If Easter, like Christmas, is based on a specific event, why is the date not fixed and is instead based on the moon?
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It is based on an older calendar. The current calendar system we use that is based on the Suns movement in the sky is relatively new and was introduced during the height of the Roman Empire. Before this we used calendars that were based on the Moons movement instead. There were a few different variants but in general the year started with a new moon around spring equinox. Easter is based on the Jewish holiday Pesach which uses this older calendar type. But Christmas is a more modern holiday that is based on the modern calendar.
Jesus wasn’t born in December so I’m not sure the fact that it was an actual event doesn’t seem related to the fact that Christmas is on a set date.
1. The Hebrew calendar was lunisolar.
2. Easter has roots in a pre-Christian fertility festival, the goddess of which lent the namesake–hence the eggs and rabbit imagery. So while people celebrate a specific (Christian) event, the festival is not tied to said event 1:1, nor the day it happened on. — Relatedly, Christmas has roots in the winter solstice, and borrows a lot of elements from it rather than just Jesus’ birth, but is similarly a celebration of that event among Christians. There is some material pointing to his actual birth being elsewhere in the year (early fall, if I remember right).
According to the story, the death and resurrection of Jesus happened at the end of Passover. That is a Jewish observance based on the lunar calendar, and Christians kept the timing of Easter based on that (though as noted in another post, they don’t always coincide in modern times).
Also worth note, Christmas Day is almost certainly not correct, nor is the date of the year 1. But it is not attached to a Jewish celebration, so it can be on a fixed date instead of varying.
Easter as a holiday has roots in the Jewish holiday of Passover. They do not celebrate the same thing, but the way they both became spring feasting holidays was not exactly coincidental. One of the effects of this is that Easter has its dates pegged to the Hebrew calendar, not the Gregorian one that the bulk of the world has standardized today.
The Gregorian calendar is a mostly pure solar calendar. It concerns itself with counting the days in the year, and nothing else. Every date on the calendar does its best to ensure that, on that day, no matter what year it is, it will always be the same season that day, and the sun will always be in the same spot in the sky on that day.
The primary counterpart to a solar calendar is a lunar calendar. Lunar calendars track moon phase, not sun position. They will often have months of 29-30 days synced up exactly with the moon cycles. It is wholly unconcerned with what season any given date is. So compared to a solar calendar, the dates will wildly drift apart. The Islamic calendar is a lunar calendar. It’s why Ramadan seems to be celebrated almost completely at random to someone used to a solar calendar. It’s because they’re counting moon phases, not season cycles.
The Hebrew calendar is lunisolar. A sort of compromise between the two. They still considered moon phase important, and track those with months synced to its phases. But they also still consider seasons important to track, for agricultural purposes. So their calendar ends up being sort of like the Islamic one, tracking the months and drifting out of sync with the solar calendar. But before they drift too far, they add a kind of “leap month” to get back in sync.
This slow drifting out of sync with occasional big-chunk corrections causes the Hebrew calendar to always be *roughly* in sync with the Gregorian calendar. Ususlly no more so than a month off. But every year they differ by a different amount. Since Easter is pegged to a Hebrew calendar date and not a Gregorian one, that’s exactly what happens to Easter when you try to mark it on a Gregorian one.
EDIT: To be a bit more specific, Easter is not exactly “pegged to the Hebrew calendar” either. It’s… a weird mix of Hebrew and Gregorian. A more precise definition of when Easter is celebrated is “the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox”. The “spring equinox” part is a day that all cultures, regardless of calendar system, were at least somewhat interested in. It’s one of only two days of the year when night and day are the same duration. Though, because that’s a solar event, only solar calendars track equinoxes on the same day every year. The “first full moon” part is where the Hebrew calendar comes in. They’re waiting for a particular date on their calendar, which is synced to the moon phases. Then, the “Sunday” part is like taking the Hebrew date, whatever it happens to be, and “rounding up to the nearest Sunday” in the Gregorian calendar, because people who use that calendar would prefer to celebrate this holiday on their designated holy day of the week. Going between solar to lunisolar and back to solar again in this way causes Easter’s date to “hop around” year-on-year… which is in no small part why the holiday became associated with rabbits.
You do know that the “events” aren’t real, right?
It would be like if, 2000 years from now, they had a holiday celebrating Tony Stark and friends saving New York City (not the date of the Avengers release, the “real” date of the battle.)
It doesn’t really matter if the numerical date of the holiday is a bit wibbly-wobbly.
The “date [being] fixed” just means that it’s based on the sun, instead of on the moon. Essentially equally arbitrary.
Because Easter is stolen from the pagan Eostre goddess of fertility. It pays tribute to the renewal of the Earth, the rebirth of life after the dead of winter. Thus Christianity reskinned this holiday as the rebirth of Jesus, rising from the dead. It also falls just after the Spring equinox when the sun (sun = son = Jesus) is dominate (more sunlight than dark).
Likewise, Christmas is stolen from the pagan Yule celebration and falls just after the winter solstice when the days begin to get longer (sun = son = Jesus is born). Almost everything (symbols, tree, gifting) we associate with celebrating Christmas comes from Yule.
These are how Christianity coopted people into the religion.
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