Paschal Full Moon

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Notionally, the paschal full moon refers to the ecclesiastical full moon of the northern spring used in the determination of the date of Easter. The name "paschal" is derived from "Pascha", a transliteration of the Greek word, which is itself a transliteration of the Hebrew pesach, both words meaning Passover. The date of Easter is determined as the first Sunday after the first paschal full moon falling on or after the Spring Equinox (March 21). This "full moon" does not currently correspond directly to any astronomical event, but is instead the 14th day of a lunar month, determined from tables. It may differ from the date of the actual full moon by up to two days.[1] The use of tables instead of actual observations of the full moon is useful and necessary since the full moon may occur on different dates depending where one is in the world.


  • The period of 19 years (the metonic cycle) is used because it produces a set of civil calendar dates for the ecclesiastical moons that repeats every nineteen years while still providing a reasonable approximation to the astronomical facts.
  • Easter is the Sunday following the paschal full moon.

In other words, Easter falls from one to seven days after the paschal full moon, so that if the paschal full moon is on Sunday, Easter is the following Sunday. Thus the earliest possible date of Easter is March 22, while the latest possible date is April 25.

Earliest Easter[edit]

In 1818, as a paschal full moon fell on Saturday March 21 (the Spring Equinox), Easter was the following day - Sunday March 22 - the earliest date possible. It will not fall on this date again until 2285, a span of 467 years.

Latest Easter[edit]

In 1943 a paschal full moon fell on Saturday March 20. As this was before the Equinox the next paschal full moon, which fell on Sunday April 18, determined the date of Easter - the following Sunday, April 25. It will not fall on this date again until 2038, a span of 95 years.

For a detailed discussion of the paschal computations, see Computus.

Easter tables[edit]

By the middle of the third century AD computists of some churches, among which were the Church of Rome and the one of Alexandria, had begun to calculate their own periodic sequences of dates of paschal full moon, to be able to determine their own dates of Easter Sunday.[2] The motivation for these experiments was a dissatisfaction with the Jewish calendars that Christians had hitherto relied on to fix the date of Easter. These Jewish calendars, according to their Christian critics, sometimes placed Nisan 14, the paschal full moon and the day of preparation for the Jewish Passover, before the spring equinox (see Easter). The Christians who began the experiments with independent computations held that the paschal full moon should never precede the equinox.

The computational principles developed at Alexandria eventually became normative, but their reception was a centuries-long process during which Alexandrian Easter tables competed with other tables incorporating different arithmetical parameters. So for a period of several centuries the sequences of dates of the paschal full moon applied by different churches could show great differences (see Easter controversy).

See also[edit]


  1. ^ Montes, Marcos J. "Calculation of the Ecclesiastical Calendar" Retrieved on 2008-01-12
  2. ^ Georges Declercq, Anno Domini: The origins of the Christian era (Brepols, Turnhout, Belgium, 2000)