Page 10 - Easter The Untold Story

What History Reveals
Easter, as we know it, resulted from gradual change that took place during the course of centuries. A critical step was the establishment of a generally accepted day of observance.
If we examine the history of this change, we find that "the first Christians continued to observe the Jewish festivals, though in a new spirit, as commemorations of events which those festivals had foreshadowed. Thus the Passover, with a new conception added to it of Christ, as the true Paschal Lamb and the firstfruits from the dead, continued to be observed, and became the Christian Easter" (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition, article "Easter").
But who approved the change from Passover to Easter? The truth is, neither Jesus nor the apostles approved the change.
The New Catholic Encyclopedia points out: "Not only was the significance of the Jewish feast changed by the Christians, but also the date. The Jewish method of fixing the date, the 14th day of Nisan, did not confine it to any one day [of the week]; at a very early time Christians assigned their Pasch to the Sunday following the Jewish feast. By the end of the 2nd century this was the universal custom except in Asia Minor, where the Jewish dating was followed by the so-called Quartodecimans" (article "Easter").
The word Easter is used mainly in Germanic languages. Other major languages to this day use a word associated with pesach, the Hebrew word for Passover. Thus, for what the English-speaking world calls Easter, the French use the word pâques, the Italians pasqua, the Spanish pascua, the Russians paskha.
Based on the writings of Bede the Venerable, an eighth-century scholar, the term Easter has been connected with the name of an Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre. Recent linguistic studies indicate Easter comes from a word meaning the rising sun and an ancient spring festival in honor of the sun. In any case, it did not come from the Bible.
The 1611King James or Authorized Version of the Bible mistakenly used the word Easter in Acts 12:4, where the word Passover should have been used. This has been corrected in the New King James Version and in other modern translations. In fact, no other serious Bible translation follows the King James in this error.
Meaning of Passover Lost
It is clear that confusion existed in the early centuries about the celebration of Passover. By the second century many people had begun to emphasize Jesus' resurrection rather than commemorate his death. In fact, some began to attach the celebration of Christ's resurrection to Nisan 14. Nisan 14 had originally been set aside to commemorate Christ's death.
Remember the words of Jesus as he took of the Passover wine: "This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me" (1 Corinthians 11:25). Christians were originally directed by Jesus himself to change the symbols of the Passover sacrifice. However, there is no New Testament reference that Jesus or his apostles ever directed that the Passover change its significance from his sacrifice to his resurrection.