Happy Resurrection Sunday 2015!!

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Notice how Easter coincides with Passover, the holiday that Jesus was observing when He was killed, and from whose Hebrew name most languages' words for Easter derive.

[Ban my account ffs!]

Does it matter when Christmas or Easter are?  No.  Except Jesus said he would put signs of his return into everything.  Born on the shortest day...dies and is reborn/resurrected in spring as the grass greens or the new year begins.

By basing his resurrection on the moon meant we look for him by the signs of the moon.  He said specifically we wouldn't know the hour or the day...but the year and month? 

[Fmr President & Senator Polnut]

I love how Christians get all excited about this, considering this is yet another old Pagan festival co-opted by them for conversion purposes.... Bushie et al, ever wonder why the date of Easter isn't the same each year?

Er... even the worst of the Christian antisemites never considered Judaism to be pagan.

I walk away with my tail between my legs.

So it's an amalgam of Judaism and Paganism ...

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Very little about it is in any way appreciably more pagan than anything else with its cultural origins in Europe.

[Fmr President & Senator Polnut]

Very little about it is in any way appreciably more pagan than anything else with its cultural origins in Europe.

Well, yes. The animal symbolism, the name...

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Very little about it is in any way appreciably more pagan than anything else with its cultural origins in Europe.

Well, yes. The animal symbolism, the name...

In most countries, those things are 'very little'.

[Fmr President & Senator Polnut]

Very little about it is in any way appreciably more pagan than anything else with its cultural origins in Europe.

Well, yes. The animal symbolism, the name...

In most countries, those things are 'very little'.

Yes.

[Oldiesfreak1854]

Very little about it is in any way appreciably more pagan than anything else with its cultural origins in Europe.

True.  Easter existed as early as the second century, long before any Christians had come into contact with Germanic pagans.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ch/bytopic/holidays/easterborrowedholiday.html

[Oswald Acted Alone, You Kook]

Has anyone else heard the story of the Easter Bunny being present at the resurrection? Supposedly his fur was brown but turned white.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

In most languages Easter is named for Passover and is generally a variant on the them of Pasach (c.f. in Welsh it is Pasg). And I'm afraid that the origin of the 'Easter' name is really not as straightforward as is often asserted: the only real source for the popular theory about a pre-Christian Germanic deity called 'Eostre' is The Venomous Venerable Bede, writing centuries later and in a tone that reads alarmingly like 'everybody says that this is so'. Bede is unusually reliable for a premodern historian,* but this is what is technically known as an extremely tenuous source. And everything that doesn't come from Bede comes from weirdo German nationalists making sh!t up in the 19th century (one can only wonder why they were so keen to find non-Jewish roots of the major Christian festival). As is often the way with mysterious English etymological questions, alternative explanations are not really any better

As for the bunnies and the eggs, there is no evidence of rabbits or hares having any association with Easter until the 17th century, and while the association with eggs is ancient and well documented, its origins are with early Christians in what is now Iraq.

_{*Although was still a massive, massive hack.}