Easter traditions are deeply engrained in cultures across the globe.

Adherents feel a sense of relief when Lent, a 40-day period during which worshippers try to emulate Christ’s suffering by fasting and abstaining from certain pleasures, is finally over—and Easter Sunday has arrived.

Many children in America and other Western nations awaken to elaborate “egg hunts” staged by their parents. The acts of painting intricate, colorful designs on eggs and enjoying chocolate rabbits, marshmallow peeps and other themed sugary treats help make this time of year especially memorable.

Alongside these and other activities, parents seek to impress upon their family the significance of the day. Their explanation could sound like, “Son, on Friday we commemorated the crucifixion and death of our Savior, so today—Easter Sunday—we celebrate His resurrection.”

In other countries, the traditions of Easter Sunday vary depending on culture—yet they are still based on the same religious meaning.

Jerusalem, where the most well-known Easter celebrations take place, typically becomes jam-packed with worshippers from all across the world. Along the famous cobble street Via Dolorosa—Latin for “Way of Suffering”—thousands of parishioners walk the path Christ is believed to have taken on His way to Golgotha. To them, and millions of like-minded believers, Easter is the principal feast of the liturgical year.

Elsewhere, a group of devout women in Peshawar, Pakistan, gathers around a picture of “Jesus” to reflect on the significance of the day and give prayers of thanksgiving. Farther east, thousands of South Korean Catholics attend services.

Later that evening, several German Christians in Europe light a customary bonfire to protect them against the cold. Meanwhile, during a traditional ceremony in Bulgaria, priests bless painted red eggs, which symbolize spring. And several time zones away, an Armenian priest in New York City releases doves to illustrate the original 12 apostles being commissioned to “spread the gospel.”

Certainly, long-held traditions such as Ash Wednesday, Lent, Good Friday, sunrise services, hot-cross buns, Easter eggs, and rabbits—which form the building blocks upon which Easter is established—must have deep ancient roots. If Easter traditions are all about the Christ of the Bible, then they should be found within the pages of God’s Word.

But are they?

While Acts 12:4 is the only time the word “Easter” is mentioned in the King James translation of the Bible, the customs of this holiday appeared long before Christ’s Resurrection.

Origin of Easter

American novelist Henry James wrote the following about traditions: “It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition…”

Throughout the centuries, millions of people have been persuaded into believing that Easter’s purpose is to honor Christ’s death and resurrection. Yet this age-old global tradition can be traced back to thousands of years before Jesus was born.

“That God sacrificed his only Son for the salvation of the world…is so mystical, so remote…yet the extraordinary fact is that a similar belief ranges all through the ancient religions, and can be traced back to the earliest times,” Edward Carpenter wrote in Pagan and Christian Creeds.

Easton’s 1897 Bible Dictionary explained that the term Easter was “originally a Saxon word (Eostre), denoting a goddess of the Saxons, in honour of whom sacrifices were offered about the time of the Passover.”

Easter customs involving the celebration of death and resurrection originate from pagan rites. In his book The Two Babylons, Alexander Hislop explained, “Among the Pagans this Lent seems to have been an indispensable preliminary to the great annual festival in commemoration of the death and resurrection of Tammuz, which was celebrated by alternate weeping and rejoicing.”

An article on Christianity.com acknowledged that “the origins of Easter are wrapped up in a celebration of seasonal renewal that has taken place in numerous cultures for thousands of years around the time of the Spring Equinox.”

The Bible records in Genesis that Nimrod, also known as Tammuz or Baal, was the founding father and builder of Babylon. His mother-wife, Semiramis, also called Ishtar, was Babylon’s first queen. She was worshipped as a goddess.

Ashtoreth (Easter), Baal’s mother and wife according to historians, was considered the “Great Goddess” throughout the ancient world, in Greece, Germany, Babylon and Phoenicia. This generally occurred in conjunction with the worship of Baal (El or Tammuz).

This is made evident in the book Did God Have a Wife? by William G. Dever. He wrote: “In earlier Canaan, the Great Goddess may be a cosmic deity who could be known by several names: Asherah; ‘Anat; Astarte; or Ba‘alat or Elath (the feminine forms of ‘Ba‘al’ and ‘El’).”

“Her role in the cult is as the consort of El, the principal male deity of the pantheon, as ‘Mother of the Gods,’” Dr. Dever further wrote.

Mr. Hislop elaborated on the origin of Easter (or Astarte) in The Two Babylons: “It bears its Chaldean origin on its very forehead. Easter is nothing else than Astarte, one of the titles of Beltis, the queen of heaven…That name, as found by Layard on the Assyrian monuments, is Ishtar.”

In nearly all Semitic dialects, “Ishtar” is pronounced “Easter.” Easter festivities extensively refer to celebrating the personage Ishtar, Ashtoreth and the “queen of heaven,” who has many interchangeable names. Each year, citizens in pagan nations celebrated her son’s death and resurrection during spring.

Plainly, this festival was initiated long before Christ walked the Earth.

Easter and the Bible

Ancient Israel incorporated some of the practices of surrounding nations, and Easter was no exception. It is in this regard that the holiday is mentioned in the Bible.

After the house of Israel was divided into the northern 10 tribes and Judah in the south, King Manasseh of Judah “set a graven image of the grove that he had made in the house [the Temple of God]” (II Kgs. 21:7).

But to what is “the grove” referring?

The Hebrew word asherah, with two exceptions, is always translated as “grove” in the King James Version of the Bible. Smith’s Bible Dictionary defines asherah in the following way: “The name of a Phoenician goddess, or rather of the idol itself…Asherah is closely connected with Ashtoreth and her worship…Ashtoreth being, perhaps, the proper name of the goddess, while Asherah is the name of her image or symbol, which was of wood.”

Dr. Dever, in his book, added, “Thus it seems clear that originally in ancient Israel there was a Goddess named ‘Asherah,’ who was associated with living trees and hilltop forest sanctuaries, and who could sometimes be symbolized by a wooden pole or an image of a tree.”

He went on, “It is noteworthy that in at least a handful of cases, the term asherah must refer to the Goddess Asherah herself, not merely to a ‘symbol.’”

Thus, when Israel’s ruler erected a figure of “the grove,” he may have actually set up an image of Asherah in God’s Temple!

Throughout Israel’s history, its people attempted to serve false gods alongside the God of the Bible. The book of Jeremiah makes clear that families in Israel also worshipped Easter—the “queen of heaven.”

Notice: “The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead their dough, to make cakes to the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto other gods” (Jer. 7:18).

Stephen Langdon wrote in his book Tammuz and Ishtar that “The cult of a goddess, who is supposed to be of Babylonian origin, was introduced into Judea in the age of Jeremiah under the name…‘queen of heaven,’ to whom the Jews offered Ishtar cakes, precisely as the Babylonians offered to their goddess.”

Israel’s devotion to false deities is also engraved in the annals of secular sources. Archeological evidence indicates that the nation of Israel fell into keeping Easter, thinking they could worship Ishtar alongside the true God. Archaeologists have found tomb inscriptions in Israel that read, “Yahweh and his Asherah,” erroneously suggesting God had a goddess as wife!

The Biblical Archaeology Society reported that “The finds from Kuntillet ‘Ajrud [a location in the northeast part of the Sinai Peninsula] were fantastic. The zingers were two large pithoi, or storage jars, that weighed about 30 pounds each. The now-reconstructed pithoi are painted with deities, humans, animals and symbols, and feature a number of inscriptions, including three that refer to Yahweh and his asherah or Asherah, depending on your interpretation. Asherah is a pagan goddess. Was she God’s wife?” The article went on to emphasize the difficulty of correctly interpreting such drawings and inscriptions.

When God started to work with Israel early on, His instructions through Moses were clear: “You shall not plant you a grove of any trees near unto the altar of the Lord your God, which you shall make you” (Deut. 16:21).

Moreover, “you shall destroy their altars,” referring to the surrounding nations’ many idols, “and break down their images, and cut down their groves, and burn their graven images with fire” (7:5). These directions from God were unmistakably plain.

But, time and time again, “the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord, and forgot the Lord their God, and served Baalim [plural of Baal] and the groves [Asherah]” (Judg. 3:7).

Israel’s behavior was clearly evil in God’s sight!

Even King Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, rejected God’s counsel and was persuaded by his foreign wives to worship Ashtoreth. As a result, the house of Israel split into north and south—directly because “Solomon went after Ashtoreth the goddess of the Zidonians” (I Kgs. 11:5).

In biblical times, without any exceptions, God’s true servants never celebrated Easter to honor Him and Israel was directly forbidden to have any part in it.

Lost in Translation

How did Easter—clearly a festival not sanctioned by God—become “Christian”?

“The idea of Christ’s resurrection was injected into the old practice of Easter observance and not the other way around” (Early Gentile Christianity and its Hellenistic Background).

The Greek word translated “Easter” in Acts 12:4 is pascha. This actually refers to Passover, which was always kept on the 15th to the 21st of the Hebrew month of Nisan (Abib). It was Passover, not Easter, that God commanded His people to observe, and they did so throughout early New Testament times—they also took the Passover symbols on Nisan 14 as Christ instructed (I Cor. 11:23-26).

“Easter” in Acts 12:4 is a gross mistranslation.

But slowly, Easter, with all its pagan customs, replaced Passover. Disagreement arose surrounding how to correctly observe it, which led to the “Quartodeciman Controversy.”

The following quote from the 11th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica shows how Easter was “Christianized”: “Polycarp, the disciple of St. John the Evangelist and bishop of Smyrna, visited Rome in 159 to confer with Anicetus, the bishop of that see, on the subject; and urged the tradition, which he had received from the apostle, of observing the fourteenth day…A final settlement of the dispute was one among the other reasons which led Constantine to summon the council of Nicaea in 325…The decision of the council was unanimous that Easter was to be kept on Sunday, and on the same Sunday throughout the world, and ‘that none should hereafter follow the blindness of the Jews’…”

In his book History of the Christian Church, Peter Schaff wrote, “At Nicaea, therefore, the Roman and Alexandrian usage with respect to Easter triumphed, and the Judaizing practice of the Quartodecimanians [those obeying God], who always celebrated Easter [actually Passover] on the fourteenth of Nisan, became thenceforth a heresy.”

Britannica stated, “There is no indication of the observance of the Easter festival in the New Testament, or in the writings of the apostolic Fathers…The first Christians continued to observe the Jewish festivals [God’s festivals of Leviticus 23], though in a new spirit…Thus the Passover, with a new conception added to it of Christ as the true Paschal Lamb…continued to be observed.”

The apostle Paul exhorted New Testament brethren to continue to keep these Holy Days: “For even Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us: therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (I Cor. 5:7-8). Matthew 26:19 states that the “disciples did as Jesus had appointed them”—He had commanded them to make “ready the Passover.”

In Matthew 28:20, Christ also instructed His disciples “to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you…”

Clearly, Jesus commanded the Passover—connected with the Feast of Unleavened Bread—to be kept as a “statute forever” (Lev. 23:31). In contrast, Easter is a human tradition that was never commanded by the God of the Bible.

Mystery Unwrapped

Every child loves to receive a gift, but does not know its contents until it is unwrapped. Professing Christians similarly cherish their traditions in keeping Easter, but are blind to its real meaning or “content.”

Very few take the time to truly seek God’s perspective. It is much easier to continue attending sunrise services, painting eggs and focusing on shared experiences.

Easter is a pagan festival concealed in “Christian giftwrap” to make it acceptable to the masses. But when this day is “unwrapped,” the true content is unmistakable. You have seen the parallels between the pagan worship in ancient times and present-day Easter celebrations are painfully obvious.

The popular concepts and traditions of Easter have convinced many that this day is all about Christ—but when exposed, it has everything to do with a pagan deity.

Today, the ancient unbiblical Easter tradition is still celebrated worldwide. Millions gather annually to celebrate the death of their “savior” (on Good Friday) and his resurrection (on Easter Sunday). They sincerely believe that they honor Christ, but little do they know that they are unwittingly serving “another Jesus”! (See II Corinthians 11:4.)

With the wrappings of Easter removed, it becomes plain that any attempt to Christianize the holiday is in “vain” (Mark 7:7).

To more fully understand Easter and its customs—as well as “another Jesus”—read The True Origin of Easter and The True Jesus Christ – Unknown to Christianity.