Posted on 04/03/2007 6:31:28 AM PDT by DouglasKC
Every spring, the anticipation and excitement of Easter is electrifying for many people. Churches prepare elaborate Easter programs that illustrate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Parents take time to color Easter eggs and hide them so their children can hunt for them.
It's typical for TV movies this time of year to depict Easter as an enjoyable occasion of renewed happiness. Television advertisements and commercial businesses also get very involved with Easter as they offer colorful Easter baskets, Easter costumes and chocolate rabbits to celebrate this great religious event.
Many churches advertise outdoor Easter sunrise services, with any and all invited. Weather permitting, the Easter celebration is visually reinforced by watching the sun rise in the east.
But what do bunnies and colored eggs have to do with Jesus' resurrection?
And if this celebration is so important, why didn't Jesus teach His apostles and the early Church to observe it? The books of the New Testament were written over a span of decades after Jesus Christ's death and resurrection, yet nowhere do we see so much as a hint of any kind of Easter celebration.
So where exactly did Easter and its customs come from? Why do hundreds of millions of people celebrate the holiday today?
Can we find Easter in the Bible?
Easter is considered the most important religious festival in today's Christianity. "The Easter feast has been and still is regarded as the greatest in the Christian church, since it commemorates the most important event in the life of its Founder" (The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, 1986, Vol. 2, "Easter"). Given its popularity, one would think that surely this observance is found in God's Word.
Some cite Acts 12:4 as authority for celebrating Easter. But there's a problem in that Easter isn't really mentioned there at all. The King James Bible translators substituted "Easter" for the Greek word Pascha, which means "Passover." "The word [Easter] does not properly occur in Scripture, although [the King James Version] has it in Acts 12:4 where it stands for Passover, as it is rightly rendered in RV" (ibid.).
The vast majority of Bible translations recognize this error in the King James Version and rightly translate the word as "Passover" in Acts 12:4. The truth is, "there is no trace of Easter celebration in the [New Testament]" (ibid.)
Where did Easter come from?
If Easter isn't found in the Bible, where exactly did it come from? And just exactly what does the name Easter mean?
It's important to review credible historical sources to understand the celebration's true history. For example, The Encyclopaedia Britannica tells us: "At Easter, popular customs reflect many ancient pagan survivals—in this instance, connected with spring fertility rites, such as the symbols of the Easter egg and the Easter hare or rabbit" (15th edition, Macropaedia, Vol. 4, p. 605, "Church Year").
In the ancient world of the Middle East, people were far more connected to the land and cycles of nature than we are today. They depended on the land's fertility and crops to survive. Spring, when fertility returned to the land after the long desolation of winter, was a much-anticipated and welcomed time for them.
Many peoples celebrated the coming of spring with celebrations and worship of their gods and goddesses, particularly those associated with fertility. Among such deities were Baal and Astarte or Ashtoreth, mentioned and condemned frequently in the Bible, whose worship typically included ritual sex to promote fertility throughout the land.
It was only natural to the peoples of the ancient Middle East to incorporate symbols of fertility—such as eggs and rabbits, which reproduce in great numbers—into those pagan celebrations for their gods. As The Encyclopaedia Britannica notes above, Easter eggs and the Easter rabbit are simply a continuation of these ancient spring fertility rites.
Nineteenth-century Scottish Protestant clergyman Alexander Hislop's work The Two Babylons is still considered a definitive work on pagan customs that survive in today's religious practices.
On Easter, he wrote: "What means the term Easter itself? It is not a Christian name. It bears its Chaldean origin on its very forehead. Easter is nothing else than Astarte, one of the titles of Beltis, the queen of heaven, whose name, as pronounced by the people of Nineveh, was evidently identical with that now in common use in this country. That name, as found by [early archaeologist Sir Austen Henry] Layard on the Assyrian monuments, is Ishtar" (1959, p. 103).
The name Easter, then, comes not from the Bible. Instead its roots go far back to the ancient pre-Christian Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar, known in the Bible as Astarte or Ashtoreth.
Ancient resurrection celebrations
What did worship of this goddess Ishtar involve? "Temples to Ishtar had many priestesses, or sacred prostitutes, who symbolically acted out the fertility rites of the cycle of nature. Ishtar has been identified with the Phoenician Astarte, the Semitic Ashtoreth, and the Sumerian Inanna. Strong similarities also exist between Ishtar and the Egyptian Isis, the Greek Aphrodite, and the Roman Venus.
"Associated with Ishtar was the young god Tammuz [mentioned in Ezekiel 8:14], considered both divine and mortal . . . In Babylonian mythology Tammuz died annually and was reborn year after year, representing the yearly cycle of the seasons and the crops. This pagan belief later was identified with the pagan gods Baal and Anat in Canaan " (Nelson's Illustrated Bible Dictionary, 1995, "Gods, Pagan," p. 509).
Alan Watts, expert in comparative religion, wrote: "It would be tedious to describe in detail all that has been handed down to us about the various rites of Tammuz . . . and many others . . . But their universal theme—the drama of death and resurrection—makes them the forerunners of the Christian Easter, and thus the first 'Easter services.' As we go on to describe the Christian observance of Easter we shall see how many of its customs and ceremonies resemble these former rites" (Easter: Its Story and Meaning, 1950, p. 58).
He goes on to explain how such practices as fasting during Lent, erecting an image of the deity in the temple sanctuary, singing hymns of mourning, lighting candles and nighttime services before Easter morning originated with ancient idolatrous practices (pp. 59-62).
Another author, Sir James Frazer (1854-1941), knighted for his contributions to our understanding of ancient religions, describes the culmination of the ancient idolatrous worship this way: "The sorrow of the worshippers was turned to joy . . . The tomb was opened: the god had risen from the dead; and as the priest touched the lips of the weeping mourners with balm, he softly whispered in their ears the glad tidings of salvation.
"The resurrection of the god was hailed by his disciples as a promise that they too would issue triumphant from the corruption of the grave. On the morrow . . . the divine resurrection was celebrated with a wild outburst of glee. At Rome, and probably elsewhere, the celebration took the form of a carnival" (The Golden Bough, 1993, p. 350).
A new celebration with ancient idolatrous roots
In various forms, worship of this god under the names Tammuz, Adonis and Attis, among others, spread from the outer reaches of the Roman Empire to Rome itself. There a truly remarkable development took place: Early Catholic Church leaders merged customs and practices associated with this earlier "resurrected" god and spring fertility celebrations and applied them to the resurrected Son of God.
The customs of the ancient fertility and resurrection celebrations weren't the only ones morphed into a new "Christian" celebration, but they are among the most obvious. After all, many historians readily admit the origin of the name Easter and the ancient fertility symbolism of rabbits and decorated eggs (which you can verify yourself in almost any encyclopedia).
Frazer observes: "When we reflect how often the Church has skilfully contrived to plant the seeds of the new faith on the old stock of paganism, we may surmise that the Easter celebration of the dead and risen Christ was grafted upon a similar celebration of the dead and risen Adonis" (p. 345).
He goes on to note that the desire to bring heathens into the Catholic Church without forcing them to surrender their idolatrous celebrations "may have led the ecclesiastical authorities to assimilate the Easter festival of the death and resurrection of their Lord to the festival of the death and resurrection of another Asiatic god which fell at the same season . . . the Church may have consciously adapted the new festival [of Easter] to its heathen predecessor for the sake of winning souls to Christ" (p. 359).
Surprisingly, the celebration of Easter didn't finally win out until A.D. 325, nearly 300 years after Jesus Christ's death and resurrection!
As the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains in the section titled "The Liturgical Year," "At the Council of Nicaea in 325, all the Churches agreed that Easter . . . should be celebrated on the Sunday following the first full moon . . . after the vernal equinox" (1995, p. 332).
Up until this time, many believers had continued to commemorate Jesus' death through the biblical Passover as Jesus and the apostles had instructed (Luke 22:19-20; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26). Now, however, with the power of the Roman Empire behind it, the Catholic Church enforced its preference for Easter. Those who wished to continue to observe the biblical Passover had to go underground to avoid persecution.
Would Jesus Christ celebrate Easter?
The record of the New Testament is clear: The faithful members of the early Church continued to observe all that the apostles taught them, as they were taught by Jesus Christ. The record of history is equally clear: In later centuries new customs, practices and doctrines were introduced that were quite foreign to the original Christians, forming a new "Christianity" they would scarcely recognize.
So a key question is, should a Christian follow what Jesus taught or what later religious teachers taught?
It's always a good idea to ask the question, what would Jesus do?
If Jesus were in the flesh today, would He celebrate Easter? The simple answer is No. He does not change. "Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and forever," as Hebrews 13:8 tells us (emphasis added throughout). Jesus never observed Easter, never sanctioned it and never taught His disciples to celebrate it. Nor did the apostles teach the Church to do so.
Today, Jesus would observe the biblical Passover and Days of Unleavened Bread as Scripture teaches and as He practiced and taught (John 13:15-17; 1 Corinthians 5:7-8). In fact, He specifically said that He anticipated observing the Passover with His true followers "in My Father's kingdom" after His return (Matthew 26:26-29).
The feasts of Passover and Unleavened Bread have deep meaning to Christ's true disciples. They reveal aspects of God's plan for the salvation of humanity—commemorating the fact that Jesus died for us and lives in us and for us (1 Corinthians 11:26; Galatians 2:20; Colossians 3:3-4).
Should you observe Easter?
If you want to be a true disciple of Christ Jesus, you need to carefully examine whether your beliefs agree with the Bible. It is not acceptable to God to merely assume that He approves of or accepts non-biblical celebrations, regardless of whether they are done for proper motives.
The fact is that God says, "Learn not the way of the heathen"—those who don't know God's truth (Jeremiah 10:2, King James Version).
His Word gives us explicit instructions regarding worshipping Him with practices adopted from pagan idolatry: "Do not inquire after their gods, saying, 'How did these nations serve their gods? I also will do likewise.' You shall not worship the Lord your God in that way; for every abomination to the Lord which He hates they have done to their gods . . . Whatever I command you, be careful to observe it; you shall not add to it nor take away from it" (Deuteronomy 12:30-32).
Jesus Christ now commands everyone to repent of following all man-made religious traditions: "Truly, these times of ignorance God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent" (Acts 17:30; compare Matthew 15:3).
Will you honor Christ's lifesaving instructions so that God can bless you? He said: "If anyone serves Me, let him follow Me; and where I am, there My servant will be also. If anyone serves Me, him My Father will honor" (John 12:26).
God wants you and me to obey His life-giving Word. When we do, we can serve Christ as His ambassadors on earth. There is no greater calling on earth and throughout time. For your ongoing happiness and security, turn to God now and seek His complete and perfect way. GN
39 posted on 04/03/2007 10:09:43 AM MDT by pgkdan
The observances of Good Friday and Easter Sunday have perpetuated the traditional chronology that the crucifixion took place on a Friday, and that the Lord's body was buried on that day at about 6:00 p.m., and that he rose from the dead early on the following Sunday morning. There are some, however, that feel this tradition is at variance with the Scriptural record. One of the problems is reckoning "three days" between Friday evening and Sunday morning. Our Lord's definitive statement is one of the problems: "For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth (Matthew 12:40)." The mention of nights, as well as the number of days, makes it hard to render this as simply an idiomatic rhetorical device rather than a statement of fact. The Sabbaths Nowhere in the Gospels does it assert that Christ was crucified on a Friday. In Mark 15:42, it refers to "...the day before the sabbath." This may be the root of the misunderstanding. The Jews had other sabbaths in addition to the weekly shabbat (Saturday). In addition to the weekly sabbaths, there were seven "high sabbaths" each year, and the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the 15th of Nisan, was one of them. Further, Matthew 28:1 should read, "At the end of the sabbaths," (which is plural in the Greek), implying there was a plurality of sabbaths that week. If Passover, the 14th of Nisan, fell earlier in the week, the 15th could have been any day prior to Saturday, the weekly Sabbath. "When the sabbaths were past" would, of course, be Sunday (actually, Saturday after sundown), in accordance to the Feast of First Fruits. (Some hold to a Thursday crucifixion on a similar basis.) The 17th of Nisan Jesus had declared that He would be in the grave three days, and yet was to be resurrected "on the morrow after the sabbath," on the day of the Feast of First Fruits. It is interesting that the authorities, anxious to get the body off the cross before sundown, unknowingly were fulfilling God's predetermined plan, "according to the Scriptures." Noah's flood ended on the 17th day of the 7th month. This month becomes the 1st month at the institution of the Passover. Our new beginning in Christ was on the anniversary of the Earth's "new beginning" under Noah! Israel's new beginning, the crossing of the Red Sea, is believed to have been on the 17th of Nisan. Also, in their flight after Passover, Israel retrieved the body of Joseph from his tomb. After Passover, Jesus was retrieved from another Joseph's tomb on this date. The Jericho Journey Another problem with a Friday crucifixion is John 12:1: "Then Jesus six days before the Passover came to Bethany..." (from Jericho). If the Friday view can be accepted, then six days earlier was the weekly shabbat, and on this day such a journey was legally out of the question for a devout Jew. Summary As for the Friday or Wednesday issue, there are many good scholars on each side of this controversy. I personally have become rather cynical toward any tradition that is not supported by Scripture. Good Friday is the "traditional" view. The Wednesday crucifixion is known as the "reconstructed view." This article is intended to stimulate study and constructive conversation during this precious season. However the important thing is that the tomb was empty. The authorities made sure that this was indisputable. Indeed, He is risen!
FRIDAY OR WEDNESDAY? -
b'shem Yah'shua
And what's your point?
Maybe you don't understand the point. Judaism had to be kept separate from the goyim, as a sort of "incubator" for the Redeemer.
Now the Redeemer has arrived. He is King over all. Everything that is good, belongs to him, because he made it. Everything that is good, ought to be devoted to the worship of God. (And no, that doesn't mean that you ought to barbecue steaks in church. It means you ought to offer the act of barbecuing steaks for your family to God in union with the work of Christ. Everything we do, unless it's sinful, ought to be an act of worship.)
Well that should tell you somethng about gospel worship ... simplicity. No bells and smells. No altars ... no priests ... no sacrifices. And no annual holy days.
Silence is not evidence, topcat, not evidence of anything.
Truth is objective and found in divine revelation.
True enough. But the silence of Scripture on any topic is not divine revelation, and neither are the writings of John Calvin.
You're okay with violating Scripture, sometimes?
How do you, within a Biblical context, explain not only Easter eggs and rabbits, but mistletoe, Yule logs and Christmas Trees?
Ohfergoodnesssakes.
Christmas trees probably developed from the trees used in medieval morality plays depicting the Fall. That's pretty Biblical.
Eggs have an obvious symbolic relationship to the resurrection, and eggs are traditionally eaten in the Passover Seder. Traditionally, in the Slavic countries, Easter eggs are decorated with Christian symbols.
The other things are pagan customs which have no relationship to the Christian faith.
And, as pointed out to you already, you won't find any of those things in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
[Galatians 4:8] Howbeit then, when ye knew not God, ye did service unto them which by nature are no gods.
Sometimes it helps to go back a little to see the context. Paul is speaking of "elements of the world" (verse 3)....idols, false gods.... the Galatians had worshiped prior to their conversion. Let us not forget, Paul was chosen as an Apostle to the Gentiles, not to the circumcised as had been the original twelve, As such, Paul evangelized many folks who had previously worshiped idols and pagan things. As Paul explained in his first letter to the Corinthian Church, idol worship is the worship of demons [I Corinthians 10:19-20].
The entities which had caused so much grief to the Galatians were evil spirits....not the Divine Laws of Our Lord. It would be very difficult for Paul, as a Lawyer and a well educated Pharisee who studied God's Laws under Gamaliel [Acts 22:3] to call the laws of God....beggarly! Yes....pagans observed days, months, seasons and years (verse 10)....but not God's Feasts and Holidays.....a big difference!
I'm not poisoning the well, just pointing out that I don't trust Bokenkotter to be an unbiased source.
Who wouldn't have known what to do with them, since they were illiterate.
Perhaps you'd like to concede my point about moving the date and changing the customs/commands?
Obviously the date was controversial, and the 14th of Nisan party lost the argument.
passover was a jewish holiday celebrating what God did for the jews the name btw NEVER CHANGED but Christians rightly felt that celebrating what Christ had done to save all man kind was a bit more memorable and that didn’t happen on a saturday but on a sunday morning!
Clearly you feel that "days, months, times and years" are referring to God's holy days. They're not and here's why:
1. The greek word used to refer to the Lord's holy days is heorte. This word isn't used in these verses.
2. Do you really believe that Paul would blaspheme the written word, the only written words they had, of the Lord our God by calling the holy days he created "weak and beggarly elements"?
I happen to think there's a better explanation. Sin is the bondage we are in. In Galatians 4, the people Paul was writing to were former pagans who observed "days, months and years" for a multitude of "gods". I think later that Jews began to influence these new Christians by saying that they HAD to adhere to all the manmade Jewish rules, laws, traditions and regulations that the Jewish religion had established over the centuries or else they didn't really know God.
I knew I should have waited a few minutes before answering this one... :-).
I hope you had a wonderful day today and found it spiritually fulfilling.
read Acts. change was the order of the day. did Christians need to be circumcised?
As pointed out earlier, the death of Christ which provided atonement for the sins of man is the essential point of Christianity. We are told to observe Christ's death until he comes again.
1Co 11:26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until He comes
Rom 6:3 Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?
The resurrection gives great hope that we too can be eternal, but everyone is going to be resurrected anyways, some in a good way and some in a bad way:
Joh 5:29 And shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation
And the bible NEVER tells us to observe the resurrection of Christ and especially never says to do it at the expense of the holy days that the Lord Jesus Christ created.
It doesn’t come from a pagan goddess named Eostre.
It comes from the Germanic word for “East.”
There is dispute that such a name for a goddess actually ever even existed. It is an indisputable fact, on the other hand, that the words Sun and Sonne, Son and Sohn, and East and Oest all are part of religious word play among germanic peoples and that THEY are the only ones who use the word “Easter” as a name for this season. (Dutch, I believe, has the same word similarities.)
The eggs came in because eggs (meat) were not consumed but were saved during lent (pickled?) and finally brought out at the end of Lent.
The rabbit didn’t show up until about the 16th century, and I believe there is a close connection between it and the American Dutch-Germans. It was not a fertility anything. It was a bunch of dutch uncles having fun with kids.
Thank you Douglas....yes, I had a wonderful Sabbath. Thank you for posting this message about the errors of Easter.
I would agree, but in the context of eating and drinking practices, not God given commandments. As pointed out, Paul is specifically addressing an issue that the Romans were having with eating and/or drinking practices. He said pretty much the same thing to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 10. Most likely that's what Paul was referring to in Romans, although he could also have been referring to days devoted to fasting.
Can you provide scripture.....chapter and verse for this information? I can't seem to locate it.
If you believe that Paul is saying that we don't need to observe God given holy days, then why does he specifically tell gentile Christians to observe God given holy days:
1Co 5:2 And ye are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he that hath done this deed might be taken away from among you.
1Co 5:6 Your glorying is not good. Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump?
1Co 5:7 Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us:
1Co 5:8 Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
In the passages above, it is clearly the time of Passover and the feast of unleavened bread. Pauls numerous references to leavening are evidence of this. He then concludes with the REAL meaning of the feast of unleavened bread...that we are to diligently search our and remove sin from our lives as we search out and remove leavening. He specifically says to keep the feast!
Amazing.
It's an amazing thing to see the parallels between the Israelites freedom from the Egyptians and the freedom of Christians from sin.
My point is that the holy days that were part of the old covenant with the nation of Israel are not binding on Christians. Paul makes it clear that binding anything from the old law would make one a debtor to the whole law.
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