Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look, and an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

Is Easter a pagan holiday?

In his treatise on the reckoning of time, 8th century English monk, the venerable bead, proposed that the word Easter comes from the name of a pagan goddess.

Here's what he wrote. Eustramaneth has a name

which is now translated Paschal month and was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eustara

and whose honor feasts were celebrated in that month, end quote. Modern pagans, having latched on to this

whole idea, further associated Eustara, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring

infertility, with Astara, a Germanic goddess of spring. Both of those names, of course,

sound an awful lot like Easter. Well, there are multiple problems with this idea, the venerable

bead notwithstanding. First, the church had fought for centuries by this point to turn people

from paganism.

Therefore, it's unlikely that one of the most important Christian holidays would be named after

a pagan goddess.

More importantly, there's no evidence of a goddess named Eostara aside from Bede, nor is

there evidence for a Germanic goddess named Oostara.

The name Easter is only used in English and it's cognate,

Austern, and German. Everywhere else, even in Germanic languages such as Dutch, Norwegian,

or Swedish, the word is derived from Pasca or Passover. Since Resurrection Day was celebrated for

hundreds of years before the Anglo-Saxons or Germans were even converted,

it's unlikely that its name indicates a pagan origin to the holiday.

More likely, Bede was either following a folk etymology or simply guessing.

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