Walk with Their Stories—On the Calendar They Lived By
When would you begin?
It doesn’t start on Palm Sunday.
It starts with Mary of Bethany—the day before Jesus enters Jerusalem—when she anoints His feet with perfume.
But how do we date that?
Yes, Easter is tied to Passover, but the Jewish calendar is lunisolar—based on both the sun and the moon—so it doesn’t align neatly with our modern Gregorian calendar. Add in decisions made by early church leaders and ancient councils, and things get… complicated.
The Story Behind the Dates
- Easter commemorates Jesus’ resurrection, which happened during Passover.
- Passover is determined by the 15th day of the Hebrew month of Nisan, which is the first month of the Jewish calendar and typically falls in March or April.
- The Hebrew calendar is luni-solar—it’s based on both the sun and moon, and its days run from sundown to sundown. Sabbath is Friday at sundown to Saturday at sundown.
- Early church leaders chose to celebrate Easter on a Sunday, not necessarily by the actual date of the resurrection in the Jewish calendar.
- In 325 AD, the Council of Nicaea decided Easter would fall on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox.
- Today, Orthodox churches still use the Julian calendar, while the Western world uses the Gregorian one. That’s why the dates rarely line up—except for this year, when both Easters land on April 20. (That won’t happen again until 2034.)
What if we read along with the women who stayed with Jesus on their watch?
If we stepped back in time and experienced Jesus' death and resurrection alongside the women who stayed with Jesus—Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Susanna, Salome, and even Pilate’s wife—we’d be following the same luni-solar calendar they did, which is still used in Jewish tradition today. (Well, come to think of it, Pilate's wife would have been following the Roman calendar.)