The principal Christian feast, on the Sunday set by the Paschal full moon, on which Christians commemorate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
“The earliest recorded observance comes from the 2nd century; the Council of Nicaea fixed the date rule in 325.
Easter is the principal festival of the Christian church, commemorating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ on the third day after his Crucifixion. Its earliest recorded observance comes from the 2nd century, and the method for setting its date was fixed by the Council of Nicaea in 325.
Easter is the oldest and most important festival in Christianity, and after nearly two thousand years its followers still cannot settle on which Sunday it falls. Western churches and Eastern Orthodox churches usually keep it weeks apart, the gap left by two different calendars.
In 2025 the two traditions landed on the same Sunday, a coincidence that happened to fall on the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. That was the gathering that first tried to fix the date. Pope Leo XIV used the moment to renew a public appeal, asking all Christians to adopt a permanently common Easter date. No agreement has been reached.
Beneath the calendar dispute sits the feast itself. Christians commemorate the Resurrection of Jesus on Easter Sunday, the climax of the week that begins with Palm Sunday and passes through Good Friday. It is the same day many call by another name entirely: Pascha.
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The story of Easter is partly a story of an argument. For its first centuries, the young church could agree that it commemorated the Resurrection but not on which day to do it.
Christians hold the Resurrection of Jesus, on the third day after his Crucifixion, to be the central doctrine of the faith and the basis of the hope of eternal life. The commemoration of that event is older than almost any record of it. Britannica places the earliest recorded observance of Easter in the 2nd century, with one of the earliest surviving Christian sermons, by a bishop in Asia Minor, built around the Paschal theme.
The early disagreement had a name: the Paschal controversies. In Asia Minor, a group known as the Quartodecimans, the "fourteenth-day" proponents, fixed the observance to 14 Nisan, the same day as the Jewish Passover. The Western church instead set the Resurrection on the following Sunday. Britannica notes the dispute was not definitively resolved until the 8th century.
In 325 the First Council of Nicaea reached for a formula. Easter would fall on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox, calculated independently of the Jewish calendar. That rule, called the computus, is why the date still moves. Western Easter can land on any Sunday from March 22 to April 25.
As the feast settled, its symbols accumulated. The Paschal candle, lit to mark light emerging from darkness, was first recorded in 384 and was in general use by the 10th century. Easter was historically the one day of the year set aside for baptism. Painted and decorated eggs, a sign of new life from the sealed shell, were first recorded in the 13th century.
The modern date gap has a precise origin. In 1582 Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian calendar, and the Eastern churches kept the older Julian reckoning. The two calendars now run thirteen days apart, which is why Orthodox Pascha so often trails Western Easter by a week or more.
WHY THIS DAY MATTERS
Three calendar days the church counts as one.
The US Conference of Catholic Bishops calls the Easter Triduum the summit of the liturgical year, running from the evening of Holy Thursday to the evening of Easter Sunday. Though three calendar days, the Triduum is counted liturgically as one day unfolding Christ's Paschal Mystery.
Christianity is the world's largest religion, with a global population that a Pew Research Center analysis put at 2.3 billion people in 2020. Easter, not Christmas, is the feast that church tradition treats as the principal festival of the faith.
The split Easter date has become an active push for Christian unity rather than a settled quirk of history. Following the rare 2025 alignment, the Catholic Church publicly stated openness to a common fixed date if all churches assent.
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GOOD TO KNOW
The popular Eostre-goddess theory rests entirely on a single 8th-century account by the monk Bede. The OED notes the goddess is confirmed by no other source and has been suspected of being his invention, though it doubts he made her up.
Britannica records ritual hare burials beside Neolithic human remains, taken to represent rebirth. As a fast-breeding spring animal, the hare became a symbol of new life that later folk custom attached to Easter.
The moving date can split the Christian world in any given year. In 2026 Western churches keep Easter on April 5 while Orthodox Pascha falls on April 12, a week later.
The South Lawn egg roll dates to 1878 under President Rutherford B. Hayes. The official White House Easter Bunny first appeared in 1969, when a staffer of First Lady Pat Nixon wore a giant rabbit costume.
GOOD TO KNOW
The feast takes its name from Pascha, the Greek and Latin word drawn from the Hebrew Pesach, which yields Spanish Pascua, Italian Pasqua, and French Paques.
Only English (Easter) and German (Ostern) name the feast from a Germanic root rather than from Pascha, which makes the English name an outlier across Europe.
Eggs are dyed red to symbolize the blood of Christ, a custom distinct from the multicolored eggs common in the West.
MYTH VS FACT
Easter is simply a repackaged pagan spring festival.
Britannica calls the pagan-appropriation presumption rather dubious. The egg and the hare carry pre-Christian symbolism, but the feast itself is a Christian commemoration of the Resurrection.
The name Easter definitely comes from a goddess called Eostre.
That derivation rests solely on Bede's 8th-century account, which the OED says no other source confirms. Britannica's editors favor a different origin entirely, the Latin in albis, meaning dawn.
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Easter is set by the computus, the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox, a rule fixed at the Council of Nicaea in 325. Because it follows the moon rather than a fixed calendar day, Western Easter can land on any Sunday from March 22 to April 25.
COLOPHON
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