It's true that Pascha and Easter are not the same holiday at all.
Pascha is Passover and Easter a much older and separate pagan festival that was celebrated through many different cultures.
I think the confusion here is because there was an attempt to merge the two festivals, to bring pagans and followers of Christ together. It's not the question of are they different or not, it is a historical fact that they are and that this happened. The question here is whether it was right or wrong to do it.
Biblically speaking we know that you can't merge pagan worship with that of YHWH. So if someone is celebrating on the same day as a pagan festival and following any of the pagan customs/practices then they are partaking in a festival that He told us not to be involved in, a festival that provokes Him to anger and themselves to confusion.
The word
Easter appears only once in the King James Version of the Bible (and not at all in most others). In that one place the King James translators mistranslated the Greek word for
Passover as “Easter."
Acts 12:4: “And when he [King Herod Agrippa I] had apprehended him [the apostle Peter], he put him in prison, and delivered him to four quaternions of soldiers to keep him; intending after Easter to bring him forth to the people.”
The Greek word translated
Easter here is
pascha, properly translated everywhere else in the Bible as “Passover.”
Nowhere in the Bible, and not in the book of Acts either which covers several decades of the history of the early Church, nor in any of the epistles of the New Testament, do we find the apostles or the early Christians celebrating anything that resembled the celebration of Easter.
Vine’s Complete Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words, in its entry “Easter,” states:
“The term
‘Easter’ is not of Christian origin. It is another form of
Astarte, one of the titles of the Chaldean goddess, the queen of heaven. The festival of
Pasch [Passover] held by Christians in post-apostolic times was a continuation of the Jewish feast … From this Pasch the pagan festival of ‘Easter’ was quite distinct and was introduced into the apostate Western religion,
as part of the attempt to adapt pagan festivals to Christianity” (W.E. Vine, 1985).
Astarte
, the Chaldean (Babylonian) spring goddess, also titled as “The Queen of Heaven" is the goddess mentioned by that title in the Jeremiah 7:18, Jeremiah 44:17-19; Jeremiah 44:25 and is also mentioned in 1 Kings 11:5; 1 Kings 5:33 and 2 Kings 23:13 in the Hebrew form of her name,
Ashtoreth.
She was adopted with her festivals throughout the years into other cultures, her name adapted into the different languages.
Most people know the Romans adopted gods from the Greeks for their Pantheon but it was also from many others as well.
Her other names are Semiramis, Ishtar, Eostre and Ostern. The English "Easter" comes from the Germanic version. The only time "Easter" is mentioned in the Bible is when YHWH was condemning the practice of worshiping her.
“There is no indication of the observance of the Easter festival in the New Testament, or in the writings of the apostolic Fathers . . . The first Christians continued to observe the Jewish festivals, though in a new spirit, as commemorations of events which those festivals foreshadowed . . ."
(
The Encyclopaedia Britannica)
"Neither the apostles, therefore, nor the Gospels, have any- where imposed... Easter... The Savior and His apostles have enjoined us
by no law to keep this feast [Easter]... And that the observance originated not by legislation [of the apostles], but as a custom the facts themselves indicate”
(fourth century scholar, Socrates Scholasticus,
Ecclesiastical History, Book V, chapter 22).
"The Apostle Paul confirms he maintained the customary observance of Passover, as was given to him by Christ Himself, when he said, “For I received of the Lord Jesus
the same night in which he was betrayed [
not Easter Sunday!] took bread” (
1 Corinthians 11:23). Keep in mind Jesus Christ was betrayed during the night of Nisan 14 (
Luke 22:15-22), which was considered the evening portion of the day of Passover (
Exodus 12:6-13). Remember, God begins a new day at evening, commencing at sunset (
Genesis 1:5). With this
established fact and connection in mind, how then was it changed from the 14th of Nisan (Passover) to the Sunday following the first full moon after the vernal equinox, and then assigned the pagan name Easter (Ishtarte)? Unquestionably, this is no minor change from the original observance that Jesus Christ exemplified (especially since people
died refusing to obey this change).
“A final settlement of the dispute [over whether and when to keep Easter or Passover] was one among the other reasons which led [the Roman emperor] Constantine to summon the council of Nicaea in 325 . . . The decision of the council was unanimous that Easter was to be kept on Sunday, and on the same Sunday throughout the world, and ‘that none should hereafter follow the blindness of the Jews’ ” (
The Encyclopaedia Britannica)
Those who "followed the blindness of the Jews" and didn't accept the pagan practices were persecuted and put to death.
The ancient religious practices and fertility symbols associated with Easter's cult existed looong before Yeshua lived as a man.
The egg is a common pagan symbol of fertility and is used as a major symbol in Easter.
Semiramis/Ishtar was supposed to have resurrected in the spring, coming from the moon in a large egg.
"The Saternalia originated as the birth date of Tammuz, the bastard son of Semiramis, the widow of Nimrod of biblical evil fame. After Shem cut Nimrod in pieces, Babylonian legend insists that he ascended into the heavens and became the sun god himself. The rays of the sun implanted the seed into his widow and presto! The son of the sun god was miraculously conceived, as was the adoration of the mother and child evident in every culture on the earth. On the winter solstice Tammuz was born; as were most of the traditions surrounding “the child-mass” season. Tammuz, the reincarnation of the sun god – Nimrod, was killed in a hunting accident when he was gored to death by a wild boar in his 40th year. Those who worshipped the son of “the sun god” then set aside 40 days of weeping for Tammuz. They celebrated “Lent” one day for each year of his incarnation - in which they would deny a worldly pleasure for his pleasure in the afterworld (see Ezekiel 8).
After many years, his mother Semiramis died. The gods looked favorably on “the mother of god” and sent her back to earth as the spring fertility goddess – always depicted as an exaggeratedly endowed bare breasted queen of sexual desire. Semiramis, the queen of heaven, was “born again” as the goddess Easter (Ashtarte) as she emerged from a giant egg that landed in the Euphrates river at sunrise on the “sun” day after the vernal equinox. To proclaim her divine authority, she changed a bird into an egg laying rabbit. As the cult developed, the priests of Easter would impregnate young virgins on the altar of the goddess of fertility at sunrise on Easter Sunday. A year later the priests of Easter would sacrifice those three-month-old babies on the altar at the front of the Sanctuary and dye Easter eggs in the blood of the sacrificed infants.
The forty days of Lent - or weeping for Tammuz, starts the Easter fertility season. The festivities culminate on Easter Sunday, when the priests of Easter slaughtered the “wild boar that killed Tammuz” and the entire congregation would eat the “ham” on Easter Sunday. (John Michael Rood,
The Mystery of Iniquity, Chapter 8)
Remember the weeping of Tammuz I mentioned before in
Ezekiel 8:13,14.
Rabbits were also I need if her symbols as a fertility goddess, and that is why we have the Easter bunny in the role of giving out the eggs.
None of these things have anything to do with Passover! And Passover should not be associated with it as YHWH said it is an abomination.
" Assuredly, we must first understand the contention between the Western congregations led by Rome and the Eastern Asiatic congregations. This debate intensified during the second century, and is historically known as the
Quartodeciman controversy.
“Quartodeciman” is simply a Latin term indicating fourteenth. What the ecclesiastical record of the second century reveals is that there was a controversy over the fourteenth— specifically,
it concerned the change from the fourteenth of Nisan (Passover) to Easter, with all of its pagan connections, associations, and typologies of fertility and fecundity. This was unequivocally
contested and rejected by the congregations of the Asiatic East. It came to a head when Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna (who was personally taught by John the apostle), faced off with Anicetus, the preeminent bishop of Rome, in about 95 A.D.