Monday, April 21, 2025

It is the 21st of April 2025. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org; I’m Dan van Voorhis.

A very happy easter Monday to you- “Easter Monday” has a checkered past of observance- at the Christian college I worked at, it was always off as we assumed people needed the day after the holiday to travel back to campus. You might remember that in the ancient church, there were celebrations called “octaves” (yes, like in music, but this just means 8)- 8 days of celebrating that begin on the holiday itself and last until the next week. So this is “the Monday in the Easter octave” or “Eastertide”.

And that it is still technically easter season I thought it would be ok if we did one more Easter related show because of the number of questions coming into my mailbox about the “pagan origins of Easter” and it’s kind of a…well, the culprit behind this is probably not who you think.

So- you may have seen a variation of the meme on the social media site for older conspiracy theorists that goes something like “actually, it’s a celebration of Eostre- the German goddess of Spring and Dawn honoring the myth that she changed a bird into a hare and gave them the ability to lay eggs”…. (Thanks for that one, Lindsay). Ok… so, is easter really pagan? Stop it. No, it is the celebration of the passion and resurrection of Christ. Did it coincide with other practices that may or may not have pagan origins? Sure, springtime is a popular time to get together and have celebrations. As for “Eostre” being a pagan goddess… well, it was the name of a month. And names of months are well… random collections of names based on festivals and deities. It’s the Venerable Bede who mentions this month based on a goddess, and that’s it… So, the holiday took the name of the month. Ok- but elsewhere it’s called some variation of “Pascha,” which comes from the Hebrew word for Passover, because we know Jesus’ passion week coincided with Passover. Why bunnies? Why Eggs? In Western Europe, if you didn’t have a calendar, you looked for other signs that the season was changing, and the arrival of hares coincided with the spring, which was when the holiday was celebrated in the month of Easter. And why eggs? We’ve covered this recently- eggs were forbidden during the Lenten fast, no one told the hens, and so they kept laying eggs, such that we have a large collection of them when the Easter feast comes.

So, you may have heard some of this stuff, but where does it come from? From angry atheists? From pagans trying to take credit for a holiday? Actually, much of the blame can be placed at the feet of a Scottish pastor named Alexander Hislop. Oh, Alex… he was one of those very hardcore Free Church of Scotland ministers who made his not like Catholics the major part of his personality… and as a Free Church minister in the 19th century he was very opposed to the celebration of holidays- not just in church (there are some in the Reformed camp who are fine with holiday celebrations but just want the Sunday service to always remain the same… fair enough) but everywhere. And he saw the celebration of the church calendar as one of the satanic pagan influences behind the Roman Catholic Church. And so he wrote a very silly but also very influential book called “the Two Babylons: Papal Worship Proved to be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife”- here we get the “church calendar events are pagan” trope that become a favorite of atheists in the next century. It’s pseudo history debunked in many places, but it doesn’t keep people from borrowing his ideas every time a Christian holiday comes around and someone wants to try and “own” the Christians.

So, I hope you made it through this season with not too many of the same tropes “was Jesus a real person?” articles by legacy glossy magazines at the grocery store or your uncle trying to make himself look smart by borrowing bad history from an angry Christian… as a historian when I get sent these things with less than pristine intentions I tend to say something like “yeah, history is complicated…” and get the conversation to the incarnate God dying and rising on our behalf, the good news that doesn’t need to wait for easter bunnies or egg hunts. And for those who do use the whole church calendar- get ready for the longest season of the year… the never-ending season of Pentecost, which I heard was based on the pagan… just kidding. Send me your questions at danv@1517.org.

The Last word for today comes from the daily lectionary for Easter Monday from 1 Corinthians 5:

6 Your boasting is not good. Don’t you know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough? 7 Get rid of the old yeast, so that you may be a new unleavened batch—as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. 8 Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old bread leavened with malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 21st of April 2025 brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man who knows the pagan origin story of coffee and kale the goat herder- he is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man who just listened to an easter sermon from someone with an accent and is now thinking about the blessing of cheeses… gruyere, Colby, feta… I’m Dan van Voorhis.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.