I think this discussion has come to a conclusion. Thanks for engaging and we’ll let your readers take a view on it.

That’s funny. You are the one who did that.

My article said that, contrary to Holland, Easter’s resurrection motif “did not come from Christianity” and that’s “even insofar as Easter itself is even Christian” because it incorporates a bunch of non-Christian stuff to the point of barely being recognizable.

You then made the non sequitur that the non-Christian stuff should count as Christian because it arose during Christianity.

I then pointed out you skipped the actual part about Easter’s resurrection motif, and that your argument was a non-sequitur anyway, confusing “when” something arose as somehow meaning it was Christian.

Refuted and cornered, you changed your argument to something else that no longer related to anything I said.

I then called you out on that.

And you now desperately try to claim I am the one being pedantic here.

You have a very short memory. But the receipts are right here.

Richard I think it should be clear to any good faith observer to our discussion that you are restorting to pedantry. You appear to be now delineating between Easter and the Easter festival to shore up your untenable claim that there is ‘nothing significantly Christian about Easter’ I would happily remove the word ‘festival’ from my previous post and stand by it’s content Bunnies and Eggs are not pagan. To suggest otherwise is simply ahistorical. Unless you want to chang the definition of pagan to essentially include Christianity and folklore, which renders the term obsolete.

No, the issue is whether Easter is full of Christian ideas or pagan folklore. It is not when that pagan folklore entered the tradition. The only thing “when” mattered to is the revivification element, which definitely is pre-Christian.

You tried to confuse these two things. I caught you. So you tried moving the goalposts. That doesn’t work here. I never said “it’s not a Christian festival.” And you didn’t start by claiming I did. You retreated to that false claim after getting cornered on being wrong about what you did say.

Bunnies and eggs are not Christian. The resurrection theme is pre-Christian. And that leaves nothing significantly Christian about Easter. That does not mean (nor did I say) that “Easter is not a Christian holiday.” It means Holland was wrong to claim it was some unique Christian contribution to world culture. Which is what I said.

The question we are discussing is if Easter bunnies and eggs had a pre-Christian origin, and they didn’t. Easter is clearly a Christian festival which is celebrated by millions of Christians ever year. Yes, it may well have non Christian origins, and yes, it doubtless changed a lot over time. But to deny it’s a Christian festival is a sort of reductio ad absurdum. It’s like saying Romeo and Juliet isn’t Shakespearean as its based heavily on 15th and 16th-century Italian novellas which Shakespeare dramatised.

No, you said they began at a certain point in time. You did not explain where the ideas came from (how they developed, what they meant, why they became popular).

It is not moot whether they came from non-Christian folklore. That’s precisely the point: Christianity’s holidays have accumulated non-Christian content and hardly resemble what they once were. Easter simply isn’t Christian. And even the core of what remains of what Easter once meant to Christians is entirely a syncretism of pre-Christian pagan and Jewish ideas and thus not relevantly original. Even that isn’t really Christian. Any more than Romeo & Juliet was written by Stephen Sondheim.

I already explained to you the origin of easter bunnies and eggs. The pertinent point is they were not a continuation of pre-Christian religious symbolism or praxis but developed much later in a Christian society. Whether they came from Christianity or non Christian local folklore is largely moot, indeed it’s arguably impossible to clearly delineate between the two. I never contested your second point.

Explain how eggs and bunnies came from the Christian belief system and not local non-Christian folklore.

And explain how resurrection/revival festivals aren’t a pre-Christian pagan idea (since that is the core of the holiday and predates the eggs and bunnies).

I don’t doubt there were other seasonal festivals around springtime. However, easter eggs and bunnies definitely arose in a Christian cultural context, they were not derived from pre-Christian religion. Bunnies were an early modern idea. Interestingly, the existence of the goddess Eostre is only attested to by Bede, we have no other documentary evidence for her existence. It’s possible she was a local deity worshiped in Kent, but this is rather speculative. Andrew Mark Henry has done some excellent videos on this at religion for breakfast. As he notes, much of the pagan association with Easter likely arose from anti-Catholic polemics in the 19th century.

That depends on what it is you think is being explained.

That the Spring Equinox was a pagan (and Jewish) holiday before Christians took it over is an extensively documented fact. Holi is still nationally celebrated in India. And so on.

That resurrected gods, and their analogy to the renewal of life and agriculture and thence to individual salvation, predate Christianity is an extensively documented fact. For example, Osiris dies and rises after three days at the full moon at the start of Winter. Inanna dies and rises after three days, possibly in Winter, and Tammuz, in Summer. Adonis, in Summer. And so on.

The death and revivification (even if not quite a resurrection) of Attis was even celebrated in Spring and immensely popular before Christians developed any substantive Easter celebration to compete with it.

But if all you want to focus on are eggs and hares: those have no Christian origin. Yet must have come from somewhere. It might not be actual heathen witchery, but just random local folklore that diffused across Europe. Although you might struggle to explain the difference.