Easter Origins

[Solon]

Originally Posted by ute4ever

What exactly do you do on Easter?

Well, I wish it were more salacious. I go to church. I eat a lot of candy, and I try to talk my wife into observing our own little fertility ritual . . . this works best if she's semi-loopy on chocolate Cadbury eggs.

[Jeff Lebowski]

So what are you saying? The Easter Bunny's not biblical?

[SteelBlue]

Originally Posted by All-American

Good stuff.

The word "easter" appears only once in the KJV New Testament (in Acts 12:4), and it's a mistranslation. The greek word is "pascha," translated 28 other times as "passover" and in this one instance as "easter." Go figure.

Your post jumped out at me because I was reading the definition of Easter in the Bible dictionary today. It says the following:

"This word occurs only once in the Bible (Acts 12:4) and then would be better translated as passover. The word Easter is from Eastre, a Norse goddess whose pagan festival was observed at the Spring equinox. The association of this pagan goddess with the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ was only by adaptation and synthesis. There is no real connection. Jesus, being the Lamb of God, was crucified at passover time and is the true Passover. He was raised from the grave on the third day thereafter. It thus became a springtime anniversary, and has come to be called Easter in the Christian world."

[BarbaraGordon]

Originally Posted by SteelBlue

Your post jumped out at me because I was reading the definition of Easter in the Bible dictionary today. It says the following:

"This word occurs only once in the Bible (Acts 12:4) and then would be better translated as passover. The word Easter is from Eastre, a Norse goddess whose pagan festival was observed at the Spring equinox. The association of this pagan goddess with the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ was only by adaptation and synthesis. There is no real connection. Jesus, being the Lamb of God, was crucified at passover time and is the true Passover. He was raised from the grave on the third day thereafter. It thus became a springtime anniversary, and has come to be called Easter in the Christian world."

Found this article today. Thought it was cute.
http://dictionary.reference.com/features/easter.html

I've spent half the day searching through dictionaries, etymological dictionaries, encyclopedias of religion, and the more I read the more confused I get.

Here's an example from the OED unabridged:

[OE. éastre wk. fem. = OHG. ôstara; more freq. in plural éastron, corresponding to OHG. ôstoron (MHG., mod.G. ostern pl.); the strong forms occas. appearing seem to have been derived from the combining form éastor-. Bæda Temp. Rat. xv. derives the word from Eostre (Northumb. spelling of Éastre), the name of a goddess whose festival was celebrated at the vernal equinox; her name (:{em}OTeut. *austrôn- cogn. w. Skr. usr{amac} dawn; see EAST) shows that she was originally the dawn-goddess.]

It seems that there is no consensus on the matter. Further, it seems that this is an issue with passionate (forgive the pun) adherents on all sides, which makes wading through the biases a little difficult.

The main positions on Easter seem to be that etymologically speaking,

1. It is a variant of Eostra, goddess of spring and rebirth.

2. It is a variant of erstehung, meaning resurrection.

3. It is a variant of Ishtar, goddess referred to in the thread's original post.

There are those who can make compelling reasons for and against any of these cases. So I give up trying to sort it out.

Things like this make me wish I had stuck to math. There's only one integral of e^x dx, right?

[YOhio]

Originally Posted by BarbaraGordon

Found this article today. Thought it was cute.
http://dictionary.reference.com/features/easter.html

I've spent half the day searching through dictionaries, etymological dictionaries, encyclopedias of religion, and the more I read the more confused I get.

Here's an example from the OED unabridged:

It seems that there is no consensus on the matter. Further, it seems that this is an issue with passionate (forgive the pun) adherents on all sides, which makes wading through the biases a little difficult.

The main positions on Easter seem to be that etymologically speaking,

1. It is a variant of Eostra, goddess of spring and rebirth.

2. It is a variant of erstehung, meaning resurrection.

3. It is a variant of Ishtar, goddess referred to in the thread's original post.

There are those who can make compelling reasons for and against any of these cases. So I give up trying to sort it out.

Things like this make me wish I had stuck to math. There's only one integral of e^x dx, right?

I thought Easter came from our hearts. Or was that Christmas?

[Solon]

Originally Posted by BarbaraGordon

The main positions on Easter seem to be that etymologically speaking,

1. It is a variant of Eostra, goddess of spring and rebirth.

2. It is a variant of erstehung, meaning resurrection.

3. It is a variant of Ishtar, goddess referred to in the thread's original post.

I think they're all related. The Easter etymology from Eostra comes from the Venerable Bede (Bæda in the OED entry), who lived ca. 672-735 and is a late source if we're talking Mesopotamian mythology. It's entirely possible that the Saxons adopted the name from the Mesopotamian Ishtar/Astarte (the names are virtually identical). The other possibility I see is that the Mesopotamians and the Saxons are branches from an identical, even older root. One scholar fixes this root as the goddess Ushas from ancient India (See CB Wilson, "Notes on Order and Reality in Art" in Leonardo vol. 14, no. 4 (Autumn, 1981), pp. 320-322; esp. note 5 on pg. 322.).

Either way, Ishtar is an older version of Eostra, and I see no problem with accepting both etymologies.

More candy, anyone?