Right around this time, as we head into Easter Sunday, I tend to see and have been told in the past that Easter is a pagan holiday. It is said that, eggs and bunnies are a part of fertility rituals. That the word Easter comes from pagan goddesses. Or that the date corresponds to pagan celebrations. Therefore we should disregard the holiday. If these things were true, then we should not participate in Easter Sunday. We shouldn’t be incorporating actually pagan rituals, or goddesses, or celebrations into our worship of the risen Jesus.
But history is not on the side of those that espouse that Easter is pagan, and today, we’re going to go through it.
First, let’s talk about the Jewishness of Easter. Originally the event that kicked off this whole thing is found in Exodus 11:1-12:32. The core of this event happens in verse 4, where we read, “4 So Moses said, ‘Thus says the Lord: ‘About midnight I will go out in the midst of Egypt, 5 and every firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sits on his throne, even to the firstborn of the slave girl who is behind the handmill, and all the firstborn of the cattle.’” The event is the final plague of death that forces the Pharaoh of Egypt to let the Israelite people go out of their slavery.
To avoid the coming death we read this starting in chapter 12:3-14, “Tell all the congregation of Israel that on the tenth day of this month every man shall take a lamb according to their fathers' houses, a lamb for a household. 4 And if the household is too small for a lamb, then he and his nearest neighbor shall take according to the number of persons; according to what each can eat you shall make your count for the lamb. 5 Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male a year old. You may take it from the sheep or from the goats, 6 and you shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month, when the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill their lambs at twilight.
7 “Then they shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they eat it. 8 They shall eat the flesh that night, roasted on the fire; with unleavened bread and bitter herbs they shall eat it. 9 Do not eat any of it raw or boiled in water, but roasted, its head with its legs and its inner parts. 10 And you shall let none of it remain until the morning; anything that remains until the morning you shall burn. 11 In this manner you shall eat it: with your belt fastened, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand. And you shall eat it in haste. It is the Lord's Passover. 12 For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments: I am the Lord. 13 The blood shall be a sign for you, on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you, when I strike the land of Egypt.
14 “This day shall be for you a memorial day, and you shall keep it as a feast to the Lord; throughout your generations, as a statute forever, you shall keep it as a feast.”
This Passover event becomes the first of many Jewish holidays and commemorates how God’s judgment passed over the people of Israel to set them free from bondage. This would be known in Hebrew as Pesach.
In Luke 22:1 we read, “Now the Feast of Unleavened Bread drew near, which is called the Passover.” It is during Passover on a Thursday evening that Jesus eats his final meal, called a Sedar meal. Afterwards he goes to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray. It is there that he is arrested, and brought before three courts over the course of the evening and morning. Jesus is then delivered up to crucifixion, dies, and is buried by sundown on Friday. At the dawn of Sunday’s light, Jesus resurrects, overcoming death.
From that time on, the Church has celebrated Jesus’ resurrection. Which in Greek became known as Pascha, which is the Greek translation of the Jewish word Pesach. This is the roots of what we call Easter or Resurrection Sunday. However, in our society from both within in the Church and from outside, people have taken issues with some of the things that surround Easter. Going as far as to say the whole thing is steeped in paganism. Let’s look at the three big issues that people have with Easter.
The first issue is the timing of it all. This is actually one of the oldest controversies of the Church. When do you celebrate Pascha? Today, some say because it is celebrated in the spring it must be pagan, because there are tons of fertility gods and goddesses that are celebrated in the spring. However, the controversy in the Church wasn’t that it happened during spring and so had something to do with fertility deities, but rather, how do we celebrated Pascha in light of its very Jewish roots in the Passover?
Do you celebrate it like the Jews did, following their lunar calendar? That means that if you are a Gentile following the Roman Julian calendar, Pascha moves with Passover. Sometimes it would be on a Sunday, other times it would be on a Friday, or a Wednesday.
This controversy became so big that at the council of Nicaea in 325, it was argued and decided on. The 325 bishops of the council decided to keep the whole of the Church celebrating Pascha on the same Sunday. It was decided that, since Passover coincide with the first full moon after the spring equinox, (or the day the Sun “moves” to a position where the northern hemisphere of earth enters spring) then the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox would be the day the whole Church would celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. This shows that it is not the date that is holy, but the event itself.
However, as the centuries went on, the Western Church adopted the Gregorian calendar, which most of the world uses today, while the Eastern Church continued with the Julian Calendar. This is why you have an Western Easter date, and an Orthodox Easter date. Sometimes they overlap, like this year, and sometimes they’re different, like next year.
So the date on which we celebrate Easter is keeping with the Passover of Judaism and not any spring deity festivals.
Now that we understand the date, let’s talk about the second issue, the name. I have been using the term Pascha, because up until roughly the 700s A.D., that was the name used by the Church, and it continues to be used in much of the world. There was a variation of the name, which was Paschal, but the name Easter began to rise as the Church moved into the Germanic area of northern Europe, which was north of the Rhine River. Here we get a Christian sudo-historian by the name of the Venerable Bede (beed) who makes a comment on how Paschal month is translated into a Germanic language.
Bede writes, “Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated ‘Paschal month,’ and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honor feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate that Paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honored name of the old observance. (De Temporum Ratione, Chapter 15)”
What Bede is saying, is that the Germanic people had a month called Eosturmonath , which coincides with the Paschal month. Therefore the Germanic people use that language instead of Paschal. Bede then states that this name comes from a goddess that they worshiped called Eostre whom they celebrated in that month.
However, there is no archeological, oral, or written history about Eostre, except from Bede; who is already looked upon by historians as a hit or miss kind of historian. However, let’s grant that Bede is correct, that the month was named after a Germanic goddess, that would be the same as the months of our calendar which were named after the gods of the Romas. What we would then have is simply the word of Passover from the Jewish Pesach, to the Greek Pascha, to the Germanic Easter. It comes down to a translation issue, not a religious one.
There is one more name of a Summeria goddess Ishtar, but the only connection there is that the names of Ishtar and Easter sound similar, but the goddess was also called Inanna. In reality there is no historical overlap between the two names, and you have a better case for Eostre, than Ishtar. Plus, as we have seen the root of Easter is in the Jewish Passover, and not other Ancient Near Eastern traditions.
Finally, the last issue is about the bunnies and the eggs. The connection begins again with German, and is through a physician named Franckenau (frank-en-ah) in the late 1500s, who wrote an essay on the subject of how German children would searched for eggs left behind by the Osterhase or Easter bunny. He wrote, “In Alsace, and the neighboring regions, these eggs are called rabbit eggs because of the myth told to fool simple people and children that the Easter Bunny is going around laying eggs and hiding them in the herb gardens. So the children look for them, even more enthusiastically, to the delight of smiling adults.” In a sense, the Easter Bunny was a Santa Clause figure for the springtime. The children would make nests in baskets for the Easter Bunny to leave presents for good boys and girls. Then the children would look for eggs left behind as well.
Why eggs? Because after the season of Lent, eggs were a treat because they had been fasted from for 40 days. Why were they colored? Because of a story that came about that Mary Magdalene had carried a basket full of eggs to the tomb and when she arrived, their coloring changed to red.
This Easter Bunny tradition eventually made its way to America, which has morphed them in the traditions we continue to have today.
So the Easter Bunny was a family activity to celebrate the end of Lent, where families could give gifts to their children and eat a treat of eggs. It wasn’t based on a fertility goddess, with rabbits multiplying and eggs being laid as a representation of her benevolence. Their traditions are steeped in Christian generosity, and the familia love of parents to their children.
Because of the history of where the name come from, I have no problem calling Resurrection Sunday, Easter Sunday, because it’s a translation issue, not a doctrinal one, as long as we focus on the Risen Savior. If you want to be as close to the language as possible, you need to forgo both and call it either Pesach or Pascha.
I also have no problem on when we celebrate Easter, because it’s not about the date, it’s about what happened with the Resurrection of Jesus. Similar to Christmas, it’s not about when Jesus’ broth happened, it’s about celebrating God who descended to earth to take on human flesh and be Emmanuel, God with us.
And I don’t have a problem with Easter egg hunts because Jesus called us to not hinder children from coming to him, and a game of hunting for eggs can open a door for children and families to come hear the Gospel message.
So when someone says that Easter is pagan, understand, history isn’t on their side, and they don’t know what they are talking about. So let the ignorant continue in their ignorance, and let’s worship Christ in the freedom he won us through the resurrection.
My challenge for you this week, is to pass out one of our Easter flyers to at least one person. Invite that family to the egg hunt, invite that neighbor to the free breakfast. We’re celebrating Jesus’ resurrection, the event on which everything of our faith hangs, and in what the hope of humanity was realized. People need to hear about his resurrection work, because Jesus will return to restore all things.
Let’s be about our Father’s work, and celebrate the Risen Son, who saves us from our sin, this Pesach, Pascha, Easter, Resurrection Sunday. Amen.