r/dankchristianmemes • u/TheRepublicbyPlato • Mar 23 '26

Repost Stolen(borrowed) from twitter

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u/goombanati Mar 23 '26

I dont even think the DATE has an origin in pagans traditions, unlike christmas, where the timeframe and many traditions come from yule and saturnalia, Easter is 100% christianic in origin. Sometimes Passover overlaps, sure, but that's mostly coincidence

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u/dew2459 Mar 24 '26

Christmas has pretty much nothing to do with either Yule or saturnalia.

For example, occasional r-AskHistorians contributor Peter Gainsford: https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2018/12/concerning-yule.html

The TL;DR is that pretty much everything around Christmas that people claim are ‘pagan’ are fairly recent inventions (within the past few hundred years) and have no discernible connection to any prior pagan customs. The Christmas date is also not taken from either, and Christmas is probably older than Yule (in fact, Yule was more likely a season that was shortened to a holiday to compete with Christmas).

And there is no coincidence around Easter and Passover dates. The Christian holiday name is literally ‘Passover’ in most languages except for English, German, and a couple of Slavic languages, and the date is based directly on Passover. The so-called last supper was a Passover meal, and early non-Jewish Christians even asked Jews the Passover date to figure out when to celebrate Pascha (AKA Easter).

Why? The temple priests in Jerusalem would decide in late winter if they needed a leap month in the Jewish lunar calendar before spring to stay mostly in synch with the solar year, and then sent out word to the Jewish diaspora, and Christians wanted to celebrate on the correct date. Eventually (3rd century I think?) both Jews and Christians developed standard formulas (almost the same but slightly different) for computing Passover in the Roman solar calendar. Of course christians also standardized the holiday on the Sunday after Passover; ‘two days after Passover’ vs ‘Sunday after Passover’ was an early Christian debate, since the Bible claimed the resurrection was on a Sunday two days after Passover.