The Real Easter

[Belacqua]

You sound like the typical christer denier. Christeranity stole a bunch of formerly pagan holy days in order to covert the pagans.

I sound like Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud, co-editors of the Dictionary of English Folklore, Oxford University Press, 2003

I sound like Ronald Hutton, author of Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, Oxford University Press, 1996

I sound like Philip A. Shaw, Lecturer in English Language and Old English, University of Leicester, author of Pagan Goddesses in the Early Germanic World: Eostre, Hreda and the Cult of Matrons, Bristol Classical Press, 2011

I sound like Candida R. Moss, Professor at the University of Birmingham, graduate of Oxford and Yale universities.

[Fake Messiah]

You do sound ridiculous when you claim that tying Easter to Eostre is a modern internet myth when it is dated to at least the 8th century and St. Bede.

[arewethereyet]

You sound like the typical christer denier. Christeranity stole a bunch of formerly pagan holy days in order to covert the pagans.

I sound like Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud, co-editors of the Dictionary of English Folklore, Oxford University Press, 2003

I sound like Ronald Hutton, author of Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, Oxford University Press, 1996

I sound like Philip A. Shaw, Lecturer in English Language and Old English, University of Leicester, author of Pagan Goddesses in the Early Germanic World: Eostre, Hreda and the Cult of Matrons, Bristol Classical Press, 2011

I sound like Candida R. Moss, Professor at the University of Birmingham, graduate of Oxford and Yale universities.

Have you ever considered sounding like yourself?  You make a great parrot and don't seem able to think for yourself...ever.

[brewer]

I found this, he he.

[Belacqua]

Recent historians (not Internet memes) tell us that there may well have been a goddess with a name similar to Eostre or Oestre. (Or I should say, people believed in such a goddess, not that she actually existed.) As Bede says, a month may well have been named after her. The Christian holiday called Pascha in Latin fell during this month, and when Christianity reached England the holiday was named for this month in English. All Romance languages keep a version of the Latin. Pascha is derived from Pesach, the Hebrew word for Passover.

Eggs, bunnies, these were all added long after the holiday was up and running, and have nothing to do with the history of the day -- in the same way that candy canes are associated with Christmas.

So English uses the pre-Christian name of a month for a holiday that is Christian. The holiday itself is not pagan.

[Fake Messiah]

in the same way that candy canes are associated with Christmas.

Christmas is known to be full of pagan symbolism and tradition, so you are really messing up your point.

[no one]