(avg. read time: 3–6 mins.)
I originally had a plan to compose a book out of the research I had done into the holidays of Easter, Christmas, and Halloween, the holidays which regularly raise arguments about their history, particularly in the U.S. The problem with that idea was that I had already made so much of what would go in the book freely available on my academia.edu page that, even with updates and expansions, I could not justify in my own mind either removing this online content to put it in the more restricted format of a published book or charging people for access to content that I had made freely available for years. I have already made a series out of one of the parts of that book in “When Was Jesus Born?” This time, I will be composing a series, with some minor updates, from “Easter, Why Are You Like This? On the Timing, Name, and Symbols of Easter.” If you wish to read this research in full, I suggest going there. If you would prefer it in a more digestible form and maybe have an interest in only one of these aspects, I will be breaking this up into six parts, including this introduction.
I dedicated myself to doing the research on holidays because there is such a meme culture among both Christians and atheists (as well as others) to claim that these holidays, including Easter, are fundamentally pagan and not Christian. Christian and atheist critics of Easter tend to claim that the holiday and its rituals have more to do with Ishtar and Eostre (the latter of which is a goddess they pretend to know a lot about only at this time of year) than with Christ. Probably the most popular meme telling the True Story of Easter(TM), despite the frequent refutation of it, is this one:
This is of course not the only such meme, as you can also find ones like this floating around:
These memes in their present form have been going around for several years, making them positively ancient by Internet standards. But for as much as they try to present themselves as some grand, revolutionary, revelatory insight, they are simply repackaging claims that have circulated for a long time before the meme-makers’ great-grandparents were born.1
I will not be responding to these particular memes line-by-line, because so many others have done so . I would rather take a deep dive into the history of the holiday, its timing, its name, and the symbols associated with its celebration, particularly the Easter eggs and the Easter rabbit.
Why Is Easter Celebrated When It Is?
The aspect of Easter that will take the longest to address is its timing as the history of it is rather complicated. I will not be providing a truly comprehensive survey, as attempting to provide such a thing in this context would be the equivalent of drinking from a firehose; I will only try to note the more significant points.2 The first matter to note on the timing of Easter is that it ranges on the Gregorian calendar, the one used for civil purposes in most places around the world, from March 22 to April 25. The Julian calendar, used by many Eastern Christian traditions, has this same range of dates, but due to the differences between the Julian and Gregorian calendars (which I will go over next week), this range is currently April 4 to May 8 when converted to the Gregorian reckoning. As for this particular range of dates, I can briefly summarize the rationale given more fully in the discussion of the Julian and Gregorian calendars. The Paschal/Passover full moon—with which Easter is associated—is allowed by these parameters to be on the equinox, which is regularly assigned to March 21 (even if it is actually on a different date in a given year), and if March 21 is on a Saturday, Easter will be celebrated on the next day. However, if a full moon occurs just before the equinox, the Paschal full moon could be as late as April 18, and if April 18 is on a Sunday, Easter will be celebrated on the next Sunday, April 25.
As indicated above, the second matter to note is that it has nothing to do with taking over some pan-religious spring festival or any festival specifically related to Ishtar or Eostre. Rather, it is a result of Easter’s association with Passover. This association goes back to the Gospel accounts as all of them place the resurrection of Jesus on the first day of the week after the Passover (Matt 26:17; 28:1; Mark 14:12; 16:2; Luke 22:7; 24:1; John 13:1; 20:1). When the time came to commemorate this event with an annual celebration—which the early Christians called “Pascha” after the Greek name for the Passover—a problem arose that proved to be far more severe than the disputes about the date of Jesus’s birth (which I will explore another time). Passover is dated according to a lunar system of months that produces a 354-day year (with an intercalated thirteenth month every few years), but the Julian calendar—named after Julius Caesar, who instituted it in 45 BCE—used across the Roman Empire was a solar calendar that produced a year that was 365¼ days (hence a leap year every four years). Passover was thus a moveable holiday and a new holiday associated with it would also move across the solar calendar. The question of how to reconcile this discrepancy to keep Pascha tied with the Paschal full moon (as Passover is to be on the fourteenth day of a lunar cycle, i.e., a full moon [Exod 12:6, 18; Lev 23:5; Num 9:3, 5; 28:16]) has driven debates for centuries. I will cover these debates in three phases. The first phase concerns the relationship of Easter to Passover. The second phase concerns the issue of calculating the proper time for Easter in each given year and how to make such calculations well in advance. The third phase concerns the divide that persists to this day between those who observe Easter according to the Julian calendar and those who observe Easter according to the Gregorian calendar.
The First Round of Debates on the Timing of Easter: 14th of Nisan (Passover) or on a Sunday?
The Third Round of Debates on the Timing of Easter: The Julian/Gregorian Divide
Wherefore Art Thou Easter? On the Names of Easter
The ultimate source for claims about Ishtar’s association with Easter, other than imagination, is Alexander Hislop’s The Two Babylons published in 1858, a notorious book with severe cases of fact deficiency and substantiation deficiency. His ultimate goal was to argue that Roman Catholicism is essentially a reskinned Babylonian religion, and nothing would get in the way of his goal.
Readers interested in a more comprehensive survey are encouraged to see Alden A. Mosshammer, The Easter Computus and the Origins of the Christian Era, OECS (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).