Timeline for Why does King James Bible Acts 12:4 say "Easter"?
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10 events
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| Mar 22, 2021 at 18:08 | comment | added | Kyralessa | @T.E.D. Let's not get hung up on semantics. Instead of the word "prove", how about this: There is a paucity of evidence for this "pagan West Germanic goddess of spring." It would be foolish to draw any conclusions about Easter/Pascha based on this flimsy evidence. We don't have to accept a poorly-attested theory merely because it's the only one we have. Anyway, as mentioned, some groups avoid the issue by using the transliteration Pascha instead of Easter. Certainly Pascha itself didn't come from a pagan fertility ritual, though I've seen "Internet scholars" assert that. | |
| Mar 22, 2021 at 17:52 | comment | added | T.E.D. | ...which is a long-winded way of saying, yeah that may not be 100% what happened, but its the best most likely theory we have right now. Perhaps future finds will clarify things. | |
| Mar 22, 2021 at 17:44 | comment | added | T.E.D. | @Kyralessa - In history that far back you can't really demand "proof" of course. Think more like the sciences' "evidence", and "theories" to explain our evidence. However, from that standpoint we'd really like more evidence than we have. What we're stuck with right now is that Bede's explanation (theory), while not as well supported as one would like, is the only one we have actual evidence for at all. | |
| Mar 22, 2021 at 15:45 | comment | added | Kyralessa | @T.E.D. Yes, it had to come from somewhere, but that doesn't prove it came from where the Venerable Bede says it came from just because he's the only one who advanced a theory about it. | |
| Mar 22, 2021 at 13:36 | comment | added | Lan | @Nacht The verse in question is from the English Christian New Testament. It isn't outrageously odd to use the English Christian term to describe the period. | |
| Mar 22, 2021 at 13:10 | comment | added | T.E.D. | ...this is a little controversial, as Venerable Bede is the only source of this info, but the West Germanic speakers all using a variant of that name can't be coincidental, so it had to come from somewhere. Bede's account seems the only one we are likely to get. | |
| Mar 22, 2021 at 13:05 | comment | added | T.E.D. | In a bit more detail, Easter appears to have been a pagan West Germanic goddess of spring, who had her own month in their calendar and feast days. It appears that early West Germanic-speaking Christians found it easiest to simply map to the Christian "rebirth" celebration to their own. | |
| Mar 22, 2021 at 0:45 | comment | added | Nacht | But "Easter" refers to the Christian holiday, and doesn't refer to the Jewish holiday, which we have the word "Passover" for, as opposed to "Pesach" which refers to both. So then "Easter" is incorrect - unless it originally referred to both, before the word "Passover" came into existence? | |
| Mar 21, 2021 at 14:41 | history | edited | Kyralessa | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Mar 21, 2021 at 14:26 | history | answered | Kyralessa | CC BY-SA 4.0 |