CRITICISM OF SUNDAY AND EASTER
It is popular among Messianic Jews to follow
Evangelicals in revealing Pagan origins of Christian feasts. Messianic
Jews of Evangelical orientation usually support these old discoveries with
own Jewish witness: there had been nothing heard about any celebrations of
Sunday in the Hebrew Bible, nothing has been attested in the apostolic
times either. Therefore a celebration of Easter Sunday cannot be Jewish in
turn.
Of course, nothing is said in TaNaKH about the Resurrection of Messiah
Y-shua. Every traditional (Halachian) Jew can affirm this fact. Now one
goes further coming to the Trinity and finally comes to Talmud. A lot of
divine triads (not Trinities!) are known in old pagan religions, starting
from Ancient Egypt (to analyse their pantheistic origin as Emanation of
the Primeval Sourse of the Universe, – cf. Kabbalah by the way, –
clearly surpasses abilities of the “discoverers”). After such reasonings
one should close Messianic Judaism for ever as a mistake. Then those
Messianic Jews who still want to preserve their faith in Gospel, should
convert into any Evangelical sect (especially where Charismatic
Glossalalia are most loved today – nothing to do with Jewish
tradition!), or to join those Halachian Jews who are tolerant to that “unhappy
Y-shua ben Yoseph”, who “was a good lad but a loser, unfortunatley:
almost-a-prophet, nothing more!”
As for Trinity, this is not a subject of a discussion now being a unique
theological concept which can be neither negated, nor proved as belonging
to the field of the apophatic theology with some hints given by G-d
Himself on His nature – cf. Three-One in Gen 18, or such Jewish concepts
as Metatron and Logos-Memrah, as well as the interchange of the field and
the electron in physics, intuiting here a likeness to co-existence of
OnlyOne-Three-TheInfinity of Separate (not any “Modes” of One!)
Person/Persons of Eyn-Sof at once. All this CANNOT be a part of any dogmic
“scientific research”, of course.
However our subject now is much more simple concerning usual human
foolishness only. Most popular foolishness states the bad Constantin
having shifted Saturday to Sunday. It is a foolishness to such a degree,
that is not worthy to discuss here at all. However every “shocking”
fool does not omit a possibility to “show” that Sunday means the day
of Sun! No matter that the Greeks celebrate the Day of Lord (Kyriakē),
as well as Armenians or Georgians, whose “Sunday” is correctly the
FIRST day of the week (as in Hebrew), not the seventh day (the latter
named with Hebrew Sabbath accordingly) as in the West.
However it is not any foolishness to say that there is no traces of
celebrating on Sunday in times of pupils of Messiah Y-shua: it is a
mistake.
Acts show that the pupils gathered on Sabbaths, Paul never travelled on
this day. The sanctity of the Sabbathian rest is clearly confirmed by
Messiah Y-shua in Matthew 24:19 (removed from Mark 13:18 by some
Anti-Semitic Greek scribe on the break of the 1st / 2nd c. with all
probability). Every Jew knows that the Sabbath ends with Havdalah. The
earliest Christian liturgy clearly reflecting the Sabbathian wine-bread
ceremony via the Last Supper, it is clear that this was practice of the
first apostles themselves, but their Havdalah was therefore a greeting
of the Resurrected Messiah Y-shua, or celebrating the First Day of the
week (so-called “Sunday”) consequently. No doubt, breaking of bread
took place after the sunset as a part of Hafdalah. Thus they broke bread
already on the first day of the week: analyse the story of Eutychus in
Acts 20:7–11, especially 20:11 if
only you still possess a sane brain, of course:
Having reanimated Eutychus, Paul came back upstairs again to break bread
– when? was it on Monday? – They lingered on “till midnight”
(20:7), however a next day begins after the sunset, not after midnight as
today among non-Jews. Was it that they missed the whole “Sunday” (the
day of Resurrection) in speaking and understood this in a hurry when it
was too late to break bread after Monday had come? Or they simply kept the
Sabbath rest till coming evening and got together before the sunset in
order to break bread after it on the first day of the week, i.e. on
Sunday, the Day of Resurrection? Who breaks bread 24 hours long!
Thus breaking the bread, or Eucharist, is namely celebration of “Sunday”,
when Sabbath is a Day of resting, dedicated to G-d, which was never “shifted”
to Sunday by nobody till post-hoc Roman catholic explanations. However it
was a local council of 37 bishops Anti-Semites in Laidicea
who tackled annulling the whole “Jewish Decalogue” at all (a phrase
“if you CAN”).
The
best evidence of continuity of this apostolic practice is found in section
14-1 of the earliest known Christian Catechism named Didache (break
of the 1st / 2nd c.): On each Lord's day having gathered yourselves together, break bread, and give thanksgiving.
This is why Constantin, wishing to favour Christians, made officials and
soldiers free from duties “on Sun's day” in order they could
participate in the Eucharist. No word is about „Saturday“ because
since Roman-Jewish wars gentile Christians used a possibility to gather on
Sundays for the Eucharist in order not to be associated with the rebels
Jews. Thus Roman (and Alexandrine) Christianity was Sunday-oriented from
the very beginning, trying to find peace with Roman authorities at
the expense of the Jews, “enemies of the Empire”. Constantin having
legalized Christianity, all these loyal Roman citizens became finally
patriotic and Anti-Semitic consequently. No “Roman-Catholic Church”
existed there yet, but when having formed itself later, it only inherited
the Roman imperialism for all further times.
Here one sees an answer, for what crime the Jewish nation was punished
with “supersession” of their chosenship with that of the
Gentiles: G-d they ostensibly murdered was the Roman Empire!
One also sees how Anti-Semitism spread further through
the mediation of Martin Luther up to Auschwitz. Speculations with religion
are known means to justify own imperialism (cf. e.g. situation in
Baltic where “explanations” arose, beginning from Orthodox Church
leaders and finishing with modern Dugin's doctrine, that the Great Duchy
of Lithuania had been Russian from the very beginning).
One also sees here a reason of the decay of today Gentile Christianity: it
started with erasure of the Lord's words in the Gospel (Mk
13:18) even at the boundary of the 2nd c., thus becoming subject to eternal words of Unchangeable G-d in Gen 13:2.
Messiah Y-shua resurrected on the First Day of the week thus fulfilling
the sense of the Sabbath in the eschatological Eighth Day of (Re)Creation
of the world, a kind of independent Catholic and Talmudic idea by the way,
cf. also Hebr 3:17 – 4:11.
Turning back to human foolishness, let us
examine how ostensible Pagan origin of Easter is being usually portrayed.
Similarly as in the case of Sunday, all “shocking inventions”
are made in frames of English and Germanic world, fully forgetting that no
such term has ever existed in Christian Orient. With only clicking “Easter
Eastre” one finds tons of dilettante publications on web retelling one
from another the same idea that Easter comes back to Old Germanic Goddess Eostre
(persons ignorant in lingustics, immediately add “similarly sounding” Ishtar
(Astartha) as an ostensible cognate of the same name...: what a horror
that Catholics worship Astharta instead of “Jesus”!)
It should be made clear that the invention of this Goddess belongs to a
short inventive note about Old Pagan Deity of spring months Eostre
by “Venerable Beda” (ca. 673–735), author of the “Church history
of the English nation”. This idea was used by Jacob Grimm in his “German
Mythology” during the burst of the German nationalism with its especial
interest in “gloriuos pagan past” (what was a typical result of
emancipating of peasantry in the West for the sake of progress of agrarian
production at the expense of partition of big manors and abolishing feudal
manorial rights, by the way). Jacob Grimm uncritically “restored” such
a Germanic deity of spring, Ostara, equalling her to Latin Aurora
on the German linguistic grounds (cf. a cognate Lith. Aušra / Aušrinė).
Therefore Grimm's “evidence” got even into serious scholarly
literature. A classical Etymological Dictionary of the German language
should be cited here for a modern most authoritative scholarly
explanation:
Ostern
Pl. mhd. ōsteren, ahd. ōstarun, ags. ēastron,
engl. Easter. In einem nd. Gebiet (Frings, Idg. Forsch. 45, 267
ff., K. Bischoff, Zs. f. Mundartig. 21, 28), gilt Pāsche(n) in
einer Randzone an der nl. Grenze. Entspr. nl. pasen, asächs.
afries. pāscha, anord. pāskar, got. paska,
wie frz. pâque aus kirchenlat. pāsca, das Hebr.
Ursprungs ist. Ostern wird zu aind. usrā
‘Morgenröte’ gestellt. Man meinte Aorōra sei den Germanen
wenigstens teilweise aus der Tageslichgöttin zur Lichtgöttin des Frühlings
geworden. Ihr westsächs. Name *Eastre sei durch Eostre bei
Beda († 735) gesichert. Aber eine solche germanische Göttin ist nicht
erwiesen, und die Bedeutung ‘Frühling’ gibt es in keiner idg.
Sprache. Ostern ist gallo-fränk. Prägung zu *austrō
‘Morgenrot’ (s. Osten) nach lt. albae (paschales),
alba ’Morgenrot’, von da aus ags. frühahd.
Auferstehungsliturgie am Morgen. J. Knobloch, in: Die Sprache 1959, 27.
Wortatlas XVI.
Ostern [‘Easter’] pl. MHG ōsteren,
OHG ōstarun, AGS ēastron, ENG Easter.
In a North-German zone bordering Netherlands (Frings, Idg. Forsch. 45, 267
ff., K. Bischoff, Zs. f. Mundartig. 21, 28), Pāsche(n) is in
use. Corresp.: Netherland. pasen, AGS OFries. pāscha,
ONord. pāskar, Goth. paska, as well as Fr. pâque
come from Church-Lat. pāsca of the Hebrew origin. Ostern
corresponds to Skr. usrā ‘Morgenröte’. One thought that
among German tribes Aorōra should have at least partly been
transormed from the Goddess of Light into a Goddess of Spring. Her
WSachs. name *Eastre seemed to have been grounded by Beda († 735)
with his Eostre. However an existence of such Germanic Goddess has
not been proven. Even more: no word of this root has a meaning ‘spring’
in any I.-E. language! Ostern is a
Gallic-Frank coining of *austrō
‘morning twilight’ (s. Osten) for Latin albae (paschales),
alba ‘morning twilight’ giving an AGS early OHG name to a
Resurrection Mass in the morning. J. Knobloch, in: Die Sprache 1959, 27.
Wortatlas XVI.
Fr. Kluge, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache. Walter
de Gruyter, Berlin - New York 1975, p. 526.
Sapienti sat! There is no hope
to persuade maniac fools, some of whom will further ‘prove’ their beloved pagan goddesses and blame Christus–Krishna, the others blaming bad
Catholics who worship these goddesses together with Santa Claus, who is
Satan Claus. The tragedy is when Messianic Jews repeat all these foolish
things showing themselves being simply evangelicals who play Jews.
This publication is a negation of a pagan
origin of traditional Christian feasts, not any attempt to negate
pagan folklore elements in them.