Posted on 03/30/2013 9:35:24 PM PDT by donmeaker
My unfavorite new Facebook meme is this bit of sillyness which has apparently been spotted everywhere from the feeds of my college friends to (allegedly) that of Richard Dawkins' Foundation for Reason and Science:
(Excerpt) Read more at thedailybeast.com ...
That poster in the article says, “After Constantine decided to Christianize the empire, Easter was changed to represent Jesus” is a strange anachronism. Do they imagine that Constantine spoke English? No: Constantine spoke Greek, and the only thing that changed about Easter on his account was that he promulgated a decree making uniform the date of a feast he, and his decree, called “PASCHA”.
Look up Ea/Oestre/Ostara. same dang thing, all over again. Sure it is Babylon, right at the root - Why was Esther's name changed to 'Esther' (Her actual name is Hadasa)? What is the entymology surrounding the word?
What they call it doesn't matter. it is not what was ordained, and it follows the tradition of the pagans. That all y'all co-opted it doesn't make it good. We are *not* to do as the pagans do, and say it is for Him. That is an abomination.
The whole "Easter"-"Ishtar" thing was started by an incredibly ignorant man named Alexander Hislop, who had absolutely no scholarly credentials in linguistics or archaeology, simply invented some of the "evidence" he cites in his book, and was blissfully ignorant of Christianity outside England.
Funny, but I was accused for years of drawing upon Hislop... Anyone making a comparative study of pagan gods will certainly be able to see where he is coming from (whether one agrees or not). I was able to arrive at a very similar conclusion, having never read him until recently. There are broad similarities between pantheons. To claim no linkage is just ludicrous.
This is disingenuous. What Constantine did was to tear Christianity away from it's Hebrew root. Quite amazing, isn't it, that Constantine's compromise landed Pascha directly upon the day of Ishtar/Isis? What a coincidence, huh?
By ratifying the decision of the bishops, most of whom suffered persecution for the faith under Diocletian? What rot!
Quite amazing, isn't it, that Constantine's compromise landed Pascha directly upon the day of Ishtar/Isis?
Care to provide evidence that there was a "day of Ishtar" that fell on the Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox ON THE JULIAN CALENDAR ???
Of course not; the Babylonians knew of no such day, nor of the calendar on which it was based, nor did Constantine know of any holiday called "Easter".
What does Esther have to do with Easter, aside from the similarity in sound? Obviously Esther lived in a pagan country next door to Babylon, not in Anglo-Saxon England.
Please, explain to me why no name sounding remotely like "Ishtar" has EVER been used for Easter outside England, Holland, western German dialect, and I believe Norwegian? How did "Babylonian, right at the root" get from Mesopotamia to England, missing everywhere in between? Teleportation? Ancient astronauts?
Hislop was exactly what Paul had in mind when he warned us against cleverly designed myths.
Sure.
And Dan Brown knows more than anyone who has ever lived even Jesus Christ Himself and the Apostoles.
Your lack of knowledge at calling the Feasts Jewish shows you are too far away from me instructing you in truth so let’s leave it at I will have to respectfully disagree with your entire position. Perhaps I would have to study the Bible another 30 years before I could tackle this job. May you have a good First Fruit Feast.
At least he knew to sell his books as fiction.
Which shows he smarter than the sort of gullible mental dwarf who claims The Gnostic Hoax of Judas is nonfiction.
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