A Bermuda kite

Anti-Easter Christians

Some Christian fundamentalists reject nearly all the customs surrounding Easter, believing them to be irrevocably tainted with paganism and idolatry. Others, like the Sabbatarian Church of God groups, claim to adhere to a more primitive form of Christianity, and keep a Christian Passover which lacks most of the practices or symbols associated with Easter and retains more features of the Jewish observance.

Possible pagan influences on Easter traditions

An Easter Bunny An Easter Bunny

In his 'De Temporum Ratione' the Venerable Bede wrote that the month Eostremonat was so named because of a goddess, Eostre, who had formerly been worshipped in that month. In recent years some scholars (Ronald Hutton, P.D. Chantepie de la Saussaye, Elizabeth Freeman) have suggested that a lack of supporting documentation for this goddess might indicate that Bede assumed her existence based on the name of the month. Others note that Bede's status as "the Father of English History", having been the author of the first substantial history of England ever written, might make the lack of additional mention for a goddess whose worship had already died out by Bede's time unsurprising. The debate receives considerable attention because the name 'Easter' is derived from Eostremonat, and thus, according to Bede, from the pagan goddess Eostre.

Jakob Grimm took up the question of Eostre in his Deutsche Mythologie of 1835, noting that Ostaramanoth was etymologically related to Eostremonat and writing of various landmarks and customs related to the goddess Ostara in Germany. Again, because of a lack of written documentation, critics suggest that Grimm took Bede's mention of a goddess Eostre at face value and constructed the goddess Ostara around existing Germanic customs which may have arisen independently. Others point to Grimm's stated intent to gather and record oral traditions which might otherwise be lost as explanation for the lack of further documentation. Amongst other traditions, Grimm connected the 'Osterhase' (Easter Bunny) and Easter Eggs to the goddess Ostara/Eostre. He also cites various place names in Germany as being evidence of Ostara, but critics contend that the close etymological relationship between Ostara and the words for 'east' and 'dawn' could mean that these place names referred to either of those two things rather than a goddess.

Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum ("Ecclesiastic History of the English People") contains a letter from Pope Gregory I to Saint Mellitus, who was then on his way to England to conduct missionary work among the heathen Anglo-Saxons. The Pope suggests that converting heathens is easier if they are allowed to retain the outward forms of their traditional pagan practices and traditions, while recasting those traditions spiritually towards Christianity instead of to their indigenous gods (whom the Pope refers to as "devils"), "to the end that, whilst some gratifications are outwardly permitted them, they may the more easily consent to the inward consolations of the grace of God". The Pope sanctioned such conversion tactics as biblically acceptable, pointing out that God did much the same thing with the ancient Israelites and their pagan sacrifices. This practice might explain the incorporation of Eostre traditions into the Christian holiday.

However, the giving of eggs at spring festivals was not restricted to Germanic peoples and could be found among the Persians, Romans, Jews and the Armenians. They were a widespread symbol of rebirth and resurrection and thus might have been adopted from any number of sources.

An anthropomorphized Easter Bunny An anthropomorphized Easter Bunny may make public appearances for children.

Easter as a Sumerian festival

Some suggest an etymological relationship between Eostre and the Sumerian goddess Ishtar ([2] [3] [4] [5]) and the possibility that aspects of an ancient festival accompanied the name, claiming that the worship of Bel and Astarte was anciently introduced into Britain, and that the hot cross buns of Good Friday and dyed eggs of Easter Sunday figured in the Chaldean rites just as they do now.

At best, any connection between Ishtar and Easter is geographically and linguistically distant, and tangential.

According to the Venerable Bede, "Eostre" was the name of a Goddess for whom the fourth month - Eostremonath - was named (De temporum ratione, I, v). But nothing else is actually known about this Goddess. Linguistic analysis suggests that her name is related to the word for "dawn," so it is plausible that she might have been a goddess of the dawn. And Bede claims that the name "Easter" came from the name of the month, not directly from the Goddess herself.

Although there are claims that her cult is the original source for such Easter traditions as the Easter Bunny, there is no evidence for this.

Claiming a connection between Ishtar and Easter also ignores the fact that Easter is called "Passover" in almost every other language in the world. (The only exceptions appear to be the languages of those people who first learned Christianity at the hands of English or other Anglophone missionaries.) Examples of this are the Hebrew Pesach; the Greek Paskha; the Latin Pascha; the Spanish La Pascua; and Scots Gaelic An Casca. The holiday was not called "Easter" until the 8th Century, by which time it had already been in existence for 700 years.

There is the additional problem that the very lands where Ishtar was once known have never been known to use a name like "Easter" for this or any other spring holiday.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

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