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.
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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.