This is part of an ongoing series that will be posted each Monday. You can read the introduction to this series by clicking here.

Now that you’ve had just about all the eggs and jellybeans you can stand, sit back, relax, and enjoy a special holiday session of Monday School – “The Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense They Tried To Teach You Yesterday!”

Today’s Lesson: What’s The Deal With Easter?

Well, as you’ve probably heard by now, yesterday was Easter – the day Jesus allegedly rose from the dead. Oddly enough, however, the word “Easter” seems to be of pagan origins and does not appear anywhere in the Bible. Well, ok – it appears once in the KJV (Acts 12:4) but the NKJV, the NIV, the RSV and every other version of the Bible I checked uses the term “Passover” instead, so we can assume the 17th century translators behind the KJV simply got it wrong.

Although I’ve read numerous accounts of how the pagan “Easter” became associated with the alleged resurrection of Jesus, this site seems to do as good a job as any in summing it up. Among the points it makes:

—– The word “Easter” probably comes from the names of ancient goddesses. The Venerable Bede (672-735 CE), a Christian scholar, first asserted in his book De Ratione Temporum that Easter was named after Eostre (a.k.a. Eastre). She was the Great Mother Goddess of the Saxon people in Northern Europe. Similar Teutonic dawn goddesses of fertility were known as Ostare, Ostara, Ostern, Eostra, Eostre, Eostur, Eastra, Eastur, Austron and Ausos. These names seem to have originally been derived from the ancient word for spring: ‘eastre.’ Goddesses like these were common in ancient cultures around the Mediterranean, and were celebrated in the springtime.

—– Many religious historians believe that the resurrection legend associated with Jesus came from stories first told about Attis hundreds of years earlier. Attis was a god of ever-reviving vegetation. Born of a virgin, he died and was reborn annually. His festival began as a day of blood on Black Friday and culminated after three days in a day of rejoicing over his resurrection. Similar resurrection stories were told about even older figures with such names as Tammuz, Osiris, Dionysus, and Orpheus. Having taken the story of Jesus’s resurrection from pagan sources, it seems highly appropriate that Christians celebrate that alleged resurrection on a day with a pagan name.

Needless to say, relatively few Christians seem to know or believe any of this. Those Christians who do nonetheless seem to insist that Jesus’s resurrection remains unique and real in a way that the resurrection of Attis and all the others never can be.

Are these Christians correct to believe this?

Those inclined to say “YES!” might want to consider the following points:

1) The Bible is our only source for the story of Jesus and his resurrection. It was written many years after the resurrection allegedly took place. Exactly who wrote the Gospel accounts of that resurrection remains a mystery. Paul is perhaps the biggest promoter of the resurrection in the Bible, but he seems never to have met Jesus when he was alive nor to have been present when the resurrection is said to have occurred. Bottom line: Believing something is true merely because these Christian scriptures say it is true is unwarranted and inappropriate. Believing something is true merely because the Bible tells us it’s true when that something contradicts everything in our experience and the laws of science seems to me to verge on the insane.

2) Whoever actually wrote the Gospels and the rest of the Christian scriptures, it is clear that they were hardly impartial observers and recorders of history. Far from it. They were obviously Christian partisans passionately dedicated to persuading their readers to adopt a particular point of view. As The Encyclopedia Britannica puts it, “These stories were shaped by the purpose of their telling: religious propaganda or preaching to inspire belief.” Putting our faith and trust in the truth of what the Christian scriptures say is thus rather like putting our faith and trust in what a used car dealer has to say about the cars he or she is trying to sell or in the claims and promises of a politician running for office. In fact, it is rather worse since few used car dealers claim their cars can raise the dead and few politicians claim that a vote for them is a vote for everlasting life.

3) As the Attis legend indicates, the Christian scriptures were not written in a vacuum uncontaminated by the broader, older cultures of the ancient world. In point of fact, virtually every important thing Jesus allegedly said and did was allegedly said and done by a long list of “Sons of God” stretching back for centuries before Jesus was ever born. And writing a “Bible” to tell about these things was quite common. Quoting the Encyclopedia Britannica’s article entitled Biblical Literature: “Both Jews and Gentiles could use ‘biographies,’ often for propaganda purposes…. A miracle worker and stories about him comprised an aretalogy (from arete, ‘virtue’; also manifestation of divine power, miracle). Aretalogies were frequently used to represent the essential creed and belief of a religious or philosophical movement…. There were tales of Heracles, the Greek hero, and a whole literature of Alexander the Great as wonder-workers, divine men.” Quoting the Britannica’s article entitled Miracle: “Early Christianity developed in the atmosphere of Hellenistic, Greco-Roman culture, which was full of miraculous accounts and legends. These no doubt influenced Christian traditions and forms of devotion, especially as popular religion always hankered after miracles….”

If we believe the Bible’s stories about Jesus even though there is no independent evidence to confirm them, consistency demands that we believe the similarly unsubstantiated stories about Attis, Heracles, Alexander the Great, and many, many others. Because this would inevitably lead us to believe many irreconcilable, contradictory things, logic demands that we believe none of them.