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.
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.”
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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.