Topical Studies
What the Bible says about
Easter, Pagan Origins of
(From Forerunner Commentary)
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What is the meaning of the name "Easter"? You have been led to suppose the word means "resurrection of Christ." For 1600 years the Western world has been taught that Christ rose from the dead on Sunday morning. But that is merely one of the fables the apostle Paul warned readers of the New Testament to expect. The resurrection did not occur on Sunday! The name "Easter," which is merely the slightly changed English spelling of the name of the ancient Assyrian and Babylonian goddess Ishtar, comes to us from old Teutonic mythology where it is known as Ostern. The Phoenician name of this goddess was Astarte, consort of Baal, the sun god, whose worship is denounced by the Almighty in the Bible as the most abominable of all pagan idolatry. Look up the word "Easter" in Webster's dictionary. You will find it clearly reveals the pagan origin of the name. In the large five-volume Hastings Dictionary of the Bible, only six brief lines are given to the name "Easter," because it occurs only once in the Bible - and that only in the Authorized King James translation. Says Hastings: "Easter, used in Authorized Version as the translation of 'Pascha' in Acts 12:4, 'Intending after Easter to bring him forth to the people.' Revised Standard Version has substituted correctly 'the Passover.'"
Herbert W. Armstrong
The Plain Truth About Easter
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Easter, as Alexander Hislop says (The Two Babylons, p. 103), "bears its Chaldean origin on its very forehead. Easter is nothing else than Astarte, one of the titles of Beltis, the queen of heaven. . . ." The ancient gods of the pagans had many different names. While this goddess was called Astarte by the Phoenicians, it appears on Assyrian monuments found by Layard in excavations at Nineveh as Ishtar (Austen H. Layard, Nineveh and Babylon, Vol. II, p. 629). Both were pronounced "Easter." Likewise, Bel (referred to in the Old Testament) also was called Molech. It was for sacrificing to Molech (I Kings 11:1-11, especially verse 7, where Molech is called an abomination) and other pagan gods that the Eternal condemned Solomon, and rended away the Kingdom of Israel from his son. In the ancient Chaldean idolatrous sun-worship, as practiced by the Phoenicians, Baal was the sun god; Astarte, his consort or wife. And Astarte is the same as Ishtar, or the English "Easter." Says Hislop: The festival, of which we read in Church history, under the name of Easter, in the third or fourth centuries, was quite a different festival from that now observed in the Romish [and Protestant] Church, and at that time was not known by any such name as Easter. It was called Pascha, or the Passover, and . . . was very early observed by many professing Christians. . . . That festival agreed originally with the time of the Jewish Passover, when Christ was crucified. . . . That festival was not idolatrous, and it was preceded by no Lent. (The Two Babylons, p. 104)
Herbert W. Armstrong
The Plain Truth About Easter
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Exodus 20:2-6
God does care how we worship Him; He gives specific commands about how He wants to be glorified according to His standards and not our own. It does matter whether or not we share in the celebration of this world's pagan religious holidays. Though the Bible—the Word of God—makes no direct references to New Year's Eve, Lent, Easter, Halloween, or Christmas, the origins of these pagan holidays are mentioned as being abominations to God.
Martin G. Collins
Pagan Holidays
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Exodus 32:1-8
They did this in their ignorance and their impatience to get things moving. Even though most of the people wanted it, and a renowned religious figure proclaimed it "a feast to the LORD," it did not make it so. God was definitely not positively impressed, nor was Moses. In one of the gravest acts of presumption shown in God's Word, and one of the largest in terms of the number involved, they took it on themselves to add this to the worship of God. What they did was very seriously disrespectful to God; they attempted to configure the nature of God according to their own desires. Proverbs 14:12 says, "There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." People say they keep Christmas and Easter to worship Christ, but they are also defining the nature of God according to their own ideas. Just as surely as the ancient Israelites blended paganism with what God truly revealed, so people do today. This is the basic principle of acts of presumption, and each of us has done this, not once, but sadly, repeatedly, even though we may know better. Jesus says in John 4:24, "God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth," meaning we must worship to the fullest of God's intent as revealed in His Word, with every act guided and determined by His revealed truth. Yet, how many corners do we cut when we feel it serves us better at the time?
John W. Ritenbaugh
Presumption and Divine Justice (Part Two)
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1 Kings 11:4-8
Even though the common people of Israel were frequently involved in idolatry (because they ignored God's words about being separate), the high places and associated pagan rites did not have official acceptance until the later years of Solomon—a king whose reign began so well. Solomon set an example that many later kings followed, and the high places remained a facet of the societies of both Israel and Judah—a thorn in their spiritual sides—until their violent subjugations by Assyria and Babylon. This negligence was no small matter. Because Solomon turned away from God and embraced the high-place paganism of the heathens, the northern ten tribes of Israel were torn from the line of David in Judah, and the two kingdoms have yet to be reunited (I Kings 11:9-13; see Ezekiel 37:15-26). Burning incense to a pagan god on top of a hill does not probably tempt us. However, the lessons and warnings still apply because, symbolically, a high place can represent anything that leads a person away from the true God—anything that leads to spiritual weakness or distracts us from our high calling. It need not be as blatantly pagan as Christmas, Easter, or the occult. Just as the natural elevations of the Promised Land were not of themselves evil, so also many of the things we encounter in life and participate in may not be morally objectionable. However, how they are used becomes the critical issue: If they lead us to embrace the world and its ways, our rightfully jealous God begins to be squeezed out of our minds. Left unchecked, the end will be just as disastrous as that of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.
David C. Grabbe
The High Places (Part One)
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Proverbs 14:12
Not all presumption is careless drifting. Unfortunately, strong evidence exists to show that much of modern liberalism in religion was deliberately planned and executed. A Layman's Guide to Protestant Theology by William Hordern, p. 74, refers to this: The method of liberalism includes the attempt to modernize Christianity. The world, liberals argue, has changed radically since the early creeds of Christendom were formulated; this makes the creeds sound archaic and unreal to modern man. We have to rethink Christianity in thought forms which the modern world can comprehend. Fosdick argued that we must express the essence of Christianity, its "abiding experiences," but that we must not identify these with the "changing categories" in which they have been expressed in the past. For example, says Fosdick, an abiding experience of Christianity has been its conviction that God will triumph over evil. This has been traditionally pictured in the category of Christ's second coming on the clouds to destroy evil and set up good. We can no longer retain the outworn category, but we can still believe the truth which this ancient thought form was trying to express. We can continue to work in the faith that, through His devoted followers, God is now building His Kingdom and that there will be a renewing of life, individual and social, to bring it into conformity with the will of God. The essence of the faith is thus retained, argues Fosdick, which the thought form in which it was once clothed has been abandoned. A second aspect of the method of liberalism is its refusal to accept religious belief on authority alone. Instead, it insists that all beliefs must pass the bar of reason and experience. Man's mind is capable of thinking God's thoughts after Him. Man's intuitions and reason are the best clues that we have to the nature of God. The mind must be kept open to all truth regardless of from whence it comes. This means that the liberal must have an open mind; no questions are closed. New facts may change the convictions that have become hallowed by custom and time. The liberal will venture forth into the unknown, firmly believing that all truth must be God's truth. In this spirit, the liberal accepts the higher criticism of the Bible and the theory of evolution. He refuses to have a religion that is afraid of truth or that tries to protect itself from critical examination. (emphasis added) Is it any wonder, when those who are supposed to be the primary protectors of religious purity think the way they do, that the laity behaves as they do? Does it really make any difference? Certainly, because the almighty God on high definitely thinks it makes a difference! Hardly anything more clearly illustrates the self-deceived perverseness of human nature as its presumptuous additions of the observation of Christmas and Easter to the worship of the God of the Bible. That Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea is indisputable, but among other things, He was not born on December 25, nor did anybody exchange gifts on that date. Scripture nowhere says there were three wise men, and it is clear they gave gifts only to Christ as King. Regarding Easter, Jesus was not resurrected on a Sunday morning, nor was He crucified on a Friday afternoon. It is impossible to squeeze three days and three nights, which Jesus Himself said would be the length of time He would spend in the tomb (Matthew 12:40), between Friday afternoon and Sunday morning. Even so, fantastically detailed and emotionally appealing traditions have presumptuously been built around both these events and have been taught to a deceived public as though they were true. Beyond what has been already mentioned regarding these days, where in God's Word does He command that we believe and do these commonly accepted practices? Men have presumptuously taken them upon themselves. The addition of Christmas and Easter to Christianity happened so long ago that they have come to be accepted as part of the Christian religion, and most people celebrate them without thought. Nevertheless, adding to so-called Christian beliefs has not ended—in fact, it is still happening. The late Pope John Paul II was an ardent ecumenist. He circled the globe many times in his travels and embraced in conference many non-Catholics in his effort to bring all into one fold. His successor, Pope Benedict XVI, has pledged to continue that effort. Recently, their representatives achieved a decisive victory in forging a much closer alliance with the Anglican Church. However, Anglican leaders could take this step only by abandoning the firm foundation of a former doctrine and thus joining Catholics in accepting a presumptuous addition that the latter already believe. A headline in the Seattle Post Intelligencer, May 17, 2005, reads, "Catholics, Anglicans reach accord on Mary: Statement closes big gap between churches." The article explains: The historical separation between Roman Catholics and Anglicans has narrowed after both found common ground on the position of Mary, mother of Jesus, according to a document conceived at the highest church levels. . . . Anglicans, already close to Catholics because of liturgy and traditions, have moved even closer through their understanding of Mary as outlined in the joint statement, which took five years and an international committee to complete. Bringing back the departed brethren has been a strong focus of the Catholic Church since the Counter-Reformation that followed the Protestant Reformation, which had dealt Catholicism a powerful blow in the sixteenth century. However, it was not until the "New Age Movement" began in earnest during the mid-1970s—with its strong, insistent call for a paradigm shift toward greater tolerance and radical thinking in religious beliefs and values—that the stage was set for ecumenical efforts to succeed. The following quotation from the same article publicly undressed, as it were, the Anglican Church: The document seeks to transcend past controversies on Catholic dogma, including the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of Mary. While not spelled out specifically in the Bible, such beliefs can be interpreted through Scripture, according to the 80-paragraph document. The result might be an elevation, or at least a heightened acknowledgment, of the place of Mary—particularly for Anglicans, the denomination born in England during the Reformation and called the Episcopal Church in the United States. Anglicanism is considered closest to Catholicism because it gives Mary a pre-eminent place among the saints, includes her in Communion prayers and holds six Marian feast days. Among other matters, Catholics and Protestants disagree over the Catholic dogmas of the Immaculate Conception—the assertion that Mary lived a life free from sin from the moment she was conceived—and the Assumption, the belief that her body and soul were taken into heaven when her earthly life ended. Those dogmas have "created problems not only for Anglicans but also for other Christians," the document said, largely because they are not explicitly supported by Scripture. But those dogmas also "can be said to be consonant with the teaching of the Scriptures and the ancient common traditions," said the document, titled "Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ." (emphasis added) How can either of these two doctrines be biblically derived? They cannot! The Catholic Church has long acknowledged that the role they give Mary cannot be supported by Scripture alone, so now both the Catholic and Anglican churches have admitted through the publication of this document that these teachings are based upon mere human tradition. In the distant past, someone decided that honoring Mary in this way would be "nice," or perhaps he used the word "appropriate," because she was chosen by God to bear His Son in her womb, and besides, she seems to be such a good woman. However, the Scriptures call for no such elevation in status, and they certainly never claim that she lived a perfect, sinless life! Now the Roman Catholic Church has gone so far as to claim she is co-savior with Christ! Such presumption seems beyond the bounds of honest, spiritual reasoning, but the Catholic Church has similarly declared Sunday to be the day of worship, replacing God's Sabbath. They have published articles openly admitting that, if one uses the Bible alone, then the Sabbath is the only acceptable day of worship. In those same articles, they have also been honest in stating that they have made this change from Sabbath to Sunday on their own authority. On these issues, their presumption is not hidden! But this is arrogant and bold hubris on a massive scale, enabled only because Satan has managed to deceive the whole world (Revelation 12:9). The overwhelming majority of people calling themselves Christian are so unconcerned—that is, tolerant and careless—they live thinking that it does not matter to God.
John W. Ritenbaugh
Presumption and Divine Justice
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Isaiah 30:9-11
For most people, it is a difficult undertaking to buck tradition. There is perhaps no clearer illustration of just how hard it is to throw off the habitual practices of our families and fellow countrymen than in our holiday celebrations. This is doubly true when speaking about religious holidays, such as Easter and Christmas. As often and as forcefully as one might try to proclaim the truth about the paganism and inaccuracies inherent in Easter and Christmas, the words seem to fall on deaf ears. No one wants to have his treasured fantasies burst. The attitude of many professing Christians concerning these holidays is similar to what God saw in Israel during the ministry of Isaiah. What is so difficult is that the truth sets up an uncomfortable proposition: Either we can ignore it and continue blithely in our deceitful, ungodly ways (risking, of course, God's condemnation), or we can accept it and change our lives to conform to it (endangering our relationships with family, friends, and society). It seems to be a no-win situation, each choice fraught with troubles. Most people, despite their purported status as believers, prefer to shrug off the inconvenient truth so as not to rock the boat in the here-and-now. They will worry about what God thinks about their decision later. Yet, to a Christian, there should be no dithering about a choice like this. Jesus tells us in Luke 12:4-5, "And I say to you, My friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear Him who, after He has killed, has power to cast into hell; yes, I say to you, fear Him!" When a real Christian is presented with truth, he embraces it out of reverence for God. As Christ also says, "He who is of God hears God's words" (John 8:47). He later said to His disciples, "He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me. . . . He who does not love Me does not keep My words" (John 14:21, 24). It is as simple as that. Consider one of these stubborn truths that exposes perhaps the most glaring inconsistency of the entire Easter scenario. Jesus Himself says in Matthew 12:38-40: Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered, saying, "Teacher, we want to see a sign from You." But He answered and said to them, "An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign, and no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth." This is not a difficult concept. Jesus says quite plainly that He would be buried for three days and three nights, just as Jonah languished three days and three nights in the great fish's belly (Jonah 1:17). Jesus says elsewhere, "Are there not twelve hours in the day?" (John 11:9), and He obviously knew that nighttime also covered twelve hours. Since a full day is made up of twelve hours of day and twelve hours of night (see Genesis 1:5, 8, 13, etc.), doing the simple math brings us to the unassailable conclusion that Jesus prophesied, as the only sign of His Messiahship, that He would be buried for 72 hours. Now, try to cram 72 hours - three days and three nights - between about sundown on Friday and sunrise on Sunday. Not even Superman could do it. In fact, it comes out to about half that time. Hmm. So, let us consider this logically. If Jesus Himself said He would be in the grave for 72 hours, but He was actually "in the heart of the earth" only 36 hours, then Jesus was a liar, guilty of sin, and His sacrifice to take the sins of the world upon Himself was useless. We have no Savior. However, through the resurrection from the dead, Jesus did live again and ascended to the right hand of the Father in heaven. This means that He did not lie. He was in the grave for exactly three days and three nights, and then the Father returned Him to life in glory. He lives now as our High Priest and soon-coming King. Thus, the Good Friday-Easter Sunday tradition is a bald-faced lie. It is a chronological impossibility. Even the traditional Easter text of John 20:1 says plainly that, when Mary Magdalene came to the tomb "while it was still dark" on that Sunday morning, the tomb was already empty. Easter sunrise services have no biblical basis - in fact, since Jesus was put into the tomb just about at sunset, He would have been resurrected at that same time (see Matthew 27:57-60; Mark 15:42-46; Luke 23:50-54; John 19:38-42). Will this truth change any minds? Has it changed yours?
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Bucking Tradition
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Matthew 12:38-40
To Catholics and many Protestants, Good Friday is a semi-holy day commemorating the day Jesus died nearly two thousand years ago. These same people celebrate Easter Sunday two days later, rejoicing that Jesus rose from the dead. What has always been confusing is how normally reasonable people can observe these days that are so woefully contradictory to the biblical accounts of Christ's death and resurrection. And this is without getting into the obvious pagan fertility symbols of bunnies and eggs that have nothing whatsoever to do with the awesome significance of the death, burial, and resurrection of mankind's Savior. Probably the most glaring contradiction involves Jesus' own statements, made several ways at several times, that define the period of His burial as 72 hours - no more, no less. For instance, He gave only one sign of His Messiahship: that He would be "in the heart of the earth" three days and three nights (Matthew 12:38-40). Three days and three nights are six periods of twelve hours each (see Jesus' own definition of a "day" in John 11:9-10), equaling 72 hours. In other places, Jesus says "in three days" (John 2:19-21), "the third day" (Mark 9:31; Luke 9:22; etc.), and "after three days" (Mark 8:31; see Matthew 27:63). When we put these different phrases together, we are boxed in to 72 hours exactly: One second after 72 hours would not be "in three days," and one second before 72 hours would not be "after three days." Thus, He must have lain in the tomb for exactly 72 hours - three days and three nights to the second - just as He said He would, proving He is our Savior. Now, let us assume He rose on Sunday at dawn. If we go back exactly 72 hours, we come to Thursday at daybreak, not Friday. The Bible, however, says that Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus put Jesus into the tomb as the sun was setting (Mark 15:42-46; John 19:39-41; see also Matthew 27:57; Luke 23:54). There is no way to get exactly 72 hours between a sunset and a sunrise - no matter how one might try to fudge the numbers! So, we can see that a Sunday morning resurrection cannot be true! If He was buried at sunset, He must have risen from the grave at sunset to fulfill the sign. The Gospel accounts do not record the time of His resurrection; they only tell us when His followers - the women who came early to the tomb, as well as Peter and John just a little while later - first knew He had indeed been resurrected. Early Sunday morning was when they came and found the tomb empty. In fact, He had been gone for about twelve hours by that point! The Seventy Weeks Prophecy in Daniel 9:27 tells us which day the crucifixion occurred: "Then he shall confirm a covenant with many for one week; but in the middle of the week He shall bring an end to sacrifice and offering. . . ." Many prophecy buffs have tried to make this sound as if it speaks of the end-time Beast, but only Christ Himself fits these clues. Jesus brought the New Covenant during His ministry, and His death put an end to the sacrificial system by His "once for all" offering of Himself for our sins (Hebrews 9:23-28). As this prophecy shows, His crucifixion occurred in the middle of the week - a Wednesday. This fits the timing perfectly. Put into the grave late on Wednesday, as the sun was setting, He remained in the tomb for exactly 72 hours, rising at sundown as Saturday, the seventh-day Sabbath, ended. This is the only scenario that fits the biblical record.
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
What Makes This a 'Good' Friday?
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1 Corinthians 11:23-25
While many consider Passover to be a Jewish festival, it should also be a sacred observance for all Christians. This is Jesus' own command, communicated through the apostle Paul, for the church to celebrate the Passover "on the night in which He was betrayed," which was the evening of the Passover, Nisan 14 on the Hebrew calendar. This was the practice of the New Testament church—in fact, it kept all of the holy days of Leviticus 23—as long as the original apostles lived. However, like all men, the apostles died one by one until only the apostle John was left. Around the turn of the second century, John died. For a few generations under the leadership of John's disciple, Polycarp (AD 69-155), and a successor, Polycrates (c. 130-196), the Ephesian church remained faithful to the teachings and traditions of the early church, including the keeping of the Passover on Nisan 14. Those few who stubbornly resisted the change to the celebration of Easter, which had supplanted Passover throughout most of Christendom, were called Quartodecimans ("fourteenthers") and Judaizers. By Origen's day (c. 185- 254), they were, he wrote, "a mere handful" among the millions living in the Empire. Even so, the Roman Church did not effectively ban the practice of keeping the Passover on Nisan 14 until AD 325 at the Council of Nicea, when rules were set down to calculate the date of Easter for the entire Church. Canon 29 of the Council of Laodicea (held in 363-364) later anathematized those Judaizers who kept the seventh-day Sabbath, many of whom were also Quartodecimans. The controversy over Passover or Easter boils down to following Scripture versus following Roman Catholic tradition. Frankly, the reason that the Roman Church chose to keep Easter rests on two faulty pillars: 1) an intense prejudice against "the perfidy of the Jews" in the crucifixion of Christ (which has come to be known as the "blood libel") and 2) the widespread celebration of Easter among pagan cultures throughout the Empire. The convoluted theological arguments that have come down from the so-called apostolic fathers, repeated endlessly by their successors, are window-dressing to obscure these unpleasant factors. Even during the first century, an anti-Jewish element had begun to creep into the church of God. In his epistles to the Romans and to the Galatians, the apostle Paul had attempted to explain the place of God's law under the New Covenant, but as Peter later testified, in Paul's epistles "are some things hard to understand, which untaught and unstable people twist to their own destruction" (II Peter 3:16). And twist them they did, moving the church away from the truths written in the Old Testament and expounded by Christ and His apostles. Soon, many Greek-speaking Christians, not wanting to be constrained by the "Hebrew" law, entertained Gnostic ideas that encouraged spiritual license. Finally, the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 ratcheted up anti-Jewish fervor to a fever pitch, and across the Empire, association with Jews and things Jewish was generally avoided. In this way, the church that appears in second-century history is quite different from its first-century counterpart. It is largely Gentile, keeping Sunday rather than the Sabbath, and growing in power and political influence. It is also attracting new converts, not only out of Greco-Roman paganism, but also from the gods and goddesses of the frontier areas like Britain, Germany, and Dacia. This church found it easier to assimilate these new converts by syncretizing the Easter celebration with their pagan spring festivals, often called after the name of the widely worshipped fertility goddess, Ishtar (or some close variation: Astarte, Eoster, Ostara, Isis, Aphrodite, etc.). It is from these heathen influences that the Easter Bunny, dyeing eggs, giving candy, and other non-biblical Easter traditions have sprung. Conversely, the Christian Passover is not a celebration but a solemn observance that commemorates the agonizing blood-sacrifice of Jesus Christ to pay for our sins (Matthew 26:28; Romans 4:25; I Corinthians 15:3; Ephesians 1:7; Titus 2:14; I John 1:7), to redeem us from spiritual bondage (Matthew 20:28; Galatians 1:4; Ephesians 2:1-3; Hebrews 2:14-15; I Peter 1:18-19; Revelation 5:9), and to open the way to fellowship with the Father (Romans 8:34; Ephesians 2:18; Hebrews 7:25; 10:19-22). Each year in the Passover ceremony, baptized Christians wash one another's feet to follow Christ's example of selfless service (John 13:1-17), as well as partake of the bread and the wine, recommitting themselves to the everlasting covenant that they have made with God. As Paul writes in I Corinthians 11:26, "For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death till He comes." Easter, however, celebrates, not the Savior's death, but His resurrection, which most professing Christians believe occurred at sunrise on the Sunday morning after His death (please see "After Three Days" which explains from the Bible that this is not the case). Neither Jesus nor His apostles mention anything about observing or memorializing His resurrection. In fact, His death is the only event of His life that the Bible consistently commands us to remember (Luke 22:19; I Corinthians 11:24-25; see the principle in Psalm 116:15; Ecclesiastes 7:1). And, yes, this excludes His birth too, making Christmas another non-biblical addition to the liturgical calendar. Despite the human desire to mark such times, Christians must be careful to do only what God's Word commands lest they be guilty of adding to or taking away from it (Deuteronomy 4:2; 12:32; Joshua 1:7; Proverbs 30:5-6; Revelation 22:18-19). When we add to or take from what God has said, we alter His revelation to us and are sure to veer even farther from His way.
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Why Passover and Not Easter?
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