There is no evidence that Christians in the first century A.D. celebrated anything called “Easter.” The word “Easter” in Acts 12:4 (KJV) is an unfortunate translation of the Greek word pascha, which always refers to the Jewish Passover. Every other time pascha appears in the New Testament—including earlier in the same chapter (Acts 12:3)—it is rightly translated as “Passover.”
Though many today celebrate Easter as the day Jesus was resurrected, Passover was not the day of His resurrection, but the night and day He was slain (the Jewish day began at evening and lasted until the next evening; Gen. 1:5; Matt. 26:17–ff). Furthermore, it was not the early Christians celebrating the Passover in Acts 12, but the enemies of Christianity—Herod and the Jews who were killing Christians (Acts 12:1–4). The holiday in Acts 12 translated as “Easter” would have involved the Jews slaying a lamb after Christ was slain on the cross, which at that point would have been a blasphemous rejection of Christ, the Lamb of God, as the ultimate and final sacrifice (1 Cor. 5:7; Heb. 10:8–18).
In the second century A.D., uninspired men introduced a yearly observance of Christ’s death and resurrection near the time of Passover. By the sixth century, Catholicism had added unscriptural and even pagan traditions, eventually forming what we now call Easter.
Some argue that Easter eggs are not related to paganism, but came from Catholic customs surrounding Lent. However, eggs were fertility symbols long before Christianity—in Babylonian, Egyptian, and Persian cultures. Rabbits also symbolized reproduction and were never associated with Christ in the Scriptures. Even if someone claims to “reinvent” these symbols for Jesus, it still runs the risk of blending the holy with the profane if used in a religious context (1 Cor. 10:20; 2 Cor. 6:14–17; cf. Lev. 10:10).
The English word Easter is commonly traced to a pagan fertility goddess—known by names like Ishtar, Ashtoreth, Astarte, Ostara, and Eostre. The Bible records Solomon worshiping a goddess named Ashtoreth (also known as the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, the female counterpart of Baal) roughly one thousand years before the resurrection of Christ (1 Kings 11:5, 33; 2 Kings 23:13). “The Venerable” Bede, a historian from the 8th-century A.D., stated that the month of April (called “Eosturmonath”) was named after Eostre, whom he described as a fertility goddess honored in springtime festivals. Though some debate the connection between Easter and these pagan goddesses, the similarities are too strong to simply dismiss. What are the odds that all these goddesses—each with nearly identical names, each associated with fertility and spring—are unrelated? They are far more likely cultural versions of the same false deity. Just as Baal had many names, so did this fertility goddess.
There is some debate about the origins of the name “Easter,” but no matter what it is called, there is no Scriptural evidence that the first-century church observed it as a religious holiday. If the name is truly derived from a pagan goddess, then whenever someone says “Easter,” he is saying the name of a false goddess that should have been forsaken and forgotten a long time ago (Hos. 2:17; cf. Ex. 23:13; Deut. 12:3; Josh. 23:7). Instead, let us always remember our Lord in the way He desires and follow the Biblical pattern of communion on the first day of every week (Acts 2:42; 20:6–7; 1 Cor. 11:20; cf. 16:2; 2 Thess. 2:15).