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I thought the early Catholic Church aligned the holidays to coincide with Pagan holidays to coax the Pagans away from their festivities and into Christian celebrations. This is why Christmas is in December, not June or July. Same with Easter - the Pagan Spring celebration. There was much liberty taken(rewritten who knows how many times?) with the Gospels. Who knows what the “originals” said.

Easter is when it is because it commemorates events that happened at the time of the Jewish Passover, and which are theologically related to the Passover. In fact, Easter is called by a name derived from the Hebrew pesach in Greek and all of the Romance languages.

Passover is when it is because, according to the Jewish Scriptures, God said that's when it should be.

There was much liberty taken(rewritten who knows how many times?) with the Gospels. Who knows what the “originals” said.

I suggest you do some more research. We have a variety of manuscripts discovered at different times and places, all of which are in substantial agreement. We also have the writings of the church fathers, which quote the Gospels and the rest of the NT frequently. We have a pretty good idea of what the original text said, and when it was written to within a decade or two.

I thought the early Catholic Church aligned the holidays to coincide with Pagan holidays to coax the Pagans away from their festivities and into Christian celebrations. This is why Christmas is in December, not June or July. Same with Easter - the Pagan Spring celebration. There was much liberty taken(rewritten who knows how many times?) with the Gospels. Who knows what the “originals” said.

There is some arbitrariness in the date of Christmas, but none at all in Easter. As for the original words, we know almost exactly what the Gospels originally said because we have extensive quotes in original letters from the first two centuries of the church, not to mention early Biblical manuscripts from 1700+ years ago.

One page of the Bodmer Papyrus (P66, P72-75) from about 200 AD

The Rylands Papyrus (P52), just a scrap but still a match to what we have today, from about 125 AD.

One page of Codex Sinaiticus, the entire Bible in Greek, from about 350 AD.

Textual analysis from Bibles maintained in other languages since the first century of the church shows no indication of what I consider major changes. Most of the anomalies between Greek manuscripts are phenomenally trivial "Jesus Christ" v. "Christ Jesus", the spelling of "David", or a verb ending that changes the tense without changing the meaning. Note: Mark 16:9-20 is missing from some major manuscripts, in my opinion the biggest variant there is, but the verses are included in some earlier Gospel fragments and in original letters dated to the second century. If you review a list of the "most important textual variants" in the Bible, you will find nothing that constitutes a change in the spiritual message and little that is even relevant once the Greek is translated to English - or do you care whether an obscure figure was named Asa or Asaph?