Easter vs Pascha

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pollycarp

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Glory to Jesus Christ.
I recently started attending a Byzantine church, where they refer to this coming Sunday as Pascha. I wondered why the Roman church calls it Easter, as that is the name of a pagan goddess. I guess it just developed over the years? I do prefer Pascha.

Thanks for any answers.
 
pollycarp said:
Glory to Jesus Christ.
I recently started attending a Byzantine church, where they refer to this coming Sunday as Pascha. I wondered why the Roman church calls it Easter, as that is the name of a pagan goddess. I guess it just developed over the years? I do prefer Pascha.

Thanks for any answers.
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The short answer is that Pascha is Greek and Easter is English. It’s a language difference, not an East/West one. The “Roman Church” in countries that don’t primarily use English don’t call it Easter. For example, in Spanish, it’s Pascua; in Italian, it’s Pasqua; in German, it’s Ostern, etc.

Even in English, the official name for the feast day is “The Resurrection of our Lord”.
 
That’s a pretty good article.

It is not that the Roman church calls it Easter, it is that the Anglophone world calls it Easter. Basically this is a quirk of the language, rather like Green Thursday that will be celebrated tomorrow in Germany.

Presumably the designation happened many centuries ago during the evangelization of northern Europe, which accounts for the similarity of the German and English words.
 
It is not that the Roman church calls it Easter, it is that the Anglophone world calls it Easter. Basically this is a quirk of the language, rather like Green Thursday that will be celebrated tomorrow in Germany.
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Indeed. It is worth noting that English and German are virtually the only major languages in the Church whose word for the Festival of the Resurrection of our Lord does not derive in from the Hebrew pesach (Passover).

The question of which term one ‘likes’ more is an odd one. I suppose that I prefer Pascha, or some variation thereof, because of its close linguistic connection to the Passover; it reinforces the association. If I were still Greek Orthodox, I’d likely use it. But to walk around my Roman Rite parish speaking of the Paschal Vigil would seem quite odd, and I’d probably get some strange looks from folks. When in Rome, as they say…
 
The French word is also *le Pâques *, after the Hebrew.
 
Easter is just fine with me. I happen to like and am proud of my native tongue and don’t feel the need to call it anything else. The English language is just as honorable as any other language.
 
English is a Germanic language and we get our word Easter from that origin.

“Germans to this day call April ostermonat, and ostarmânoth is found as early as Eginhart [c. 800] ([contemporary of Charlemagne]). The great christian festival, which usually falls in April or the end of March, bears in the oldest of [Old High German] remains the name ôstarâ; it is mostly found in the plural, because two days (ôstartagâ, aostortagâ, Diut. 1, 266) were kept at Easter. This Ostrâ, like the [Anglo Saxon] Eâstre, must in the heathen religion have denoted a higher being, whose worship was so firmly rooted, that the christian teachers tolerated the name, and applied it to one of their own grandest anniversaries. All the nations bordering on us have retained the Biblical “pascha;” even Ulphilas writes paska, not austro, though he must have known the word; the Norse tongue also has imported its paskir, Swed[ish] pask, Dan[ish] paaske. The [Old High German] adv. ôstar expresses movement toward the rising sun (Gramm. 3, 205), likewise the [Old Norse] austr, and probably an [Anglo Saxon] eástor and Goth[ic] áustr.4 (Italics in original)”
 
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