For Apostle Fast there is solution - come back to older traidion (the Hoyl Spirit Monday as beginningn) or what Romanian Chruch did (to start on Tuesday or Wednesday in the Pentecsot Week). Kyriopascha ctualyl it hink shouldn't happen at all (see e.g Copts).
en.m.wikipedia.org
Thank you. I better understand now. It has to do with priorities, I guess. For me, Jesus was unconcerned about the issue so I feel free to stress over "accuracy" as a pedestrian issue. BTW The Gregorian Calendar is simply better than the Julian, scientists use other "calendars" or time measurements that are far more accurate eg the Sideral Timekeeping. Indeed "calendar" in a wider sense is a meaningless concept, a crude way for humans to roughly handle time passage.People who get bogged down in arguments comparing the supposed "accuracy" of the two seem to me to be missing the point, by which I mean no disrespect to you as one who is new to the calendar controversy. "More useful" depends not necessarily on "accuracy" but on what you want out of a calendar generally.
Quite simply, many Orthodox (myself included) reject the Revised Julian Calendar because it's not the calendar that was passed down to us from Roman/patristic times. In a liturgical context, connection to our forefathers through continuity in worship is far more important than mere astronomical accuracy. It unifies us not only today, but through the ages, aided by its cyclical nature which repeats every 532 years and is completely lacking in the new calendar. There are other differences which are often highlighted (and have been in this thread) and I don't want to understate their importance, but that continuity alone would suffice as a reason for traditionally-minded Orthodox Christians even absent the rest.
There's also the issue of how it came about, which has nothing to do with the new calendar per se but is still important to understand the resistance to it because it ushered in a period of often-bloody persecution against pious Orthodox clergy and laity whose only "crime" was continuing to practice the unaltered faith as it was passed down to them. The RJC was forced on the whole Church unilaterally by the Ecumenical Patriarchate under the highly-controversial Patriarch and known Freemason named Meletios, an act which was regarded by most jurisdictions as an empty papal pretension and ignored because even a perfectly good new calendar would need to be implemented by a pan-Orthodox council. He was chased out of Constantinople and made to resign after a fairly short tenure, but the division he caused was there to stay.
You'll often see anathemas against the Gregorian Calendar applied to the RJC, and that's because RJC was specifically devised in order to align much of our liturgical year with the GC and thus promote (or at the very least intentionally reopen the possibility of) concelebration with Roman Catholics and Protestants. That's where the problem of ecumenism comes in, which I won't go into any more than that because it'd add several paragraphs to what I'd hoped would be a short answer. Such hopes are always dashed quickly when talking about the calendar.
Not the revised Julian that the church uses.
I'm repeating myself constantly, even in this thread: if we bring the older date of the beginning of this fast, it won't disappear in the Revised Julian calendar. And already Romanian Church has done it (but only in the year in which Pascha is late), so not only OOs.
It won't help to bring majority fo them, as calendar it's not the only issue. Even in Serbia (Serbian Church except maybe a few parishes follows old calendar) there is one or two Old Calendarists groups...
This is actually a misunderstanding, not a canon.
blogs.ancientfaith.com
Can't answer for the others, but the transition in Greece was anything but forced. The Synod of the Church of Greece, in conjunction with the EP, which still oversees a good part of the country, decided, as was their prerogative, in 1924 to align with the state, which had adopted the new calendar in 1923. End of, or should have been, if some people hadn't thrown a hissy fit in disobedience of their bishops.
Astronomy is the study of celestial bodies, which are given by God as signs, among other things. There is no basis for dismissing the inaccuracy of the old Julian calendar as "merely astronomical". Might as well do the eucharist with cornbread and tequila, and then say "the differences are merely culinary, what's really important is that we all persist in error together, and not join with those heterodox!"
These are themselves something of liturgical absurdities, actually. For instance, there was no Apostles Fast as we know it until, potentially, the 9th century (St Nikephoros)! Before that, there was (in some places) a resumption of fasting after the week of Pentecost, which was later put into writing (Apostolic Constitutions: 5.20)—but even here it seems to imply a resumption of *normal Wednesday and Friday fasting*, not a separate new fast.
While already mentioned by others, the date of Pascha is *not* regulated by the canons in the way you are suggesting.
Just wait until someone shows him all the "religious truths" out there!
With this I do not agree.
The problem at the time (4th c) was that many Jewish communities were not celebrating Passover according to the Biblical formula - so the canon was enjoining them to not look to the local Jewish community for guidance on when the Passover should fall.
No it doesn't. It means that the church must not use the Jewish month of Nisan, as it was calculated in the 3rd century, to set the date of the Christian festival, but to use an independently-calculated month of Nisan (or "month of the new" as the Fathers called it) to set the date of the Christian festival.
As stated previously, the issue is not with the full moon - but with the Julian calendar date for the Equinox (which is 13 days later than the actual observable equinox).
But the issue is with the full moon. This year, the Gregorian moon is full on April 16th and the Julian moon is not full until April 20th. That is why the Easters are a week apart.
A week apart isn't much of an issue, IMO. But that's related to a calculated full moon - which both East and West use - versus the observable full moon. Neither Church has a 100% accurate set of lunar tables, but they are certainly different, and the West's is more accurate when compared to the observable full moon.
It would be nice if we made a push to move it back to the 25th. So the Incarnation happens on the equinox (March 25th), Nativity happens on the solstice (December 25th), etc. If we're going to fix stuff let's really fix it!
That's the trick, isn't it? There are plenty that will disagree simply on principle, as the "One" in One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church is actually an affront to them (despite what they otherwise say). And then we have to figure out just what we mean by "all Churches"—this will inevitably have to be watered down, and then we're potentially back where we started (though hopefully with a more sensible system, for when those "all Churches" are ready to accept it).
A week apart is a serious issue when the extra week takes the festival out of the third week of the visible moon's phases. The computus was designed as much as possible to place the festival in the third week of the visible moon's phases, counting the lunar month as beginning with the first appearance of the waxing crescent. Since the computus is based on the average lunar motion it doesn't always do this perfectly, but the Gregorian computus manages it most of the time. This year, however, the Julian computus puts the festival in the fourth week of the moon's phases.
Fr. George was overstating the case for a Biblical formula of Passover. The only Biblical prescription for Passover is that it occurs on the fourteenth day of the first lunar month. Jewish communities in the third and fourth centuries did this. What they didn't do in every place was follow a rule of the equinox. The third- and fourth-century Christian computists insisted on a rule of the equinox, relying on Josephus, who wrote:
The third- and fourth century computists took Josephus at his literal word and insisted that the first month must be the one whose fourteenth day fell when the sun was in Aries, that is, on or after the equinox. Christians who relied on their Jewish neighbors to tell them when the week of Unleavened Bread would fall and set Easter to the Sunday in that week would be celebrating before the equinox if their Jewish neighbors did not follow a rule of the equinox: And therefore, from the point of view of the computists, they would be celebrating Easter in the last month of the old year rather than in the first month of the new year. The canon, as Fr. George stated, is directed toward Christians who followed the old tradition of relying on their Jewish neighbors' calendar and thereby celebrated Easter before the equinox.Josephus said:
Fixed. We will not rely on anyone outside the Orthodox communion to solve our calendar issues. Only Orthodox churches will be involved in deciding on a new calendar, if one is to come to pass.
I didn't claim it wasn't an issue - but when one is routinely asked to celebrate the feast over a month late, the one-week shifts are more of a nuisance than a challenge. Let us fix our more fundamental issue (calculating the 1st lunar cycle using the Julian fixed-date Equinox) before we get to the issue of fixing the pre-calculated lunar cycles.
The reply should work here, but this prior comment seems to have more infoOrthodoxChristianity.net
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An article on the subject by Fr. Theoklitos can be read here:
The Old Calendarist Lie of Codex 772
Concerning Codex 772 [1] by Elder Theoklitos Dionysiatis One lie constituted the generative origins of the Old Calendarists which, to t...www.johnsanidopoulos.com
Since this one article by Fr. Theoklitos is all that I could formerly find on the subject in English, I was asked to find supporting information to back up his claims. The Old Calendarist “Synod in Resistance” in Greece has recently provided a summary in English of a scholarly paper by Bishop Cyprian of Oreoi which goes into greater detail regarding this forgery. Among other things, Bishop Cyprian of Oreoi of the Synod in Resistance states:
He's EP.