Easter

Now for Christians Easter is the celebration or remembrance of the death of Christ for our sins but when I stop to think of it I realised that Easter has nothing to do with Christ but rather a whole lot of rituals that have no biblical origination. As we are in the mist of celebrating the Easter holidays I decided to do some research on the topic and the information I discovered was nothing short of unbelievable! David .C Pack had the best definitions, opinions and explanations. He is the pastor of the restored church of God and he oversees one of the most extensively biblically based websites in the world. He is also a published writer of over 25 books.

 Easter is a celebration of an ancient Babylonian family 2000 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, it could be said that the event portrayed here is, in a sense, Easter. Of course, the occasion could easily have been a Phrygian family honoring Attis and Cybele, or perhaps a Phoenician family worshipping Adonis and Astarte. Also fitting the description well would be a heretic Israelite family honoring the Canaanite Baal and Ashtoreth. Or this depiction could just as easily represent any number of other immoral, pagan fertility celebrations of death and resurrection—including the modern Easter celebration as it has come to us through the Anglo-Saxon fertility rites of the goddess Eostre or Ostara. These are all the same festivals, separated only by time and culture

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. Now notice the following powerful quotes that demonstrate more about the true origin of how the modern Easter celebration got its name:“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). The fact that vernal festivals were general among pagan peoples no doubt had much to do with the form assumed by the Eastern festival in the Christian churches. The English term Easter is of pagan origin” (Albert Henry Newman, D.D., LL.D., A Manual of Church History. “On this greatest of Christian festivals, several survivals occur of ancient heathen ceremonies. To begin with, the name itself is not Christian but pagan. Ostara was the Anglo-Saxon Goddess of Spring” (Ethel L. Urlin, Festival, Holy Days, and Saints Days.

“Easter—the name Easter comes to us from Ostera or Eostre, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring, for whom a spring festival was held annually, as it is from this pagan festival that some of our Easter customs have come” (Hazeltine, p. 53). “In Babylon, the goddess of spring was called Ishtar. She was identified with the planet Venus, which, because, [it] rises before the Sun…or sets after it…appears to love the light [this means Venus loves the sun-god]…In Phoenecia, she became Astarte; in Greece, Eostre [related to the Greek word Eos: “dawn”], and in Germany, Ostara [this comes from the German word Ost: “east,” which is the direction of dawn]” (Englehart, p. 4).

As we have seen, many names are interchangeable for the more well-known Easter. Pagans typically used many different names for the same god or goddess. Nimrod, the Bible figure who built the city of Babylon (Gen. 10:8), is an example. He was worshipped as Saturn, Vulcan, Kronos, Baal, Tammuz, Molech and others, but he was always the same god—the fire or sun god universally worshipped in nearly every ancient culture. The goddess Easter was no different. She was one goddess with many names, the goddess of fertility, worshipped in spring when all life was being renewed.

The widely-known historian, Will Durant, in his famous and respected work, Story of Civilization, writes, “Ishtar [Astarte to the Greeks, Ashtoreth to the Jews], interests us not only as analogue of the Egyptian Isis and prototype of the Grecian Aphrodite and the Roman Venus, but as the formal beneficiary of one of the strangest of Babylonian customs…known to us chiefly from a famous page in Herodotus: Every native woman is obliged, once in her life, to sit in the temple of Venus [Easter], and have intercourse with some stranger.” Is it any wonder that the Bible speaks of the religious system that has descended from that ancient city as, “Mystery, babylon the great, the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth” (Rev. 17:5)?

This shook me to the core as I just adopted Easter like many from my parents and never searched for its origin. In the bible any reference associated with Easter is Leviticus 23 vs. 4 here Easter is mentioned or in other bibles the Passover. Knowing the feast of the Passover we hardly follow it over Easter nor do we observe the days of unleavened bread (acts 12:1) which follow so I truly wonder is Easter about Jesus or is it just another tradition thrust upon unquestioning minds……………………