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CAL-2064Folder 02How Calendars Work

Lunar, Solar and Lunisolar

The biblical year is lunisolar; the Julian and Gregorian calendars are purely solar. That mismatch is why Pascha must be computed rather than simply looked up.

ASTRONOMYDOCUMENTED HISTORY

Three families

A lunar calendar tracks moon cycles and drifts through the solar year. A solar calendar tracks the sun and ignores the moon. A lunisolar calendar tracks both, inserting an extra month periodically to keep the lunar months aligned with the agricultural year — the Hebrew calendar's approach.

The nineteen-year cycle

235 lunar months come very close to 19 solar years — the Metonic cycle. Both the Hebrew intercalation scheme and the Christian Paschal tables lean on it. The approximation is good but not exact, and its small error is a second, separate source of drift in the Paschal computation, distinct from the leap-year error.

Consequence for Pascha

Because Pascha depends on a full moon and an equinox, the Church needed a computation — the computus — rather than a fixed date. Whole centuries of ecclesiastical mathematics exist because of this one requirement.

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