Easter - Pagan Origin?

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fisherman_carl

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So, I have a question about Easter. We’ve all heard people say that Easter is of Pagan origins. But, I was listening to Catholic apologist Steve Ray on Catholic Answers Live today say that Easter is of Pagan origins from the Germans. Steve Ray said the name Easter comes from a Pagan godess named Ēostre (or Ostara)?

However, this conflicts with what I already know from an article on catholic.com. To me this article makes more sense than what Steve Ray said. Here is a quote of the relevant part from an article by James Akin.

"All this is nonsense. Easter is not based on a pagan holiday but on a Jewish one, Passover. Easter originated as the first Sunday following Passover, when Jesus was crucified.

Neither, as some anti-Catholics claim, is the name Easter derived from the pagan goddess Ishtar. As checking the dictionary will reveal, Easter is derived from the Old English word east, which means precisely what it does today. Only a speaker of English or German (where the holiday is called Ostern) could fall for such a claim.

In virtually every other language, the name of Easter is derived from the Jewish word Pesach or “Passover.” Thus in Greek the term for Easter is Pascha; in Latin the term is also Pascha. From there it passed into the Romance languages, and so in Spanish it is Pascua, in Italian Pasqua, in French Paques, and in Portugese Pascoa. It also passed into the non-Romance languages, such as the Germanic languages Dutch, where it is Pasen, and Danish, where it is Paaske."
source: archive.catholic.com/thisrock/1999/9903chap.asp

Like I said what James Akin said makes more sense to me, but I was looking to see if anyone else knew anything about this. Steve Ray kind of threw me for a loop by saying it was of Pagan origin. It sounds like Steve Ray is wrong here but I just wanted to check. Thanks.
 
As a former Jehovah’s Witness who was made to obsess over
such things (( and even talking about it RE-activates the years of RUTS that this
paranoid belief system created in me, ruts of paranoid thinking )),
please let me assure you that Easter is NOT of pagan origin.

The word, Easter? Is IT of pagan origin??
Maybe, maybe not. Writers are divided about the evidence.
Ostara was a name of a pagan goddess, and pagans in other cultures
sometimes associated their Seasons with gods and goddesses,
but don’t worry or fret about this.
Do you worry about calling the first month of the year, January? Or March, March?
Both are derived from pagan gods, and you aren’t committing idolatry or paganism
by following traditional convention by referring to months by those Pagan names of deities.
Don’t let fundamentalists and JWs and Armstrong-ites make you worry about
silly stuff like this. This is paranoid self-righteousness that their leaders are handing down, and confusing and destroying many people’s Orthodox Catholic Christian faith
with such worrisome pointless and harmless details as the remote possible pagan origins of the names, in some countries, of the Christian holiday in honor of the Resurrection,
yes, named originally after Pesach, often called PASCH or PASCUA in most of the Catholic and Orthodox world, and Easter in parts of it as well. The word is utterly harmless. Please, if you have the “REV” Alexander Hislop’s paranoid book, The Two Babylons, from whence comes much of this wild paranoia, please, do yourself and your faith a favor, and tear that book up and throw it in the trash where that sensationalistic
potboiler truly belongs.

God love you, and stay away from those ultra-fundy, anti-holiday groups.
They are sincere, but sincerely wrong. And they’re making mountains out of MOLEHILLS.
Don’t let them get you worried. Please, don’t.
Peace to you,
Jaypeeto4
 
There is really only one question you need to answer about Easter. Do you believe in the Resurrection?

Easter is not about etymology (for every word can be found to have non-Christian roots) or paganism (there really were religions before Christianity that celebrated events during Spring) or how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It’s about the Risen Christ.
 
The date might be near a old holiday of fertility. The symboles eggs and bunnies. I remember from myth class something about that.
 
The origin of Easter and the complex idea of ‘resurrection’ has its root in Ancient Egypt, as do many of the ideas, concepts and allegories of the 3 Abrahamic religions. The importance of the East as the place where the sun god Ra was re-born every morning, having passed through the 12 divisions of the Tuat and the resurrection of the sun every day, has been transformed into our idea of the resurrection of Jesus, and indeed the resurrection of our own soul. This whole process was very complex and was developed over thousands of years - much longer than the age of our western culture, If we wish to covet this idea as our own, we break one of the 10 commandments! Thou shalt not covet thy neighbours goods.
 
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