This is the name retrospectively given to the gathering of Christian clerics at the double monastery of Streaneshalch, located above the town now known as Whitby in 664 AD/CE – in the seventh century.
Bede said the old British name for that place was the ‘Bay of the Beacon’. Whitby did not become known by it’s modern name until after Viking settlement in the tenth or eleventh century. Bede called this meeting a ‘synodus’ but as the meeting was called by, and the ultimate decision was made by, king Oswy of Northumbria, it really was more of a council meeting for the king than a gathering purely of clerics. So you could say that at the time it happened it really was the witangemot of Streaneshalch.
The main points discussed were what should be the date of the Christian celebration of Easter and the “right” clerical tonsure for Christians. These were two outward signs of the differences between, what can be termed, the ‘Celtic’ church and the ‘Roman’ church. The reason why the Roman church won the debate affected all other Christian practises in Britain from that time forward.
It should be noted that the Venerable Bede, writing in 731, said that the month this Christian celebration often fell in (now called April) was called Eosturmonath by the Anglo-Saxons but that month was (during his time) then being translated as the “Paschal month”. He claimed that the Anglo-Saxons had named it after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month. However Ronald Hutton mentioned1 that it is just as likely that the Anglo-Saxon term was originally derived from a root word meaning “opening” or “beginning” and Bede may have mistakenly associated it with a goddess whose worship had, by his time, completely vanished. Since the name ‘Easter’ is still mostly used, instead of the modern variations of the name ‘Pascha’, in English speaking countries the earliest Christians in Britain were obviously not worried about calling this celebration ‘Easter’. The Christian name ‘Pascha’ is derived from the Jewish word ‘Pesach’ or “Passover”. This Christian feast was referred to as ‘celebrating the Passover’ originally. The idea was that Christ was the sacrificial lamb. Before discussing the Synod itself, it is necessary to go into the background of the Easter dating controversy to understand what they were arguing about.
The Feast of Easter Today – where we ended up
Easter is a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus and now the Christian holy days around this period, for a lot of mainstream western churches, cover various events over the final few days of his earthly life. It is the theologically most important festival in the Christian calendar.
- Maundy Thursday commemorates the Last Supper. This is normally thought that Jesus and his followers were celebrating the Jewish Passover or Pesach. The Christian church specified this as Nisan 14 (Nisan being the first month of the Jewish lunar calendar). Later that day Jesus would be captured in the garden of Gethsemane and handed over to the Romans. The name ‘Maundy’ is derived from the Latin “mandatum”, meaning a commandment. Jesus said “Do this in memory of me” and this is taken as the institution of the eucharist in part of Christianity. This commandment to “Do this in memory of me” was also taken to refer to the feast day celebrations and caused part of the early disagreements within the church about Easter.
- Good Friday commemorates Christ’s suffering and crucifixion. It is thought ‘Good’ has developed from ‘God’s’.
- Holy Saturday is the time of the Easter vigil, when Christ’s body was resting in his tomb. For some in the early church this was the time to baptise new converts ready for them to receive their first communion or eucharist on Easter day itself. Though I couldn’t find out what the practice on baptism, for new converts, was in the Anglo-Saxon or Irish kingdoms by the seventh century in Europe.
- Easter day is the celebration of Christ conquering death.
The modern definition of the Easter date is that it falls on the first Sunday after the first ecclesiastical full moon after 20th March. March 20th being the vernal equinox, which is the day in the solar year when the number of hours of daylight more or less equals the hours of darkness. In the 21st century it has only fallen on March 21st twice (2003 and 2007). The vernal equinox now falls on 19th, 20th or 21st March2.
A modern quote explains what is involved in this definition: “Astronomy is absolutely at the heart of setting the date for Easter. It depends on two astronomical things – the spring equinox and the full moon”3.
The important calculation, the first full moon after the vernal equinox, is considered to be “14 Nisan” which Christian sources said was the Passover date. Modern Jewish sources seem to refer to 15 Nisan as their Pesach (or Passover) but their day starts on the evening before so the last supper on the evening of 14 Nisan would tie in with 15 Nisan actually being the Passover date.
The current Orthodox Easter falls on a different day to the western Christian Easter purely because the Orthodox churches use the Julian calendar for their Easter calculation and the western churches now use the Gregorian calendar, which is the same calendar used in society generally. The Julian calendar, introduced by the Roman emperor Julius Caesar, was the predecessor of the Gregorian calendar in society but both are based on a standardised cycle of one complete orbit of the earth around the sun over a cycle of seasons (a tropical year). The tropical year is about 20 minutes shorter than the sidereal year which is the time it takes the earth to complete one full orbit around the sun as measured with respect to the fixed stars.
The Julian calendar ended up adding too many days though through their leap year calculation method. So by 1582 AD/CE Pope Gregory XIII authorised the change to the Gregorian calendar in the west, which calculates the leap year requirement more accurately, and instructed that 10 days be dropped upon the adoption of the Gregorian calendar to get the solar calendar back in sync with astronomical events like the vernal equinox or the winter solstice. This was slowly accepted around the world – Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752 AD/CE and had to drop 11 days at that point to get the calendar back in sync with astronomical events. The Gregorian calendar is not exactly a correct representation of the tropical year either but it has a smaller error built in than the Julian calendar: The Gregorian calendar is off by one day every 3236 years4.
The Feast of Easter – the history of setting the date to the Synod of Whitby
Apparently the calculation of the Easter date has never been done by simple observation, possibly due to potential cloud cover (?) and the need to co-ordinate the celebrations for churches in different areas. So tables were drawn up from very early times to predict 14 Nisan. How the early Christians managed any sort of calculations – considering the limitations in their equipment to observe the skies and with limited understanding of the mechanics of the movements of the planets – is a mystery of it’s own.
By 190 AD/CE there was already a divergence in the celebration of the Easter feast within the church. The early church celebrated the Passover with the Jews and the churches in Asia, including Ephesus, Smyrna and Patmos, terminated their Lenten fast and celebrated Easter on the “fourteenth day of the moon [of Nisan] on which day the Jews were commanded to sacrifice the lamb… whatever day of the week it might happen to be” 5. The second century bishop of Smyrna, Polycarp, celebrated Easter in this way and said the tradition came from John the Apostle. This practice became known as Quartodecimanism. Other churches held their Easter celebration on the Sunday after the Passover which was the day of the resurrection. Polycarp had discussed this issue in Rome with Anicetus (first solo bishop of Rome) and it was decided “that each church would continue to celebrate Passover according to their own traditions, as each had received different traditions from their respective apostles (from a letter from Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, to Victor, bishop of Rome, preserved in Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History V:24, A.D. 323)6.
About 195 AD/CE the bishop of Rome attempted to excommunicate the Quartodecimans but he was rebuked by other prelates, including Irenaeus in Gaul so he backed down. I refer to him as the bishop of Rome because this post was not generally known as the Pope at this point – the title ‘Pope’, from the Greek papas or ‘little father’, became attached exclusively to the bishop of Rome in the fourth century7. Before then it was used by a number of important bishops8. The idea that when Jesus gave the keys to the kingdom to Peter in Matthew 16 (Peter being retrospectively deemed to be the first bishop of Rome), he was giving the keys to Peter exclusively is not an idea that was widely accepted in the very early church. In Matthew 18:18 he gives the other apostles the power to bind and loose on earth and in heaven. It was a north African bishop in the time of Damasus (around 370 AD/CE) who first claimed that, based on Matthew 16, ‘Peter was superior to the other apostles and alone received the keys of the kingdom, which were distributed by him to the rest’9. A brief amount of detail about the position of the papacy in the early centuries of the church, and how the different apostolic traditions were seen then, has been included in this article as the basis of the decisions made at the Synod of Whitby would eventually be based on the spiritual authority of the different traditions.
It is often written that the Council of Nicea, in 325 AD/CE, settled the Paschal celebration date though not the method of calculation. But the Paschal tables of the different Christian churches were certainly works in progress at the time of the Council and also that process continued for a long while afterwards. Even in 1800 AD/CE, the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss created a new algorithm (a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations) to calculate the Easter date more accurately.
I looked for a translation of the actual ruling of the Council of Nicea so I could define exactly what was agreed. As far as I can tell, the actual documents issued by the Council of Nicea itself were 10:
- the Creed
- 20 Canons
- a letter to the Church of Alexandria.
I went through the English translation of these documents at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3801.htm but could only find a reference to Easter itself in the synodal letter: “We further proclaim to you the good news of the agreement concerning the holy Easter…so that all our brethren in the East who formerly followed the custom of the Jews are henceforth to celebrate the said most sacred feast of Easter at the same time with the Romans and yourselves and all those who have observed Easter from the beginning.”11
Another primary source quoted is a letter sent by the emperor Constantine to the bishops who were unable to attend (from Theodoret, Historia Ecclesia, Book I, ch.9.12) But this simply appears to be an extremely wordy exhortation to adopt the method of calculation of Easter followed by Rome, which he believes is followed in the greater part of the Christian world and avoid any link with the Jewish celebration.
The nineteenth century History of the Councils of the Church by Hefele13 said that the Council of Nicea did not generally settle the date for Easter for the church. Certainly the church in Rome and the church in Alexandria continued to celebrate Easter on different days after the Council of Nicea, because their methods for calculating the Easter date were different. The scientific method used for calculating the date is referred to as a “computus”. St Cyril of Alexandria (378-444 AD/CE) sent the Alexandrine paschal tables to the bishop of Rome (Pope) and explained what was wrong with the Latin computus. Pope Leo then accepted the Alexandrine computus.
The Roman and Alexandrine methods of calculating Easter only fully came together though in the 6th century when Dionysius Exiguus used the Alexandrine computus and converted it into the Julian solar calendar for his Easter tables issued in 525 AD/CE.
The difficulties in the calculations for Easter are due to the fact that the lunar year (by which the day of 14 Nisan is calculated) does not exactly correspond to the length of the solar year we use for the calendar.
Apparently the Irish Synod of Mag Léne, in 631 AD/CE, adopted the Dionysian tables of Rome. The Irish church, along with the Celtic churches in Britain (those of the British and Picts), had originally used a computus called the Latercus, covering an 84 year cycle, which had a built-in error that caused the full moon to fall progressively too early.
References
[1] Stations of the Sun by Ronald Hutton, p.180, quoted in https://jerome23.wordpress.com/2009/04/10/eostre-never-existed-why-easter-is-not-a-pagan-holiday/
[2] http://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/varying-march-equinox-date.html
[3] Dr Marek Kukula, public astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, quoted in ‘Why Can’t the Date of Easter be Fixed?’ article by Caroline Wyatt, 25 March 2016 @ bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35880795
[4] http://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/julian-gregorian-switch.html
[5] Wikipedia: Easter Controversy
[6] http://www.christian-history.org/nicea-myths.html
[7] A Nearly Infallible History of Christianity by Nick Page, 2013, Hodder & Stoughton: London
[8] http://www.religionfacts.com/papacy
[9] Pg 294 in ‘A History of Christianity’ by Diarmaid MacCulloch, 2010, Penguin Books: London
[10] http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/nicaea.html
[11] The Synodal letter from the First Council of Nicea (A.D. 325) Translated by Henry Percival 1900. http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3801.htm
[12] http://www.tertullian.org/fathers2/NPNF2-03/Npnf2-03-10.htm#P1098_224595
[13] http://legacy.fordham.edu/halsall/source/const1-easter.asp