View attachment 191172
Your thoughts on Easter and anything that you can add to this? I came across this yesterday. If I have posted this in the wrong forum I apologize and am open to it being moved to wherever is needed.
Short answer, everything mentioned in that graphic is objectively false.
Long answer: The term "Easter" is derived from the Anglo-Saxon month Eosturmonath, which corresponds to the Latin month of April. This is mentioned in the 8th century work by the Anglo-Saxon Christian monk Bede known as The Reckoning of Time. In the relevant place in the text Bede explains the names of the Anglo-Saxon months and their supposed etymologies. He mentions Eosturmonath, which he says was named for a formerly worshiped goddess named Eostre; but that in his own time the month was now celebrated by the Anglo-Saxons as the Paschal Month. Since the Anglo-Saxons had been converted to Christianity several centuries earlier they had abandoned their pagan ways and been practicing Christianity for some time.
This is the only mention of a goddess named Eostre in the historical record. No other mention exists, and no evidence exists, not even in the archeological record; there are no cultic sites dedicated to this supposed-goddess. The fact that Bede is our one and only source is enough for some to speculate that Bede may have been wrong, and no such goddess was ever worshiped. Though over a thousand years after Bede Jacob Grimm (of Grimm's fairytales fame) speculated, using Bede as his source (as there is no other source) that the Anglo-Saxon Eostre may have been called Ostera in northern Germany (the name is pure conjecture, no goddess by Ostera is found in any records of any kind anywhere); as a way of explaining why the name of the Paschal Feast is known as Ostern in German even as it is known as Easter in English.
At this point it's important to point out that the term "Easter" in English (and "Ostern" in German) is exceptionally unique. Throughout the historic Christian world (and beyond) the name of the Paschal Feast is almost universally a transliteration of the Greek Pascha, for example in French it is Pâques, in Swedish it is Påsk, in Italian it is Pasqua, in Arabic it is Fish, in Ethiopian it is Fasika, in Welsh it is Pasg, and so on and so forth.
This means that there was no holiday known as "Easter" until the late middle ages, and then, only in the English language as a peculiar way of describing what the rest of the Christian world, from Ireland to Spain to Egypt to Western China knew as a variant of "Pascha".
Constantine didn't do anything. Not a thing. However one of the issues which the Council of Nicea did address was a standardized means of calculating the Paschal Feast, there had at that point been several methods of calculating when to celebrate it. Even more history: since the early 2nd century there were largely two major schools of thought, in places like Rome and Egypt the Paschal Feast was kept as a moveable feast that was always honored on a Sunday, because Christ had been raised from the dead on a Sunday; however in places like Anatolia (modern Turkey) the practice was to celebrate it on the same day as the Jewish Passover, on the Jewish calendar date of Nissan 14. This later position was known as Quartodecimanism, literally meaning Fourteenism. In the early 2nd century the Roman bishop Anicetus and the bishop of Smyrna Polycarp met and discussed many things finding that they had virtually all things in common except when to celebrate the Paschal Feast, they both appealed to the fact that this was what had been done where they are from since the beginning and decided this was not reason enough to stop communion. And so both practices existed, though as time went on Quartodecimanism became less popular even those regions it was formerly normative. At the Council of Nicea the gathered bishops, from all over the eastern portion of the Roman Empire (virtually no Western bishops were at the council, the bishop of Rome himself being absent due to age and health concerns and represented by two deacons) concluded that the method of calculating the Feast by the churches in Egypt (which was also how virtually all churches everywhere were doing it anyway) was to be the standard.
Constantine had no role in this. Constantine didn't choose or decide anything, here merely facilitated the event of the bishops gathering at Nicea, the purpose of which was to address the theological controversy surrounding the teachings of Arius; the issue on the Paschal Computus was tertiary at best, but it did establish the computus which became the normative way of calculating Pascha even to the present day.
As for the "Ishtar" connection, that's pure fancy. Ishtar was a Semitic goddess, even granting Bede's correctness concerning the etymology of Easter coming from Eosturmonath coming from Eostre the Anglo-Saxon religion had precisely no relationship with the religious traditions of ancient Mesopotamia. The connection is drawn by pure imagination based upon the fact that if you squint your eyes and tilt your head "Easter" and "Ishtar" almost-kinda-sorta-maybe sound vaguely similar-ish and one could imagine a connection if one tried really, really hard to make one. But there is no connection, it is the product of an over-active imagination with precisely zero evidence.
"But isn't Ishtar a fertility goddess, and isn't Eostre associated with bunnies and eggs?" Ishtar was a goddess of fertility, but there's nothing to associate the supposed Anglo-Saxon Eostre with bunnies, eggs, springtime, fertility, or anything. Again, our one and only source is Bede, and the only thing Bede tells us is that the month of Eosturmonath was named after this goddess. He tells us nothing more than this, we have a name, that's all we have. We can speculate all we want, but idle speculation is all it would be. And, again, it is entirely possible that Bede was mistaken even on this point, as it is very strange that there should be precisely no evidence of any kind that the Anglo-Saxons worshiped such a goddess, no sites of worship in the archeological record, no images, or records of any kind.
So, in the end, everything in the graphic is pure falsehood. And easily demonstrated to be false. Anyone interested is capable of finding all this information for themselves, with a bit of searching one can find Bede's Reckoning of Time and search it themselves (that's what I did, I've read the work first hand). And if one bothers to try and find sources for the claims made, they usually don't exist at all (that is, claims are made without any sources or citations given), or they end up going back to sources which themselves make claims without any sources or citations given--such as Alexander Hislop and his craptastic piece of nonsense known as The Two Babylons, which makes numerous false claims which Hislop seems to have pulled straight out of his hindquarters. Hislop is also the inventor of the Nimrod-Semiramis myth--if you've ever heard that Nimrod's wife's name was Semiramis and their child's name was Tammuz then you can owe that to Alexander Hislop who made it all up out of whole cloth.
-CryptoLutheran
Ishtar (Akkadian, Assyrian and Babylonian) was from 3500BC (ish) and with those now dead civilizations, she died out as well. She was a Semitic goddess of love, sex, fertility, etc. The Greek goddess of love was not Ishtar, it was Aphrodite, also known or tied to Venus. You can see there is no etymological connection... no chance. We can't tie Ishtar and Venus etymologically speaking. At the time of Constantine... who is wrongly credited with bringing Ishtar worship into the church.... we are dealing with Venus, not Ishtar.. there was no Ishtar anymore. 
