that said why mess with what works:
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
Do you worship the Elohim of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob?or do you worship the Evil One?
Even we Proddies recognize a good solution when we see it!
There’s nothing in error about it. It’s easily checked out.
It is NOT called Easter in France, Italy, Spain, etc.
It’s called Pasca or some similar term.
And I know German and English well enough to know that the words Son/Sohn, Sun/Sonne, and East/Oest are similar in pronunctiation and in word play. (A “SonRise” Service is very familiar to you...correct?)
Your theory doesn’t hold together.
They DO NOT call it Easter in MOST European countries. They simply don’t.
celebrating every day is a great thing. i wish more parishes (orthodox as well) were literally open every day. it’d be nice to be able to walk in and say some prayers on my saint’s day/name day for instance... though i guess that’s what having a home alter/icon corner is for...
so why do some folks call it that here? (we call it pascha as well btw...)
**If Easter isn’t found in the Bible, where exactly did it come from?**
The Resurrection of the Lord is mentioned in the Bible.
These people are Christians in Name ONLY.
Again, you can call a Suburban a Lexus all you want to, it is still a Suburban. You bend your knee to the Holy Roman Church every “Easter” whether you call it Passover or not. It is not a theory, my belief is grounded solely on scripture and the re-enactment thereof.
I believe he is referring to our practice of offering the Mass/Liturgy every day (except Good Friday, and Holy Saturday). And yes, it is a ‘bonus’ that most Catholic Churches are open pretty much all the time.
You’re welcome to drop by any time. I just hope you don’t accidentally wander into some house of modernist architectural horrors.
Since your use of Elohim has not been clarified, I can't answer your question directly.
In still other cases, the meaning is not clear from the text, but may refer to powerful beings (e.g. Genesis 6:2, "... the sons of Elohim saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them for wives... ," Exodus 4:16, "... and you [Moses] will be as Elohim to him [Aaron]... ," Exodus 22:28, "Thou shalt not revile Elohim, or curse a ruler of your people... ," where the parallelism suggests that Elohim may refer to human rulers). See Sons of God for more insight into this suggestion.
You still haven't answered my question.
I've seen a few of those. There is one in my hometown that looks as much like a planetarium as anything else. They demolished a beautiful church when they built it, too.
Do not post to me ever again. I will have nothing to do with someone who says Christians worship "the evil one."
(shakes dust off his metaphorical feet).
i wish more orthodox churches wer open/had liturgy daily. for most its a matter of resources but even many large cathedrals don’t. (though many of these are open more often...)
Take heart ... many of those houses of modernist architectural horrors were poorly constructed. I see a demolition crew in their not too distant future.
The word God is very fuzzy.Some people call Allah by the name God.
Please clarify your answer.
I don't know ... but some folks insist on trying. I'm surprised that the wheels on their cars are round.
Well no, Allah is actually Arabic for God. Arabic speaking Christians worship Allah, which in English means God.
By God, I mean the triune God of the Father, His only Son, and Holy Spirit.
You've still avoided my question.
Xzins, Easter has never been considered cognate to Passover, which celebrates the sacrifice of the Lamb (and which is observed, if at all, by most Christians as Good Friday), but to the Feast of Firstfruits, the day when our Lord Yeshua was raised as the Firstfruits of the dead (cf. 1 Co. 15:20, 23). It's true that the King James' translators put "Easter" instead of "Passover" in Acts 12:4, but this was simply one of the many documented errors of the King James Version, an example of reading an anachronism back into the text.
Xenia, while it's true that Constantine mandated Sunday worship and also the Easter-based date of the Resurrection Day--and he was pretty blunt that he didn't want any of the Church's practices linked to those of the Jews--he was in many ways simply ratifying the majority position of the churches at that time. The fact is that many Christians were already worshiping on Sunday (which is not in and of itself a sin, since we should worship every day) and ignoring the Biblical Sabbath (which is a problem) and had adopted and adapted some pagan holidays into their practice.
But let's be fair to those early believers: When they adopted the Feast of Ishtar (Easter) or Saturnalia (Christmas), they were not attempting to bring idols into the Temple like Solomon, so to speak. Rather, they were engaged in a type of cultural "one-upmanship" and outreach. Since those were the days on which everyone was released from work, it made sense to them to co-opt those days--especially in a time when keeping the Jewish Feasts instead only increased the level of persecution.
So they could say, "You celebrate the Feast of Ishtar because you think she brings life*? Well our Lord rose on this day from the dead, and He truly gives eternal life!" Or, "You celebrate the 'rebirth' of the Sun on Saturnalia. But we celebrate the birth of the Son of God, who truly is the Light of the World."
* As in fertility; hence the eggs and bunnies, as the article points out. And that, xzins, is why I respectfully don't buy your alternative explanation for the origin of the name Easter. Even if you are right that the name is merely a coincidence (and to be honest, your explanation seems rather contrived), the symbols of a cult of fertility are all over Easter to this very day.As a side-note, December 25th was probably chosen because it was roughly equivalent to Kislev 25th on the Jewish Calendar--the beginning of Hanunkkah, and the time of our Lord Yeshua's conception, though not His birth.
Now, do I agree with that decision even though I'm sympathetic to the motives of the early believers and difficult situation they were in? No. I think it was a very human solution in a difficult situation--which is exactly the problem with it. God condemns making up our own appointed times in lieu of His (1 Ki. 12:33, Dan. 7:25), and even in such a time of persecution, the Ekklesia, empowered by His Spirit, should have kept the Biblical Feasts:
Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: Which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Messiah. (Col. 2:16-17)This isn't about legalism. One is saved by grace received through faith, not by observing all of the right holy days--Abraham was saved by faith 430 years before Passover even existed, after all. However, I remain firm in my belief that by giving up keeping God's Appointed Times, that the Church has lost a great blessing, for the entire plan of Salvation, from the birth of the Messiah and His Forerunner (Elijah/John the Baptist) to the Crucifixion, to the giving of the Holy Spirit to the destruction of the Temple, to the Second Coming/Rapture, to the restoration of God's covenant relationship with Israel, to God dwelling in Jerusalem is played out every year in the Feasts, and we are just now rediscovering this after so long an absence.Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Messiah 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)
We--and here I'm specifically speaking to my fellow Messianics--need to regard this restored gift as a matter of great joy, a blessing to be shared, not as a matter for contention among our brothers and sisters in the Messiah.
It's in his addendum to the Council of Nicea. I've got to go run an errand, but I'll try to pull the exact quote when I get back.
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