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
This discussion is not a question of salvation.b'shem Yah'shuaIt is a valid question of worship of our coming King ,
who will sit on the throne of David in Jerusalem.
The Feast of Tabernacles (Feast of Sukkot or Feast of Booths) is an eight day
Judaeo - Christian festival (the Season of our Joy) that pictures the establishment
of the 1000 year messianic kingdom to be set up at the second coming of Yeshua
the Messiah (Christ). It is one of the three pilgrimage festivals God gave the children
of Israel in the Bible (Leviticus 23). It was during these festivals that the Israelites
would bring their offerings and firstlings to the Temple in Jerusalem and enjoy a feast!Sukkot (the Feast of Tabernacles ) is not a "Jewish festival", but rather a "Hebrew"
festival, for it was given to all the Israelite tribes, not just Judah. Today,
it would be observed by all of God's people since ". . . if ye be Christ's,
then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise" (Gal 3:29).
Christ is already reigning as king and serving as our high priest.
read Acts. change was the order of the day. did Christians need to be circumcised?
171 posted on 04/03/2007 8:26:03 PM MDT by kawaii
Not in the flesh. But of the heart. See Rav Shaul in Romans 2 & 3 The answer is yes!
b'shem Yah'shua
But you might argue, "But they said Gentiles didn't have to keep the Torah!" That's not quite the case, but I'd have to argue theological minutiae with you beyond the scope of this thread to prove it. However, even supposing that the Gentile believers were not expected to learn and follow the whole Torah, neither do the Apostles give the Gentiles the authority to change God's Appointed Times or to force the Jews to "uncircumcise" (cease to be Jewish, which includes keeping the Torah; cf. 1 Co. 7:18)--both of which we are guilty of.
Now, if Jewish believers are still supposed to keep the Feasts, and if we are not to create artificial walls of separation between Jew and Gentile, guess which Feastdays the Ekklesia as a whole should be keeping? How about the ones which God Himself appointed on Mt. Sinai and kept in the person of the Messiah Yeshua?
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: 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. (1 Co. 5:7-8)
I was thinking more in terms of the priest reading/relaying the RCC's decrees to the laity in their native tongues. Of course, the fact that the RCC did such a poor job educating the masses to be able to read the Scriptures (as opposed to, say, the Jews or the Protestants) does not exactly count in your favor, but that's another subject.
Obviously the date was controversial, and the 14th of Nisan party lost the argument.
And wrongly so--one of the many reasons I don't accept the RCC's authority. A council of men or even the word of an emperor does not have the authority to change one letter of the Word of God.
Neither can you be trusted to be an unbiased source. Neither can I. But unless you can show that his bias has affected his analysis of the downside of the Church's political ascendancy, simply saying, "Well, he's a liberal" is simply the variant of an ad hominem called poisoning the well.
1 Corinthians 5:7-8
(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:
(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.
Paul is not speaking about keeping the literal feast of the passover. He is using that as a symbol. Notice he said to keep it with “the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth”. How does one literally eat sincerity and truth?
Not at all. But I've come to believe that Scripture does not mandate against women's ordination, though it's been erroneously read that way. The short argument is: If a woman can be a prophet--and clearly she can; the prophetess Deborah even ruled over Israel in the time of the Judges--why could she not be a teacher, which rates below a prophet? The longer argument, including an analysis of the passages usually taken to mandate against women in leadership positions, can be found here if you are interested.
But, since you have made Scripture our common source of authority, are you okay with the Roman Catholic Church violating the Scriptures in regards to the date of the Passover? Are you okay with it forcing Jews to stop living as Jews to worship the Jewish Messiah, in violation of 1 Co. 7:18 and Acts 21:21?
Christmas trees probably developed from the trees used in medieval morality plays depicting the Fall. That's pretty Biblical.
I think you're too biased a source to trust on that. ;) And really, you're connecting conifers to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? What, Eve ate a pinecone now? That's a bit of a stretch.
Seriously, the fact is that no one knows where Christmas trees come from. But there are distinct parallels in pagan solstice rituals--the fresh tree represents the "rebirth" of the sun and the world as the days again grow longer. Does that mean that those putting them up are participating in idolatry? No, certainly not deliberately. But it numbers among the reasons why some of us have scratched our heads and gone back to the Holy-days that God Himself mandated and kept, using the symbols that He Himself set into place.
Eggs have an obvious symbolic relationship to the resurrection, and eggs are traditionally eaten in the Passover Seder.
To clarify, the bezeh (the roasted egg) was adopted into the Seder in place of the roasted lamb after the fall of the Temple among Ashkenazi Jews (many Sephardics continue to have lamb).
But for it being an "obvious" symbol of Resurrection? How so? Did Messiah reincarnate and start over as an egg? Or did He rise bodily from the dead as a fully-formed adult? The fact is that eggs have no Biblical connection with Resurrection, and you're stretching to avoid the obvious connection with fertility rites.
The other things are pagan customs which have no relationship to the Christian faith.
Thank you for admitting it.
And, as pointed out to you already, you won't find any of those things in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
And your point is . . . ? The last time I checked, the Catechism wasn't a historical treatise explaining the origins of traditions or even going into detail on holiday traditions, so why would it?
The Catechism is silent on the subject, and irrelevant to the conversation. The question on the table is why the date of Pesach was changed, and whether the decision on the dating had pagan overtones--possibly because of an attempt to co-opt the pagan culture by the Ekklesia. We would not expect the Catechism, which deals with current Catholic theology, not the historical debates, to speak on this subject, so one wonders why you're referencing it.
In Jerusalem ?Literally ?
Oh, my. The argument from silence - so the implication is Catholics must be guilty of paganism? The Catechism is about the practice of our faith and those things you mentioned are not included. Easter eggs and rabbits, mistletoe, Yule logs, and Christmas Trees were brought up by you, so my comment is relevant.
You neglected to address my question about the egg.
In any case, the possible "Eostre" connection puts us in the 8th century at least, so I've long since ceded the etymological argument. Your argument against the rabbit connection is good, and I'll have to do some more digging in that area. For the eggs, since eggs go back well before the creation of Lent in connection with Spring and as fertility symbols, I don't think we can call that the origin of the link.
But set that aside for a moment while I do some digging. I've ceded some arguments here. Who would like to cede that Pesach was indeed kept on the 14th of Nisan in the Eastern churches until the Council of Nicea and Constantine's letter? Who would like to cede that we've replaced the Biblical commands and symbolism with man-made ones?
Christ is literally reigning as king and serving as high priest, in heaven.
You do know that Yah'shua will literally rule the world from Jerusalem with an iron rod.
Christ clearly stated that His kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36). Also, since He is not from the tribe of Levi, He could not serve as high priest while on the earth (Hebrews 7:12-14). He is a high priest after the order of Mechizedek (Hebrews 6:20), and Melchizedek served as both king and priest at the same time (Hebrews 7:1). Since Christ would serve as king and high priest at the same time, and He could not be a priest on earth, then His reign as king is also not going to be on this earth.
That of course raises a number of questions.
Where does it say that the holy days were part of the old covenant? And where does it say that they're not part of the new covenant?
Does this mean that there is no law under the new covenant...that man is "free" to sin...to transgress God's law?
Colossians 2:16
(16) Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of a holy day, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days:
We are not to judge based on keeping a holy day, and therefore we are not to bind the keeping of such on anyone.
Just because we are not bound to the old law does not mean that we may sin freely. Romans 6 explains this pretty well.
If you read that verse carefully, you will see that the injunction is not to let anyone judge you in HOW you are keeping the holy days, not whether you should keep them. For example:
Col 2:8 Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.
God's holy days are scriptural commandments of the Lord, not "philosophy" or "vain deceit". They are not traditions of men, but commandments of God. They are not "rudiments of the world". Paul was not stupid or unlearned.
Col 2:20 Wherefore if ye be dead with Christ from the rudiments of the world, why, as though living in the world, are ye subject to ordinances,
Col 2:21 (Touch not; taste not; handle not;
Col 2:22 Which all are to perish with the using;) after the commandments and doctrines of men?
The Lord's holy days are not an ordinance of the world. It is not a doctrine or commandment of men, but of God.
If you think that Paul is calling God's holy days any of these things then you must believe that Paul was either stupid or a liar.
Um, you were the one making an argument from silence. I'm simply pointing out that the Catechism, comprised centuries after the fact and not dealing with the matter at hand, is an irrelevant source to the subject, so it's hardly surprising that it is silent.
so the implication is Catholics must be guilty of paganism?
You have read my other posts on this thread, right? Like the ones where I point out that co-opting pagan holidays and symbols was probably done with the best of intentions, as a bridge to evangelizing the pagan culture around them? I have been trying to deal with this as an honest error, not as a deliberate sin.
The sin was in deliberately changing the date just to shove away the Jews, and in demanding that Jews "uncircumcise" to enter the Body of a Circumcised Messiah.
So does the Feast of First Fruits, which according to Leviticus 23:11 is to always occur on Sunday following Passover. Just as Passover prefigured the Crucifixion, so First Fruits prefigured the Resurrection.
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