Jesus Would Role Over In His Grave

[Confused Ape]

You silly christians. Always stealing everyone elses shit.

The idea that Easter is named after Ishtar originated with Alexander Hislop

Alexander Hislop (born Duns, Berwickshire, 1807; died Arbroath, 13 March 1865) was a Free Church of Scotland minister known for his outspoken criticisms of the Roman Catholic Church.

He wrote several books, his most famous being The Two Babylons: Papal worship Proved to be the worship of Nimrod and His wife.

Hislop's work has been described as conspiracy theory propaganda which mixed "sketchy knowledge of Middle Eastern antiquity with a vivid imagination."[1]

He claimed the Roman Catholic Church was a Babylonian mystery cult, and pagan, whereas Protestants worshipped the true Jesus and the true God. He contended that Roman Catholic religious practices are actually pagan practices grafted onto true Christianity during the reign of Constantine. At this point, he alleged, the merger between the Roman state religion and its adoration of the mother and child was transferred to Christianity, merging Christian characters with pagan mythology. The Goddess was renamed Mary, and Jesus was the renamed Jupiter-Puer, or "Jupiter the Boy".

Hislop's theory was that the goddess, in Rome called Venus or Fortuna, was the Roman name of the more ancient Babylonian cult of Ishtar, whose origins began with a blonde-haired and blue-eyed woman named Semiramis.

According to Hislop, Semiramis was an exceedingly beautiful woman, who gave birth to a son named Tammuz, was instrumental as the queen, and wife of Nimrod the founder of Babylon, and its religion, complete with a pseudo-Virgin Birth. This he called a foreshadowing of the birth of Christ, prompted by Satan. Later, Nimrod was killed, and Semiramis, pregnant with his child, claimed the child was Nimrod reborn.

Hislop claimed that the cult and worship of Semiramis spread globally, her name changing with the culture. In Egypt she was Isis, in Greece and Rome she was called Venus, Diana, Athena, and a host of other names, but was always prayed to and central to the faith which was based on Babylonian mystery religion.

The following link is to a page of his book where he says that the name, Easter, is Astarte/Ishtar so of Chaldean origins.

The Two Babylons

The Etymology of Ēostre traces the word back from Old English.

Old English Eōstre continues into modern English as Easter and derives from Proto-Germanic *austrōn meaning 'dawn', itself a descendent of the Proto-Indo-European root *aus-, meaning 'to shine' (modern English east also derives from this root).[1]

The goddess name Eōstre is therefore linguistically cognate with numerous other dawn goddesses attested among Indo-European language-speaking peoples. These cognates lead to the reconstruction of a Proto-Indo-European dawn goddess; the Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture details that "A Proto-Indo-European goddess of the dawn is supported both by the evidence of cognate names and the similarity of mythic representation of the dawn goddess among various [Indo-European] groups” and that “all of this evidence permits us to posit a [Proto-Indo-European] *haéusōs 'goddess of dawn' who was characterized as a "reluctant" bringer of light for which she is punished. In three of the IE stocks, Baltic, Greek and Indo-Iranian, the existence of a PIE 'goddess of the dawn' is given additional linguistic support in that she is designated the 'daughter of heaven'"[2]

Yes, there's a lot of pagan ideas in Christianity and people wandered around a lot and borrowed bits and pieces from each other. Saying that the proto-Germanic tribes worshiped Ishtar is stretching it a bit, though. It's also stretching it to say that the proto-Germanic tribes changed Ishtar's symbols of lions and an eight pointed star into bunnies and eggs.