Just have a question - Julian Calendar

[HumbleMan]

Good afternoon all

If I'm not mistaken, the Eastern churches use the Julian calendar for church related purposes?

If this is true, I just would like to know the history behind the Eastern churches using that and the Western churches using the Gregorian calendar.

Thanks!

M

 

[buzuxi]

Some eastern churches use what is called the revised julian calendar which is basically using the gregorian calendar for the fixed feast days such as Christmas but still retain the calculation of Easter as it always was based on the julian calendar. Those using the revised julian calendar would include the greeks and antiochans and a few others.

The Slavic churches and the Church of Jerusalem and many monasteries still use the full Julian calendar. The julian calendar is simply that calendar in use during the roman empire when the various feast days were instituted. The liturgical calendar with all those christian holidays was completed when the julian calendar was the official calendar of the empire.

The gregorian calendar which is now the official business calendar for the world was implemented under Pope Gregory in the late 1500's. It was not accepted immediately by all but by the 1800's all of western Europe adopted it and by the time of the dissolution of the Ottomon empire in 1920 or so all of Eastern europe also accepted it. The Julian calendar lags actual solar time by a few minutes annually, so the gregorian corrected that. That was the reason for the institution of the gregorian calendar. Pope Gregory wanted to correct the time lapse.

Easter is celebrated by all in the Orthodox Church based on Julian wreckoning. This is because the whole basis for the paschal controversy settled in Nicea was for all to celebrate easter on the same date ( for Orthodox ). The nicean formula was obviously based on the julian calendar so everyone still retains the same paschal tables devised milleniums ago.

 

[ArmyMatt]

Easter is celebrated by all in the Orthodox Church based on Julian wreckoning. This is because the whole basis for the paschal controversy settled in Nicea was for all to celebrate easter on the same date ( for Orthodox ). The nicean formula was obviously based on the julian calendar so everyone still retains the same paschal tables devised milleniums ago.

I think it also was to keep the Christian Passover distinct from the Jewish prototype.

 

[Mockingbird0]

We use the Gregorian calendar because it is more accurate.

This year, 2014, the Spring equinox occurred at 16:57 Universal Time on March 20th. The Gregorian calendar's formal equinox was just a few hours later, on March 21. The Julian calendar's formal equinox was on April 3rd.

The recent full moon occurred at 7:42 Universal Time on April 15th. The Gregorian calendar's formal full moon was a few hours earlier, during daylight on April 14th. The Julian calendar's moon will not be full until Friday, April 18th.

I think it also was to keep the Christian Passover distinct from the Jewish prototype.

Not "distinct", but independent. By the council's decision, whatever date our Jewish neighbors use for their Passover and Feast of Unleavened Bread is not to make any difference to our computation.

 

[Mariya116]

The Gregorian IS more accurate. During my Sunday bar hopping session someone actually explained to me in detail why Julian and Gregorian calendars are different. Something like in 100 years (?) the difference will grow from 13 days to 14 days. So, our dear antiquated Julian calendar is wrong and off.

 

[rusmeister]

The Gregorian IS more accurate, as Mariya said, and I must confess myself to be a closet "Gregorian wannabe".

However, while it would be easy to draw from that that therefore the Eastern Churches are outdated, and that the right response is to "modernize", some benefits HAVE been observed from not "going the way of the world".

The world takes the holiday (such as Christmas or Easter) and turns it into something unrecognizable, having nothing to do with Christ and very nearly practicing the opposite of what we would preach. It becomes impossible to culturally "reclaim" the holiday, because everyone has come to associate it with something else.

Having our holidays off-kilter from the world reclaims them; makes them ours again.

I hope that's not actually being the devil's advocate...

 

[WisdomTree]

Maybe it's time for a new calendar? Though this would require a new council...

 

[HumbleMan]

Thank y'all for the answers. As usual, you are a very learned and articulate bunch.

One of my new hobbies is interdenomination/interfaith studies of doctrine and theology. I hope you don't mind me popping in once in a while to be corrected of my ignorance of things orthodox.

 

[ArmyMatt]

I hope you don't mind me popping in once in a while to be corrected of my ignorance of things orthodox.

not at all, stick around and ask away!

 

[buzuxi02]

Maybe it's time for a new calendar? Though this would require a new council...

It maybe discussed in that Council of 2016. It would still take decades to devise a proper liturgical calendar where the immovable and moveable feasts along with the fasts properly line up with the solar year. Will take even longer to implement.

 

[Mockingbird0]

The Gregorian IS more accurate. During my Sunday bar hopping session someone actually explained to me in detail why Julian and Gregorian calendars are different. Something like in 100 years (?) the difference will grow from 13 days to 14 days. So, our dear antiquated Julian calendar is wrong and off.

The event you write of will take place in 2100, in which year Gregorian February has 28 days while Julian February has 29 days.

The 13-day solar discrepancy is not as glaring as the 3-to-5-day lunar discrepancy. One would need instruments to detect the solar discrepancy, while a single glance at the sky showed me that the moon was not round and full this morning (Friday April 18th, 2014) before sunrise, when the Julian calendar says it should have been round and full.

 

[gzt]

You don't so much need instruments as a detailed historical record of astronomical observations. Which we have had for many centuries - Hipparchus, after all, ca 150 BCE, knew about the precession of the equinoxes, which is a very slow phenomenon (1 degree per century) and much harder to catch than the discrepancy between the Julian calendar and "actual" time. The failings of the Julian as a civil calendar were known at its inception, they just thought it was close enough for their purposes - it was much better than the other calendars at the time and retooling in a few hundred years was probably seen as no big deal.

 

[Mockingbird0]

For my purposes, the horizon, zenith, nadir, and sighting-stones, also sand-glasses, water-clocks, sun-dials and other shadow-sticks, are all instruments.

Some hold the propositions:

(1) that the fathers locked in the Julian paschalion for all time;
(2) that only a formal ecumenical council can modify the paschalion.

I reject these propositions, as gzt also seems to do with the remark that "retooling in a few hundred years was probably seen as no big deal". Proposition (1), on my reading of the sources, seems inconsistent with the 3rd/4th century writers' presuppositions about the purpose of their computations. They considered Easter to be a full-moon festival. Nowadays, Orthodox Easter is already sometimes celebrated during last quarter of the moon's phases, and will increasingly coincide with the dark of the moon as the centuries roll. On the solar side, orthodox Easter will eventually wrap around to the season of the year in which the paschalion was designed to prevent the festival from falling.

Proposition (2) seems self-contradictory since no council can be deemed "ecumenical" except in hindshight. For any local church to follow the Finnish Orthodox onto the Gregorian paschalion would need only for that church to schedule its services for the same time as the Finns'.

Some hold a third proposition:

(3) that the Nicene fathers gave to the Patriarch of Alexandria the privilege of adjusting the paschalion on his own initiative.

I reject this proposition also. In the 5th century, proposition (3) may have been used by the Roman church as a face-saving reason to switch from the Roman-84 paschalion to a paschalion based on a 19-year cycle. But I cannot find any evidence that any Bishop of Alexandria prior to Cyril ever made this claim for himself.

Still I wonder: Why don't those who hold proposition (3) apply to whoever they recognize as Patriarch of Alexandria for updated lunar tables?