Easter

Most European names for the feast come from the Greek and Latin pascha, which comes from the Aramaic form of the Hebrew Pesach, Passover. The word first meant the Passover feast of Exodus 12. Wikipedia quotes Paul, writing from Ephesus: “Christ our Pascha (Passover) has been sacrificed for us.” The Gospels place the crucifixion and resurrection in the week of Passover in Jerusalem.

Jewish scholars say the same from their side. Ismar Schorsch of the Jewish Theological Seminary writes that “If Passover is largely about Egypt, Easter is largely about Passover,” and that in both religions “the calendar is adjusted to ensure that the holiday is celebrated early in the spring,” so that Easter stays close to the full moon that coincided with the start of Passover.

Wikipedia says some early Christians, among them those of Asia Minor, Jerusalem and Syria, kept the death of Christ on 14 Nisan, the day of Passover, whatever day of the week it fell on. They are called Quartodecimans, from the Latin for “fourteenth.” Polycarp was one; Eusebius says he claimed the practice came from the apostle John. Other churches, among them Rome, kept the feast on a Sunday. Wikipedia notes the hostility of Pope Victor I toward the Quartodeciman practice.

Scholars disagree on which practice is older. Wikipedia says some think Sunday observance came first and others that the fourteenth was original.

Popular accounts say Nicaea set the rule for the date of Easter. Wikipedia’s page on the date says the Council did not give any explicit rule. It wrote only that “all our brethren in the East who formerly followed the custom of the Jews are henceforth to celebrate the said most sacred feast of Easter at the same time with the Romans and yourselves [the Church of Alexandria] and all those who have observed Easter from the beginning.” So Nicaea required one common date and ended the Jewish-calendar practice.

The explicit rule, a Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox, is credited to Nicaea by later writers. Wikipedia says the claim that the Fathers agreed it at Nicaea goes back to Dionysius Exiguus in 525 and calls it false. Schorsch, writing in 2003, still says Nicaea determined the rule. We report both and give the weight to the page that checks the Council’s own wording.

Easter is the first Sunday after the Paschal full moon on or after 21 March, which is a church calculation (the computus). Wikipedia says the full moon and the equinox in it are ecclesiastical dates, with the equinox fixed at 21 March, and not observations of the sky. In this way the feast always falls between 22 March and 25 April in the Gregorian calendar. Wikipedia says the Alexandrian method was the one passed on by Dionysius Exiguus, who published an Easter table in 525.

Pope Gregory XIII, pope from 1572 to 1585, issued the bull Inter gravissimas on 24 February 1582. It replaced the Julian calendar with the Gregorian, dropped ten days (Thursday 4 October 1582 was followed by Friday 15 October), and changed the lunar tables used for Easter. Catholics and Protestants now use the Gregorian calendar. Wikipedia says the Eastern churches keep Easter by the Julian calendar, so their date is often different.

In English the feast is not called after Passover but after Ēostre, an Old English word. Wikipedia says the name developed before 899 and refers to an Anglo-Saxon goddess. The only ancient writer who names her is the Venerable Bede (672 to 735) in De temporum ratione. Winick of the Library of Congress gives Bede’s words: “Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated ‘Paschal month’, and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate that Paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honoured name of the old observance.”

Scholars have debated whether Bede invented her. Wikipedia says the debate was strongest before the discovery in 1958, in the Rhein-Erft-Kreis, of votive inscriptions to goddesses called the matronae Austriahenae, and that modern scholars now generally accept that she was a genuine goddess. Winick adds that in Bede’s account there is no hare, fertility or rebirth: “just the Old English name for April and the word ‘Easter’ itself.”

Jacob Grimm, in his Deutsche Mythologie (1835), saw that Easter was called Ostara in Old High German and conjectured a goddess of that name, writing that she “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.” Winick says no shrine or ancient writing refers to a goddess called Ostara. Wikipedia adds that the same 1958 inscriptions are cited by some as support for a Continental Germanic goddess of a related name, so we do not call the goddess a pure invention. Winick also gives a simpler explanation for the German name: much of Germany was Christianized by Anglo-Saxon priests, who probably brought their own name for the feast with them.

The link between this Ostara and a hare came later. In 1874 Adolf Holtzmann wrote that the Easter hare was inexplicable to him but “probably the hare was the sacred animal of Ostara.” Winick calls it a conjecture, made to explain a tradition that already existed.

Wikipedia reports two explanations. Many sources trace the custom of Easter eggs to the early Christians of Mesopotamia, who stained eggs red “in memory of the blood of Christ, shed at His crucifixion.” Medievalists point instead to the prohibition of eggs during Lent, after which eggs were blessed at Easter. Wikipedia adds that in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Crete eggs were associated with death and rebirth, and that the Roman Ritual of 1610 treats the egg as a symbol of the resurrection of Jesus.

We could not confirm a Persian or Roman-festival origin for the Easter egg, so we do not rely on it.

Winick of the Library of Congress says the first clear reference is in Georg Franck von Franckenau’s Latin essay De ovis paschalibus (“About Easter Eggs”), 1682. It says that in Germania Superior (the Palatinate, Alsace and neighboring regions) and in Westphalia the eggs were called di hasen-eier, hare’s eggs, “from the story, told by children and the simple-minded, that a hare (der Oster-Hase) laid the eggs” to be found hidden in the garden. Winick concludes that German settlers in Pennsylvania almost certainly brought the hare to America. He cites drawings by Johann Conrad Gilbert, who came from Germany in 1757, and reasons that the tradition reached Pennsylvania by 1757 at the latest.

Winick says that in the newspapers in the Library’s Chronicling America collection “Easter Hare” predominates until 1893 and “Easter Rabbit” is more common after that, while “Easter Bunny” does not appear until 1883 and stays rare until the twentieth century. Puck Magazine covers of 1899, 1900 and 1901 were, he says, the first to feature Easter Bunnies. Wikipedia dates chocolate eggs to 1725 (the widow Giambone, Turin), the first hollow chocolate egg to J.S. Fry & Sons in 1873, and Cadbury’s first Easter egg to 1875.

In Australia some people have replaced the Bunny with the Easter Bilby, to raise awareness of the damage that introduced rabbits cause (see the figures below).

The claim is that the English word Easter comes from Ishtar or Astarte, a Babylonian or Phoenician goddess. Wikipedia traces it to Alexander Hislop’s The Two Babylons, a pamphlet of 1853 expanded in 1858, which says “Easter is nothing else than Astarte” and equates her with Ishtar. Wikipedia says scholars of the twentieth century treat the book’s approach as pseudohistory.

The words are not related. Easter is from Old English Ēastre, a Germanic word, while Ishtar is a Mesopotamian name of another language family. Winick of the Library of Congress calls the idea “pure invention”.

Bede does name a goddess Eostre (card 5). The hare, the eggs and a spring festival come from later writers: Grimm in 1835 and Holtzmann in 1874 (card 6). Bede says nothing of a hare, and Winick finds the first link between a hare and Ostara in Holtzmann.

This story says the goddess changed a bird into a hare, and that the hare kept the ability to lay eggs. Winick traced the earliest version he could find to American Notes and Queries, 1889, in an item by a writer signing “RWH”, who cites no source. He guesses that the writer took it from a German scholar after Grimm.

It is a legend, and it is not ancient.

The date is tied to spring, as Passover is. Schorsch says that in both religions the calendar is adjusted to keep the holiday early in the spring. The 21 March in the rule is an ecclesiastical date, fixed by the church, as Wikipedia explains. We found no source for specific equinox or wreath rites behind the Christian date, so we drop that part of the claim.

Christians kept the feast before 325, and the Quartodeciman dispute shows the argument was already old by the second century (card 2). Nicaea asked for a common date. The detailed computing rule came afterwards (card 3).

Wikipedia reports that the Romans held a spring festival, the Hilaria, on 22 to 25 March (our sources are the Chronography of 354 and Arnobius), that marked the rebirth of Attis. So a spring festival of a dying and returning god did exist in Rome.

The claim that Christianity took its resurrection from it is much weaker. Jonathan Z. Smith wrote in 1987 that the category of the “dying and rising god” is “largely a misnomer based on imaginative reconstructions and exceedingly late or highly ambiguous texts.”

Wikipedia says the three Synoptic Gospels describe the Last Supper as a Passover meal, while John does not. It reports that scholars disagree on how to reconcile them. One of them, Brant Pitre, argues that they agree.

The King James Version of Acts 12:4 reads: “And when he had apprehended him, he put him in prison, and delivered him to four quaternions of soldiers to keep him; intending after Easter to bring him forth to the people.” The Greek word there is pascha, which means Passover. United Church of God says it is rendered “Passover” in the New King James Version.

The chocolate egg and the Easter Bunny of shops are modern (card 9). The customs under them are not: the hare-eggs story is written down in 1682 (card 8), red eggs are said to go back to the early Christians of Mesopotamia, and the Lenten egg prohibition is medieval (card 7).

Muslims honor Jesus (Isa) as a prophet and the Messiah, and they honor his mother Mary. But the core of Easter is that Jesus was crucified and rose as a sacrifice for sin, and the Quran says “they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him” (4:157), that Allah “raised him to Himself” (4:158), and that “no bearer of burdens will bear the burden of another” (6:164, 35:18). Love for Jesus is shown by following what he taught, which the Quran says was the worship of Allah alone (5:116 to 5:117).