There is a certain dismay when the Christian Easter and the Jewish Passover are disparagent holidays, as this year. It reflects a discord in our religious heritage that is uncharitable and jealous despite the vividness of the historic connection.

Easter and its metaphor is Christianity’s patent holiday. Easter is Christianity’s hood ornament, our totem pole, the act at center stage, never mind it is labeled as Easter, referring to Eostre the pagan Saxon goddess of spring and fertility, and similar to the goddesses of Europe; Ostara, Eastra, Austion, Ausos.

After all, why invent a religion from scratch? The Roman influence remains on Easter as White Week, the Latin hebdomada, when the newly baptized wore white clothing symbolizing some ancestral linen sales at the local Walmart, a kind of rebirth in any case. A singular event as when my mother washed the winter quilts and hung them on the line, a certain sign of spring.

The Spanish refer to Easter as Pascua, the French as Paques, from Greek and Latin, Pesach in Hebrew, to reference the Passover recorded in Exodus, since specific to the Jewish tradition of Haggadah, the scriptural obligation of the Orthodox to recount the Exodus story during the eight day feast of the moon of Nissan, the last of the 10 plagues spent on Egypt.

No. 10’s cruel patent being to kill the first born. As the story relates this the plague that broke the pharaoh’s will and he told his Hebrew subjects to clear out. The story further entwined with the unleavened bread for the journey, what we know as hard-tack, pretzels count and saltine crackers.

By the legend, 600,000 families (2 million people) left Egypt that day, and we thought our weekend traffic was tough. The Pharaoh at this juncture may have been the historical Mernepath, notable as politically weak, unlike his father Rameses II.

There are no Egyptian records of the Exodus by the folks who recorded just about everything including the local tax rate. The legend of Exodus may have been founded in the period of 1300 B.C., a time of numerous mass migrations: atypical weather, crop failure, floods, war and barbarian invasion, the Trojan Wars were of this same time; this also when the vast Hittite Empire folded.

Egypt was busy fighting off a seaward invasion that established in Canaan and became the Philistines, followed by an influx of Hebrew tribes, whence the Exodus. Seems as if the Middle East is still in that migratorial flux related by Exodus.

The Hebrews probably never were “slaves” in Egypt, they certainly didn’t build the pyramids completed 300 years before the appearance of the Hebrews. Historically there were no Jews in Bronze Age Egypt, the kingdom of Judah rose during the Iron Age, appearing in the archeological record on the Mernoptsch Stele between 1208-03 BCE, when a confederation of “Habiru” tribes established around the Jordan River.

Egyptian kingdoms, contrary to Biblical rumor, were not slave-based, if maybe a few war prisoners here and there, but slaves tend to be resentful, not particularly good consumers, not good for the economy, as the Confederacy was to learn. The Bible story is decidedly anti-Egyptian, anti-establishment at this point, if even good books do that.

Stories, as English majors know, are who we really are, a combination of truth and fiction; our legends become ourselves, capture our hopes, our dreams, our nightmares. Every nation, synod, tribe, club, family has its legends around which we form identity and faith, and in that context, all legends are true because in the end we become those legends.

The disparity between Christian Easter and Hebrew Passover and its Jesus/Joshua connection has a complex root. The Orthodox Easter date is a celestial event, first Sunday after first full moon after equinox, a nice straightforward bit of math.

The Hebrew paschal moon is a complex celestial rhythm of an 84-year cycle, in turn further complicated in that Greek and Russian Orthodox use the Julian calendar and a 19-year paschal cycle, hence their Easter dates can be as much as five weeks apart (Russian Orthodox Easter is May 1, 2016)

On a humanitarian level, celebrating Easter separate from the Hebrew Passover seems discordant, mindful of the toxic ideological purities present in Islam. All of whose interpretations are based on myth, complicated by an excess of English majors, and a smattering of astronomers.

Passover this year is April 22-30. For the Jewish calendar the new moon marks the beginning of each month, the seventh month being Nissan.

Passover is the 14th day of Nissan at the full moon. A moon calendar requires a leap month of 29 days every few years to catch up to the lunar cycle. Messing up things even more, the Jewish calendar is herbal.

The installation of the Jewish leap year pushes Passover into April, a second full moon after equinox and the Christian Easter. And since Jewish Passover can occur on various days of the week, this further messes up the Christian Easter occurring as it does on Sunday morning, the format established at the Council of Nicea in 325 AD.

A Vatican discussion is ongoing to pick a single set date for Easter. If you ever wonder why there are more Jewish physicists and mathematicians, it’s because they were raised trying to figure out their weird calendar.

There is little chance two of the world’s great religions will create an orthodoxy for the joint celebration of Easter and Passover as would be emblematic of the continuity of these religions. Won’t happen, but it would be nice.

As for us original heathen faithful to Eostre who just want to celebrate spring, I offer that the original Passover was celebrated as the time the spring barley ripen. The Hebrew month Abib (green ears) named for the ripening of the barley corn. I have a place in my heart for a religion that respects the crop year and keeps it holy.