Episode 117 The Easter Controversy – Computus 3 Ways

Description: In today’s episode, Dr. Carly McNamara of the University of Glasgow takes us through the set up on the Eastern Controversy as it played out in the early Church in Britain. She walks us through who the big players were and the multiple parties that formed. She will also explain that this controversy was much more than just a Roman vs Celt story. There were many issues, groups and opinions at play.

About Today’s Guest:
Dr. Carolyn McNamara
On Twitter: @MedievalCarly
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Begin Transcript:
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•In today’s episode, Dr. Carly McNamara of the University of Glasgow takes us through the set up on the Eastern Controversy as it played out in the early Church in Britain. She walks us through who the big players were and the multiple parties that formed. She will also explain that this controversy was much more than just a Roman vs Celt story. There were many issues, groups and opinions at play. Let’s find out more!
•With that, here is the next piece of the mosaic of the history of the Popes of Rome and Christian Church.
[00:00:00] I'd like to welcome back Dr. Carly McNamara to discuss our, or to continue discussing our trip through the history of Christianity in Ireland and the British ISS. I would definitely highly suggest you go back and listen to the previous episodes, especially the one on archeology. I think people will really enjoy the at.
Today, we're diving into a really interesting topic that I think is incredibly important and probably not as well known, especially when you really dig into the nitty gritty of the topic. And it's the Easter controversy in between the churches and Ireland and in England and the British aisles in general, uh, maybe layouts, um, that Dr.
McNamara, some of the. Issues that are involved with this Easter controversy. Yeah. So the main issue of course, is the calculation of when Easter is meant to fall. [00:01:00] And so this is done through a process called computes, which is just. The name for the masks involved. And it's generally a, a fairly complicated process because it deals with both lunar and solar calendars.
And in addition to that, it's got to be after the date of Passover. So it has to occur after the Equinox and the full moon. After Passover, but also on a Sunday. And that just almost feels like a mental game of twister so it get into some fairly complex masks that, that I try to avoid myself as a historian, but yeah, that's the main thing.
And then other things that we see discussed, um, in Ireland and Britain space civically is kind of the Tarcher that is used by monks in orders. There's some other really brief mentions of other possible things, but they're never really identified clearly. And it may just [00:02:00] kind of be people trying to, to make digs at each other in small ways.
It's a, the, the whole idea, the. Dating of Easter. It's so complicated. I got into this in some of my earlier episodes on the council of NAC, where they really hammered that out. And, uh, there was a big controversy, whether it should always be on the certain date, the 15th of ni Nissan, or should it be on the Sunday.
And so they come up with this really complicated equation of, like you said, all these different dates that are swirling around each other. Uh, Was it pretty much that by the point that the Irish and that the Easter controversy in Britain, the, I guess you might say that the broad strokes of it were figured out the Easter controversy, but now they're digging into sort of controversy 2.0 of these whole ideas of lunar cycles and you yearly cycles and it's, it's even more complicated than.
What they were arguing [00:03:00] about a few hundred years earlier at the council of NAIA. Yeah, I think you're right. I think this really is kind of Easter controversy. 2.0, if you like, and you know, for people who have heard of the Easter controversy, it's really usually fashioned in this. You know, quote unquote Irish church versus the Roman church, but really there's three different methods of calculation that are all kind of floating around near the same time here.
So we've got, what's called the 84 year cycle or the, the Celtic cycle that it's frequently called, which is what was in use in Britain and Ireland. And that includes, you know, the, the British church or what we might think of as the. It would include the Irish and the picks. So you've got them using this 84 year cycle.
You've got this Victorian calculation that was created by victorious of Acutane in 4 57. That was in use in GA in Spain. And then you've got this 19 [00:04:00] year cycle that was created by DESE. Gus, uh, that didn't get adopted in Rome until the six thirties, which, you know, we might think of as fairly late in the game, as far as this is concerned.
And the fact that, you know, we'll kind of talk about this in, of what only happened in 6 64. It's interesting too, because the Easter controversy and the controversy over the dating of Ireland and. Course of church history comes up again with the Gregorian calendar reforms in the middle ages. And then even today there's, if you look at the Eastern Orthodox, they've had a controversy over it.
And that, that's why if you look at your calendar, they'll have the Orthodox Easter and the Catholic Easter, because it's another controversy with the dating of Easter. So we're talking about a controversy that's been brewing for 1700 years or so. Yeah, that's quite a while to still be working on the same issue.
uh, that's one of the big issues with this, uh, whole controversy is [00:05:00] the Roman church is starting to get some influence. In the churches in Britain. What, what could we say about that? So I think that we wanna be careful about how much power we consider Rome to have in this period. I mean, they are recognized as the seat of Peter and Paul, so they do have this kind of.
I don't no, we could call it first among equals kind of situation. So they are recognized as having a, a position of significance, but they're not the kind of powerful central, you know, seat of Catholicism. Like we see today. So today the Pope says X, Y, and Z, and everybody goes right. That's what it is. But back in this time period, there was a lot of disagreements that was happening and that was allowed to happen.
And so if. Different bishops in GA or in Britain or in Ireland where having a disagreement, they might send people to [00:06:00] Rome to get Rome, to act as a kind of appellate court for decision making. So if they say we can't get together and agree on this, so we'll go to Rome, which has authority that we respect, but necessarily that we.
Always obey to get some assistance in trying to make some decisions when they're having trouble. I'll use this as a time to do a little foreshadowing of my next series. I think you're absolutely correct in that what we view as PayPal power and pop power today really is a fairly modern, innovative, and it's something that they would not have recognized at all back then that a Pope could just say, well, Just do it this way and that's how it is.