Antioch (1928), Albania (1937), Bulgaria (1968), and the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (2023).¹³ The Orthodox Church in America uses it too, but not everywhere: some OCA parishes keep the Julian calendar, and the Diocese of Alaska does.
• The Julian calendar: Jerusalem, Russia, Serbia, Georgia, and the monasteries of Mount Athos, among others. Poland adopted the new calendar in 1924 and went back to the old one in 2014, leaving parishes free to keep the new.
• Pascha: nearly every Orthodox church calculates it the old way, on the Julian Paschalion. The Orthodox Church of Finland went fully Gregorian in 1921, Paschalion included, so it keeps Pascha on the Western date.¹⁴

The gap between the two calendars is thirteen days now. It grows to fourteen in 2100.

The 1997 Aleppo consultation also proposed a common date: keep Nicaea's rule, but compute the equinox and the full moon by the best astronomy, measured from Jerusalem.¹⁵ Neither East nor West has adopted it; each still uses its own tables.

Field Note: Old Calendar isn't "Old Calendarist." The Russian, Serbian, Georgian, and Jerusalem churches keep the Julian calendar and are in full communion with the churches that changed. "Old Calendarists" are something else: groups, mostly Greek, that broke communion over the 1924 change itself. In 1935 three bishops of the Church of Greece joined the movement and consecrated four more. In 1937 it split over how to regard the New Calendar Church: Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Florina held it was in schism only potentially, and Bishop Matthew of Bresthena and others called that a betrayal. The historian George Lardas notes that the two branches have gone their separate ways ever since.¹⁶ They aren't in communion with the mainstream Orthodox churches.

What you do

If you're Orthodox: keep the calendar your bishop and your parish keep, and don't argue about it at coffee hour. You don't need to become a calendar apologist. Faithful Orthodox Christians live on both systems; I've been on each, and I had to do the same amount of laundry either way. New Calendar and Old Calendar churches are in full communion and share one Pascha, so the division is smaller than it looks from outside. No canon names a civil calendar at all; the canons are about Pascha. Father Lawrence Farley points out that Nicaea mandated no civil calendar, Old or New, though he still values the Julian calendar as a marker of identity, which is a different argument from dogma.¹⁷ Saint Paul's word to the Romans about feast days fits here: one person esteems one day above another, and each should honor the Lord in it (Romans 14:5–6). If your Russian friend invites you to Christmas on January 7, go, and bring a dish.

If you're visiting: check the parish website before you plan around Christmas or Pascha. When your Orthodox coworker says "it's our Easter this weekend," the polite reply is "Christ is risen!" They'll be delighted that you knew it.

Go deeper

• Eusebius, Life of Constantine III.18 (NPNF2 1).
• NPNF2 14, "On the Keeping of Easter," with Apostolic Canon 7 and Antioch canon 1.
• Hapgood, Service Book, "A Table to Find Easter Day," p. xix.
• Father Andrew Stephen Damick, "No, the Paschal date difference is not about Passover (and other Orthodox urban legends)," Ancient Faith (2022).
• The Church Year: Feasts, Fasts, and Pascha Every Sunday.

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