✝️ Easter Date

computus · golden number · epact · Western & Orthodox · 1583-4099

Advertisement

Easter is the first Sunday after the ecclesiastical full moon that falls on or after 21 March — a rule that needs no telescope, only arithmetic the Church formalised by the 8th century. The Gregorian implementation below is the Anonymous computus (the Oudin form used in every almanac), and the Orthodox date comes from the same rule kept on the Julian calendar, which now sits 13 days behind. The golden number (position in the 19-year Metonic cycle) and the epact (the moon\u2019s age on 1 January) are shown because they are the actual intermediates.

—

A 1,300-year-old algorithm still shipping

The Council of Nicaea (325) delegated the date to the Church of Alexandria\u2019s tables, and the arithmetic settled into the "Anonymous" computus by the 7th century — golden number from the 19-year Metonic cycle, an epact to shift the lunar age for solar-year drift, then "next Sunday after the paschal full moon". When the Gregorian reform rewrote the calendar in 1582 it fixed the solar year but kept the ecclesiastical moon, which is exactly why Western and Orthodox Easter now disagree: same rule, two calendars, a 13-day gap and different epact corrections. They do coincide (both calendars answered 20 April in 2025, and the next shared dates are 2028 and 2031) — but mostly the two Easters sit a week to over a month apart. The algorithm above is the same one the Book of Common Prayer\u2019s margin directed parish priests to compute by hand.

Part of Everyday Tools. Like everything on tukuk.org: free, no account, no tracking.

Advertisement
Advertisement