The evening before the crucifixion (on good friday) -- the last supper -- was at the passover seder (the first night of passover). Thus, the same sort of calculation is done. The Jewish calendar is a lunar/solar calendar -- the (approximate) length of a lunar month is 29 1/2 days (thus the alternating 29/30 day lengths for the Hebrew/Islam months), but the bible says that passover has to be the first full moon after the vernal equinox. So the Jewish calendar uses Meton's approximation -- 19 solar years = 235 lunar months (which is a very good approximation). However, the council of Nicea (in about 350AD) decided (probably for religious reasons) that they never wanted the eve of good friday to occur during an actual passover seder, so they fiddled with the formula, to make sure that it never happened. Victor On Sat, Apr 11, 2009 at 7:04 PM, Dan Asimov <dasimov@earthlink.net> wrote:

Ha! I was just studying that very webpage a few minutes ago before Victor posted it. First time I realized the dates of Easter and Rosh Hashanah are closely related.

(Though it's no accident that the English word "paschal" means "relating to Easter or Passover".)

--Dan

Victor wrote:

<< Here's John Conway's rendering of the algorithm for the date of Easter (courtesy of http://quasar.as.utexas.edu/BillInfo/ReligiousCalendars.html ): . . . . . .

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