“ The author states in the first paragraph that there is no actual evidence to back up that claim. All I know is that the name is not Biblical in origin. ”
...guess ill have to take her word on that. /sarc
In a study done by the University of Sydney it was discovered that Easter actually began as a pagan festival celebrating spring in the Northern Hemisphere, long before the advent of Christianity. In the first couple of centuries after Jesus’s life, feast days in the new Christian church were attached to old pagan festivals. Spring festivals with the theme of new life and relief from the cold of winter became connected explicitly to Jesus having conquered death by being resurrected after the crucifixion.
But the first of the actual religious intervention happened in 325AD when the first major church council, the Council of Nicaea, determined that Easter should fall on the Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox. This is why Easter changes dates to this day and are sometimes called movable feasts.
Easter takes its name from a pagan goddess from Anglo-Saxon England who was described in a book by the eighth-century English monk Bede. Eostre was a goddess of spring or renewal and that’s why her feast is attached to the vernal equinox. In Germany the festival is called Ostern, and the goddess is called Ostara. But what’s in a name?
rwood