Happy Resurrection Sunday 2015!!

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I love how Christians get all excited about this, considering this is yet another old Pagan festival co-opted by them for conversion purposes.... Bushie et al, ever wonder why the date of Easter isn't the same each year?

Er... even the worst of the Christian antisemites never considered Judaism to be pagan.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

In most languages Easter is named for Passover and is generally a variant on the them of Pasach (c.f. in Welsh it is Pasg). And I'm afraid that the origin of the 'Easter' name is really not as straightforward as is often asserted: the only real source for the popular theory about a pre-Christian Germanic deity called 'Eostre' is The Venomous Venerable Bede, writing centuries later and in a tone that reads alarmingly like 'everybody says that this is so'. Bede is unusually reliable for a premodern historian,* but this is what is technically known as an extremely tenuous source. And everything that doesn't come from Bede comes from weirdo German nationalists making sh!t up in the 19th century (one can only wonder why they were so keen to find non-Jewish roots of the major Christian festival). As is often the way with mysterious English etymological questions, alternative explanations are not really any better

As for the bunnies and the eggs, there is no evidence of rabbits or hares having any association with Easter until the 17th century, and while the association with eggs is ancient and well documented, its origins are with early Christians in what is now Iraq.

_{*Although was still a massive, massive hack.}