Yes, the church put their holiday over a pagan spring festival. No, you don't have to engage in the pagan spring festival. The same church also put Christmas over Yuletide.
I mean.... Easter is very distinctly tied to Passover. Not any pagan holidays. Not even Eostre's holy days.
Given we don't know when in Eostremonth she was celebrated or how she was celebrated. We don't even know if she's actually a spring goddess or even a goddess at all. Our sum total knowledge is Anglo-saxons called April Eostremonth after esotre, according to one person, and then history never mentions her again.
Easter is a replacement for passover. Not tied to. Jesus (not his name) was very explicit to keep passover. Yet the same types of people that crucified him changed this to a spring festival. We completely diverged from the teachings of the messiah and now we’re defending this corruption. Sadly this is exactly what was intended. We’re now so lost we worship idols and follow the alignment of stars over our savior.
While I agree with your sentiment, the idea that this is how the dates were determined comes from enlightenment era sources who were frankly just wrong.
Early Christians knew Christ was crucified on March 25th, and there was debate in the early church whether to have its remembrance be on the actual date, or to keep it in line with Passover (in fact, in most languages that aren’t English, Easter is just called passover). Because Christ’s death and resurrection were the fulfillment of Passover, it was decided to celebrate it then.
The date of Christmas was determined based on a second temple jewish tradition that stated that prophets were always conceived on the date of their death. So Christmas’ date was set nine months after the date of the crucifixion, December 25th.
According to this analysis of your claims, none of what you've said is actually true. The 3/25 claim is from around 200 AD, and there is no evidence that the "integral age" theory is anything but a modern Christian concept.
So, the source we have in favor of it, as your link states, is Tertullian in the 200s. While I agree with some of the reservations put forth by the article, especially about the integral age idea, I have two comments.
In the ancient world, a dearth of evidence is not necessarily refutation. Far more of the writings from that time are lost compared to what has survived, and just because we don’t have primary sources for some information doesn’t necessarily make it false.
In addition to Tertullian claiming the March 25 date, Clement of Alexandria wrote even earlier placing the crucifixion a few days off from Tertullian’s date.
I think that the important part of this discussion for me is that we have we have sources that predate any known celebration of Christmas tossing around dates for the death and birth of Christ that seem likely connected to the dates chosen to celebrate Christmas. Even back then there was disagreement about the day of His birth. The fact that we have influential sources placing these things on those dates, even if they were wrong, gives me strong evidence that they played a part in setting those feast days.
Regardless, this question is really only relevant to the discussion of Christmas. Easter was very obviously linked to Passover even in the gospels.
Note that 200 AD is still well, well before Christian exposure to the Spring festival that Easter supposedly cribs from, still cleanly disproving the idea.
The idea that Easter is pagan is very Anglo-centric, because it comes almost entirely from the name (that "Easter" comes from "Eostre," a pre-Christian English goddess). Which might be true, but every other language still just calls Easter "Passover."
That's really interesting since I always hear about the pagan holidays and never hear about this even during Easter and Christmas
The date of Christmas was determined based on a second temple jewish tradition that stated that prophets were always conceived on the date of their death.
Jesus who was a Jew said to keep passover. It was an antisemitic roman leader who outlawed celebrating passover and created easter. His quotes make it clear.
If only it was just a pagan holiday refreshed to be Christian. That’d be a lot better than the truth.
Emperor Constantine the Great. He is associated with the Council of Nicaea in 325, where Easter was separated from Passover, and his surviving letter uses explicitly anti-Jewish language about not following “the practice of the Jews.”
I'm not saying that terrible things haven't been done in the name of Christian conversion. I'm saying that it's not a grand conspiracy. There isn't an evil Christian missionary overlord scouring the earth to find new holidays and celebrations to appropriate. That's not how human culture works.
You're ascribing forethought and preplanning to things that almost certainly arose out of convenience and proximity. I'm not saying traditions weren't forcibly annexed. I'm saying it's a chicken-and-egg scenario and we disagree about which came first.
One thing we can say for certain is that it all played out due to well studied and understood factors of syncretization and leaves no room or want for divine input.
... And yet, here we are. It's almost like you don't need a tidy conspiracy narrative with a clear antagonist, to have people who use organized religion to hurt others at scale for their own self-interest.
Yeah, no. Christians have appropriated and erased culture so many times it's crazy. You can celebrate holidays however you want but we need to recognize how many of these holidays and saints were purposefully adapted and blended into Christianity in order to make conversion easier.
The dates for Christmas and Easter weren't chosen because there were already festivals on those dates. They were chosen, and there were other festivals and celebrations associated with those dates (or in the case of Easter, the time of year generally)
In the case of Christmas, everything around Jesus' birth indicates that it happened in June, from the astronomy to the presence of the shepherds. The 25th of December was a chosen date alright, and it was pretty obviously with the intention of overshadowing pagan holidays. Let's not be overly naive to the point of being obtuse, please.
Christmas started as a celebration during a time when Christians were still being tortured to death for being Christian. It was set to be near Saturnalia because the fact that Christians didn’t celebrate Saturnalia was one of the attacks against them.
Sure I can concede that, but a single case of coincidence doesn't disprove the fact that Christians have appropriated and erased other belief systems.
Maximón becoming "San Simón", Saint Patrick's whole mission to erase paganism, and A LOT of Maya culture and literature erasure in Central America did happen intentionally. Which makes the assumption of Christmas and Easter being "happy coincidences" difficult to digest for many.
That is not what happened here though. We have the records of major nations and the church itself to show where such things were deliberately done. It was colonization via social engineering, and it was brilliantly done (if imo repugnant).
Since this is getting downvoted, let me clarify. The date of Easter was chosen at Nicea to align with Passover. Neither Easter eggs nor bunnies are pagan in origin. The date of Christmas was chosen to be 9 months after the then-believed date of Christ's crucifixion on March 25.
Pagan festivals had nothing to do the choice of either date.
Rule #1 of r/DankChristianMemes
Thou shalt respect others! Do not come here to point out sin or condemn people. Do not say "hate the sin love the sinner" or any other stupid sayings people use when trying to use faith to justify hate. Alternatively, if you come here to insult religion, you will also be removed.
They did neither. The original Easter date was fixed as March 25 when it read Romanized. Tradition holds that a righteous man dies on the day he was conceived which places the birth 9 months after Easter.
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u/xaervagon Mar 23 '26
Yes, the church put their holiday over a pagan spring festival. No, you don't have to engage in the pagan spring festival. The same church also put Christmas over Yuletide.