Easter: Its Origin, Meaning And Significance

BY: AUGUSTINE ANYIMADU-AHENKAE.

“If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins” –

1 Cor 15:17

“then know this, you and all the people of Israel: It is by the name of Jesus Christ

of Nazareth, whom you crucified but whom God raised from the dead, that this man

stands before you healed.” – Acts 4:10

INTRODUCTION

I had hoped to write a treatise on the meaning and significance of Easter and

elaborate on its spiritual and inspirational aspects without having to get into the

apologetical details of correcting cheap fallacies and falsities leveled against

this yet another important tenet of the Christian faith and practice, but I was

wrong. The atheists are at it again, coming with their half truths, misleading

historical assessments and outright falsities aimed at ridiculing and denying the

truth of the Christian faith. “En hadat tahat beshemesh”, said the author of

Ecclesiastes- there is nothing new under the sun. What is has been, and will be

again. I know. Every year, when it is Easter time like this they will try to

ridicule and mislead. So as to stay focused, let me address the issue from its

correct perspective.

QUESTION ABOUT ORIGIN

Can anyone in his or her right senses tell us that if someone adopts a new name, it

means that person begins to exist only on the day of the new name? Say Kofi was born

in 1980, baptized as Peter in 1990, will we say that Kofi was born in 1990 rather

than his original date of birth of 1980, just because his current name was adopted

in 1990? Did the country Ghana and its people begin to exist in 1957? Then which

people were referred to as the Gold Coast?

You see, cheap, myopic anti-Catholic and anti-Christian apologists keep confusing

names with realities, and the pattern runs through all their attacks. In life, the

same reality can take on different names at different times, but the change in name

does not mean the reality did not exist before the new name was adopted. These

atheistic apologists do not think that way, sadly. In attacking Christian faith and

worship, they fail to question whether the reality designated by the name exists in

the Bible or not, and keep looking for only its current name, so if they don’t find

the name, they claim it is unbiblical. That’s what they do to deny a doctrine like

the holy trinity, among others. On Christmas and Easter, they only need to find

parallels in paganism, and once they find the parallel, they jump into false

conclusion, implying causation from correlation, that since there is a pagan

parallel, the Christian practice must have been stolen from the

pagan one. Constantine era is their cash cow. Because the conversion of

Constantine led eventually to imposition of Christianity on everyone in his empire,

an act which Christians ourselves did not exactly sanction, the church had to find

an authentic way of helping the pagan converts to embrace Christianity by

inculturating Christ’s gospel in their contexts, moving from known to unknown, and

the fact that the pagans had similar festivities to the Christians made it easier

for them to embrace that of the Christians, with renewed meaning though. But

anti-christian and anti-catholic trash peddlars keep twisting this for their own

intents and purposes. What they cleverly and impiously leave out is that all those

Christian tenets they allege to be of pagan origin were already being practiced or

believed by the church long before this Constantine era they talk of, and these

beliefs can all be traced to the earliest church of the apostles and

sub-apostolic times.

PAGAN ORIGINS? HOW ABOUT THE EARLY EASTER CONTROVERSIES?

Is Easter a pagan feast as alleged by these atheists? Kwaku Ba writes:

“So the first Easter as we could recognize today was celebrated on 327 AD, a good

327 years after Jesus. So Easter is from pagan origins and the date of the

celebration was chosen by ancient Roman church fathers who voted for it by a simple

majority. There is no biblical basis for this holiday.”

Wow! Seriously ? This is the kind of lies and deception that infuriate me . If

Easter did not exist until this 327 AD you talk about, how come there were

controversies in the church about the date of its celebration, as early as the 2nd

century? Did you never hear of the first Easter Controversy, precisely the

quartodeciman controversy? How could there be a controversy about the date for

celebrating something which did not exist? Or about the Roman-Alexandrian Easter

controversy?

That the celebration of Easter was already an established practice by the

sub-apostolic times is undoubted, but there was a disagreement about the correct

date for its celebration. Whereas the church in Asia had always celebrated it on the

day of Jewish Passover, as it historically happened, the church in Rome celebrated

it on a Sunday, also as historically happened. One kept the date, the other, the

day. Consequently, the Asians, called the quartodecimans (because they followed the

date of 14th day of the month of Nissan), occasionally celebrated Easter at the time

when the rest of the church (which followed Rome) were observing Good Friday, for

instance, because the date fell on that day. Both sides had stalwarts to defend

their choices, and the practice was allowed initially to continue, but after a while

the need for a unified date of celebration was inevitably felt. For instance,

getting to the end of the second century, Pope Victor I (189-198)

attempted to impose the Roman usage on everyone, but in the face of stiff

opposition, led by Polycrates, Bishop of Ephesus, he was unsuccessful. Of course

gradually, by the 3rd century, Quartodecimanism had waned, but the point is, the

existence of such a controversy about date for Easter celebration historically

speaks loudly against the pagan origin theorists who claim the church stole Easter

from paganism in the 4th century, by which time Easter was already a long

established practice in the church.

ORIGIN OF EASTER

CELEBRATION

That what we now call “Easter” is about the celebration of the passion, death and

resurrection of Christ, also called the paschal mystery, cannot be denied by anyone

who visits any church during this season. These events which Easter celebrates are

more than amply recorded in scripture, so the question as to whether Easter is

Biblical or not does not even come in at all. One doesn’t even need to waste time

answering that question, ideally speaking. However, in the face of fact –twisting

and misleadingly wrong allegations by those who claim Easter celebration is pagan

originated, the relevant question to ask is, did the church steal this celebration

from paganism? We know we celebrate the resurrection of Christ, but did the idea or

practice of having any such celebration come from the pagan festivities? Did the

church only begin to celebrate the resurrection of Christ, as a season or event of

the year, only after it encountered paganism at some

point in her history, as alleged by the atheists? Because to say Easter is pagan

means that either the idea or practice of celebrating what Easter celebrates, as we

have it now, sprung from paganism. Is that true?

Evidence from history shows that this is not the case. Early church history

evidences that the church was already celebrating this paschal mystery – the

passion, death and resurrection of the Lord- as the central feast of the church,

with the same themes and most of the practices we have today (like Easter vigil,

observance of good Friday, Easter Sunday itself, etc) from the beginning. Other

aspects like baptisms around this time were added in the earliest stages.

PASCHA

The Greek word “pascha” is a transliteration of the Aramaic word for the Hebrew “

pesach”, which means Passover. The church had this annual celebration from its

earliest times. While every Sunday was celebrated in a miniature way as the

resurrection of the Lord, the Church, reflecting on the Christ event, celebrated the

Jewish Passover in their own different way, putting this Christ event at the center,

and doing this annually at or around the same time as the Jewish Passover. The name

“Easter” was not used from the beginning, but the celebration of the event as an

annual feast was done.

Traces of the apostolic church’s continual marking of this “Christianized” Jewish

feast, with a new central theme and activities on the Christ event, is seen in such

a passage as 1 Cor 5: 8, where St. Paul had to encourage the Corinthians to

celebrate it:

“Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and

wickedness, but with bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth.” – St.

Paul, 1 Cor 5:8.

For the avoidance of doubt as to the fact of keeping this feast not in the Jewish

way but with Christ as the center, the verse before this one makes it clear:

“Get rid of the old yeast that you may be a new batch without yeast--as you really

are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. “ – 1 Cor 5;7

Note the emphasis- “Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed”, and so “keep

the feast” or “continue to mark the feast “ in which we celebrate this event- THE

PASCHA, later called Easter.

So the church, following from the apostles, kept this Easter event as an annual

celebration of the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus, and they always marked

it on or around the Jewish Passover feast, when the event happened. As far as the

feast we now call Easter is concerned, its origin then lies in the earliest church

who started and continued to celebrate it every year in memory of its founder.

THE ENGLISH WORD ‘EASTER’:

Venerable Bede, an English Historian of the 8th century, was the one who started the

claim that the word was derived from Eostre, an Anglo-Saxon goddess of Spring to

whom the month of April was dedicated. The English word Easter is said to be adopted

by the early English Christians who, in their quest for converting others to

Christianity, decided to use this name to coincide with that of their old spring

celebration, and make it easier for them to convert. As much as we may abhor such a

move today, we have to be careful not to judge too quickly, and have to remember

many things:

1- This is English. The others, like the Greeks and Latin for example, have

different names for the event. Frederick Holweck writes in the Catholic Encyclopedia

that:

“The Greeks called Easter the pascha anastasimon; Good Friday the pascha

staurosimon. The respective terms used by the Latins are Pascha resurrectionis and

Pascha crucifixionis. In the Roman and Monastic Breviaries the feast bears the title

Dominica Resurrectionis; in the Mozarabic Breviary, In Lætatione Diei Pasch

Resurrectionis; in the Ambrosian Breviary, In Die Sancto Paschæ. The Romance

languages have adopted the Hebrew-Greek term: Latin, Pascha; Italian, Pasqua;

Spanish, Pascua; French, Pâques. Also some Celtic and Teutonic nations use it”

2- That the English adopted this name because they wanted the pagans to see the

parallels and convert to Christ, which they did, after abandoning their own pagan

practices

3- Those pagan practices were never and have never been a feature of the

Christian celebration which was already established in the universal church before,

during and after these English Christians adopted the name

4- There was already the Christian celebration of this feast in the universal

church before, during and after this nickname, which is what we celebrate today. It

is the same celebration.

5- The date we fix this Easter celebration has never followed the pagan

reckoning. Rather, together with the rest of the universal church, it follows the

Jewish Passover, the 14th of Nissan. All the controversies, whether it is on the

Sunday after the 14th of Nissan, or the 14th of Nissan itself, or the Sunday after

the vernal equinox, are following the Jewish tradition or using that as a guide, not

any pagan feast.. This gives more evidence that it is not a pagan feast, nor has

paganism influenced the christian celebration- rather its Jewish origins are clear.

Consequently, it cannot be called a pagan feast. If anything, call it a Jewish

feast- but because we have replaced the elements with Christ’s paschal mystery, it

is truly a Christian feast .

ROOTED IN SCRIPTURE

As I said, the Easter event is so central to Scripture and to the Christian faith

that for anyone to claim it is not in the Bible, that person must be seeing stars

when he or she reads the Bible. The Bible records the crucifixion, death and

resurrection of Christ in all the four gospels, as well as the epistles. This is

exactly what Easter celebrates. If someone celebrates a different thing during

Easter, then I don’t know about that. By the way, when did atheists like Kwaku Ba

start to use the Bible which they always condemn and reject, as the standard for

determining the authenticity of something? Hmm, these guys think they are smarter

than everyone else.

IN THREE DAYS?

Another difficulty one would encounter if one adopts a wrong approach to reading the

Bible is that the Easter story does not add up in terms of the “three days and three

nights” claim by Jesus.

Newsflash: it is correct as it is!

These are the events as recorded:

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all inform us that the Last Supper and the Crucifixion

took place on Preparation Day.

• Mark and John inform us that the next day, the day after the Crucifixion, was the

Sabbath.

• Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John inform us that the Resurrection took place on the

first day of the week.

• Matthew, Mark, and Luke inform us that the day before the Resurrection was the

Sabbath, and John heavily implies it.

Anytime we use our current understanding of things to judge the manner of reckoning

used centuries ago, we encounter problems. It is obvious from the narratives that

the crucifixion took place on Friday, Jesus rested in the tomb on Saturday, and was

raised on Sunday. But these facts have to be born in mind:

1- The gospel writers were writing for an audience beyond Palestine, and in the

first century Roman empire, there was no general consensus about the names of the

days of the week, the number of the current year, the names and lengths of the

months, the date of the new year

2- No consensus on the time at which the day began. For example, the day began

at midnight in Egypt, at sunrise in Greece, and at sunset in Palestine. So even

though it is not what we are used to, the gospels are really worded in such a way as

to make the dates and times comprehensible to anyone in the Roman Empire who was

familiar with the Jewish Scriptures.

3- When you count days by addition, you get a different answer from when you

subtract them. For instance, a three day seminar can begin on Monday night and end

on Wednesday morning, and everyone will still call it a three day seminar, even

though if you add the hours it may not even reach 48 hours. But if you were to

subtract Wednesday from Monday’s dates, you would get only two days. So Jesus was

right in his three day claim – Friday evening, Saturday, and Sunday early morning.

4- “Day and night” is an expression that is used to represent one day.

5- The ancients calculated the days by adding, as in the example of the seminar

above, rather than subtracting, and that is why for example Pentecost, the fiftieth

day, falls on Sunday, and not on Monday.

SPIRITUAL LESSONS FOR EASTER

The Easter event has abundance of lessons for all of us, as individuals, families,

churches, and as a nation.

From Holy Thursday through good Friday and Saturday to Easter morning, lessons

abound about the narratives that we can draw from. Let me give just a few here

HOLY THURSDAY:

1-In Jesus’ relentless prayers, we learn of the need to persevere in prayer.

2-In Jesus’ frequent temptation to avoid the passion, we are forwarned about

choosing the cosy, easy way, and in his frequent rejection of that path, we are

admonished to leave our comfort zones and reach out for the higher calling.

3-In the apostles’ tiredness and sleepiness, we see ourselves: frail, weak, needing

to be on the watch always.

6- In their inability (not just failure) to watch with Jesus, we see how futile

it is to put one’s trust in human beings, because even when they promise to help

you, there’s always the familiar excuse: circumstances beyond control.

7- In Jesus battling it out alone with his father through prayers, we are given

the blueprint to use when we are faced with difficulties – rather than telling

everyone how miserable we are, we should pray and pray and pray

8- In Jesus’ pleading with the father to take the cup of suffering from him, we

are reminded of Abraham’s and Moses’ intercessions, and are encouraged to ask God

for more, even the one we think is obvious- we should still ask God for more.

GOOD FRIDAY

9- In Judas’ betrayal we are forwarned to take care of “the sins which so easily

doth beset us” Hebrews 12:1. Remember, Judas already loved money so much, and was

once being described as a thief. He didn’t hate Christ, he just loved money, and saw

an opportunity to make money, and, regardless of the consequences, pursued it. He is

the kind that could do ritual murder before thinking about what he’s done.

10- In Pilate’s failure to free Jesus even though he was convinced of his

righteousness, but for fear of the Jews and for maintaining his political post, we

are warned to always speak the truth no matter the cost, and to be courageous and

bold.

11- In Jesus’ willing sacrifice, we have role models for individuals, families,

leaders, nation- and are reminded that sacrificing for the general good may appear

unpleasant at first, but may have eternal rewards: “Therefore God has raised him on

high, and given him a name above every other name, that at the mention of the name

of Jesus, every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth…every

tongue shall confess, that Jesus Christ is God, to the glory of God the father…” (cf

Phil 2:6-11

12- In Jesus’ forgiveness of his assailants, we are given a model of forgiveness,

remembering that “vengeance is the Lord’s”, and if we really don’t like our enemies,

they would be worse off being avenged by God than by us, so the earlier we release

them from our hearts and minds and allow God to do it, the better.

HOLY SATURDAY

13- In Jesus’ date with hell, we have received a high priest and intercessor who has

truly experienced everything humans can possibly experience in both life and death,

and therefore can help us better.

14- In his death, we see the death of our old self, and everything that wars with us

(more in my book)

EASTER SUNDAY

15- In the rolling of the stone on the tomb by the power of God, we see our

liberation from the deep shackles entangling us, the stones being put on us by the

many things that war with us in life

16- In the resurrection of Christ from the dead, we see our own resurrection from

both our present deaths and our rising to eternal life: “ if the spirit of Christ

dwells in you, the spirit which raised Christ from the dead will quicken your bodies

and give it life”

17- In the women’s early rising to care for the body, they get the reward of being

the first to meet the risen Christ. Love, care and service pay good dividends

always.

18- In Jesus’ glorified resurrected body which makes him enter into a closed room

and yet they can touch him, as Thomas did, we see the immensity of the glory God has

prepared for us if we follow him and serve him well. Some of the Catholic saints

achieved this state of incorruptibility and bilocation while on earth. St Martin De

Porres could enter a closed room just like Jesus did after the resurrection. Padre

Pio and Saint Anthony of Padua could be in many places physically at the same time.

The list is a long one, but Jesus’ resurrection is not only a foretaste, but a

catalyst and causal factor of our own glorification in God.

19- The greatest news of all: his resurrection enables everyone who accepts him to

come to God, for now, after the resurrection, all the promises of God for us can

come true.

20- His victory is our victory. After his resurrection, nothing can separate us from

the love of God: neither death, nor life, nor things that are, nor things that will

be, nor problems, nor situations, nor rulers, nor authorities…. We are truly set

free indeed

21- For in all these things, WE ARE MORE THAN CONQUERORS, through Christ who died

for us and rose again. ALLELUIA, HE IS RISEN! On the rooftops shout alleluia, our

savior is risen. Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali, land of Ghana, the people who

walked in darkness, have seen a great light… today our redemption is concretized!

GOD BLESS OUR HOMELAND GHANA

And make our nation great and strong/Bold to defend forever/The cause of Freedom and

of right/Fill all our hearts with true humility/Make us cherish, fearless

honesty/And help us to resist oppressors’ rule/With all our will and might for

evermore.

Happy Easter to you all! Happy Happy Happy Easter!

-Augustine Anyimadu- Ahenkae

New York, NY

gtrabboni@yahoo.com

REFERENCES

Anyimadu-Ahenkae Augustine . More Than Conquerors: How to Live the Victorious Life

amidst Trials and Tribulations. New York: Inspired Word Publishers LLC. 2011. Print.

Anyimadu-Ahenkae Augustine. Easter : How Biblical ? New York: Inspired Word

Publishers LLC. 2011. Print.

Anyimadu-Ahenkae Augustine. The Easter Story: Origin, Meaning and

Significance.Inspired Word Publications LLC. 2011. Print

Gailard, J. Holy Week and Easter. Tr. W. Busch. Minnesota: Collegeville

Press.1954.Print

Holweck, Frederick. "Easter." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 5. New York: Robert

Appleton Company, 1909.