Page 3 - Easter The Untold Story

EASTER AS AN ENGLISH WORD
The Oxford English Dictionary (second edition, 1989) cites Bede the Venerable, an English monk and scholar (circa A.D. 673-735) for the derivation of Easter from Eostre. Eostre was an Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring. Her festival was celebrated at the vernal equinox.
Some conclude, based on words origins alone, that Easter is therefore pagan (not from the Bible). They believe that while language may change over time, the original sense of the word continues to reflect its true meaning.
Recent scholarship recognizes that a word's derivation may have little or no bearing upon the concept to which it refers in common usage. Moreover, words simply change meaning with time. (Readers familiar with the King James Version of the Bile can appreciate that even common words from Elizabethan times no longer maintain a similar sense today. For example, "delicacies" in Revelation 18:3 now denotes "wantonness" and "suffer" in Matthew 19:14 has the sense of "let" or "allow".)
For many European languages, the corresponding words for Easter derive from the Greek word pascha, which comes from the Hebrew word pesach (passover):
Therefore, if the earliest sense of a word (and all that it denotes) determines true meaning. Easter would be pagan in origin for English-speaking peoples, but by the same logic the Easter celebration would be biblical for non-English speaking peoples who know it by a name derived from pascha.
French
paques
Italian
pasqua
Spanish
pascua
Dutch
pasq
Latin
pascha
Russian
paskha