Constantine’s Easter Controversy with the Quartodecimen
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Constantine’s Easter Controversy with the Quartodecimen

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By John Bingham , and Sophie Jamieson. The Most Rev Justin Welby said that Anglican leaders would join discussions with other church leaders about the move to fix the date for the first time and put an end to almost 2, years of controversy. The plan, which would schedule the Christian festival on the same Sunday each year, is expected to be welcomed by parents and schools but may anger traditionalists.

Anglicans to join Copts and Catholics in talks to finally resolve-centuries long problem of fixing the date of Easter.

The history behind the establishment of Easter within the church is an example of known eventually as the Quartodeciman Controversy, reverberated across the that the Jewish dating of Passover was the determinant of the date of Easter.

April was called easter-monadh. The plural eaestron is used, because the feast lasts seven days. The Greeks call Easter the pascha anastasimon ; Good Friday the pascha staurosimon. The respective terms used by the Latins are Pascha resurrectionis and Pascha crucifixionis. In some parts of France also First Communion is called Paques , whatever time of the year administered. Easter is the principal feast of the ecclesiastical year.

Leo I Serino xlvii in Exodum calls it the greatest feast festum festorum , and says that Christmas is celebrated only in preparation for Easter. It is the center of the greater part of the ecclesiastical year. The order of Sundays from Septuagesima to the last Sunday after Pentecost, the feast of the Ascension , Pentecost, Corpus Christi, and all other movable feasts, from that of the Prayer of Jesus in the Garden Tuesday after Septuagesima to the feast of the Sacred Heart Friday after the octave of Corpus Christi , depend upon the Easter date.

Commemorating the slaying of the true Lamb of God and the Resurrection of Christ, the cornerstone upon which faith is built, it is also the oldest feast of the Christian Church , as old as Christianity , the connecting link between the Old and New Testaments. That the Apostolic Fathers do not mention it and that we first hear of it principally through the controversy of the Quartodecimans are purely accidental. The connection between the Jewish Passover and the Christian feast of Easter is real and ideal.

In fact, the Jewish feast was taken over into the Christian Easter celebration; the liturgy Exultet sings of the passing of Israel through the Red Sea , the paschal lamb, the column of fire, etc. Apart, however, from the Jewish feast, the Christians would have celebrated the anniversary of the death and the Resurrection of Christ.