The Pagan Holiday of Easter

A Lutheran minister on the radio expressed the wish that Easter have a fixed date like Christmas. That's not possible, he said, because no one knows the date of Jesus’ resurrection from the tomb. That’s a foolish statement, of course, since no one knows the exact date of His birth either. We do know it wasn’t December 25th, the date on which the world celebrates Christmas.

For a long time, I was convinced that Jesus died on the cross on a Friday and that Good Friday was one of the few dates on the calendar with a genuine significance for Christians. After all, Scripture tells us that His body, and those of the criminals crucified beside Him, had to be taken down before the start of the Sabbath which begins Friday at sundown. I have since learned that there are some questions about that belief. Jesus’ body was removed from the cross prior to the yearly Sabbath, but I wonder if those who promote that theory possess more accurate information than those who accept the view that I’ve long held.

Does it matter?

If the date of Jesus’ death and resurrection were really significant, the Bible would clearly report them, as it would also report the date of His birth. It’s certainly no surprise that Easter has no connection to Jesus, and its practices are rooted in paganism. Holidays or Holy Days, a booklet from the United Church of God, reports that many Easter customs pre-date Christianity and honor various false idols, such as Ashtoreth, goddess of spring and fertility whom the bible calls “the abomination of the Sidonians.” The Easter bunny and the eggs that compete with religious imagery as symbols of the season are representatives of fertility and the return of spring.

Handbook of Christian Feasts and Customs notes that fertility rites and customs began to be interwoven with religion soon after Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden. Having rejected God, humanity needed to find alternative explanations for the beginning of life. Man created his own gods and found them in forces of nature. “The pagan nations made statues or images to represent the powers they worshiped,” reports Nelson’s New Illustrated Bible Dictionary. These idols included men and animals, such as the owl that the elites worship at Bohemian Grove, but also the sun, the moon, the stars, and even the sea and rain. “Many pagan cultures believed that the god of fertility died each year during the winter but was reborn each year in spring.”

Jewish people continue to celebrate the Sabbath on Saturday, but Catholics and most professing (if not always practicing) Christians choose Sunday as the day to attend religious services and to take a rest from work. But Sunday celebrates the sun, yet another pagan deity. According to R.K. Bishop, anti-Jewish sentiment may have played a role in the rejection of Saturday as the Sabbath day, and the embracing of Easter in place of Passover in commemorating the death of Jesus Christ.

Prior to A.D. 70, the Roman government regarded Christianity as a “branch of the Jewish religion,” Jesse Lyman Hurlbut says in The Story of the Christian Church. Following two Jewish revolts against the Roman Empire, however, Jews faced persecution, and their religious practices were suppressed. Many Christians responded to this persecution by abandoning any customs or practices connected to Judaism and replacing them with pagan practices of which the Romans approved. So, Easter took the place of Passover for Christians wishing to celebrate the resurrection, and Sunday became the Sabbath.

Celebrating the resurrection was itself a new concept, according to Holidays or Holy Days which states that Scripture (I Corinthians 11:26) encourages Christians only to remember the death of Jesus. The resurrection gives us hope that we, too, will one day be resurrected, and was necessary in completing God’s mission, but it was His persecution and death that demonstrated God’s love and willingness to forgive mankind.

It may not be important to know the dates of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, but the belief that he died on a Friday and rose from the grave on Sunday is not supported by Scripture where, in Matthew 12:38, Jesus tells the scribes and Pharisees that He would be “three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” If He was crucified on Friday and rose from the tomb on Sunday, He would have spent one complete day and no more than two nights in the grave. It’s a serious matter because Jesus’ statement about the amount of time He would be “in the heart of the earth” was a prophecy, the fulfillment of which proved He was the Messiah.

Holidays or Holy Days presents a chronology of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection in which they state that Jesus shared a Passover meal with His disciples (The Last Supper) on a Tuesday evening. Following the meal, He was betrayed by Judas, arrested and brought before the high priest. He died on the cross on Wednesday at 3 p.m., and was entombed before sunset. He rose from the dead near sunset on Saturday, three days and three nights after His burial.

The choice of Easter Sunday as the day to celebrate the resurrection helped Christians to distance themselves from the Jews, and also fit in well with the theme of rebirth and fertility that was central to pagan beliefs, but Easter, like Christmas, is not truly Christian, and should be celebrated with caution by true believers.

© 2013 Brian W. Fairbanks

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Faith

After declining an invitation to attend a lecture on Bible prophecy several months ago, someone I know explained his lack of interest in the subject by saying he thinks God "wants us to live our lives as best we can and not focus so much on future events.”

Maybe, but living our lives with little more than faith that God is present can be a challenge. Is there a God? I’m convinced there is because there is, indeed, a design evident in the world. I’m not talking about “Intelligent Design,” the concept that some Christian fundamentalists are promoting as a companion to Darwinian Evolution for teaching in public schools. I am not familiar with the gist of its tenets. (You read that right: “gist of its tenets.”) I’m referring to evidence I see with my own eyes. There is a design to life, and to call it “intelligent” is redundant. If it’s a design, it automatically involves thought: intelligence.

The design of which I speak is visible to anyone with eyes. The sun rises each morning and sets each night, its brilliant rays lighting another part of the world as the moon rises to illuminate the night. Flowers bloom in spring; the leaves die and fall from the trees each autumn. The seasons themselves are symbolic of the stages of our lives: winter, spring, summer, and fall each have their charms and chastisements. Except for those who suffer from horrible deformities, the human face has a pattern: a forehead, a nose, cheeks, lips, and a mouth with ears on the side of the skull. These anatomical parts serve the same function in every person. We breathe through the nose, see with the eyes, hear with the ears, and speak, as well as eat, through the mouth. Male and female bodies are different, but though men come in a variety of builds and heights, their parts do not vary. Same with women.

Clearly, there is intelligence at work behind the scenes of the world. This intelligence can only belong to a Supreme Being. But who?

Christians believe it to be the God of the Old and New Testament. Jews reject the New Testament and its claim that the Messiah whom they await has already appeared, but believe in the same God who passed down the 10 commandments to Moses, and flooded the world, wiping out the entire population of earth save Noah, his family, and one male and one female representative of each animal.

There are other religions whose followers worship other gods, such as Islam whose adherents believe Allah is the only true god, and there are even religions that serve no deity, Buddhism for one.

What to believe?

Christians believe that the times in which we live, especially the turmoil in the Middle East, is proof that they chose the truth. There is one God with a capital “G” who created the heavens and the earth, and also created hell, a place of suffering and banishment from God, following the unsuccessful coup in which Lucifer, an angel whom God favored above all others, attempted to conquer God and rule heaven in His place. Renamed Satan, and also called the devil, Lucifer challenged God’s sentence of condemnation. In response, God created Adam and Eve whom He banished from the Garden of Eden after Satan successfully tempted them to disobey their creator. Their sin was passed on to all of their descendants, and only through Jesus Christ can the death sentence be overturned. According to the gospels of the New Testament, Jesus lived a life of total obedience to God the Father, and His perfection made Him the only one eligible to serve as a sacrificial lamb to take on the sins of the world and pay the hideously brutal price that God demands of sinners. God took out His rage on the Son then raised Him from the dead. Those who believe in the Son are now in God’s good graces. As for Jesus, His work on earth is not done. He will return to judge the world. That’s Christianity in a nutshell.

Bible prophecy gives us clues to the Second Coming, and those who study and interpret it insist that most prophecies concerning the end times have been fulfilled or are about to be. The countdown to Armageddon has begun.

Prophecy is important because signs of its fulfillment strengthen and, in some cases, inspires faith. I may believe in God without the evidence that fulfilled prophecy provides, but I might not believe God’s promise that salvation will lead to eternal life in His kingdom beyond the clouds. Too many of God’s actions betray a cruel, unforgiving nature, as well as an imperfect one. How did Lucifer ever come to rebel in the first place? Did God not anticipate that His creations might turn against Him? Did He not think it wise to take precautions to prevent such rebellion? And His requirement that one suffer and die to atone for sin does not bespeak a compassionate nature.

But the Father and the Son are one and the same, the Bible says. God’s abandonment of Jesus as He died on the cross was abandonment of Himself, and we, the wretched disobedient flock whose sins required that Jesus act as savior, are the beneficiaries of His torment. And doubts about God’s character, and worries that He won’t keep His promises, are the whispered wishes of the devil.

The simple fact is that faith in God requires hard work. The catalog of suffering on earth crowds out all evidence of love and goodness. Children are abducted by sadistic perverts, raped and murdered in heinous fashion. Lives that never reach adulthood are snuffed out without warning. Plagues, wars, and terrorism dominate the news, and we are all living on borrowed time, sentenced to death even as we are pulled from the womb. Faith that there is a rainbow awaiting us on the other side of this life can sometimes mean shutting down your brain, but if C.S. Lewis can struggle with belief (and he did in A Grief Observed), I can, too, and so can others. We may not “believe” so much as guess, hope, and cross our fingers, but even that is something.

© 2013 Brian W. Fairbanks

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Gore Vidal 1925-2012

In his memoir, Palimpsest, Gore Vidal refers to the "tyranny of sex," and of how he was finally free of it in his old age. And soon, he said, he would be free of the greatest tyrant of all: life itself. Freedom came to Gore Vidal on Tuesday at age 86. In Psalms 14:1, we read ""The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God." To his discredit, Gore Vidal was not a believer in God or an afterlife, but he was certainly no fool. His novels, and, even more so, his brilliant essays, the finest ever written in my opinion, make that clear. A wise man, and a brave one, he was, until his passing, the man I called my favorite "living writer." Now, I guess he has moved up to become my favorite writer, period. Of course, he has no heir.

Unlike most writers, Vidal loved to be on camera, had, in fact, expressed a desire to be a movie star, his idol of the screen being Mickey Rooney (a revelation made in the superb - and, alas, out of print - Screening History). In a documentary titled Profile of a Writer, Vidal appeared without voiceover commentary from a narrator and without a single glimpse of his interviewer. It was nothing but Vidal offering a monologue from Rome where he lived at the time. Oh, he could be pompous, alright, and aloof, possessing an icy detachment that I saw as a protective device. For all his wit and intelligence, he was undoubtedly a man who had been severely wounded by life, obvious in his description of his mother as someone who married, several times, for money. That, he told John Kennedy, is why the family from which both he and Jacqueline Bouvier were sprung was a disaster (Bouvier, a.k.a. Jackie Kennedy Onassis, was Vidal's step-sister through one of his mother's marriages). The "disaster" led Jacqueline to become a "professional widow" and led Vidal to become a professional writer. Did Vidal see a need or desire to write as a symptom of an emotional or psychological disturbance? I think he did. One writes to impose meaning on life, to, in a sense, control it.

As much as I admired Vidal, I did not agree with his every stance. He despised Christianity, seeing it as the first religion to insist its truths are absolutes. He could also be a bit of a hypocrite. During the impeachment proceedings brought against President Clinton, he defended Clinton and attacked independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr, claiming they had orchestrated a witch hunt based on nothing more than a sexual indiscretion on Clinton’s part. Like Bill Maher and others who came to Clinton’s defense, he claimed it was strictly “about sex.” But it wasn’t about sex. It was about Clinton’s having lied under oath. Sex was a sidebar. Yet in his Profile of a Writer segment, Vidal tells of how he was once approached by a Mafioso who knew of his intense dislike of Bobby Kennedy. Did Vidal want to stop Kennedy in his quest for a seat in the Senate? Yes, he did, so Vidal met the “tall, swarthy” hoodlum in a bar where the author of The Best Man declined to use knowledge of Kennedy’s affair with an underage girl because, as he said in his play, sex should play no role in politics. But the mobster knew of a woman whose “carnal knowledge” of the president (Bobby’s brother, John) led to her being threatened with deportation if she continued to pursue a lawsuit related to the matter. Vidal thought that this episode could be used fairly because “although sex is involved, this is an interesting story of how power is misused by a royal family." Vidal didn’t make use of this scandalous information only because it had been sealed by a judge. But that example of an abuse of power mirrors Clinton’s abuses of power. Vidal was an observer, but like any observer, he didn't always observe objectively. But nobody's perfect.

From 2006, my review of Vidal's second memoir, Point to Point Navigation:

When it comes to Gore Vidal's latest, and, no doubt, last memoir, Point to Point Navigation, the Publishers Weekly review gets it right: "readers' reactions will be determined by how they already feel about him."

I like Vidal. Even when I disagree with him, I can't help but be impressed by the wit of his arguments and the style in his writing. And I like Point to Point Navigation, even though it seems like something of a cheat, opening as it does with four chapters - 27 pages - recycled verbatim from 1992's Screening History, a small gem about the impact that movies have had on his life and society at large. Vidal explains his action by saying (in parentheses) that the book "has been allowed to go out of print and so now I reprise its principal argument."

The appearance of old material seems eerily prescient in some ways, as if Vidal, now 81, can't be bothered restating anew that which he has already said. After all, time is short. It also seems to be a testament to his recent admission that "I no longer find myself waking up every morning with the compulsion to put pen to paper.''

The specter of death hangs heavy over this volume, with Vidal devoting many pages to his late partner, Howard Austen, as well as reminiscing about Johnny Carson, on whose late night show I was introduced to this man of letters in the early '70s. There are times when his memory fails him (as does his proofreader). He tells us his father died in February 1969, yet claims he lived to see man walk on the moon, an event that occurred five months later. Elsewhere, he takes on his own biographers, dismissing Fred Kaplan's "authorized" account of his life as inaccurate, but expressing some admiration for recent books by Dennis Altman, among others. The general tone is one of a man attempting to set the record straight and to tie up loose ends.

Vidal is sometimes dismissed these days as an eccentric who no longer deserves to be taken seriously. He is, after all, a "conspiracy theorist" who has questioned, in such books as Dreaming War, the official story about the events that led to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. But Vidal is unbowed. "Ours is a society riddled with plots of every kind. . ." he writes before delving, once more, into a conspiracy theory related to the JFK assassination.

Point to Point Navigation is rather scatter-shot, jumping from one subject to another without the benefit of nice comfortable segues, but that tends to be true of memory itself. If you like Vidal, you'll forgive the book its inconsistency, and be rewarded with a worthwhile read.

© 2012 Brian W. Fairbanks

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