FIXING the date of Easter could ‘detach Christians from their Jewish roots’, says the Bishop.

The Bishop of Salisbury, the Rt Revd Nicholas Holtam, warned that fixing the date of Easter could weaken the shared experience of Christians, Jews and Muslims as ‘children of Abraham and people of the book’.

He made the warning during a sermon at his Diocese’s annual Maundy Thursday Chrism Eucharist, at Salisbury Cathedral, attended by priests and laypeople from across the region. The Bishop said the death of Jesus was connected with and interpreted by the central story of Judaism and that in a world ‘bedevilled by religious violence, it’s God’s awkward gift’ that the central acts by which Christians remember Jesus are linked with one of the most sacred Jewish festivals.

The Rt Revd Nicholas Holtam said: “If the Primates of the Anglican Communion thought same sex relationships are difficult to know what to do with, just wait until they get going on the implications of fixing the date of Easter. It seems to me a curiously unexamined piece of cultural accommodation that would separate the timing of Easter from Passover and detach us from our Jewish roots.

“In a world in which the dominant secular narrative about religion is of division and violence it ought to be a gift that there are shared stories, experiences and scriptures.

“Our job is to live with this connectedness, work with it, explore its meaning including the awkward difficulties and differences to make a more Godly story for the sake of a deeply troubled world.”