Many years ago I was counseling a woman whose husband was adamantly opposed to the gospel. One item in particular bothered him — Easter, he said, was nothing more than the Christianization of a pagan celebration. So he himself did not recognize the remembrance and forbade his wife and family from recognizing it as well. His concept of Easter was not uncommon, though perhaps it was a little extreme.
But was he correct? Is Easter merely an excuse to add credibility to a pagan holiday? Professor Anthony McRoy has done some good research into the topic. In his article “Was Easter Borrowed from a Pagan Holiday?” he identifies two primary concerns:
- Is the actual celebration of Easter derived from a pagan festival?
- Is the name of the holiday from the worship of a pagan fertility goddess named “Eostre” as the English hsitorian and monk Venerable Bede (673-735) asserted?
To the first he says,
The Nordic/Germanic peoples (including the Anglo-Saxons) were comparative latecomers to Christianity. Pope Gregory I sent a missionary enterprise led by Augustine of Canterbury to the Anglo-Saxons in 596/7. The forcible conversion of the Saxons in Europe began under Charlemagne in 772. Hence, if “Easter” (i.e. the Christian Passover festival) was celebrated prior to those dates, any supposed pagan Anglo-Saxon festival of “Eostre” can have no significance. And there is, in fact, clear evidence that Christians celebrated an Easter/Passover festival by the second century, if not earlier. It follows that the Christian Easter/Passover celebration, which originated in the Mediterranean basin, was not influenced by any Germanic pagan festival.
To the second he says,
There are several problems with the passage in Bede. In his book, The Stations of the Sun, Professor Ronald Hutton (a well-known historian of British paganism and occultism) critiques Bede’s sketchy knowledge of other pagan festivals, and argues that the same is true for the statement about Eostre: “It falls into a category of interpretations which Bede admitted to be his own, rather than generally agreed or proven fact.”
This leads us to the next problem: there is no evidence outside of Bede for the existence of this Anglo-Saxon goddess. There is no equivalent goddess in the Norse Eddas or in ancient Germanic paganism from continental Europe. Hutton suggests, therefore, that “the Anglo-Saxon Estor-monath simply meant ‘the month of opening’ or ‘the month of beginnings,'” and concludes that there is no evidence for a pre-Christian festival in the British Isles in March or April.
So just what is the origination of the word “Easter?”
One theory for the origin of the name is that the Latin phrase in albis (“in white”), which Christians used in reference to Easter week, found its way into Old High German as eostarum, or “dawn.” There is some evidence of early Germanic borrowing of Latin despite that fact that the Germanic peoples lived outside the Roman Empire — though the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes were far very removed from it. This theory presumes that the word only became current after the introduction of either Roman influence or the Christian faith, which is uncertain. But if accurate, it would demonstrate that the festival is not named after a pagan goddess.…
So Christians in ancient Anglo-Saxon and Germanic areas called their Passover holiday what they did—doubtless colloquially at first—simply because it occurred around the time of Eosturmonath/Ostarmanoth.
There are more details in McRoy’s article, but this should defuse at least some of the questions some of your unbelieving friends may have about the Easter remembrance.
Words of Grace 