For me, seeing how the issue of Easter was the result of a government edict (upon pain of death) in 325 AD, I preferred to return to the faith practiced by the Apostles. I cannot find the word “Easter” in the NT and it is not in the Greek. The only word is the one translated “passover” every place else. That is what I practice and I am not alone. In fact, aside from the JW’s position on Easter, there are a number of Churches of God that observe the Passover instead of Easter.
This is not only time that a church has been co-opted by government. In recent history, the LDS church changed their position on plural marriage right after the US government held Utah statehood hostage. I suspect that the Roman Catholic Church may have a “revelation” about married priests if the sexual abuse scandal gets much worse and governments hint of severe criminal sanctions. I also suspect that some Protestant churches may have revelations to permit gay “marriage” about the time that governments start to enforce equal rights laws.
In the case of Easter, Emperor Constantine presided over the Council of Nicea in 325 AD and decided the issue in favor of observing Easter and condemned anyone observing the Passover on the 14th of Nisan to be an apostate worthy of death.
While others may bend their knee to church doctrines decided by worldly governments, even if they are rubber-stamped by church delegates, I will politely reserve the right to come to my own conclusion.
There are various ways of sugar-coating this, but the history on this point is far more settled than is AlGore’s GlobalLukeWarming.
I often call it Resurrection Sunday.
theBuckwheat: “There are various ways of sugar-coating this, but the history on this point is far more settled than is AlGore’s GlobalLukeWarming.”
Why would you burden people who celebrate Easter by talking about its history? So what if it was ORIGINALLY created by government edict? We don’t celebrate Easter by government edict. We celebrate it because it means Christ is risen.
I guess I’m trying to make the point (probably not very well) that I think you are mistakenly burdening believers. You are trying to hold them to a standard that has absolutely nothing to do with what they actually believe. We are supposed to be free of such laws of men.
What matters is what people think and feel in their hearts when they worship right now, not what some government did over a thousand years ago. Christians are simply celebrating Christ’s resurrection. There’s nothing wrong with that. Lighten up, brother!
I don’t see were it says to use toilet paper either. So your upset about a word that describes what happened in the Bible. But it is not in the bible. So I guess no words should be used to explain it outside the bible?
(Yeah, well you can't find the word "Bible" in the Bible, either...I'm sure that doesn't stop you from reading it, does it?)
Easter was already celebrated, all they settled at the First Conference of Nicaea (other of course than the matter of the Arian heresy and the Creed) was how to calculate the date of Easter.
And if you read the Venerable Bede's History of the English Church and People (which I highly recommend, by the way) you will find that the word "Easter" is just an Anglo-Saxon happenstance. It was the name of an old British goddess that nobody remembers a thing about, other than that her festival occurred around the time of Easter. Bede's mention of her is the only mention anywhere, by the way, and some people claim he made it up. No reason to question his credibility, I think that the various godlings of a non-literate people tend to fall by the wayside because nobody writes them down.
The English had a second controversy over the calculation of the date of Easter somewhat later, which was resolved in 664 at the Council of Whitby. The Irish didn't get on board until a hundred years later or so.
So it really isn't worth worrying about at all.
You can't get too exercised about the minutiae of translations into your native tongue, if it bothers you go read the Greek Testament and the LXX and the Vulgate.
Well of course you won’t find the term Easter.
What you are looking for is PASCHA. And you find that from the death of Christ onwards.
Bless you on this week after Resurrection Day - we celebrate the day when our hope for eternal life, the salvation depicted each year by the Passover, was revealed by the empty tomb, by the risen Savior.
Your views are to history what Globull Warming is to science.
First, it is an accident of our Germanic language that we call it Easter (rooted in the ancient Germanic word for sunrise) while most other languages use the word for Passover and liturgically the Church refers to Paschal celebration. The celebration of what in English is called Easter is a celebration of the Christian passover.
Second, The celibate priesthood is not a matter of doctrine, but of discipline. Historically married men have been made priests and even today some married converts from Lutheranism or Anglicanism are ordained priests in the Latin rite. In the eastern rite, in eastern Europe, it is common practice as it is with our Orthodox brethren. Ordination of married men Latin rite is a rule that could be changed and is mostly advocated by the leftists while the Vatican has not shown any inclination towards changing.
Arguments over the date of Pasch is a matter of what calendar is used-even among Christians those on the Julian calendar often celebrate on different dates than those of us on the Gregorian calendar. Roman emperors, like other governments, had their own political reasons for how they enforce decisions by the councils. Also as of the Council of Nicea, Constantine was not actually a baptized Christian, he was only baptized towards the very end of his life, and was mostly concerned with the political ramifications arguments within the Church had on his empire. Throughout history, heresy was often enforced with death sentence penalties in civil courts, but not in the Church courts because the governments use religion as a unifying force within the country- the concept of freedom of religion is are hard lesson still not learned in much of the world- where the Church is much more interested in the proper formation of the conscience and salvation of the individual’s soul. In point of fact, the history of the Church is very often defined in tension with the secular governments with secular governments trying to wield influence in places the Church considered itself sovereign and vice-versa.