b'shem Y'shua
Posted on 04/16/2006 9:07:24 AM PDT by The Lumster
The Pagan Origin Of Easter
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Easter is a day that is honered by nearly all of contemporary Christianity and is used to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The holiday often involves a church service at sunrise, a feast which includes an "Easter Ham", decorated eggs and stories about rabbits.
Those who love truth learn to ask questions, and many questions must be asked regarding the holiday of Easter.
Is it truly the day when Jesus arose from the dead? Where did all of the strange customs come from, which have nothing to do with the resurrection of our Saviour?
The purpose of this tract is to help answer those questions, and to help those who seek truth to draw their own conclusions.
The first thing we must understand is that professing Christians were not the only ones who celebrated a festival called "Easter."
"Ishtar", which is pronounced "Easter" was a day that commemorated the resurrection of one of their gods that they called "Tammuz", who was believed to be the only begotten son of the moon-goddess and the sun-god.
In those ancient times, there was a man named Nimrod, who was the grandson of one of Noah's son named Ham.
Ham had a son named Cush who married a woman named Semiramis.Cush and Semiramis then had a son named him "Nimrod."
After the death of his father, Nimrod married his own mother and became a powerful King.
The Bible tells of of this man, Nimrod, in Genesis 10:8-10 as follows: "And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord: wherefore it is said, even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord. And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad,and Calneh, in the land of Shinar."
Nimrod became a god-man to the people and Semiramis, his wife and mother, became the powerful Queen of ancient Babylon.
Nimrod was eventually killed by an enemy, and his body was cut in pieces and sent to various parts of his kingdom.
Semiramis had all of the parts gathered, except for one part that could not be found.
That missing part was his reproductive organ. Semiramis claimed that Nimrod could not come back to life without it and told the people of Babylon that Nimrod had ascended to the sun and was now to be called "Baal", the sun god.
Queen Semiramis also proclaimed that Baal would be present on earth in the form of a flame, whether candle or lamp, when used in worship.
Semiramis was creating a mystery religion, and with the help of Satan, she set herself up as a goddess.
Semiramis claimed that she was immaculately conceived.
She taught that the moon was a goddess that went through a 28 day cycle and ovulated when full.
She further claimed that she came down from the moon in a giant moon egg that fell into the Euphrates River.
This was to have happened at the time of the first full moon after the spring equinox.
Semiramis became known as "Ishtar" which is pronounced "Easter", and her moon egg became known as "Ishtar's" egg."
Ishtar soon became pregnant and claimed that it was the rays of the sun-god Baal that caused her to conceive.
The son that she brought forth was named Tammuz.
Tammuz was noted to be especially fond of rabbits, and they became sacred in the ancient religion, because Tammuz was believed to be the son of the sun-god, Baal. Tammuz, like his supposed father, became a hunter.
The day came when Tammuz was killed by a wild pig.
Queen Ishtar told the people that Tammuz was now ascended to his father, Baal, and that the two of them would be with the worshippers in the sacred candle or lamp flame as Father, Son and Spirit.
Ishtar, who was now worshipped as the "Mother of God and Queen of Heaven", continued to build her mystery religion.
The queen told the worshippers that when Tammuz was killed by the wild pig, some of his blood fell on the stump of an evergreen tree, and the stump grew into a full new tree overnight. This made the evergreen tree sacred by the blood of Tammuz.
She also proclaimed a forty day period of time of sorrow each year prior to the anniversary of the death of Tammuz.
During this time, no meat was to be eaten.
Worshippers were to meditate upon the sacred mysteries of Baal and Tammuz, and to make the sign of the "T" in front of their hearts as they worshipped.
They also ate sacred cakes with the marking of a "T" or cross on the top.
Every year, on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox, a celebration was made.
It was Ishtar's Sunday and was celebrated with rabbits and eggs.
Ishtar also proclaimed that because Tammuz was killed by a pig, that a pig must be eaten on that Sunday.
By now, the readers of this tract should have made the connection that paganism has infiltrated the contemporary "Christian" churches, and further study indicates that this paganism came in by way of the Roman Catholic System.
The truth is that Easter has nothing whatsoever to do with the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.
We also know that Easter can be as much as three weeks away from the Passover, because the pagan holiday is always set as the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox.
Some have wondered why the word "Easter" is in the the King James Bible.
It is because Acts, chapter 12, tells us that it was the evil King Herod, who was planning to celebrate Easter, and not the Christians.
The true Passover and pagan Easter sometimes coincide, but in some years, they are a great distance apart.
So much more could be said, and we have much more information for you, if you are a seeker of the truth.
We know that the Bible tells us in John 4:24, "God is a spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth."
The truth is that the forty days of Lent, eggs, rabbits,hot cross buns and the Easter ham have everything to do with the ancient pagan religion of Mystery Babylon.These are all antichrist activities!
Satan is a master deceiver, and has filled the lives of well-meaning, professing Christians with idolatry.
These things bring the wrath of God upon children of disobedience, who try to make pagan customs of Baal worship Christian.
You must answer for your activities and for what you teach your children.
These customs of Easter honor Baal, who is also Satan, and is still worshipped as the "Rising Sun" and his house is the "House of the Rising Sun."
How many churches have "sunrise services" on Ishtar's day and face the rising sun in the East?
How many will use colored eggs and rabbit stories, as they did in ancient Babylon.
These things are no joke, any more than Judgement day is a joke.
I pray to God that this tract will cause you to search for more truth.
We will be glad to help you by providing more information and by praying for you.
These are the last days, and it is time to repent, come out and be separate.
David J. Meyer
Last Trumpet Ministries International PO Box 806 Beaver Dam, WI 53916
http://www.lasttrumpetministries.org/
You worry about them too much. Let them believe what they want. We know what is right and what is wrong. I laugh at these folks. What cares about them. I don't even want to give them the time of day.
Semiramis is ever-virgin, and that is the essence of paganism.
God's word says that Mary had many children after giving birth to her savior, and God's word does not lie.
"You have an interesting view of history and theology."
The only view of history, or theology that is truth is God's word, not the many contortions thereof by men.
Peter was the first Pope.
83 posted on 04/17/2006 8:11:14 AM MDT by Petronski (I love Cyborg!)
Constantine, Pontifex Maximus of the Roman state religion. He called all the bishops of the eastern and western churches to attend. The bishop of Rome was invited to attend but he chose not to attend. One of the titles of the Roman Emperor was Pontifix Maximus, This title goes all the way back to Babylon and the beginnings of the mother-child Here was the magnificent temple of Esculapius, a pagan god The title of the Magian high priest of Babylon was "Chief Bridge Builder"
Revelation 2:13 'I know where you dwell, where Satan's throne is; Revelation 2:14 'But I have a few things against you, because you Revelation 2:15 'So you also have some who in the same wayThe Council of Nicea was summoned, and presided over, by the Emperor Constantine.
b'shem Y'shua
a title given to the Roman Emperor by the king of Ephesus
who had inherited the title from Babylon
cult under Nimrod of Genesis 10 and his wife Sumerimus. Later,
Julius Caesar was elected Pontifex Maximus and when he became Emperor,
he became the supreme civil and religious ruler and head of Rome
politically and religiously with all the power and functions of the Babylonian pontiff.
whose idol was in the form of a serpent.
The inhabitants were known as the chief temple keepers of Asia.
When the Babylonian cult of the Magians was driven out of Babylon,
they found a haven in Pergamum.
meaning the one who spans the gap between mortals and Satan and his hosts.
In Latin this title was written "Pontifex Maximus," Revelation 2:12 "And to the angel of the church in Pergamum write:
The One who has the sharp two-edged sword says this:
and you hold fast My name, and did not deny My faith
even in the days of Antipas, My witness, My faithful one,
who was killed among you, where Satan dwells.
have there some who hold the teaching of Balaam,
who kept teaching Balak to put a stumbling block
before the sons of Israel, to eat things sacrificed
to idols and to commit {acts of} immorality.
hold the teaching of the Nicolaitans.
LOL
I'm sure that the good pastor is less concerned with grammar than certain other things...
A master pastor locksmith. It has a certain ring to it...
So you deny Christ's divinity? Or object to the perpetual virginity of Mary?
If Christ is not God, then we are not saved. If He was not born of the Virgin, taking our humanity to Himself, and thus gaining for Himself a mother, properly called "Theotokos", in that she bore God, then we are not saved.
As for 'blasphemy' take up your complaint with the harps of the Holy Spirit who sat in council in Constantinople at the Fifth Ecumenical Council, who finally set down what the Church had always believed, that she remained perpetually a virgin. (And if you don't accept the authority of the Ecumenical Councils, on what authority were the various books of the Bible collected?)
Mary did not bear God; she bore the sinless human body infused by the son of God. The Holy Spirit had nothing to do with the 'fifth ecumenical council.' No part of the body of Christ has ever believed that Mary, mother of at least six children, besides our Lord, remained a perpetual virgin. That belief is the basis of all paganism that has or ever will exist on earth.
The word of God is given to us by the Holy Spirit, working through each and every believer, i.e. "the saints," and is in no way dependent on any fallible body of nicolaitans, claiming for themselves that which is given to every member of the body of Christ.
What these critics fail to realize is that the Christian Church at that time HAD to replcae or usurp some pagan practises in order to spread the Gospel and convert pagans to Christianity.
Christ died for our sins, but the exact day it happened is probably unknowable, like the day of His birth. The important this is IT HAPPENED.
If celebrating Christmas on the date of the festival of Sol Invictis, or celebrating Easter on some pagan holiday served to replace pagan celebrations with Christian ones, all well and good.
The important thing is that we don't worship oak trees or mistletoe or Tammuz or Oestre or any other pagan deities or symbols.
WE won, even if it was partly accomplishing by Christianizing some of their practises.
Sometimes these fundamentalists loose all sense of perspective.
You are a Nestorian heretic. Your position on the relation of Christ's humanity and divinity was condemned by the Third Ecumenical Council before the canon of Scripture was fixed, and has not held by any sizable body of Christians west of what is now Iraq, for over a millenium and a half, until its revival among later day protestants--not Orthodox, not Copts, not Armenians, not Latins, not Anglicans, nor any of the leaders of the protestant reformation accept your position. If you appeal to 'each and every believer', you have a quite bit of explaining to do, as to how you, and not the historic Church nor most of its separated off-shoots, have arrived at the 'true' position after all these centuries.
Unless, of course, you are an Assyrian. You don't happen to be an Assyrian do you? If not, you can consider joining up, then you can commemorate Nestorius and Theodore of Mopsuestia, who originated your erroneous ideas back in the fourth century.
No member of the body of Christ deifies Mary.
You are so right. A properly aged Peep is like a properly aged steak and bottle of red wine. (Well, maybe not, but aging is of the utmost importance!)
Quite right--no one deifies Mary (or anyone else) save God alone, and that by grace--or do you deny the words of Scripture that by grace, through faith, we become "partakers of the divine nature", and "I have said ye are gods" (quoted from the Psalms by Our Lord)?
I think your problem may be you have an insufficiently lofty notion of deity and worship, so you confuse the doctrine that Mary's vow of perpetual virginity was kept (betrothal to the aged widower Joseph being the means of protecting the vow) and the honor shown her for her faith, her 'be it unto me according to thy word' which allowed God to become incarnate, which faith puts her first among the saints who live by faith, with 'deification' and 'worship'.
Nonetheless, to deny Mary the title Theotokos, either denies the unity of Christ's person or His divinity, either of which is heresy, as it denies the basis of our salvation.
Actually, I may have been turned to the wrong page of my 'I Spy Book of Heresies' (that's a joke--but we Orthodox might as well be issued one, since we remember clearly all the rot folks came up with back in the first millenium of the Church). You may be an Apollinarian, rather than a Nestorian: you assert Mary only contributed a body to Christ--what then of His complete human nature? Whatever he did not assume of ours, is not saved. Has Christ no soul? no human will? If He assumed only our body, not our soul, our mind, our will, our human activity and energies then only our body is saved.
You 'read' things into the word that are not in print. Mary made no vow of perpetual virginity, and your ideas concerning Joseph would make profitable TV footage for the anti-christ masses that buy Da Vinci books.
You assume that the Bible is an axiom system from which you can prove everything that's true about God, Christ, Mary, salvation. . . Sorry, it's not so, the Bible isn't a Christian Koran, it's the books the Church judged to be the primary trustworthy witnesses to the history of salvation.
Christ didn't give us a book, he founded a Church. The Church keeps recollections of a great deal that isn't in even the full Christian canon of Scripture, let alone the version shortened by Luther--facing East to pray, the name of the Samaritan woman at the well (Photini), the fact that St. James, the first Bishop of Jerusalem, was Joseph's son by his first wife Salome, and a bit of Mary's life before her betrothal to Joseph, including her vow, to mention but a few.
You still haven't answered me concerning the fact that the vast majority of Christians who ever lived deny your Christology (and for that matter, uphold the perpetual virginity of Mary). You appealed to the concensus of believers, then take a minority position.
I see no reason why I, as an Orthodox Christian, with access to the entire patrimony of the ancient Church, should take correction from someone who has picked up our primary texts and read them on his own without regard to how and in what context they were understood by Christians throughout the centuries. People like you make me feel that Tertullian was right--heretics have no right to appeal to Scripture against the teachings of the Church, because the Scriptures are the Church's book.
Sorry, but your position is much more akin to the DaVinci code mania than mine: you are maintaining that there is some conspiratorial aspect to the plain preaching of the Church down through the ages, that hid the 'truth' of your erroneous doctrines. Read a history of the Church, say Jaroslav Pelikan's 5 volume set.
Nothing I'm telling you wasn't taught openly by the Church for centuries. If your doctrines were true, then, just as in Brown's fantasy, the Church would be a massive conspiracy to hide them. Fortunately for our salvation, your doctrines are not true.
Gee, that's funny, because the Lord tells us in his word that his word is all there is, and not to accept the "traditions of the elders."
.You place man made traditions that deny the word as the authority. It's not the purvey of a man made corporation to present or qualify God's word. We cannot even know who the church is; that is for the Lord and his angels. We fraternize with the tares as well as the wheat, and have no filter by which to recognize either. Man's declaration of what is the church differs drastically from the Lord's.
"The Church keeps recollections of a great deal that isn't in even the full Christian canon of Scripture, let alone the version shortened by Luther--facing East to pray, the name of the Samaritan woman at the well (Photini), the fact that St. James, the first Bishop of Jerusalem, was Joseph's son by his first wife Salome, and a bit of Mary's life before her betrothal to Joseph, including her vow, to mention but a few."
Or is it the nicolaitan tares that rule man's corporate 'church' that manufactured and keeps those satanic lies? Man's corporations declare almost all under their domain to be 'saved,' but God's word says that few will find the gate. My money is on the word. Your masses of 'christians' will wilt at the Great White Throne. "Depart from me, for I never knew ye"
By their fruits, ye shall know them.
What works of power can you point to among those who subscribe to your crabbed view of the Gospel, who dishonor Christ's mother, and deny Him His full humanity, claiming He took only a body from His mother?
The Elder Ephraim tells penitents whom he has never met their sins, and is only the latest example of such a gift among the Orthodox. St. Seraphim of Sarov was transfigured in light like Our Lord, was befriended by a wild bear, was given strength to pray 1000 nights on a rock in the Russian wilderness, and prophesied the persecution of the Church under the Bolsheviks two centuries earlier, when Imperial Russia was a the height of its power. St. Nektarios of Pentapolis predicted that a babe would grow up to lead his people--the child became Prime Minister of Greece later in life. St. John Maximovich worked miraculous cures by his prayers, and his body has not decayed in death. St. Herman of Alaska converted many to Christ, while living as a hermit; turned back a flood--with prayer and an icon of her whose proper titles you deny; and prophesied that a monk would return to his hermitage, as indeed happened nearly 200 years later.
I could go on. I limited myself to the most famous examples from the past 300 years or so. Elder Ephraim and every one of those great saints confessed the same faith I profess, and deny your opinions.
What works of manifest grace does the Spirit work among you neo-Apollinarians who dishonor the Blessed Virgin and call the Bible the word of God, when the Gospel says Christ is the Word?
I'll be content to allow the Lord to decide who is or is not a saint. Your opinion of greatness hinges on acceptance of the same lies that you accept.
Few there be...
Jesus Himself many times quoted and referred to the Scriptures to drive home the point in His teachings. Since He Himself is the Word of God, then by your position there is no valid reason that He would bother to even acknowledge the Scriptures .....that is, if it's not God's (Written)Word.....and yet....
Luk 24:44 Now He [Jesus] said to them, "These are My words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things which are written about Me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled." 45 Then He [Jesus] opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, 46 and He said to them, "Thus it is written, that the Christ would suffer and rise again from the dead the third day, 47 and that repentance for forgiveness of sins would be proclaimed in His name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem. 48 "You are witnesses of these things.
John 5:39 "You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that testify about Me;......John 5:46 "For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me, for he wrote about Me. 47 "But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?"
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