Nicaea and the Independence of the Christian Reckoning

The First Ecumenical Council settled that Pascha is to be kept by all the Churches on the same Sunday, after the vernal equinox, and computed independently of the Jewish reckoning. It did not promulgate the Alexandrian computus, did not legislate a date for the equinox by canon, and did not prescribe the Julian solar calendar. This file states what the council did, where the evidence for it is, and what cannot honestly be built on it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Dispute Nicaea Settled

By 325 the Church had been divided over the date of Pascha for well over a century. Two questions were tangled together.

The first was the Quartodeciman question. The Churches of Asia kept Pascha on the fourteenth of Nisan itself, whatever day of the week it fell on, appealing to the practice of the Apostle John; most of the rest of the Church kept it on the following Sunday. Eusebius preserves the correspondence of the second-century controversy, including Polycrates of Ephesus’ defence of the Asian usage and Pope Victor’s attempt to excommunicate the Asian Churches, which St Irenaeus rebuked him for (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 5.23–25; trans. NPNF II/1; and see St Irenaeus of Lyons).

The second was the Protopaschite question: among Churches that already kept Pascha on a Sunday, some — notably in Syria and Mesopotamia — determined which Sunday by asking the local Jewish community when Passover fell, and so sometimes kept Pascha before the equinox or twice in one solar year.

Nicaea ruled for the majority practice on both counts: one Sunday, kept by all the Churches together, after the vernal equinox, computed by the Church herself.

Where the Evidence Actually Is

This is the point at which popular accounts go wrong, and the repository’s own treatment of the council states the correction plainly: the twenty canons of Nicaea contain no Paschal rule. The decision is preserved elsewhere (see The Seven Ecumenical Councils: The Creed and the Canons, whose account this file agrees with and expands).

The evidence is threefold:

The council’s synodal letter to the Church of Alexandria, which announces that agreement has been reached on the Paschal question and that the brethren in the East who had kept it with the Jews will now keep it with the Romans and with all who have kept it from of old (preserved in Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 1.9, and Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History 1.9; trans. NPNF II/2 and II/3).
Constantine’s circular letter to the Churches, quoted at length by Eusebius, which is the polemical document and the source of most of the later rhetoric: it urges that it is unbecoming to follow the custom of the Jews in this matter, and that the Church should have nothing in common with them in the reckoning (Eusebius, Life of Constantine 3.18–20; trans. NPNF II/1).
The subsequent canonical enforcement. The Council of Antioch (341) opens its canons by penalizing clergy and laity who keep Pascha “with the Jews,” contrary to the definition of the great and holy synod convened at Nicaea concerning the feast of the saving Pascha — evidence, from within sixteen years, both that Nicaea had decided the matter and that the decision was not one of the twenty canons but a synodal act referred to as such (Antioch 341, canon 1; in The Rudder [Pedalion], trans. Cummings, Chicago, 1957; and NPNF II/14, ed. Percival). Apostolic Canon 7 likewise deposes a bishop, presbyter, or deacon who keeps the holy day of Pascha before the vernal equinox with the Jews — the Apostolic Canons being received as canonical by Quinisext (692) canon 2 (see Orthodoxy: Sources of Canons).

Two facts follow from the shape of this evidence, and both matter. First, the Nicene Paschal decision is genuine, universally received, and canonically enforced — it is not a scholarly reconstruction. Second, it exists as a synodal decision and a principle, not as a numbered canon with a technical annex.

What the Council Did Not Do

It is precisely because the decision is real that its limits have to be stated exactly. Four things are commonly attributed to Nicaea that the sources will not support.

Nicaea did not promulgate the Alexandrian computus. The nineteen-year cycle, the golden numbers, and the tables of the paschal moon are the work of the Alexandrian church, developed and refined across the fourth and fifth centuries. The council’s letter does not contain them, does not describe them, and does not command them. What it did was give Alexandria the task of announcing the date each year to the other Churches — an administrative arrangement, not the canonization of a formula (Mosshammer, The Easter Computus and the Origins of the Christian Era, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, chs. 2–3).

Nicaea did not fix 21 March by decree. The date of the ecclesiastical equinox is a feature of the Alexandrian tables; the Latin Churches for a long period used 25 March, and Rome and Alexandria differed for centuries on the earliest and latest permissible dates of Pascha as well as on the equinox.

Nicaea did not settle the computus in fact. This is the decisive historical point, and it is easily checked. If the council had promulgated a computus, the Churches would have stopped disagreeing about the date. They did not. Rome long used an eighty-four-year cycle rather than the Alexandrian nineteen-year one; Victorius of Aquitaine produced a rival table in 457; Dionysius Exiguus recast the Alexandrian tables in Latin in 525 and it took generations for his reckoning to prevail; the British and Irish Churches kept a different Easter until the Synod of Whitby in 664 and later, and the divergence persisted in parts of the Celtic world into the eighth century (Declercq, Anno Domini: The Origins of the Christian Era, Turnhout: Brepols, 2000; Mosshammer, The Easter Computus, chs. 6–12). Real Easters were kept on different Sundays by Churches in communion for three hundred years after Nicaea. That is not consistent with a council having laid down the arithmetic.

And Nicaea did not prescribe the Julian calendar. There is no Nicene canon, and no clause of the synodal letter, that legislates a solar calendar. The Julian calendar was simply the civil calendar of the Roman Empire, in which every act of the council — and every other public act of the fourth century — was necessarily dated. The Church used it because everyone used it (see What the Julian Calendar Is).

The Concession This Requires

This library keeps the Julian calendar and argues for it (see The Case for the Old Calendar). It therefore has a particular obligation to be exact here, because the claim that “the Julian calendar was established by the First Ecumenical Council” is common in old-calendar polemic and it is not true. Nothing in the sources supports it. An argument for the received calendar that rests on it is an argument built on sand, and the position is stronger without it.

The Nicene material does carry two things that bear on the later dispute, and they should be claimed at their real weight and no more:

A principle of common observance. The council’s whole concern was that the Churches should keep the feast together, “with one accord and on the same day.” That principle tells against unilateral change of a common practice — a point made in The Case for the Old Calendar, and one that cuts against anyone who breaks communion over a calendar (see The Old Calendarist Separations).
A principle of independence. The Christian reckoning is the Church’s own and is not to be taken from another community’s calendar. That principle is why the Church did not simply adopt the Gregorian Paschalion in 1582 or since, and why the New Calendar churches, when they changed their fixed calendar, kept the Orthodox Paschalion untouched (see The Revised Julian Calendar and Its Reception).

A Note on the Rhetoric

Constantine’s letter contains language about the Jews that is harsh and that has been used badly. Two things should be said about it, and both are matters of accuracy rather than of apology.

The letter is the emperor’s, not the council’s: it is a circular from Constantine urging the decision, and its rhetoric is his. The council’s own synodal letter, in the form transmitted by Socrates and Theodoret, is markedly more restrained and speaks of unity of practice rather than of separation from a people.

And the substance of the decision is calendrical independence, not a doctrine about the Jewish people. What the Church settled was that she would compute her own feast by her own reckoning — the same principle by which she does not compute it from a papal bull or an astronomical bureau. Later Orthodox commentary that turns the Nicene rule into a doctrine about Passover has, as the hub file notes, imported the “Zonaras proviso” into a place it does not belong (see How Pascha Is Reckoned; Orthodoxy: The Church Calendar).

References

Antioch (341), canon 1; Apostolic Canon 7; Quinisext (692), canon 2. In The Rudder (Pedalion), trans. D. Cummings. Chicago: Orthodox Christian Educational Society, 1957; and in Percival, Henry R., ed. The Seven Ecumenical Councils, NPNF II/14.
Declercq, Georges. Anno Domini: The Origins of the Christian Era. Turnhout: Brepols, 2000.
Eusebius. Ecclesiastical History 5.23–25; Life of Constantine 3.18–20. Trans. NPNF II/1.
Mosshammer, Alden A. The Easter Computus and the Origins of the Christian Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Socrates Scholasticus. Ecclesiastical History 1.9. Trans. NPNF II/2.
Theodoret. Ecclesiastical History 1.9. Trans. NPNF II/3.
Davis, Leo Donald. The First Seven Ecumenical Councils (325–787). Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990.