συχνά εγώ ονειρεύομαι για την γλυκιά σοκολάτα!

It is weird to be in a holding pattern... especially when one is busy with school at the same time. I do want to assure you, my faithful readers, that The Greek Geek shall return, and soon. We're scheduled to do principle photography in early/mid-March and our hope is to start releasing new episodes during Holy Week 2012. Western Holy Week. Not the Holy Week as observed in the eastern church.

Which brings us to today's lesson.

It is deceptively simple, although like almost anything in the Christian world the details can drive you insane. The simple reason for why Western and Eastern/Orthodox Easter are sometimes on the same Sunday, sometimes almost on the same Sunday, and sometimes waaaaaaaaay far from each other has to do with the Julian calendar versus the Gregorian calendar. All nations -- I believe with the singular exception of Ethiopia -- now use the Gregorian calendar for purposes of civil time, and the Western Christian polities use it for calculating church time. But the majority of the Eastern/Orthodox polities still use the Julian calendar for purposes of calculating moveable feasts. For those of you wondering what a moveable feast is: it is somewhat a misnomer; most feast-days are calculated by adding or subtracting a specific number of days relative to Easter, and therefore most feast days stay fixed relative to each other and with respect to the date of Easter. They only move on the secular calendar because Easter itself moves. Confused yet?

Now for an interesting historical side-note. 

Full implementation of the Gregorian calendar in the West happened a lot more recently than most people realize. The British Empire and its American colonies "went Gregorian" in 1752, literally over one night. This has a significant impact on calculating exact historical times. If you look closely at dates from American pre-Revolution colonial history, you will notice a gap from Wednesday 9/2/1752 and Thursday 9/14/1752, inclusive. This is because in 1752 the Julian and Gregorian calendars were approximately 12 days off from each other. For the sake of civil sanity, it was agreed not to mess with the day of the week, but only with the date -- Wednesday was still followed by Thursday, but rather than adding one day (2+1=3), the Powers That Be added 12 days (2+12=14) to the calendar. This seems weird at first, but it makes sense when you keep in mind that so many Christian feast-days are based on a number of Sundays before or after Easter. If we had made the calendar transition along with day-of-week, then Wednesday 9/2/1752 would have been followed by Monday 9/14/1752. Moveable feasts calculated as "the ## Sunday before/after Easter" would seem fine... except that in 1753 Easter Sunday would've fallen on Friday 4/22/1753. Clearly, this would have collapsed the entire liturgical calendar so it makes sense in hindsight.

And now for an interesting side-note to the side-note: adoption of the Gregorian calendar for civil/secular time occurred later in the eastern part of Christendom and in the areas where Islamic and/or Jewish calendars were common. Russia, Greece, and Turkey all used the Julian calendar until the 20th century; thus, when you look at dates in a history book referring to the first few decades of the 1900s in eastern Europe and west/central Asia, you might want to check whether the date is Julian or Gregorian.

Confused yet? Here is where it all comes together:

Most of the Eastern/Orthodox polities still use the Julian calendar for the lunar cycle that determines Easter's date but the date itself is expressed in terms of the Gregorian calendar. Since the two calendars are currently almost exactly half a lunar cycle off -- and getting further off each year, I might add -- a curious thing happens with the reckoning of Easter. It is normal for any lunar-determined religious observation to jump around the calendar since the lunar cycle is approximately 2.5 days shorter than the standardized solar cycle.  But when one uses the Julian dating, you can end up having a different full moon date serving as the determinant for calculation. Thus, the "jumps" across the calendar that we see for Easter occur both in the West and the East, but not necessarily in the same year.

Believe it or not, this explains it. And yes, I struggle to understand it sometimes myself. The result certainly appears erratic, but trust me: it really is determined by the mathematical consequences of two calendars that reckon time closely relative to one another but not quite identically.

For the record:

2011 - both Easters 24 April
2012 - Western Easter 8 April, Eastern Easter 15 April
2013 - Western  31 March, Eastern 5 May!
2014 - both Easters 20 April

And now you know.
Χριστός Ανέστη! Αληθώς Ανέστη!

οι γάτες οι όμορφες μου γκρι γούνα έχουν!

Once upon a time...

There was a show called THIS WEEK IN HERESY. 4 of its 10 episodes featured a rather outspoken seminary student named Philip Tanner who took viewers through places in the Christian New Testament that appear to be doctrinal justifications for anti-gay theology -- but which mean something totally different when we look at them in their original language: the generation of Greek spoken widely across the "civilized" world during the Hellenistic Era. The Greek spoken during this era is called Koiné, Hellenistic Greek, Ελληνιστική Κοινή, or simply Κοινή. The common tongue.

As a side note... I always find it fascinating how when fantasy or sci-fi stories invoke a Common Language, we tend to have such a hard time accepting such an entity. And yet... in our own global history we have unmistakable proof that yes, indeed, Κοινή was just such a language. But I digress.

As my colleagues from 4M Ministries & I continue to grow into our shared and yet distinct ministerial calls, we are restructuring and expanding the vision. It is an exciting time, albeit a tad scary as well. And as part of our expansion, we are now starting individual blogs. This, then, is the first entry in the Greek Geek's individual blog.

I want to take a minute to speak about grammar, spelling, and diacritical marks on this blog. In order to properly render this blog, your browser will need to be able to recognize the standard Greek character set. I am not an expert on Unicode standards, so I unfortunately cannot provide technical help on such things. I can tell you that my authoring environment is a MacBook Pro running Lion (OS X v10.7.5) and using Firefox. One thing I do know, however, is that the Polytonic Greek character set is less widely supported than "standard" Greek. For purposes of this blog, then, I will avoid Polytonic characters unless absolutely necessary. For those of you who have some knowledge of Greek, then, you are likely to encounter what will seem like a mish-mash with modern Greek spelling but Κοινή linguistic features. So, to be clear: yes I know that I am mixing different "generations" of the Hellenic language strata. And that's that about that, cool?

I think I'll stop now. Comments, suggestions, etc., are always appreciated.

Για Θεού είναι η δόξα και η εξουσία στους αιώνες των αιώνων. Αμήν.