Is Easter pagan? If you Google search around you're going to find a bunch of sites saying Easter is pagan don't do it. If you're Christian you've got to not be a pagan.

You've got to be authentically Christian and reject all Easter traditions.

And today I'm going to debunk three of those allegations. First that Easter eggs are pagan. They're not. That Easter bunnies are pagan. They're not.

And then the name Easter itself is pagan. And the answer to that is kind of but let me explain. We'll do a little bit of Germanic English etymology to understand how this word Easter became.

So Easter became associated with the resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. My name is Taylor Marshall. And I'll be discussing this as a Catholic.

And I'm going to debunk the idea that Catholics practice paganism when they celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ for our justification.

And the Saint Paul says in his epistle to the Roman. So let's start off with Easter eggs. Why do we have Easter eggs? Well, there's actually a good bit of scholarship out there showing that there is no relationship between eggs or painted eggs in a pagan goddess.

There's no this online. But there is no history. There's no anthropological connection to study showing that there's a connection between eggs and a goddess. So why are eggs associated with Catholic Easter?

There are two reasons. First we go back into Jewish customs. I encourage you want to learn more about this. Check out my book The Crucified Rabbi Judaism and the origins of Catholic Christianity.

I give you 300 plus prophecies of how Christ fulfills the Old Testament prophets and not just Christ but Christ and the Catholic Church and the sacraments.

Okay, so at Passover meal and remember Christ was crucified in the context of the Passover. He is the Passover lamb. When John the baptizer goes to baptize him, he says, behold the Lamb of God. Behold him who takes away the sins of the world. That's from John the Baptist inspired by the Holy Spirit.

At the Passover meal, there was served a Passover lamb, unleavened bread, bitter herbs and an egg. An egg is also served at Passover. Moreover, in Catholic tradition, going all the way back to the second century, probably even before Christians were fasting for a number of days.

Turtolians says, two weeks, other church fathers say 40 days. This eventually becomes what we know is passion week and then the 40 or 46 days of lent in the Catholic tradition.

And during this time period, Christians said, you know, Christ offered his flesh on the cross for our salvation. Let us offer up as a sacrifice, not eating flesh. That is not eating meat for 40 days, 46 days. However, it was calculated.

In preparation to remember the death of Christ on the cross and to celebrate his resurrection on the third day. This is the tradition of lent, passion week, a passion tide, holy week and of course, good Friday.

So Christians did not eat any meat or any products from animals, land animals. That means they ate no beef, they ate no pork, they ate no chicken and they did not consume milk, which comes from a mammal, no cheese, no dairy, and they did not eat any eggs, which come from a chicken.

This means that these people, our forebears in the Catholic church, were completely deprived basically of any source of protein for 46 days.

And you can tell that they were hungry for that egg. And so people would take eggs, there'd be a more and more of a surplus of eggs because they weren't being consumed and they would paint them and they would decorate them and give them to one another as a gift so that they could eat these precious eggs on Easter Sunday.

There's also a tradition that Mary Magdalene went to the emperor and told him about Christ and she was holding an egg as a symbol of the resurrection. It's like a tomb, but inside it, you break it open, there is life inside.

And the emperor said, a man couldn't raise from the dead, no more than that egg could turn from white to red and right in the presence, the egg turned from white to red.

And so there's a tradition, especially in Russia, to die the eggs red, but they can be died any color.

It's really celebrating the resurrection of Christ in the form of something that you fasted from for 46 days.

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