The Meaning of Easter

It is doubtful that Christians who celebrate Easter take time to consider the background of that feast. They devoutly celebrate an ancient sacrificial custom thinking it all began with Jesus and the gospels. We should look more closely at the feast.

The central belief of Christianity is that Jesus was a human sacrifice for mankind. Somehow, Christians have accepted this teaching from an ancient, barbaric time, and still believe it today. They believe that Man committed something called “Original Sin” and that the only way he could achieve salvation was by means of a human sacrifice. They believe that the almighty and eternal God, who is a merciful, loving, and forgiving God, could be appeased only by this hideous and grisly torture and lynching of a human being. Because an ordinary human sacrifice would not be sufficient, the Son of God had to come down to Earth to be the sacrificial victim. He had to be scourged, driven to Golgatha under the weight of the cross, nailed to the cross, pierced with a spear, and slowly suffocated until he bled to death. Crucifixion was one of the most horrible forms of execution ever devised.

Long before Christianity, human sacrifice was an integral part of worship of the gods. Today many religions still use an altar, but the first altars were used to sacrifice human and animal victims. References in literature to the sacrifice of human individuals harks back to the days when this was a routine and deeply reverent practice. In the story of the Trojan War, Agamemnon tells his wife to prepare his daughter for her marriage. He then takes her to the shore and sacrifices her to the gods in order to obtain favorable winds for his trip to Troy. You can be sure that the story is not pure whimsy. Human sacrifice was well known in ancient Greece, as it was in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, Canaan, and Israel. At the time of Jesus, human sacrifice was a recent memory.

It is clear that back in the early history of the Israelites, human sacrifice was customary. Consider the stories of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis 22:1-19, Japhthah and his daughter in Judges 11:30-31, King Ahaz and his son in 2 Chronicles 28:3, and King Manasseh and his son in 2 Chronicles 33:6. Later in their history, the Israelites turned away from human sacrifice and declared it an abomination.
Nevertheless, the New Testament repeatedly refers to the idea that Jesus was a sacrifice for Mankind. For example, John 1:29, “Behold the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the World;” John 2:2, “He is propitiation for the sins of the world;” Matthew 20, “Á ransom for many;” Matthew 26:28, “This is my blood of the New Testament which is shed for many for the remission of sins;” Hebrews 9:23-28, “Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many;” (See also Philippians 2:17, 4:18; Romans 12:1, 15:16; 1Peter 1:18-19, 2:5; Ephesians 1:7; and Titus 2:14).

The dogma that Jesus was crucified as a form of atonement for Man’s original sin did not become established as a doctrine of the very early Church until the fourth century AD. Saint Augustine (354-430), who laid down many of the Church doctrines, including the doctrine of atonement, said that man was doomed to Hell until Jesus redeemed him. He regarded Jesus’ sacrifice “Not as payment of a debt due to God, but as an act of justice to the Devil in discharge of his fair and lawful claims.”

Like many other aspects of Christianity, the idea of propitiating a god with a human sacrifice, and even having the god himself be the sacrificial victim, was not new when the Church dreamed-up this explanation of Jesus’ crucifixion. It was borrowed from old pagan myths. I have mentioned the human sacrifices carried out by early Israelites. The Canaanites sacrificed children to the god Molech, and the prophets inveighed against such sacrificing (See Samuel 17:17; Jeremiah 7:31; Ezekiel 16:20, 20:26).

In Egypt, the priests performed human sacrifice when the Pharaoh died. The Pharaoh was believed to be a god. His family and servants were buried alive with him. Eventually the priests started substituting animals, dolls, and other forms of art for living victims. In ancient Mesopotamia archiologists have found the tombs of kings with entire households that were buried alive when the king was interred.

In India, it was the custom to perform human sacrifice in order to guarantee a good harvest and appease the gods. The victim was believed to be the god sacrificing himself, in the form of a man, to himself as a god. The ancient Khonds of India believed that their human sacrificial victim died for all mankind and became a god.

The ancient Greeks sacrificed a criminal at Rhodes after putting him in royal robes. They did this in memory of the sacrifice by Kronos of his “Only begotten Son.” Themistocles sacrificed Persian youths to Dionysus.

Needless to say, there are conflicting accounts of the crucifixion of Jesus in the different Gospels. I will spare you the little discrepancies. John puts Jesus’ death on the 14th day of the Hebrew month of Nisan. Matthew, Mark, and Luke put it on the 15th day of Nisan. All of them say it took place on Friday, but historians, looking at calendars from that period, cannot find any Friday that fell on the 14th or the 15th of Nisan. There is some question about the hour at which Jesus was crucified. Mark 15:25 says that it was the third hour. John 19:14 says Jesus was not taken away to be crucified until the 6th hour.

According to Matthew, before his crucifixion Jesus had said, “For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so will the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:40, see also Mark 8:31). The Gospels then go on to say that Jesus died on Friday night, and rose from the dead on Sunday morning. No matter how you stretch it, that is one day and two nights.

The resurrection of Jesus from the dead has been called the basis for all Christianity. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:13-14: “But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.” The celebration of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead is the most important date on the Catholics’ liturgical calendar. It is also the concoction of Paul and other writers who came long after Jesus died.

The accounts of Jesus’ resurrection are so contradictory and improbable that the whole story has to be dismissed as fiction. Matthew says that the day following Jesus crucifixion Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to the tomb (Matt 28:2), but Mark says that the two Marys and Salome went (Mark 16:1). Luke writes that Mary Magdalene went with Mary the mother of James, Joanna, and other women (Luke 24:10). Matthew says that the stone was removed by an angel when the women arrived at Jesus’ tomb (Matt. 28:2), but Mark and Luke say it had already been removed (Mark 16:2-4, Luke 24:1-2). Matthew says that when the women arrived, the angel was outside the tomb (Matt 28:2), but Mark says the angel was inside the tomb (Mark 16:5) and Luke says there were two men inside the tomb (Luke 24:4).

In Matthew the two women rush from the tomb to tell the disciples (Matt 28:8-9), but Mark says that they said nothing to anyone (Mark 16:8). Luke says that they reported the story to the disciples (Luke 24:9-11). John tells a very different story from the others (John 20:1-18). Later post-resurrection stories are also in conflict (compare Matt 28:16-20 with Luke 24:13-53, and John 20:19).

The first Gospel written was the Gospel of Mark. Scholars can tell that the whole story of the resurrection of Jesus in Mark was added to the Gospel by somebody else long after the original version was written. Originally, the Gospel of Mark ended at Chapter16:8. That is the part where the women find the empty tomb and are told by a “young man” that Jesus has risen. The part of the Gospel after that, in which Jesus appears to various people, was added by later writers who wanted to supply authenticity to the myth of Jesus’ resurrection. As Professor Bart D. Ehrman of the University of North Carolina says: “These verses [Mark 16:9-20] are absent from our two oldest and best manuscripts of Mark’s Gospel, along with other important witnesses; the transition between this passage and the one preceding it is hard to understand...and there are a large number of words and phrases in the passage that are not found elsewhere in Mark.”

If you consider the fact that the Gospels of Mathew and Luke were based on the gospel of Mark, then it becomes clear that the Gospels’ story of Jesus’ resurrection is pure myth that was made-up long after the Gospels were written. The earliest Christian scriptures were the Epistles of Paul, yet Paul does not give any details about Jesus’ resurrection other than referring to it (See Rom. 6:5, 1 Cor. 15:13).

While it is possible that a man named Jesus (Yeshua) actually lived, it is certain that he was not God, did not perform real miracles, and did not arise from the dead. Easter is a nice time of year, but it would actually be more reverent toward nature to celebrate the day as the return of warm weather and spring foliage rather than to perpetuate the myth of the resurrection of a Jewish preacher 2000 years ago.