Is it true that Eostre was misinterpreted as being an ancient pagan godess, when in fact it was simply the name of a month?

patron-saint-of-smart-asses:

mademoiseli:

residinginpurgatory:

I don’t know the exact etymological origins of Easter, nor what Eostre is exactly. All I can tell you is that anyone who uses “Eostre” as evidence that Easter is a pagan tradition is a charlatan; if you look at the word for the holiday in basically any other language, it is a variation of Passover/Pesach.

A lot of these loose connections between Christian terms and “pagan” terms are actually very English centric

You can only make a haphazard connection between the word Eoster and the Christian celebration of Easter if you are thinking in the context of the English language.

Here’s how you say Easter in various other languages:

• Spanish: Pascua
• Portuguese: Páscoa
• French: Pâques
• Italian: Pasqua
• Romanian: Pasti
• Greek: Paskha
• Danish: Paaske
• Russian: Paskha

In most, if not all of these cases, the word for Easter doubles as the word for the Jewish Passover. So for a good part of the Christian word, the word for Easter is completely unrelated to this “Eostre.” In some countries, it’s simply called “Resurrection Festival.”

This sort of reminds me of a claim from that Zeitgeist movie, about how supposedly the term “Son of God” came from the phrase “Sun of God” somehow indicating that Christianity was derived from pagan sun worship. But again, this is a very ignorant and English centric claim, because it assumes that the words “son” and “sun” sound the same in every language on earth.

By the way, if you find movies like the Zeigeist as painfully annoying as I do, here’s a good article on the inaccuracies presented in the movie.

Plus. Eostre is a Germanic word, from Central Europe, and Christianity first took root in the Middle East and Mediterranean. So yeah, anyone who makes that claim is ignorant of both etymology and history.