The claim comes in two versions. One says Easter is the goddess Ishtar under a new name. The other says it began as a spring festival for an Anglo-Saxon goddess, usually spelled Eostre, which the church quietly took over. The Ishtar version collapses on inspection. The Eostre version contains one narrow truth: the English word Easter probably grew from that goddess’s name. The celebration is centuries older than the English word, and from the start it has marked one event, a tomb found empty.
R.L. Solberg, a professor of theology who runs an apologetics ministry called the Biblical Roots, tested the claim by reading primary historical documents and the writings of the early church fathers.
Testing the Ishtar claim
A borrowing claim makes predictions. If the early church absorbed an Ishtar festival, a living Ishtar cult should appear in the world the first Christians knew. Similar rituals should turn up, or a document showing one practice becoming the other. At minimum, the two names should be related as words.
Solberg reports finding none of this. Ishtar was a Mesopotamian goddess of love and sex, and by his account, “worship of Ishtar actually faded out about 400 years even before Jesus showed up.” The names do not match either. He notes that Ishtar “translates into English as Esther, not Easter.” His verdict: “it turns out there’s literally no historical or religious connection at all in the name Ishtar.”
The dating of Ishtar’s decline is Solberg’s report. He does not name the specific texts behind it in this conversation, so it is a claim a reader can check, not one this piece can settle. The Ishtar theory needs more than that date to survive, however. It rests on two words that sound alike in modern English. The first Christians spoke Greek, Aramaic and Latin, and as the next sections show, they called the feast by a name that sounds nothing like Ishtar. A resemblance that exists only in a much later language cannot explain what happened before that language existed.
The narrow truth about Eostre
The Eostre version deserves more care because part of it holds. Solberg grants the linguistic point: “the English word, Easter, probably derived from some version of Ostra.”
He then limits what that point can carry: “But there’s no link between the two celebrations or between the goddess and between the resurrection of Jesus.” A word passing from one use to another is a fact about language. Proving that a practice passed between religions takes evidence of another kind.
The gap shows most clearly in what each kind of festival is for. Solberg describes the pagan outlook as one where everything shares one divine reality. Its gods are often flawed and jealous, and worshipers try to appease them for a good harvest or a fertile womb. Christianity starts from the opposite premise. God is not part of creation. He made it and stands over it. So the Christian feast runs in the other direction. The worshipers are thanking God for a gift already given in his Son, who died, was buried and rose. They are not offering gifts in hope of a return.
That is the basis for Solberg’s statement, “So Easter has nothing to do with fertility, has nothing to do with springtime renewal.” He calls it “a past looking holiday.” A fertility rite looks forward to a crop that has not come. The resurrection feast looks back to something that already happened.
The feast is older than its English name
Nearly every form of the pagan accusation hangs on the English word, which makes the word’s age the decisive question. Solberg says that the early Christian writings he read, “first, second, third century writings, none of them use the word Easter.” They use forms of the Greek word for Passover, which comes from the Hebrew Pesach and is often written Pascha in English. Most of the world still uses a form of that older name. Spanish and French are among his examples.
The Passover vocabulary ties the feast to Israel’s deliverance from Egypt and to the timing of Jesus’ death. Paul makes the link explicit: “For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us” (1 Corinthians 5:7). The earliest name for the celebration points to Jewish Scripture.
When did English speakers start saying Easter? Solberg could not find the first instance: “I was unable to discover the exact first time that the English word Easter was used in relation to the celebration of the resurrection.” Reasoning from how English developed, he estimates that “the earliest it could have been, would’ve been the seventh century or so,” and adds, “It’s possible it may not have been until the ninth or 10th or 11th century.” These are estimates, and he presents them that way.
Even the earliest estimate leaves the conclusion intact. As Solberg puts it, “by the time that was used, people had been celebrating the resurrection for centuries.” A name that arrives centuries after a celebration began cannot be its origin. At most it explains what one language group later called it.
Why that name took hold is still unresolved. Solberg mentions two theories. One links it to the timing of the Anglo-Saxon goddess. The other traces it to the word for the direction east, where the sun rises on Easter morning, which he connects to the old Hebrew habit of orienting toward the east. He does not choose between them: “I was unable to satisfy my curiosity enough to have a strong opinion on it.”
Could the church have absorbed local customs anyway?
This is the strongest form of the objection. Even if the word came late, perhaps the church gradually blended into its pagan surroundings, and the English name only labeled what had already happened.
The surviving writings cut against that picture. Many works of the early church fathers are arguments against paganism, written by Christians surrounded by Roman religion and defending worship of the one true God. Solberg, who read those writings in his research, asks, “So how in the world would the early church get to the point that they would adopt a pagan celebration.” He says he cannot find a historical thread that would lead early believers to take up a fertility ritual.
This is an inference from the character of the sources, not a document that rules out every local custom in every region. Its force is that it moves the burden of proof. A borrowing claim has to show where the borrowing happened, against the grain of what the church was writing at the time. The Eostre theory, as usually told, does not do that.
There is also a problem of method. Solberg warns that historians “have such a tendency to anachronistically read our modern understanding into these old documents.” The rabbit is a good test case. In earlier popular culture a white rabbit could stand for the purity of Mary, and rabbits emerging from the ground could suggest rebirth, according to Solberg. Today many assume the rabbit means fertility. The swastika shows the same error in sharper form. Before the Nazis it was a Hindu sign of abundance and a good life, and reading its modern meaning back into ancient Indian texts would distort them. Projecting today’s egg hunts back onto the early church makes the same mistake, crediting the first Christians with connections a modern skeptic makes.
Lisa Fields applies the same discipline to reading the Bible. Readers are tempted to push their own ideas into an ancient author’s words, and the first question for a holiday or a passage is what it meant to those who first practiced or wrote it.
Why the date moves
Easter shifts around the calendar, and some take that as the mark of a seasonal or lunar pagan festival. The history points to the Hebrew calendar instead.
Passover falls on the fourteenth of the Hebrew month of Nisan, a date set in Exodus 12, so it lands on a different weekday each year. All four Gospels place the discovery of the empty tomb on the first day of the week (Matthew 28:1; Mark 16:2; Luke 24:1; John 20:1). In Solberg’s account, that left early Christians with two reasonable options. One group, whose name he translates from Latin as fourteeners, kept the feast on the fourteenth of Nisan. The other kept it on the first day of the week, when the tomb was found empty. He describes the dispute as lasting at least the first three centuries and says “it was an honest disagreement.”
According to Solberg, the Council of Nicaea moved the church toward a shared answer. Constantine had no real authority over the church, he notes, but “What he cared most about was unity,” and he backed a Sunday. The church eventually settled on “the first Sunday after the Paschal full moon.” The date moves because it still follows the lunar timing of Passover.
Solberg also connects the resurrection to the Hebrew feast of firstfruits, which fell on the Sunday after Passover. Paul uses that imagery: “But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept” (1 Corinthians 15:20). The language Paul chose for the resurrection comes from Israel’s calendar.
One more fact reframes the whole quarrel. Solberg points out that “the Bible does not command or require us to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus.” With no commanded day, he concludes, “That means there is no wrong day to celebrate it.” A Christian who skips Easter breaks no biblical command. Solberg’s only caution concerns the reason: “don’t do that because you think it’s pagan.” That reason fails every test above.
Eggs, bunnies and the line between celebrating and worshiping
The customs raise a different question, about worship rather than origins. Celebration is public rejoicing over a person or an event. Worship is giving something the devotion of your heart. Wedding guests celebrate the couple without worshiping them, and no one at a birthday party bows to the child. By that measure, Solberg argues, no one at even a fully secular Easter is worshiping the bunny, the eggs or the idea of fertility. He treats those customs as religiously neutral, much like fireworks on the Fourth of July, and sees an egg hunt after a Sunday service centered on Scripture and the gospel as a sign of priorities in the right order.
Worship still matters in his account. “every human being worships something,” Solberg says, and “It’s what you worship that we need to be mindful of.” The risk he names is a present one. Going back about fifty years, he says, the American understanding of Easter was far more religious, and now two Easters have grown apart: a Christian feast of the resurrection and a secular holiday of colored eggs. He states it this way: “Easter doesn’t have pagan roots,” and then, “it’s gonna have a pagan future if Christians don’t remember what it’s all about.”
Lisa Fields offers a way to read that split: “the presence of counterfeits is proof that a authentic exists.” She adds, “A counterfeit shows up because authentic exists not the other way around.” A commercial Easter copies something real, which gives a reason to look for the original.
For those who still find the customs troubling, Solberg’s answer is practical. Call it Resurrection Sunday, set the bunnies and eggs aside, and keep the point of the day.
What remains open
The record settles more than the online claim expects. The Ishtar link has no historical, religious or linguistic support. The Eostre link holds only at the level of one English word. The feast went by the name of Passover for centuries before that word existed. Its moving date comes from the Hebrew calendar, and the earliest Christian writers were arguing against paganism.
The open question is narrow: when and why English speakers began calling the feast Easter. That belongs to the history of the English language and leaves the origin of the celebration untouched.
The feast was never built on its name. It was built on a claim about a tomb, and Paul tied everything to that claim: “And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17). Etymology can tell us where a word came from. Only the evidence about that tomb can tell us whether the feast celebrates something that happened.