They sound like cognates, but apparently they are not. Isn't language fun??
Perhaps the homonymic of new day [dawn] and new year [spring] which is inaugurated by Christ's Resurrection from the dead, which re-enlivens creation with the re-creation of life in the spring, and from the sleep of night, is the "estrogen factor" featured here... I personally think Christ would have cringed at the thought of the Life He gives to us being some kind of sunrise or spring season...
The orders of worship of the Old Temple Jewish times are found in the Christian orders of worship, except differently, under other names or under the same names... I am not a student of these, but the general idea is that the Christians were a "legitimate heresy" of the Hebrew Faith - By the standards of the Jews, the only thing wrong with the Christians was this insanity they had believing that a Dead Jew was God... So the two orders of worship were the same, and as the two divided farther and farther apart, they differentiated more and more clearly - I am not a good student here, but the feast of Tabernacles, for instance, has its corresponding place as a Feast in the Early Christian Church and to this day... So it is like that...
And Pascha is the Resurrection, which is the Passover of Death following the Jewish Passover from the Sprinkling of the Blood... Ours has no blood... And Christ passes over death, and indeed IS Himself our Pascha... Because for those who are believing in Christ, the death they die does not give them death, but instead gain, as Paul wrote of Life and death: "To live - Christ... To die - Gain..."
So we have probably chewed this to death enough-already!
Arsenios
