Posted on 04/21/2011 3:45:20 PM PDT by AnalogReigns
The historical evidence contradicts this popular notion.
Anyone encountering anti-Christian polemics will quickly come up against the accusation that a major festival practiced by Christians across the globe, namely, Easter, was actually borrowed or rather usurped from a pagan celebration. I often encounter this idea among Muslims who claim that later Christians compromised with paganism to dilute the original faith of Jesus.
(Excerpt) Read more at christianitytoday.com ...
I'm posting this as an ANGLICAN CAUCUS, to avoid the typical vitriol, from those who disagree....
Y’know, it’s almost like me saying my birthday is the same as Ralph’s . . . what a coincidence! Who cares? This idiocy always pops up its ugly head every Christian holyday . . . Easter, Christmas, St. Valentine’s Day, etc.
The day itself might have been borrowed or coincidental, but then who cares?
Anglican FReeper
Confirmed at age 14
It’s a silly argument -— so clearly linked to Passsover in so many ways I can’t even begin to get it.
Now Christmas, with Yule logs, etc . . . OK, pretty good arguments can be made that this was pretty much co-opted from pagans.
Easter? PFfft.
Anglican caucus, has there ever been one before this one?
Anglican all my life from family who have been for centuries.
All we need to do is drop “Easter” and call it Resurrection day. That’s what we are celebrating. Who knows where “Easter” came from. Christmas is a whole nuther ball of wax. It actually should be Rosh Hashanah. It’s pretty obvious we got that date wrong.
How come people never ask where the pagans borrow their holidays from?
You might want to ping the mod to get the caucus into the thread title.
Freegards
bkmk
Easter is a description of an ancient Babylonian family—2,000 years before Christ—honoring the resurrection of their god, Tammuz, who was brought back from the underworld by his mother/wife, Ishtar (after whom the festival was named). As Ishtar was actually pronounced “Easter” in most Semitic dialects.
The vast majority of ecclesiastical and secular historians agree that the name of Easter and the traditions surrounding it are deeply rooted in pagan religion.
“Since Bede the Venerable (De ratione temporum 1:5) the origin of the term for the feast of Christ’s Resurrection has been popularly considered to be from the Anglo-Saxon Eastre, a goddess of spring…the Old High German plural for dawn, eostarun; whence has come the German Ostern, and our English Easter” (The New Catholic Encyclopedia, 1967, Vol. 5, p. 6).
I think it should be approached from a different angle.
It’s not fair to call the seasons “pagan” holidays, when in truth, they are “natural” holidays, that all people had to deal with if they lived in the temperate or colder latitudes, no matter their religion.
Even ancient, primitive cultures were obsessed with calendars, because knowing when to plant and when to harvest literally meant life or death. Holidays truly meant things.
The one exception in the world was Egypt, notwithstanding its equatorial location, because its annual flood of the Nile was so dominant, and the resulting crops so plentiful, that no other time of the year truly mattered once that crop was out of the way, until the next flood and planting season.
Now compare this with the monotheistic religious holidays, based on events, not the seasons.
To make matters worse, the leaders of the dominant cultures wanted to manipulate the calendar to their own ends, as well as the obvious problem that neither the solar nor lunar calendar was stable, and tended to drift over time. So what happens when it is supposed to be harvest time, but it is the middle of winter?
Likewise, when people migrated across the latitudes and at different elevations, everything got loopy.
Which explains why, over time, religious people started assigning their holidays to the natural cycle times, because it was the only way they could be *about* right, in the absence of any other means of knowing.
So their intent had nothing to do with what the pagans did, only in sharing the same time of the calendar with them.
Pagan religions were basically astral. They included idolatry and the use of oracles, which were similar to the Jewish prophets in the way they operated, but the things they worshiped were basically things they saw in the sky, mainly the gas giant planets Jupiter and Saturn.
Jewish and Christian religion includes several stories about people being seen after their deaths, including the story of Jesus himself, Lazasrus, and the prophet Samuel. All of those tales are similar; the person was seen for some period of time, the senses of the people who saw them were totally fooled in that the experience was utterly indistinguishable from their having returned in real human bodies, but they did not stick around for years or marry and have kids or start businesses. Those stories involve paranormal things, but not magical or supernatural things nor anything violating physical or mathematical laws. Again to my knowledge, pagan religions never included anything like that.
If you want violations of physical, mathematical, and probabilistic and statistical laws in wholesale lots, you need to be talking to the evolutionites, they specialize in that sort of thing. Evolution requires an infinite sequence of probabilistic miracles. The Bible includes a finite number of "miracles" which is probably about 20 - 50, and none of those stories involve any violations of basic laws.
First off, your 20-50 is entirely inaccurate from the Bible Scriptures, if you care to study the entire Old Testament and New Testament and all the Old Testament prophecies regarding Christ / Messiah, just the dating alone regarding Messiah call for divine intervention / control of human events to accurately meet such dates.
No violation of basic laws : take one, the virgin birth of Christ...no violation of basic laws you say. False presupposition. And there are many more in the Bible that defy basic laws.
the easter bunny, easter eggs, and easter baskets have nothing to do with christianity. Christmas trees, reindeer, snowmen, mistletoe, christmas wreaths, holly, eggnog, christmas stockings, and christmas presents have nothing to do with christianity either. Even snow has nothing to do with christianity. Don’t even get me started on halloween.
Easter comes from Ishtar and Astarte. But it is only called ‘Easter’ in English (and I have no idea why - God’s sense of humor?). I believe other languages use a variation of the Hebrew term ‘pessach’ (passover).
You wrote:
“Easter comes from Ishtar and Astarte.”
Nope. The Germans did not worship Mesopotamian gods or goddesses.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not claiming that God was not involved in those stories, just that God, unlike evolutionites, works within the laws of physics and mathematics. The main point however which would hold good even if I were wrong, is that the Bible only contains a certain number of such stories which is almost certainly under 100, while evolution requires an infinite number of probabilistic miracles.
The Scottish Mason Hislop family book continues to influence conspirators on the net...however they never seem to remember that Ralph Woodrow pulled his book for many good reasons-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Hislop
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Woodrow
Here’s the Scottish Mason’s book -
http://philologos.org/__eb-ttb/
Ralph Woodrow -
http://www.ralphwoodrow.org/books/pages/babylon-mystery.html
There always appears to be a perfectly timed manifesto, book, movie, documentary...favoring a secularist mini-me-god/ess culture which unfortunately and perhaps deliberately leads people away from the real Word -
[I AM] The Way, The Truth and The Life.
[...]In the original language of the gospels, the Greek word “pascha” is used for the Aramaic form of the Hebrew word “pesach”, which means Passover. During the first three centuries of the Church, “Pasch” referred specifically to the celebration of Christ’s passion and death; by the end of the fourth century, it also included the Easter Vigil; and by the end of the fifth century, it referred to Easter itself.
In all, the term signified Christ as the new Passover Lamb.
Together -
the mystery of the Last Supper,
the sacrifice of Good Friday and
the resurrection of Easter form the new Passover -
The New Pasch.[...]
http://www.ewtn.com/library/ANSWERS/EASTPAG.htm
In Spain and Italy they call it Paschua.
Semantics, tis all.
Kind of like the word "God" (or Gott) is old German for a pagan deity....
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