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Shooting down the claims that Easter has pagan origins

Shooting down the claims that Easter has pagan origins

Last updated on: March 31, 2015 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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Shooting down the claims that Easter has pagan origins 2015-03-30T20:26:20-04:00 Gene Veith

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Rev. Joseph Abrahamson has thoroughly refuted these claims about Easter, and yet we still keep hearing them:

There are three main things people attack about this Holy Day:

They claim that it is pagan because the name Easter is from a pagan goddess.

They claim that Easter eggs are a symbol of pagan worship, particularly of that false goddess in number 1.

They claim that the Easter bunny is a pagan symbol, the consort of the pagan goddess in number 1.

All of these claims are false.

Easter eggs, for example, come from the use of eggs in the Passover celebration and in the practice of breaking the Lenten fast against eating animal products with eggs on Easter morning. Go here for the details about why all of these claims of Easter’s pagan origins are just demonstrably wrong.

In the meantime, ANOTHER claim has emerged–that Easter and Easter eggs come from a Persian Zoroastrian holiday named Nowruz. Rev. Abrahamson shoots that one down too, linked and excerpted after the jump.From Rev. Joseph Abrahamson:

One of the more recent claims against Easter is that this Christian Holy Day is merely a hijacked version of the Persian Zoroastrian new year festival called Nowruz (or Nauruz). The argument is that because Nowruz is celebrated on the vernal equinox, Christians must have taken this date or somehow absorbed this Zoroastrian holiday into its own ritual year.

We have dealt previously with several of these claims, in particular the origin of the Easter Egg in Christianity is covered in this article.

Very few in the West knew anything about Zoroastrianism or its festivals until the 18th century, and almost nobody in the West had ever heard of Nowruz before the mid-20th century. The first ever translation of the Zoroastrian sacred texts, the Avesta, into any European language was made by Anquetil Duperron and published in 1771 (James Darmesteter 1880, xv–xx). Controversy about the genuineness of the source documents shrouded the publication until the close of the 18th century. The term Zoroastrianism was first used by archaeologist A.H. Sayce in 1874, another term from the 19th century that was used to describe this religious group is Mazdaism. (Sayce 1874, 307)

Even today, with the rising awareness of Zoroastrianism in the West, there are still very few who have made the effort to investigate the historical documentary sources of Nowruz. This lack of knowledge about Zoroastrianism and its origins has left Christians vulnerable to false claims against Christianity in many respects. This has been an issue for Christians at least since the time of Manichaeism (A.D. 3rd cent.) and the growth of Mandaeism and Roman Mithraism.

Today Zoroastrianism is popularly considered the source for the ideas of monotheism, of the devil, and the theological distinction between the devil’s evil and a good god; the theological teaching of a resurrection, among others.

Claims like these and our particular focus here on the claim against Christian Easter seem to carry weight because Zoroastrianism ostensibly pre-dates the Incarnation of Christ by about 1,300 years. And it is widely presumed that the festival of Nowruz along with the use of decorated eggs also pre-date the Resurrection of Christ.

There are today a great deal of both popular writing about Zoroastrianism as a religious source for Christianity. There is also a fairly respected academic study of Zoroastrianism as part of the history of religions school that generally backs this claim. But when one begins to pull at the thread of these narratives by going to the actual sources one finds something different. Even though the tapestry they have woven is very complex and ornate and looks to be substantial, there is very little of the original yarn in the work. That original yarn itself is weak, often broken and held together by an overwhelming amount of newer threads that actually make up most of the structure.

[Keep reading. . .]

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