Easter Paganism?
Is Easter Polluted with Paganism?
“You may not get any chocolate bunnies this Easter, but you’re bound to stumble across an article or meme suggesting that the story of Jesus Christ’s resurrection from the dead is just a reincarnation of some pagan myth. Whether it’s Ishtar, Osiris, or Attis, these claims are tantalizing but devoid of scholarly content–much like the sugar rush of the chocolate bunny, with its deficit of actual nourishment.
Claims like these are at least as old as James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, published in 1890. However, they circulate routinely in new packaging. Unfortunately, the public tends to remain ignorant of the results of alternative scholarship. Sensationalism (like sex) sells. So does controversy. And when the sensation or the controversy revolves around beliefs that millions believe in whole-heartedly, sorting fact from fiction becomes increasingly difficult …” [read the rest of my article “The Myth of the Pagan Origins of Easter" over at Intellectual Takeout].
Charnock on Christ’s Redemptive Work
The Puritan pastor Stephen Charnock has a glorious description of Christ’s work of redemption:
It was in him God tore up the foundations of the devil’s empire, disarmed all the curses of the law, overthrew the false conceits of the world, knocked off the fetters of their captivity, demolished the power of death, snatched souls from the flames of hell, unbarred the gates of heaven, prepared eternal mansions, ‘laid his beams in the waters,’ the foundations of an happy eternity in the misery, afflictions, death, blood of his only Son. He restored man to glory by weakness, to wisdom by foolishness; he made the law lose its sting in the sides of him whom it struck, took away our captivity by misery, flung death to the ground by death, quenched hell by its own flames, opened heaven by a cross, cemented an everlasting habitation by blood, and condemned sin by a sacrifice for it. By a crucified man, and a weak flesh encompassed with infirmity, the God of heaven subdues the god of the world, destroys the empire of the proud spirits, and subdues principalities and powers under his feet, who besides their usurped authority had a vast ambition to preserve it, and a strength and subtlety unconquerable by the power of man; and hereby shows, that no evil was so great but his almighty arm could put it in execution, what his immense wisdom had provided as a remedy against it.
- Charnock, Works, vol. 4, p. 151.
May the peace of Christ be with you in this Holy Week!