What the Early Christians Believed about Easter. Was Easter Pagan? David Bercot

Hi, I'm David Berceau, and tonight we're doing another episode of The Historic Faith. This is March 2024, just a few days before Easter. So I have in front of me a number of questions about Easter, and we thought we would just focus exclusively tonight on the subject of Easter.

So I'll just begin with the first question, which is, I've always heard that Easter is a pagan holiday. Is that true?

Well, the answer very simply is no. Easter is not a pagan holiday. Those early Christians who were just one generation removed from the apostles were celebrating Easter way back in the early second century, I mean, just a few decades after the apostle John's death. And they state that the custom goes all the way back to the apostles.

Only back then, they didn't call it Easter. They called it Pascha, which is Greek for Passover. In fact, one key piece of evidence we have about Pascha or Easter is from the writings of Irenaeus. These date to about the year 170 or 180. And Irenaeus says this: "When the blessed Polycarp was visiting in Rome in the time of Anacetus, who was the bishop in Rome, they were at once well inclined towards each other, not willing that any quarrel should come between them upon this matter." And the matter was the observance of Pascha. "For Anacetus could not persuade Polycarp to forego the observance of his Pascha customs inasmuch as these things had always been observed by John, the disciple of our Lord, and by other apostles with whom Polycarp had been conversant.

Nor, on the other hand, could Polycarp succeed in persuading Anacetus to keep Pascha in his way, for Anacetus maintained that he was bound to adhere to the usage of the elders who preceded him. And in this state of affairs, they agreed with each other." This is an immensely important piece of evidence because Irenaeus was a personal disciple of Polycarp.

So he received this account firsthand from Polycarp. In turn, Polycarp was a personal disciple of the apostle John. And Polycarp testifies that he received from the apostle John the custom of celebrating Pascha each year based on Nisan the 14th, which was the day of the Jewish Passover.

So Pascha goes back as far as at least the apostle John's time. Now, please note in this issue the dispute between Polycarp, who was the bishop of Smyrna, and Anacetus, the bishop of Rome. The only controversy concerned how to calculate the date of when to celebrate Pascha each year. There was no issue about should we even be doing this or not. It had been being done for so long. The only concern was when should we do it?

Actually, the very name that the early Christians gave this celebration suggests that it dates back to New Testament times. That's because they called it by a Jewish name, Pascha. Now, don't misunderstand me. Pascha is a Greek word, but most Jews in the first century spoke Greek, and the Greek-speaking Jews called Passover Pascha.

Now, by the beginning of the second century, the church was predominantly Gentile. In fact, I would guess that it was at least 90% Gentile by then. So if Pascha was a new custom that they were starting in the second century, why would they give it a Jewish name? Why would they connect it to the Passover to which they themselves had no connection?

Surely they would have given it a more apt name, such as Estosis, which is the Greek word for resurrection, or something like that. The fact that it is called by a Jewish name is strong evidence that the custom of celebrating Easter started sometime in the first century when the church was predominantly Jewish.

Now, based on the evidence, I am personally persuaded that the Christian Pascha is an apostolic practice from the first century. And interestingly, the Latin-speaking Christians also called this celebration by this same name, Pascha, even though that was clearly not a native Latin word. All right, let's go to our next question. And this question is, where does the name Easter come from? I've heard that it is derived from the Greek goddess Astarte.

Well, Astarte is the Greek name for the Canaanite and Phoenician deity whose name was Atart, which I'm probably mispronouncing. I'm not fluent in Canaanite. She was the goddess of war, hunting, beauty, love, and healing. Now, at one time, scholars thought that she was a fertility goddess, but today, I don't think any scholars claim that. From the evidence they found, and there's quite a bit of archaeological evidence, there's nothing to connect her with fertility rites. Atart seems to be the same goddess as the goddess Ishtar, who was worshiped in Mesopotamia.

Although the Greek name Astarte sounds somewhat vaguely similar to Easter, there is absolutely no evidence to connect the two. I mean, there's no historical or archaeological evidence, and there's no evidence from etymology, which we'll be talking about in a few minutes. Etymology is the study of the origin of words.

So we need to be careful when we start making claims about the origins of words just because one word sounds similar or vaguely similar to a word in another language. And I'm going to give you an example that I dealt with when I was much younger.

This concerned the doctrine of British Israelism. I'm going to guess most of you have never even heard of that term. It was a fairly popular doctrine, or I should say a somewhat popular doctrine, in the early 20th century, you know, a century ago or so. According to this doctrine of British Israelism, the 10 tribes who wandered off, who disappeared, whatever, actually they did come back, but according to this theory, they never came back to Palestine. So they traveled across Europe, particularly the tribe of Dan. And so you can trace the tribe of Dan as it traveled across Europe through the centuries. You come across names like the Danube River, Ahas, the tribe of Dan. Now, I'm serious.

This is what they were teaching. And then the country of Denmark, which we call Denmark in English, but in Danish, it's Danmark with a D-A-N at the beginning. And then there's the town in England called Danbury. So you can just see the tribe of Dan just keeps moving.

Well, not only that, there's a city in Virginia called Danville. So apparently, the tribe of Dan made it all the way to the New World. Now, I added that last one, but the first three were actual examples given to me. So I think you can see the danger of just because something sounds the same as a word in another language, you can't start making claims like that. I'll give you another one, the Spanish word embeddersado.

Now, normally in Spanish, if a word sounds very similar to an English word, it usually has the same meaning. So when I was in Honduras, when I first began the ministry there of the Society of the Good Shepherd in the year 2000, I wasn't very fluent in Spanish, and I haven't made any progress, so I'm still not. But anyway, I knew a little bit of Spanish. And so when I did something I was embarrassed about, I would say, "Estoy embeddersado." And I was doing that all the time. I noticed people kind of grinned when I said it, but I didn't think much about it. And it was actually that was my first visit there. And it was actually on the way home.

I had picked up a Honduran newspaper, and I was reading it on the way home to practice my Spanish because for me, it was a lot easier to read Spanish than to speak it or to understand it being spoken. And I was looking at the classified ads, see if I could figure out, you know, what it was advertising. And there was just ad after ad that asked the people if they had un problema embeddersada.

And I thought, it sounded like, "Do you have an embarrassing problem?" I thought that's weird. If it was one ad, you might think, "Okay, some psychologist or something." But there were several of these. I thought, "Why are they all asking, 'Do you have an embarrassing problem?'" So when I got home, I looked it up in the dictionary, and I discovered that embeddersado, that sounds like embarrass, actually in Spanish means pregnant. So I was going around saying that to people, "Oh, I'm so pregnant," you know. But anyway, I'll give you one final example.

I took three years of Latin in high school, and often in Latin texts, you would see the word J-A-M, jam. It was actually pronounced yam. And today they spell it I-A-M. But back then, in our Latin textbooks, it was spelled J-A-M. In Latin, I and J are the same letter, or they developed from each other.

And it means now or already, but it looks like our word jam. And, you know, I used to go through texts, particularly when I was starting, and you'd see jam, and you'd see a bunch of other words that looked like English words. And, you know, me and some of the other guys would have fun just inventing these definitions of what it was saying. In other words, just because a word looks the same or sounds the same as the word in another language, you can't make the assumption that one came from the other.

So what is the origin of the word Easter, and why do we call it Easter if the early Christians called it Pascha? Well, actually, Easter is an almost exclusively a term used in English-speaking countries. Everywhere else, in nearly every other country other than England, the United States, and, you know, countries that speak the English language, everybody else calls it Pascha. For example, in Spanish-speaking countries, Easter is called Pascua. And like I say, it's like that in virtually every country except English-speaking countries.

So then where did English-speaking countries get the name Easter? Well, it's definitely an Anglo-Saxon word. And the medieval historian Bede, often called the Venerable Bede, who lived in the early 8th century, he talks about it. He states in one of his works, which is entitled On the Reckoning of Time, he states that the name Easter is derived from the name of the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring, whose name was Easter or Ostera.

So that's where the claim originates that the name Easter is connected to an Anglo-Saxon goddess. And we're going to examine that claim in a minute. But first, I want to repeat that even if Bede is correct, there is nothing to link this goddess, Easter or Ostera, to the Greek goddess Astarte. I mean, we have a similarity in sound, but that's all.

There's not even a similarity of spelling, nor is there any connection in their etymology. Now, when Bede made his claim, England had been quote Christianized for about a century. So no one was still worshiping this alleged goddess. Bede is going on hearsay.

The problem is that archaeologists and historians have not been able to find the slightest trace that such a goddess ever existed. I mean, there's no artifacts, there's no written records that bear her name. So even though historians respect Bede's competence, they also recognize that he isn't infallible.

On the other hand, what is beyond question is that the Anglo-Saxons did have a month in their calendar named Easter Monot, which corresponds roughly to our March and April. And once again, I'm probably butchering the pronunciation. I'm not fluent in ancient Anglo-Saxon.

So a number of historians think that Pascha was called Easter by the Anglo-Saxons because it fell during their month of Easter Monot. Now, that's a reasonable hypothesis, but we can't prove it. Now, I had spoken earlier about the etymology of the word Easter, its origin. Now, etymologists seem to all agree that the Saxon word Easter is derived from the old Germanic word for east, which makes perfect sense.

East and Easter. So the original Saxon word Easter probably meant dawn. I mean, either way, its roots were in the Germanic word of east because the sun rises in the east. So in other words, dawn and east were very closely connected words in ancient German. So the etymology or origin for the Saxon word Easter is in the word east, not in the word Astarte.

Now, since in ancient times and often today, the celebration of Pascha always began at dawn, it's easy to see why the Anglo-Saxons would have called the celebration Easter, which was apparently their name for dawn. Or as others have said, it may have come from their name for the month in which it was celebrated.

Okay, let's go to our next question.

Is it wrong for us to call it Easter or should we call it Pascha?

And that's certainly a valid question. And I don't know that there's one right answer. I personally have no problem calling it Easter, but I wish we all did call it Pascha instead. However, how do you change such an entrenched custom? It's similar to our calling the first day of the week Sunday or our calling the seventh day of the week Saturday. I mean, both of those words are of pagan origin, but yeah, how do you stop it? I mean, the Quakers tried. They came up with a calendar that did away with all of these names that have pagan origins, both the days of the week and the days of the month. But I mean, their calendar never caught on.

No one uses it today because the days of the week and the days of the month are too entrenched in our culture. And so it's very hard to get most English-speaking people to change the name from Easter to Pascha. Now, a lot of people in my own church, which is Chambersburg Christian Fellowship, they often will call it Resurrection Sunday, and I like that as well. But as I said, you know, my preference would be for all of us to call it Pascha, which is what the early Christians called it, and it's what most of the rest of the world calls it.

Okay, let's go to the next question. How is the date for Easter calculated? Every year it falls on a different date. And that's correct. Every year it is on a different date. Because Easter falls every year on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox, which is March 21st.

And that's why Easter does not fall on the same date every year. And the reason it's connected to the full moon is because, like I say, of its Jewish origins back when the church was mainly Jewish. Because Jesus was crucified at the time of the Jewish Passover, and the Jewish Passover is always on Nisan the 14th, which always falls on a full moon.

So Jesus was crucified on or about the Passover, and the early Christians wanted to remember his death around the time of the Jewish Passover each year, if possible. However, since the Jewish Passover follows the lunar calendar and the Gentile Christians were using the solar calendar, it means that the Passover never exactly coincides with an exact date on our solar calendars. It changes every year. That is the date of the Passover.

So typically, Easter falls on the same week as Passover, but not always. I mean, the early Christians were more concerned that Pascha or Easter be celebrated after the spring equinox because Jesus died and was resurrected in the springtime. And they believed, and I believe, that this was a divinely orchestrated thing, that Jesus would come to life, would bring life to mankind in the spring when everything else is coming back to life.

As a result of that, the Christian calculations for Easter and the Jewish calculations for Passover are slightly different. And occasionally, there's a wide disparity between Easter and Passover. For example, this year, 2024, Easter falls on March 31st, but Passover, which is a week long, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, it doesn't begin this year until April 22nd.

Now, although Passover can fall on any day of the week, the early Christians felt it was important to always celebrate Easter on a Sunday, the day of the week in which Jesus was resurrected, which makes perfect sense. It would seem strange to celebrate his resurrection on a Thursday. So Easter always falls on a Sunday, and Good Friday, which commemorates the day Jesus was crucified, always falls on a Friday.

So again, in case you didn't catch it, Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox, which is normally March 21st. That's how we calculate it. Okay, our next question. Where did Lent come from?

Well, Lent comes from the early Christian practice of fasting prior to Pascha or Easter. Now, normally, Christians fasted every Wednesday and Friday. So Good Friday was a regular fast day anyway. Now, in most churches, Christians also fasted on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. So if nothing else, in most churches, I'm talking about, you know, in the pre-Nicene period, in most churches, Christians would have fasted that Friday of Good Friday and also the Saturday. And then Sunday, of course, was a time of feasting and celebrating.

But other Christians during the early Christian period, and like I say, it varied between churches, they fasted the entire week preceding Easter. And then there were a few churches that fasted for 40 days prior to Easter in memory of Jesus' 40-day fast in the wilderness. And that's where the custom of Lent was started, was from this practice of some churches of fasting for 40 days before Easter, or at least of some people. It was never something enforced on everybody in the whole church that they had to fast.

So just with regard to that, on any of these fasts, I should probably explain to you how the early Christians fasted because it was a little different than how many people think of fasting today. Normally, when we fast a day, most people I know of, they will fast the entire 24-hour period. And some people have been able to fast completely for 40 days, not eating anything at all. But the normal Christian practice and why they were able to fast so often, like I say, every week, you know, two times a week and other days if they had a special reason to fast, was they would begin the fast at sunrise, but then they would end it at three o'clock in the afternoon, which is the hour when Jesus died.

So you would go for much of the day without eating, but then at three o'clock in the afternoon, you would end your fast. Now, the Montanists, who were extra strict, they would go all the way to 6 p.m.

So their fasting 40 days didn't mean they went 40 whole days without eating anything, which is humanly possible, but like I say, the average person would probably not be able to do that without exceptional faith. But yeah, they were eating each of those days. They just were not eating between sunrise and three in the afternoon.

Okay, our final question is, what about Easter eggs and Easter bunnies? It seems certain that they are of pagan origin. And yes, I've always assumed that myself. I mean, what do they have to do with Easter? They're certainly not in the Bible.

Well, the Easter bunny and Easter egg are not of early Christian origin. There's no mention of them in the pre-Nicene writings or in the post-Nicene writings of, say, like the fourth or fifth century. The problem, though, is that no one knows how they became associated with Easter. The popular answer is that the Saxon goddess Easter was the goddess of fertility and that bunnies and eggs are symbols of fertility.

And you know, I used to say that myself, so I'm not ridiculing anyone who says that. But the problem with that answer that I myself used to give because I heard it secondhand, I mean, I did not read anything about eggs and Easter bunnies in the early Christian writings. So when people said it was pagan, sure, that sounded reasonable.

But the problem with that answer is that, number one, we've already seen there's no independent evidence that such a goddess named Easter ever existed. And number two, the eighth century historian, the venerable Bede, is our only source for believing that such a goddess ever existed. And he says that she was the goddess of spring, not the goddess of fertility. Okay, so that's total myth that this has something to do with fertility.

I mean, it's a reasonable maybe guess, but just zero evidence for it. Okay, but number three, no one has been able to trace Easter eggs and the Easter bunny or bunnies in general all the way back to the early Middle Ages when the Angles and Saxons ruled England. And I'm talking about the pagan ones. If eggs and bunnies were associated with a pagan spring holiday, then we would find some evidence during that period when the Angles and Saxons ruled Britain. And some of them were Christian or quote Christian, but most of them were pagan. I don't know how long it took, maybe 200 years before they all finally converted to Roman Catholicism. But yeah, there's no mention.

We do have chronicles and references to things going on then. No mention about Easter eggs, bunnies, anything like that dealing with the pagan Angles and Saxons. Nor do we have from any of the other pagans that lived in Europe.

In fact, I was surprised to find this out. The first references to Easter eggs are many centuries later, during the high Middle Ages, when Europe was totally Christian, and I put quotation marks around Christian. They were either Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, the ones who lived in Eastern Europe.

So it would seem that Easter eggs are of Christian origin from the Middle Ages because that's when we first start reading about them. But why did they get associated with Easter? Now, nobody knows that. I mean, someone has suggested that hard-boiled eggs were part of the Easter feast. You know, when the fast was over, they were celebrating Christ's resurrection. Hey, let's all eat. And hard-boiled eggs were part of that.

But that's no more than a guess. I mean, we simply don't know. We have no primary sources of why hard-boiled eggs became suddenly associated with Easter. All we know is that it's sometime from the high Middle Ages when all of Europe was nominally Christian.

Now, the practice of coloring eggs and decorating them seems almost certainly to have begun among Christians in the late Middle Ages. And we have no earlier mention of those practices, no mention among the pagans. What about the Easter bunny? Now, I would have said, surely that is pagan. But here we have the same situation. We have no primary sources, nothing that we can turn to and say, aha, I see the Easter bunny came from here. So we have no grounds to say, oh, this was something from the pagans because when we first read about the Easter bunny, it's when Christian was totally nominally Europe. So since we have no primary sources, I turned to a tertiary source just for this podcast.

I went to Wikipedia to see what they have to say about the Easter bunny. Now, please don't laugh. Wikipedia is often one of the better tertiary sources out there. But that's all it ever is. It's a tertiary source, meaning you're not allowed to use primary sources. You have to quote from other, you have to quote from secondary sources. So that makes it a tertiary source, the third level up.

But now their article says this. I'll read this quote.

It says this about the Easter bunny. Originating among German Lutherans, the Easter hare, H-A-R-E, originally played the role of a judge evaluating whether children were good or disobedient in behavior at the start of the season of Easter tide, similar to the naughty or nice list made by Santa Claus.

As part of the legend, the creature carries colored eggs in its basket as well as candy and sometimes toys to the homes of children. As such, the Easter bunny again shows similarities to Santa. The custom was first mentioned in Georg Frank von Frankenau's book entitled About Easter Eggs, which was written in 1682.

So it seems like even the Easter bunny is of relatively recent origin, and it appears fairly certain to have originated among professing Christians, even among Protestants. So does our local church, Chambersburg Christian Fellowship, sponsor an Easter egg hunt every year?

No, we don't. But the practice seems to have originated with Christians, not with pagans. So that sums up our questions about Easter. I appreciated everyone who asked us questions about that. And I hope these answers have been a blessing to you. Thanks for listening.