I cringe when church signs promote Easter eggs

[Amos_with_goats]

....Many such actual historical records have survived that paint a very different picture of those early centuries of the church and of Christians than what our critics would have us believe. I would caution you, and everyone, to not just accept these claims, but demand historical evidence for them. Else how do you know but what they are simply lies meant to discredit the Christian faith?....
Pilgrim

I know you are probably getting tired of this... I guess you are since you seem to be completely ignoring these posts.

See, I am a follower of Christ. I study the Word and trust the Spirit to give me Wisdom. I pray and seek the Lord... I fast, I was baptized... I have been anointed with oil and I annoint with oil.... I do a few other things but if I mention them, it will get freaky in this thread.

Here is my point. Faith and practice is clearly established in the Word. Wanna celebrate communion>? I am ALL for that! I even do it outside the church! (I know, I know, CRAZY huh?)

THe problem is that until you help me see where Easter eggs and baskets of candy and chocolate bunnies are in some way related to faith in Christ.... this is all rather pointless.

Really. (oh, and 'peeps' ARE evil, no such invention should EVER be given to children unless you do not like them).,,, peeps are evil.

[Pilgrim]

Here is better reference

Larry Boemler "Asherah and Easter," Biblical Archaeology Review, Vol. 18, Number 3, 1992-May/June reprinted at: http://www.worldmissions.org/Clipper...AndAsherah.htm
Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod Q & A Set 15, "Why do we celebrate a festival called Easter?" at: http://www.wels.net/sab/text/qa/qa15.html
Gerald L. Berry, "Religions of the World," Barns & Noble, (1956).
J Farrar & S. Farrar, "Eight Sabbats for Witches," Phoenix, Custer, WA, (1988).
"Sunna," TeenWitch at: http://www.teenwitch.com
"Dies Solis and other Latin Names for the Days of the Week," Logo Files, at:
http://www.logofiles.com/
"Sunday Observance," Latin Mass News, at: http://www.unavoceca.org/

Every quote contained in this posting as well as the articles referenced are from contemporary writers, many of whom are admittedly anti-Christian.

Furthermore, the only reference that seems to cite an archaeological source, the reference to the article by a Larry Boemler "Asherah and Easter" in the May/June 1992 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review does not even exist. I have maintained a subscription to BAR for over 30 years and checked the BAR online library. I am posting a link to that particular issue so you can see for yourself that there is no article "Asherah and Easter" or any article by a Larry Boemler:

http://members.bib-arch.org/publicat...ume=18&Issue=3

Come on, are "Sabbats for Witches" and "teenwitch" supposed to be authoritative sources?

I have heard these same kinds of arguments used to try to prove that the flood account in Genesis is borrowed from the Babylonian flood account "Enuma Elish" based on nothing more than a few similarities. And critics also contend that the Law of Moses was an adoption of the Code of Hammurabi based again on nothing more than some similarities or that the Jewish feasts are adoptions of pagan festivals because they were observed at the same time of year. These are nothing more than thinly veiled attempts to undermind the historical veracity of both Judaism and Christianity, and the Bible itself.

The truth is that neither the Jewish nor yet the Christian holidays even occur at the same time as ancient pagan holidays. Every culture the world over, from Babylon to Britain, from Egypt to the Americas, from the ancient Mayans to the Ming dynasty, every culture the world over celebrated the major astronomical events of the year; spring and fall equinox, summer and winter solstice, new moons, lunar and solar eclipses, planetary conjunctions, comets, meteors, and every other event that took place in the heavens. That can in no way be taken to mean that they "adopted" these observance from each other.

But to really throw a wrench in the works, neither the Jewish nor yet the Christian observances occur on any of these astronomical dates that were being celebrated by pagans. There is no ancient culture that celebrated a festival on the 14th day after the first new moon after the spring equinox as Judaism does, or the first Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox as Christianity does. There is not one single manuscript or tablet or artifact or inscription that metnions a birthday of any god on December 25. And the only evidence that is acceptable is an ancient tablet or inscription or scroll that states such, not some 21st century writer's opinion.

Take for example the claims that the article makes about Tammuz. The foremost authority on the Sumerian gods (Tammuz was a Sumerian deity) is the esteemed Sumerian scholar Samuel Noah Kramer who translated the Sumerian Tablet from Nippur, the only actual historical evidence we have regarding the cult of Tammuz and their beliefs and practices, and according to these ancient tablets the feast day for Tammuz was celebrated at the summer solstice with a 6-day period of mourning for the beginning of the summer drought. This was the “weeping” that is mentioned by Ezekiel and it occurred in June. I have read everything Kramer has published on Tammuz and there is no record of a festival for Tammuz being celebrated on December 25. Here is a link to the Samuel Noah Kramer Institute of Assyriology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies and you can contact them to verify the information:
http://www.biu.ac.il/JS/Kramer/

So there is a decided lack of any real scholarship in the article you posted, and if you would care to click on the link to the supposed BAR article you will see that the link which is supposed to contain a copy of the BAR article "cannot be found." Same for the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. In fact, it looks like the only "links" that might actually lead to a working site are the witch related ones, and I won't even bother with them.

In Christ,
Pilgrim

[Pilgrim]

I appreciate your detailed reply.. but I do admit I am a little confused..

Where in scripture are Easter eggs and baskets of candy and chocolate bunnies found?

Of course some will say that neither are air conditioning, or the internet... but neither of these are part of faith and practice....

Would you promote Easter eggs and baskets of candy and chocolate bunnies to believers who were opposed to such things? If so, then why?

Fasting, my friend. It's about fasting. And that is most certainly a Biblical principle.

In Christ,
Pilgrim

[Pilgrim]

Why does the notion that Easter is named after the pagan goddess Ishtar undermine the Christian faith? Why does the idea of celebrating Jesus' birth on the former pagan festival of Yuletide undermine the Christian faith?

Jesus didn't tell us to commemorate the day of his birth, nor did he tell us to commemorate the day of his death and resurrection. The sacrifice that Jesus made for us is what matters, whether we choose to pick a random day each year to specifically commemorate his resurrection or choose some other date is secondary.

Because the Gospel is not a fairy tale, it is the historical account of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And the celebration of Jesus' birth and resurrection are celebrations of actual historical events. If those celebrations can be shown to be based on lies, it undermines the historical veracity of Gospels.

The same kind of attacks are being made against Judaism as well. Claims that the Jews "adopted" the beliefs of the pagans among whom they lived and that even the Law of Moses and the feasts prescribed are also borrowed from other religions that came before them. This too undermines the historical veracity of the Old Testament and relegates the Bible to an accumlation of beliefs and stories borrowed from other sources. It's a very shop step from "we don't know when Jesus was born/died" to "Jesus was never actually born/died."

It's not really anything new, the enemies of the Gospel have always tried to undermine the credibility of the Christian faith. But what is new is how much success they are having.

In Christ,
Pilgrim

[Pilgrim]

I suggest you do some more research. In ancient fertility rites of the goddess "Astarte"(easter) eggs were dipped in the blood of sacrificed babies to color them red. The ritual is as pagan as it gets...just like Christ"mas"

And just where does that particular piece of information come from? Perhaps it was recorded in the Ugaritic texts? Or maybe someone read it off the 6th century dedicatory inscription on the statue of Astarte that is housed in the Cairo Museum? It's certainly not recorded in 1st Kings. So where exactly did that particular information come from?

In Christ,
Pilgrim

[Pilgrim]

I know you are probably getting tired of this... I guess you are since you seem to be completely ignoring these posts.

I'm not ignoring your posts. I am a researcher and I actually do research all the references and links offered to support someone's views. That takes time.

See, I am a follower of Christ. I study the Word and trust the Spirit to give me Wisdom. I pray and seek the Lord... I fast, I was baptized... I have been anointed with oil and I annoint with oil.... I do a few other things but if I mention them, it will get freaky in this thread.

Here is my point. Faith and practice is clearly established in the Word. Wanna celebrate communion>? I am ALL for that! I even do it outside the church! (I know, I know, CRAZY huh?)

THe problem is that until you help me see where Easter eggs and baskets of candy and chocolate bunnies are in some way related to faith in Christ.... this is all rather pointless.

Really. (oh, and 'peeps' ARE evil, no such invention should EVER be given to children unless you do not like them).,,, peeps are evil.

As I said in a previous post, the eggs and chocolate is about fasting, and fasting is certainly a Biblical practice.

In Christ,
Pilgrim

[Vhayes]

If chocolate eggs and baskets of jelly beans open the door to a child's heart that might otherwise never hear about the resurrection of Jesus Christ, then bring on the bunnies and the baskets.

[Amos_with_goats]

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I'm not ignoring your posts. I am a researcher and I actually do research all the references and links offered to support someone's views. That takes time.



As I said in a previous post, the eggs and chocolate is about fasting, and fasting is certainly a Biblical practice.

In Christ,
Pilgrim

I am glad you cleared that up... for a bit it seemed like you were advocating Easter eggs and baskets of candy and chocolate bunnies. I was a little unclear about the scriptural basis for that.

Was afraid you might be reading that 'Infancy Gospel of Thomas' or something like that....

Seems like... oh, I don't know... actually talking about the resurrection would be a more effective approach.

If chocolate eggs and baskets of jelly beans open the door to a child's heart that might otherwise never hear about the resurrection of Jesus Christ, then bring on the bunnies and the baskets.

Ok, so let's see... we spend the first 6 (7?) years of a child's life 'celebrating' "Easter", giving them Easter eggs and baskets of candy and chocolate bunnies... then when they are old enough we tell them it is really about the resurrection... and that it is the MOST important thing they understand... that Christ had defeated sin and death through rising from the dead.....

SO important, that we spent the first 6(or 7) years of their lives telling them all about Easter eggs and baskets of candy and chocolate bunnies....

THAT makes perfect sense to me... almost like how the guy in the red suit with the reindeer (name like Satin)... makes it SO easy to clear up the whole 'Virgin Birth' thing.....

[Vhayes]

Wow Amos.

What is WRONG with baskets and bunnies? Seriously - what is wrong with them? If you celebrate your birthday with a cake, why is it that we cannot celebrate Easter - the Resurrection - with chocolate and brightly colored eggs?

Who is more powerful? A pagan wooden idol or God? The Resurrected Christ or a chocolate bunny? How many Americans do you know who buy an Easter basket and say, "How COOL - this will be in remembrance of the Great Fertility Goddess!" ?

It's a time of celebration so let's all set around in sackcloth and ashes...

[Amos_with_goats]

Wow Amos.

What is WRONG with baskets and bunnies? Seriously - what is wrong with them? If you celebrate your birthday with a cake, why is it that we cannot celebrate Easter - the Resurrection - with chocolate and brightly colored eggs?

Who is more powerful? A pagan wooden idol or God? The Resurrected Christ or a chocolate bunny? How many Americans do you know who buy an Easter basket and say, "How COOL - this will be in remembrance of the Great Fertility Goddess!" ?

It's a time of celebration so let's all set around in sackcloth and ashes...

Sack Cloth? WHo said anything about sack cloth?

HOW exactly does telling a child about the Easter Bunny lead them to understand what Christ did?


EVEN if you somehow believed that it did... WHY on earth would anyone defend the practice? Is there some kind of 'gospel decoder ring' I never got that somehow translates all this?

Never mind, EVEN if there were a decoder.... why use a code?

[tango]

Actually that’s not true and I dare say wherever you got that information they provided no actual etymological link to support the claim. It seems it is sufficient to some that if two words sound similar, then they must be related. And it certainly works well for the critics who attempt to undermine the historical validity of the Christian faith. But I’m afraid the etymological history of words is not that simple.

Claims and counterclaims are all well and good but you still didn't say why the origins of a word have anything to do with the sacrifice Jesus made for us. We could call the day "Unholy Day Of Satan Incarnate" and it still wouldn't change a single thing about the sacrifice Jesus made for us.

There's no point denying the pagan festivals of annual death and rebirth, they go back at least as far as the days of Ezekiel where people would weep over Tammuz. There's also little point claiming that what we call a day changes anything about history. Arguing that Christian festivals have pagan origins is the kind of "clever" philosophical stunts people pull, usually hoping for Christians to say something like "oh dear, I didn't know that, I guess my entire faith crumbles to dust now".

[tango]

Because the Gospel is not a fairy tale, it is the historical account of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And the celebration of Jesus' birth and resurrection are celebrations of actual historical events. If those celebrations can be shown to be based on lies, it undermines the historical veracity of Gospels.

Who said the gospel was a fairy tale? Who disputed that the virgin birth and resurrection were actual events? All that is in dispute here is whether Jesus was actually born on December 25, not whether he was born as a man in the first place. If anything the insistence on a particular date when we don't actually know fuels the fire of the people hostile to us - if we don't even know ourselves what is real and what is assumed it becomes much easier for our opponents to take full advantage of that.

If we can accept that Jesus was born but we don't know the exact date (it's not as if it matters anyway) then why is it such a problem to accept that it probably wasn't December 25 but we just picked that day to commemorate it?

The same kind of attacks are being made against Judaism as well. Claims that the Jews "adopted" the beliefs of the pagans among whom they lived and that even the Law of Moses and the feasts prescribed are also borrowed from other religions that came before them. This too undermines the historical veracity of the Old Testament and relegates the Bible to an accumlation of beliefs and stories borrowed from other sources.

That's a different argument entirely. There's a big difference between the argument that core Christian beliefs are simply a bunch of rehashed pagan beliefs, and the argument that man-made Christian traditions don't have divine origins.

It's a very shop step from "we don't know when Jesus was born/died" to "Jesus was never actually born/died."

What nonsense. Do the people challenging the location of Obama's birthplace attempt to argue that Obama was never actually born? It's a huge step from accepting someone lived and died but without knowing the precise dates, to arguing they never lived at all. We don't know the when the people whose remains we periodically find were born and died but nobody is claiming that without precise dates we can't accept they existed.

[tango]

Wow Amos.

What is WRONG with baskets and bunnies? Seriously - what is wrong with them? If you celebrate your birthday with a cake, why is it that we cannot celebrate Easter - the Resurrection - with chocolate and brightly colored eggs?

Who is more powerful? A pagan wooden idol or God? The Resurrected Christ or a chocolate bunny? How many Americans do you know who buy an Easter basket and say, "How COOL - this will be in remembrance of the Great Fertility Goddess!" ?

It's a time of celebration so let's all set around in sackcloth and ashes...

I don't see anything wrong with chocolate eggs and bunnies (aside from the blatant commercial profiteering, but that's another argument). My issue is when we act as if these are somehow symbolic of Jesus. When kids are told one thing up to a certain age and are then told that it's not quite true, no, scratch that, not true at all and are told something else, it's hard to see how that is going to help their faith in other things they are told are true.

If we can present something that we can subsequently expand on as they get older so they are filling in the gaps rather than suddenly realising that the tales they believed were false it works. If kids are told that the eggs and bunnies are traditions and nothing more, and are told about the death and resurrection of Jesus when they are old enough to understand, I don't see a problem.

I remember being told as a child that we exchange eggs because the stone over the tomb was shaped like an egg, and tales like that annoy me. I just wonder how many kids are told things like that, then told they aren't really true but the story of Jesus is true, only to be left wondering how long it will be before they are told that something else is true.

When I was a small child I asked my parents what caused thunder. My father told me it was "big holes in the sky", which I couldn't figure out (I'd have been about 4 at the time at a guess) but accepted it was probably true. When I was old enough to know it was nothing to do with big holes in the sky I couldn't understand why he told me something that wasn't true. Until I found out what he'd actually said was that it was a "big noise in the sky" and I'd just misheard him I regarded a lot of what he said with doubt.

[Vhayes]

Sack Cloth? WHo said anything about sack cloth?

HOW exactly does telling a child about the Easter Bunny lead them to understand what Christ did?


EVEN if you somehow believed that it did... WHY on earth would anyone defend the practice? Is there some kind of 'gospel decoder ring' I never got that somehow translates all this?

Never mind, EVEN if there were a decoder.... why use a code?

I can't remember ever being told that eggs that were brightly colored and chocolate bunnies represented anything. They were part of the celebration of the Resurrection.

What on earth is all the 'decoder' stuff?

[Pilgrim]

Who said the gospel was a fairy tale? Who disputed that the virgin birth and resurrection were actual events? All that is in dispute here is whether Jesus was actually born on December 25 ...

What is in dispute is whether or not the birth, death, and resurrection accounts of Jesus are actual historical events or adoptions of pagan beliefs and customs. If you have not gotten that far in this controversy, then you need to read a little more, or a little more carefully.

... not whether he was born as a man in the first place. If anything the insistence on a particular date when we don't actually know fuels the fire of the people hostile to us - if we don't even know ourselves what is real and what is assumed it becomes much easier for our opponents to take full advantage of that.

If we can accept that Jesus was born but we don't know the exact date (it's not as if it matters anyway) then why is it such a problem to accept that it probably wasn't December 25 but we just picked that day to commemorate it?

The problem is that it’s not true. Christianity did not simply pick a date out of thin air, or worse borrow some pagan celebration and give it a Christian veneer. Easter and Christmas were historical events and the dates we celebrate these events can be traced back to Apostolic times and are rooted in history and can be tested historically, along with every other historical event in the Gospels.

That's a different argument entirely. There's a big difference between the argument that core Christian beliefs are simply a bunch of rehashed pagan beliefs, and the argument that man-made Christian traditions don't have divine origins.

But the issue of whether or not the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus are actual historical events or simply adoptions of pagan beliefs and festivals goes to the very core of Christian beliefs. These attacks are not simply an attempt to discredit the date of observance, they are attacks against the events themselves and the charge is that they are not actual historical events but simply adaptations of pagan beliefs.

What nonsense. Do the people challenging the location of Obama's birthplace attempt to argue that Obama was never actually born? It's a huge step from accepting someone lived and died but without knowing the precise dates, to arguing they never lived at all. We don't know the when the people whose remains we periodically find were born and died but nobody is claiming that without precise dates we can't accept they existed.

Nonsense? Sigh. Okay, look at this excerpt from a post right here on this subject.

“Many religious historians and liberal theologians believe that the death and resurrection legends were first associated with Attis, many centuries before the birth of Jesus. They were simply grafted onto stories of Jesus' life in order to make Christian theology more acceptable to Pagans. Others suggest that many of the events in Jesus' life that were recorded in the gospels were lifted from the life of Krishna…”

This is an excerpt from the previous post #43 by shepherdsword which blatantly shows the attempt to undermine the Gospels by claiming the birth, death and resurrection events in the life of Jesus that the Gospels record and Christians observe were not actual historical events but were simply “lifted” from pagan myths and “grafted onto stories of Jesus’ life.”

Can you hear me now?

In Christ,
Pilgrim