Emmanuel Ukudolo l Saturday, April 8, 2023
LAGOS, Nigeria – Few hours from now, precisely Sunday Christendom will celebrate Easter globally.
Many celebrating Easter believe they are celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ, followed by Galilee on Monday, the day many believe the resurrected Jesus Christ showed himself to his apostles.
In the village setting, Galilee is celebrated with a ritual of visiting the plantations and the cool wind blowing across the vegetations is seen as the spiritual appearance of Christ to those present, often accomplaied with the shout, see Jesus, see Jesus.
In actual sense, there is no place in the Holy Bible where you will see the celebration of Easter or Galilee. The only celebration Jesus instructed his disciples to celebrate remains the Lord’s Super/memorial which he instituted on Nissan 14 in the Jewish calender and commanded his deciples to keep doing in rememberance of him, Luke 22: 19.
What then is the origin of Easter, often celebrated with two emblems, an egg and a rabbit?
According to the Enclopedia Britanica, “There is no indication of the observance of Easter festival in the New Testament or in the writings of the apostolic fathers. The sanctity of the special times was an idea absent from the minds of the first Christians”. VIII Pa. 828.
In the same vein, the Catholic Encyclopedia 1913, Vol 5 P. 227 noted that it was the custom of celebrating the return of the spring that gravitated to Easter.
“The egg is the emblem of germinating life of early spring… The rabbit is a pagan symbol and has always been an emblem of fertily”, the encyclopedia added.
The book, The Two Babylon by Alexander Hislop noted that Easter is not a Christian name but has its origin in Chaldean culture, and that Easter is nothing but Astarte, one of the titles of the Beltis, the queen of heaven, whose name as found by Layard on the Assyrian monuments is Ishtar.
According to Layard, the two emblems used for Easter today feature prominently during the celebration of ishtar .
