The origins of Easter

       Ask people in the western hemisphere what Easter means to them and many will think of chocolate eggs, new-born chicks, baby rabbits, a welcome weekend break and maybe a new outfit or two. Spiritually-minded individuals may also mention Christ’s resurrection, celebrated on Easter Sunday as one of the church’s most pivotal feasts. 

       Yet, far from being a Christian practice, Easter is a pagan festival with roots in ancient sex worship. According to The Catholic Encyclopedia, for example, “A great many pagan customs, celebrating the return of spring, gravitated to Easter. The egg is the emblem of the germinating life of early spring. . . . The rabbit is a pagan symbol and has always been an emblem of fertility.”  

       The Westminster Dictionary of the Bible says Easter was “originally the spring festival in honour of the Teutonic goddess of the light and spring, known in Anglo-Saxon as Eastre or Eostre. There is no indication of the observance of the Easter festival in the New Testament, or in the writings of the apostolic Fathers. The sanctity of special times was an idea absent from the minds of the first Christians. . . . The ecclesiastical historian Socrates (Hist. Eccl. v. 22) states, with perfect truth, that neither the Lord nor his apostles enjoined the keeping of this or any other festival . . . and he attributes the observance of Easter by the church to the perpetuation of an old usage, ‘just as many other customs have been established.’” 

       Another source, The Encyclopedia Americana, refers to the Venerable Bede, English historian of the early 8th century, in saying: “The word [Easter] is derived from the Norse Ostara or Eostre, meaning the festival of spring at the vernal equinox, March 21, when nature is in resurrection after winter. Hence, the rabbits, notable for their fecundity, and the eggs, colored like rays of the returning sun and the northern lights or aurora borealis.” 

      Eggs and rabbits feature strongly in Easter traditions, as both were viewed by ancient pagans as important symbols during their spring fertility rites. Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend, explains: “Children roll pasch eggs in England. Everywhere they hunt the many-colored Easter eggs, brought by the Easter rabbit. This is not mere child’s play, but the vestige of a fertility rite, the eggs and the rabbit both symbolizing fertility. Furthermore, the rabbit was the escort of the Germanic goddess Ostara who gave the name to the festival by way of the German Ostern.” 

       Significantly, the only event Jesus commanded his followers to observe was the Memorial of his death, the only event for which we have a date – Nisan 14, the Jewish Passover, which Jesus observed with his 11 faithful apostles. 

      As for Lent, the 40-day fast was meant to commemorate Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness, yet Jesus never asked his disciples to observe this. The first mention of this period of sacrifice before Easter was in a letter by Athanasius dated 330 CE. Prior to this, fasting in the early part of the year was common among ancient Babylonians, Egyptians and Greeks.

Should the cross be venerated?

        Men have bowed to it, fought for it and even died for it. Revered by Christendom, it has come to symbolise the supreme sacrifice of one perfect man for a grossly imperfect world.

       Even today, despite determined attempts by militant secularists to efface it from schools, council chambers, courts, colleges and other public buildings, the cross remains a powerful image, a rallying point for some 41,000 Christian denominations.

       So it may came as a shock to learn that, according to several respected scholars, Jesus didn’t die on a cross at all. Instead, scriptural accounts indicate that Jesus was impaled upon a single, upright stake.

       In his Expository Dictionary of New & Old Testament Words, W E Vine distinguishes the Greek word ‘stauros’ (‘stake’ or ‘pale’) as used in Matthew’s account of Jesus’ death, “from the ecclesiastical form of a two beamed cross”.          This is backed up by The Imperial Bible-Dictionary which says that the word stauros′ “properly signified a stake, an upright pole, or piece of paling, on which anything might be hung, or which might be used in impaling a piece of ground.......Even amongst the Romans the crux (Latin, from which our cross is derived) appears to have been originally an upright pole.” The Catholic Encyclopaedia also admits that “the cross originally consisted of a simple vertical pole, sharpened at its upper end." 

     Another Greek word used in the gospels to describe the means of Jesus’ execution is xy’lon, which in the Critical Lexicon and Concordance to the English and Greek New Testament is defines as “a piece of timber, a wooden stake.” This is in agreement with the King James Version at Acts 5:30: “The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom ye slew and hanged on a tree [xy′lon]”, while other versions, also translate xy′lon as “tree.” At Acts 13:29, The Jerusalem Bible at Acts 13:29 says: “When they had carried out everything that scripture foretells about (Jesus) they took him down from the tree [xy′lon] and buried him.”

Origin of the Cross

       Vine explains that the cross originated from ancient Chaldea where it was used “as the symbol of the god Tammuz (being in the shape of the mystic Tau, the initial of his name) in that country and in adjacent lands, including Egypt.”

       By the middle of the 3rd century CE, the early Christian faith had been polluted by unscriptural doctrines, many drawn from pagan beliefs. “In order to increase the prestige of the apostate ecclesiastical system pagans were received into the churches....and were permitted largely to retain their pagan signs and symbols. Hence the Tau or T in its most frequent form, with the cross-piece lowered, was adopted to stand for the cross of Christ.”

       Much of the blame for this can be laid on Rome’s sun-god worshipping Emperor Constantine who, it was claimed, had a vision of a cross emblazoned on the sun with the words “in hoc vince” (by this conquer) just before an important military victory. As a result, he supposedly became a Christian, but was not baptised until just before his death 25 years later. Questioning his motives, the author of The Non-Christian Cross stated:  “He acted rather as if he were converting Christianity into what he thought most likely to be accepted by his subjects as a catholic [universal] religion, than as if he had been converted to the teachings of Jesus the Nazarene." 

      Interestingly, the image of the cross is not exclusive to churchgoers. The ancient Egyptians had their own version with the handle-shaped ansate - a T shape topped by a circle - while the ‘gamma’ cross venerated by Hindus and Buddhists is more commonly recognised by its Sanskrit name: “swastika”.

*“TO THE STAKE”

Jesus’ enemies yelled: “To the stake with him!” (John 19:15) The basic Greek word for “stake” used in the Gospel accounts is stau·rosʹ. The book History of the Cross reports: “Stauros means ‘an upright pale,’ a strong stake, such as farmers drive into the ground to make their fences or palisades​—no more, no less.”