The Surprise and Celebration of Easter

New Testament scholar and Anglican bishop N. T. Wright recalls being at a party once when someone decided to read a portion of the seventeenth-century Prayer Book for laughs. The Prayer Book includes a table of numbers for locating the date of Easter with these instructions: 

To find Easter, look for the Golden Number of the year in the first Column of the table, against which stands the day of the Paschal Full Moon; then look in the third column for the Sunday Letter, next after the date of the Full Moon,…