Isn’t funny, that how one set of myths become somebody else’s truths. Manuscripts written a 70-year generation after the purported events, with no other contemporary manuscripts to dove-tail, including a manuscript steadfast followers call delusions, more celebrated than a man named Gautama.
“For starters, the word for Easter in many languages—including Spanish (Pascua), French (Pâques), and Romanian (Pa?ti)—is derived from the Hebrew word pesach, or “Passover.” Christians indeed borrowed many of their Easter traditions from another faith, but it was the monotheistic religion of Judaism, not paganism.”
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Christians would be doing the right thing if they focused a lot less on “Easter” and a lot more on Passover.
Like Jesus did.
.... Just curious as to where the name “Easter” came from. I was hoping he was going to explain it in this article.
Ronald Nash, cited in the article, was my professor at Western Kentucky before he went on to RTS.
Who care where it came from originally, from who and what reason. We now use it to celebrate the resurrection of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
It also does not matter on what day Jesus Christ was born. We celebrate His birth on December 25 of each year.
It is the remembrance and celebration that is important and irrespective of the date, or time, or who was there, or where He was housed.
Bookmark
The resurrection of Our Savior is not derived from a pagan holiday, but a lot of Easter activities are.
Excellent read.
Bkmrk.
Easter came from the pagan holiday of looking for rabbit eggs.
Feminism is derived from pagan women seeking to dominate men through witchcraft. Abortion is derived from the pagan ritual of human sacrifice.
That is what you can tell someone anytime they try to diminish Christianity by claiming it has pagan origins.
Where the English language term “Easter” comes from, I find of little or no significance, but will defer to some competent philologist, if such exists. Not to half assed home brewed skeptics.
Easter is the greatest of all “Christian” observances, closely followed by Christmas. It supposedly celebrates the resurrection of Christ. WHY, then, did Paul command the Gentile Christians to “show the Lord’s DEATH” till He come? Jesus Christ Himself celebrated His famous “Last Supper,” with His disciples, proclaiming that a bit of unleavened bread represented His body; that a sip of wine represented His shed blood. This was in commemoration of His DEATH for the sins of all mankind. Why is there no command anywhere in the Bible to celebrate His resurrection? Why did not the apostles celebrate it? Is the “Passover” only “Jewish,” and therefore not Christian? Should Christians observe Easter? Does the Bible command Easter observance? You will be astonished at the answers! Here, from the pages of your own Bible is the PLAIN TRUTH about EASTER and the Passover!
You were born into a “ready-made” world. You had no voice in how it is structured; its customs, traditions, religions, or politics. It took you about two years to learn the language of your parents; about six years to learn your own indigenous alphabet; about seven or eight years to learn to read simple sentences, and to begin to write.
However, from your earliest years, long before you learned to read or write; long before you learned what “research” or “study” was, you heard about the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, the Easter bunny, and watched, no doubt, hundreds of cartoons and kiddy shows on television. From your earliest years on this earth, your parents were inculcating into your mind the traditions, customs, fables, superstitions and assumptions of their own upbringing.
The point is, you first learned of “Easter,” or other religious customs through your parents or guardians. You did not research history, carefully weigh the facts, and make a reasoned decision to observe “Easter.”
Millions of adults in the western world of professing Christianity have memories of those sleepy mornings when, all excited to be dragged from bed at perhaps 3:00 or 4:00 a.m., they were dressed in frilly little frocks or a new little boy’s suit, complete with clip-on bow tie; white patent-leather shoes, greens and yellows—the colors of spring—and trundled off in the family car to an open air coliseum, or perhaps to a hilltop, to join with hundreds or thousands of others in an “Easter Sunrise Service.”
You didn’t know what “Easter” was. Only that it sounded a little like a point on the compass. Of course, the sun rose in the East. Maybe that was it? Or was it merely the opposite of “Wester”? Most likely, if you are like millions of others, you never became curious enough to go to a major encyclopedia and look up the term. We tend to take our environment for granted.
Have you ever looked into the history and origins of Easter?
Naturally, like Christmas, it comes to all of Protestantism from the Roman Catholic Church. However, the universal church got it from much, much more ancient sources.
Here is what the vaunted Catholic Encyclopedia has to say about Easter: “The English term, according to the Ven. Bede ( De temporum ratione , I, v) relates to Eostre, a Teutonic goddess of the rising light of day and spring…that the Apostolic fathers [the apostles of Christ] do not mention it and that we first hear of it principally through the controversy of the Quartodecimans are purely accidental” (The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. V, p. 224).
A “Teutonic goddess of the rising light of day and spring”? Well, yes, but much, much more than merely a pagan goddess of the rising light of day and spring. She was, in the demented minds of superstitious pagans, a goddess of sex and fertility; of fecundity and procreativity. Her symbols were, most importantly, the egg, and, secondarily, the rabbit. Of course, rabbits don’t lay eggs, but many a child does not learn this until a later age.
Bunnies are cuddly to little children. So are tiny chickens, and gaily-colored eggs. Concerning Easter eggs, the Catholic Encyclopedia somewhat reluctantly admits, “The custom may have its origin in paganism, for a great many pagan customs, celebrating the return of spring [and therefore directly related to SUN-worship], gravitated to Easter. The egg is the emblem of the germinating life of early spring…the Easter rabbit lays the eggs, for which reason they are hidden in a nest or in the garden. The rabbit is a pagan symbol and has always been an emblem of fertility…In France, handball playing was one of the Easter amusements, found also in Germany…The ball may represent the sun, which is believed to take three leaps in rising on Easter morning” (ibid. p. 227).
Dozens of “quaint” customs derived from ancient superstitions and myths. Most revolved around cupidity, and had suggestive fertility rites obvious in their execution. The same source admits, “On Easter Monday the women had a right to strike their husbands. On Tuesday the men struck their wives, as in December the servants scolded their masters…In the northern parts of England the men parade the streets on Easter Sunday and claim the privilege of lifting every woman three times from the ground, receiving in payment a kiss or a silver sixpence. In Neumark (Germany) on Easter day the men servants whip the maidservants with switches; on Monday the maids whip the men. They secure their release with Easter eggs. These customs are probably of pre-Christian origin.” (Ibid. p. 227).
These, and many other rituals, were pagan fertility rites, derived from worship of the sun. For example, the same source says, “The Easter Fire is lit on the top of mountains (Easter Mountain, Osterberg) and must be kindled from new fire, drawn from wood by friction; this is a custom of pagan origin in vogue all over Europe, signifying the victory of spring over winter…the church adopted the observance into the Easter ceremonies, referring it to the fiery column in the desert and to the resurrection of Christ” (Ibid. p. 227, emphasis mine).
Note that admission carefully, for it lies at the very heart of the matter.
Now, notice the origin of the name “Easter.” Hislop says, “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 Layard on the Assyrian monuments, is Ishtar” ( The Two Babylons , Hislop, p. 103).
The “h” was silent, just as in the Assyrian “Astarte,” where the last two letters were also silent, giving the identical pronunciation used today, “Easter.”
Of course, as millions know and also observe, “Easter” is preceded by forty days of “Lent.” But where did “Lent” come from?” Is it the past tense of “to lend”? Is it something found in one’s navel? It certainly is not found in the Bible!
Let Hislop answer: “The forty days’ abstinence of Lent was directly borrowed from the worshippers of the Babylonian goddess. Such a Lent of forty days, `in the spring of the year,’ is still observed by the Yezidis or pagan devil-worshippers of Koordistan, who have inherited it from their early masters, the Babylonians. Such a Lent of forty days was held in the spring by the pagan Mexicans, for thus we read in Humboldt [ Mexican Researches, v. i. P. 404] where he gives account of Mexican observances: `Three days after the vernal equinox…began a solemn fast of forty days in honor of the sun.’ Such a Lent of forty days was observed in Egypt, as may be seen on consulting Wilkinson’s Egyptians. This Egyptian Lent of forty days, we are informed by Landseer, in his Sabean Researches, was held expressly in commemoration of Adonis or Osiris, the great mediatorial god” (ibid. p. 105).
There is no part of “Easter” which is not rooted in rank paganism. “But we don’t do it with those pagan meanings in mind,” one might protest. Naturally! That is the whole point! It is the disguise, the deception, the counterfeit which Satan uses to delude and deceive, not a direct admission of the truth.
As Hislop says, “To conciliate the pagans to nominal Christianity, Rome, pursuing its usual policy, took measures to get the Christian and Pagan festivals amalgamated, and, by a complicated but skillful adjustment of the calendar, it was found no difficult matter, in general, to get Paganism and Christianity _now far sunk in idolatry _ in this as in so many other things, to shake hands” (Ibid. p. 105).
What does God Almighty say about His people “adapting” pagan rituals and ceremonies into their worship toward the true God? “When the LORD thy God shall cut off the nations from before thee, whither thou goest to possess them, and thou succeedest them, and dwellest in their land;
“Take heed to thyself that thou be not snared by following them, after that they be destroyed from before thee; and that thou inquire not after their gods, saying, How did these nations serve their gods ? even so will I do likewise .
“Thou shalt not do so unto the LORD thy God: for every abomination to the LORD, which he hateth, have they done unto their gods; for even their sons and their daughters they have burnt in the fire to their gods.
“What thing soever I command you, observe to do it: thou shalt not add thereto , nor diminish from it” (Deuteronomy 12:29-32).
When Israel was gradually expanding from a family into a nation while in slavery in Egypt, the people were surrounded by most vile and degrading paganism. The sun, moon and stars were worshipped, as was the Nile River, and dozens of assorted forms of life from crocodiles to scarabs. As a display of God’s wrath, God struck at the “gods” of Egypt with plagues. Not only was this intended to break the back of the world’s greatest power at that time, thus forcing the Pharaoh to release his slaves, but it was also to demonstrate God’s great superiority over the pagan gods of Egypt.
When Israel was brought out of Egypt, God knew they would encounter many heathen, pagan, sun-worshipping nations such as the Hivites, Amalakites, Jebusites, Edomites, Philistines, Perizzites, and many others. All of them practiced the abominable rites of fertility; sun worship! Human sacrifice was not uncommon, as among the Aztecs in ancient Mexico.
Because they were “amazed” at the progression of the seasons; because they believed their antics and sacrifices caused the “sun god” to begin his journey once more into the temperate zones, thus “conquering” winter and causing the life-sustaining crops to grow once again, they observed the movements of the moon and planets; observed “times” and seasons.
But God warned them, “When thou art come into the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not learn to do after the abominations of those nations.
“There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times , or an enchanter, or a witch,
“Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer [one who supposedly foretells the future by communicating with the dead].
“For all that do these things are an abomination unto the LORD: and because of these abominations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee.
“Thou shalt be perfect with the LORD thy God.
“For these nations, which thou shalt possess, hearkened unto observers of times, and unto diviners: but as for thee, the LORD thy God hath not suffered thee so to do” (Deuteronomy 18:9-14).
Easter, or “Ishtar,” is always observed in the spring, and is replete with fertility symbols! It is nothing less than a carry-over from pagan Babylonian, Greek and Roman sun worship! Its symbols are NOT sanctioned by Jesus Christ or God the Father, but, instead, are CONDEMNED in the Bible!
Parades down Fifth Avenue; an Easter-egg hunt on the White House lawn; sunrise services; the colors of springtime, and the pleasant aroma of “hot cross buns” drifting into the street from restaurants and bakeries—a nostalgic time of the memories of springtime, all buried in the remote past; with no knowledge of the utterly pagan origins. Such is the “Easter” of today.
“In Your Easter Bonnet, with all the frills upon it,” can be heard as children hide “Easter Eggs” around the lawn, busily eating little chocolate bunnies.
It all seems so “innocent,” somehow; so “family” oriented.
Is there a pagan origin of something so innocent-appearing as a “hot cross bun?”
Hislop says, “The hot cross buns of Good Friday, and the dyed eggs of Pasch or Easter Sunday, figured in the Chaldean [Babylonian] rites just as they do now. The `buns’ known too by that identical name, were used in the worship of the queen of heaven, the goddess Easter, as early as the days of Cecrops, the founder of Athens—that is, 1500 years before the Christian era. `One species of sacred bread,’ says Bryant, `which used to be offered to the gods, was of great antiquity, and called Boun.” (Hislops The Two Babylons p. 108).
The origin of the English word is Nordic, and was Bous . It stood for “Horus” and “Taurus,” or the Bull, and ultimately derived from Nimrod. Even today, millions of farmers call their cows, “boss,” or “bossy,” completely unaware of the origin of the custom. The bous or the boun was baked as quite a family affair. Notice what Jeremiah, God’s prophet, said about it: “Seest thou not what they do in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem?
“The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead their dough, to make cakes to the queen of heaven , and to pour out drink offerings unto other gods, that they may provoke me to anger.
“Do they provoke me to anger? saith the LORD: do they not provoke themselves to the confusion of their own faces?
“Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, mine anger and my fury shall be poured out upon this place, upon man, and upon beast, and upon the trees of the field, and upon the fruit of the ground; and it shall burn, and shall not be quenched” (Jeremiah 7:17-20).
God thunders at rebellious mankind , “Learn not the way of the heathen!” (Jeremiah 10:2). The “hot cross buns” are Satan’s substitute for the unleavened bread to be eaten during the Days of Unleavened Bread. The “cross” or the “X” is an ancient symbol for the “solar wheel” and is a symbol of the sun, and the non-existent “queen of heaven,” or Semiramus, the mother-wife of Nimrod. Together, the two of them ushered in the ancient “Babylonish MYSTERY” religion; made the deity into a “MYSTERY” to be worshipped by whimsical pagan rites.
Now, notice the biblical reference to sunrise services: “Then he brought me to the door of the gate of the LORD’S house which was toward the north; and, behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz” [Nimrod; the sun god].
“Then said he unto me, Hast thou seen this, O son of man? turn thee yet again, and thou shalt see greater abominations than these.
“And he brought me into the inner court of the LORD’S house, and, behold, at the door of the temple of the LORD, between the porch and the altar, were about five and twenty men, with their backs toward the temple of the LORD , and their faces toward the east; and they worshipped the sun toward the east.” The sun is in the east at its RISING! This is nothing less than a “SUNRISE” service—sun worship at the dawning of the sun!
“Then he said unto me, Hast thou seen this, O son of man? Is it a light thing to the house of Judah that they commit the abominations which they commit here? for they have filled the land with violence, and have returned to provoke me to anger…Therefore will I also deal in fury: mine eye shall not spare, neither will I have pity: and though they cry in mine ears with a loud voice, yet will I not hear them” (Ezekiel 8:13-18).
This is the only place in the Bible where men are described as turning their backs on God’s temple, facing the SUN at its rising, and worshipping the sun!
Any pagan Babylonian who might be brought back to life today would instantly recognize the significance of an “Easter sunrise service.”
The Apostles continued to observe the symbols of Christ’s broken body and shed blood on the fourteenth of Abib, or Nisan, as the first Hebrew month came to be called following the Babylonian Captivity. The word “Easter” appears nowhere in the Bible in any of its earliest manuscripts. However, hypocritical, lying copyists deliberately changed the Greek word for “Passover,” which is Pasch , from Pesach in the Hebrew. The Spanish word, taken from Latin, is Pascua .
Notice an example of deliberate tampering with the Holy Word of God found in Acts 12:4. I will include the verses around it for the setting: ” Now about that time Herod the king stretched forth his hands to vex certain of the church.
“And he killed James the brother of John with the sword.
” And because he saw it pleased the Jews, he proceeded further to take Peter also. (Then were the days of unleavened bread.)
“And when he had apprehended him, he put him in prison, and delivered him to four quaternions of soldiers to keep him; intending after Easter to bring him forth to the people” (Acts 12:1-4). This deliberate insertion into the King James Translation of the Bible is utterly fraudulent, and those who collaborated in its insertion knew it was. The Diaglott , which is a transliteration directly from the original Greek, says, “…and having seized him, he put him in prison, delivering him to four quarternions of soldiers to guard him, intending after the PASSOVER to lead him out to the people.”
Here is the New International version of the same verse: “After arresting him, he put him in prison, handing him over to be guarded by four squads of four soldiers each. Herod intended to bring him out for public trial after the Passover.”
The New Revised Standard has it: “When he had seized him, he put him in prison and handed him over to four squads of soldiers to guard him, intending to bring him out to the people after the Passover.”
Here is each word from the fourth verse in Greek, with the accompanying number from Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance . Notice carefully the word Pascha for “Passover”: “. . . piazo :G4084 . . tithemi :G5087 . . phulake :G5438 . . paradidomi :G3860 . . tessares :G5064 . . tetradion :G5069 . . stratiotes :G4757 . . phulasso :G5442 . . bouleuo :G1011 . . meta :G3326 . . pascha :G3957 . . anago :G321 . . laos :G2992.”
Now, notice the definition of the word from Strongs G3957: “3957. pascha , pas’-khah; of Chald. or. [comp. H6453]; the Passover .”
Now, notice the marginal notes from Dr. Bullinger’s Companion Bible : “Gr. To Pascha , the Passover. Easter is a heathen term, derived from the Saxon goddess Eastre , the same as Astarte, the Syrian Venus, called Ashtoreth in the O.T.”
God’s word pronounces a CURSE on anyone who would do violence to it; who would assay to either insert words into it, or take words from it (Revelation 22:19). Those who conspired to deliberately insert a purely PAGAN word into the inspired text shall bear their own guilt.
Such a deliberate insertion serves to highlight the lengths to which the apostate church went to ENFORCE “Easter” upon professing Christians. However, the enforcement took many centuries! From the earliest writings of the “ante-Nicene Fathers” as they are blasphemously called (Christ commanded, “Call no man your father on Earth” [Matthew 23:9], obviously referring to a spiritual title , rather than referring to one’s own flesh and blood father), it is obvious that the church Jesus Christ founded continued to observe the Lord’s Supper on the fourteenth of Nisan.
The Catholic Encyclopedia admits: “The dioceses of all Asia, as from an older tradition [note that carefully!], held that the fourteenth day of the moon, on which day the Jews were commanded to sacrifice the lamb, should always be observed as the feast of the life-giving pasch , contending that the fast ought to end on that day, whatever day of the week it might happen to be” (ibid. Volume V, p. 228).
But there was never any “fast” prescribed by Christ. The ONLY commanded fast in the Bible is that of the “Day of Atonement” (Leviticus 23:27; Acts 27:9). The writer of the article in the Catholic Encyclopedia obfuscates the important point; i.e., that the early Christians clung to the FOURTEENTH OF NISAN for the Lord’s Supper (commonly called “The Passover”) by writing about a “fast” which may or may not have been at issue. Any such fast was mere human tradition, and not a biblical command. Of course, the Catholic writers are attempting to build a case for “Lent,” which is not mentioned anywhere in the Bible.
Now, notice this blatant admission: “Further, Irenaeus states that St. Polycarp, who, like the other Asiatics [meaning all those in Asia Minor and Palestine], kept Easter [a deliberate insertion! Polycarp had never heard the term, except as Astarte , and would have studiously avoided it! The Catholic writer deliberately refers to Pascha the Passover, as “Easter”] ON THE FOURTEENTH DAY OF THE MONTH, whatever day of the week that might be, following therein the tradition which he claimed to have derived from St. John the Apostle, came to Rome c. 150 about this very question, but COULD NOT BE PERSUADED BY POPE ANICETUS TO RELINQUISH HIS QUARTODECIMAN [fourteenth] OBSERVANCE” (ibid. p. 228 emphasis mine).
Later, under the article “Easter,” the same writer, reporting on the infamous “Council of Nicaea,” which took place in 325 AD, said, “…we may safely infer from scattered notices that the council ruled: (1) that Easter must be celebrated by all throughout the world on the same Sunday; (2) that this Sunday must follow the fourteenth day of the paschal moon; (3) that that moon was to be accounted the paschal moon whose fourteenth day followed the spring equinox…this ruling of the Council of Nicaea did not remove all difficulties nor at once win universal acceptance amongst the Syrians…the Roman missionaries coming to England in the time of St. Gregory the Great found the British Christians, the representatives of that Christianity which had been introduced into Britain during the period of the Roman occupation [hence, during the days of the apostle Paul and other apostles!], still adhering to an ancient system of Easter-computation which Rome itself had put aside” (ibid. p. 229).
Again, the term “Easter” is deliberately injected into the article. However, the apostles never heard of the word, except in its ancient application to Ashtoreth , or Astarte , the “Venus” of pagans, and would have been outraged to have heard anyone attach such a despicable name to the somber and holy observance of the Lord’s Supper!
The Catholic writer then admits to many points of “obscurity” in the historical records of the controversy which finally led to the Council of Nicaea attempting to FORCE Christians to discontinue observing the Passover on the fourteenth, as Christ had commanded. He says, “There is, for example, the perplexing doubt whether the crucifixion [sic] of Christ took place on the fourteenth or fifteenth of Nisan. The Synoptists seem to favour the latter, St. John the former date.”
But the Synoptists (Matthew, Mark and Luke) did not “favor” the fifteenth at all, and it is because of John’s important statement that the Sabbath which fell on the day following the death of Christ was “an HIGH day,” i.e., the first Day of Unleavened Bread, that it had to be admitted that the death of Christ took place on the fourteenth!
So it was that the stage was set for the monstrous persecutions which followed. For literally centuries, God’s people continued to observe the Lord’s Supper on the beginning of the fourteenth of Nisan, just as Christ had set the example. They were labeled “fourteenthers,” (Quartodecimans) as a derisive term, and were mercilessly hunted down and slaughtered.
Halley’s Bible Handbook says, under the article “Forerunners of the Reformation,” “Albigenses or Carthari in southern France, northern Spain and northern Italy, preached against the immoralities of the priesthood, pilgrimages, worship of saints and images, completely rejected the clergy and its claims; criticized church conditions; opposed the claims of the Church of Rome; made great use of the Scriptures; lived self denying lives and had great zeal for moral purity. By 1167 they embraced possibly a majority of the population of South France; by 1200 very numerous in Northern Italy. In 1208 a crusade was ordered by Pope Innocent III; a bloody war of extermination followed, scarcely paralleled in history; town after town was put to the sword and the inhabitants murdered without distinction of age or sex; in 1229 the Inquisition was established and within a hundred years the Albigenses were utterly rooted out.” The histories show that the “Carthari” (meaning “Puritans” or “pure ones”) were also influenced by the Bogomils in Bulgaria.
History shows that many thousands of believing Christians throughout Europe and the British Isles clung to the fourteenth of Nisan as the true date for the observance of the Lord’s Supper; that it required many hundreds of years for this practice to be stamped out. Even today, remnants of the “Waldenses” exist in Italy, and are the largest Protestant group in that country. Their name is variously determined as coming from Peter Waldo, or their habit of dwelling in the valleys of remote alpine regions in northern Italy, Switzerland, and France. Halley’s Bible Handbook says, “Waldo, a rich merchant of Lyons, South France (1176), gave his property to the poor and went about preaching; opposed clerical usurpation and profligacy; denied the exclusive right of the clergy to teach the Gospel, rejected masses, prayers for the dead and purgatory; taught the Bible as the sole rule of belief and life; their preaching kindled a great desire among the people to read the Bible. They were gradually repressed by the Inquisition except in the Alpine Valleys southwest of Turin where they still are found, the only medieval sect still surviving, a story of heroic endurance of persecutions. Now the leading Protestant body in Italy” (P. 785). The Bogomils, Albigensians, Petrobrusians, Arnoldists, Vaudois, and a large number of other sects, mostly named by their enemies, and mostly termed “heretics,” included many who were “Sabbatarians,” and who kept God’s annual Sabbaths as well.
This was why the “Quartodeciman controversy” raged for so many centuries, as many continued to observe the symbols of Christ’s broken body and shed blood on the fourteenth of Nisan, as Christ Himself had commanded.
By no stretch of the imagination did the apostles of Christ ever celebrate “Easter” ( Ishtar ), or urge it upon others!
Bump
hmmm