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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Every year, on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox, a celebration was made.

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.

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.

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.

We will be glad to help you by providing more information and by praying for you.

Of course, Christ quoted the Scriptures--generally if prophecies have been written down, and one is speaking of their fulfillment, one will cite the text, not the spoken version. And I quoted the Scriptures in this discussion (including a reference to Christ's own quotation of 'I have said ye are gods' from the Psalms)--conveniently ignored by my interlocutor.

Certainly what can be proven from the Scriptures, when 'rightly divided',
is true.

The problem with e-s's position is that he denies anything his own human reason, reading with the mind-set of a post-'Enlightenment' rationalist can't 'prove' from the Scriptures. This is absurd. All of the history of salvation since the Scriptures were written, much of which brings men to salvation in Christ, can't be 'proved' as from an axiom system from the Scriptures. One can't prove from Scripture that a GRU executioner was converted to Christ by the example of the New Martyr Lydia, but it's true, and the report of it comforted and inspired many persecuted by the Bolsheviks. One can't prove from Scripture that St. Seraphim of Sarov was transfigured in light, but it happened, and so forth.

Similarly, even Scripture tells us that not all of Christ's works were written down.

But in the face of this e-s denies the accounts of Joseph and Mary's life preserved by the Church simply because they aren't written in his Bible, and
worse, tars with the name of a small antinomian sect condemned in the Scriptures, almost all Christians who ever lived because we believe 'extra-Biblical' accounts.

The strain of protestant piety, which, having rejected various corrurptions of the Latin church (the sale of indulgences, bishops acting as temporal lords, and the like) throws out all of the patrimony of Christian Church 'from before the division of East and West' seizes the canon of Scripture (shortened, incidentally by Luther) as the only trustworthy thing is objectively self-contradictory. Having overthrown the authority of the Church and tradition, it lacks any real basis for establishing the authority of the Scriptures:

Why these Scriptures (which after all means 'writings', being the translation of the Greek 'graphe'), not others? Why not the 'Gospel of Judas'? or the 'Gospel of Thomas'?

In the end, the answer is, and must be, because the Church Christ founded (or made manifest) on the day of Pentecost in the descent of the Holy Spirit, judged certain books to be trustworthy, and not others. When the Scriptures were written, the list of the books we now regard as Scripture was not compiled, indeed most references to 'the Scriptures' in the New Testament manifestly refer only to the Scriptures already accepted by the Jews. (A matter of (horror!) *tradition*.)

Another thing you can't 'prove from Scripture', but which is nontheless true, is that we have a fairly complete account of the process by which the Church selected the canon of Scripture. And it took a long time. The first list of the New Testament Christians universally accept occurs in a letter of St. Athanasius the Great from the 4th century, all earlier listings either miss books or have extras. A local council at Carthage proposed the list now accepted by Orthodox and Latin Christians late in the 4th century, and it was only in the 7th century that there was clear explicit agreement to the Carthaginian decision by a general council (the canons of the Sixth Ecumenical Council explicitly ratify the acts of the Council of Carthage).

As I noted earlier: I'm coming to think Tertullian was right.

2Timothy 3:1 But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come. 3:2 For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3:3 unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, 3:4 treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, 3:5 holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power; Avoid such men as these. 3:6 For among them are those who enter into households and captivate weak women weighed down with sins, led on by various impulses, 3:7 always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. 3:8 Now as Jannes and Jambres withstood Moses, so do these also resist the truth: men of corrupt minds, reprobate concerning the faith.

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