Dan Snow's History Hit - The Truth About Easter

Episode Date: April 2, 2021

In one of the most popular episodes from our archive, Dan is joined by Francesca Stavrakopoulou to discuss the history and myths that surround Easter. Francesca Stavrakopoulou is Professor of Hebrew Bible & Ancient Religion at Exeter University. Her research is primarily focused on ancient Israelite and Judahite religions, and portrayals of the religious past in the Hebrew Bible. She is interested in biblical traditions and religious practices most at odds with Western cultural preferences.

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Today is the beginning of the Easter weekend here in the UK. Everyone's chilling out, everyone's in the garden, shivering. As people do, those time-hallowed British things, you might like to listen to this episode of Dan Snow's History Hit, which is a rerun. It's one of our most popular episodes ever. We talk to Francesca Stavrakopoulou about the Bible, about Easter. She's a professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at Exeter University. She's known as the atheist who loves the Bible. And she is on to talk all about where Easter came from. The myth. You'll have all heard the myth that there was some pagan deity called something like Easter. Well, it's not true, as Francesca will

tell you. I hope everyone enjoys this podcast as much as people did the first time round. It broke all our records years ago when we first recorded this and broadcast it. If you want to go back and listen to some deep, deep history, the archive of Dan Snow's history, you can do so at historyhit.tv. No ads over there. For a small subscription, you get access to the Netflix for History. Hundreds of hours of history documentary. Thousands of podcasts. They're all there. Go and wallow in them,

binge them all this Easter weekend. But in the meantime, enjoy Francesca Stavrokopoulou. Hello, Professor, how are you? Hi, I'm very well, thank you. Thank you for that amazing introduction. Well, I mean, it's the least I can do. I quite like being a master. You are the master of all you survey. And today we are surveying Easter. Yes. Which moves around, which we can discuss later. I've never really understood that.

But people get very excited about Easter. Let me briefly say, because it's hard in modern Christian slash post-Christian society, everyone gets a bit more excited about Christmas. But every time I go to church at Christmas, when I have to do with my in-laws and things, you basically get shouted at by the priest for not going to church at Easter and only going at Christmas. So what is it with Christians and Easter? Is this the big one? Yeah, Easter is absolutely the big one, bigger than christmas and because the whole point of christianity is that it has as its very center the notion that a god died and then rose again

and this wasn't just some kind of you know fancy party trick this is the idea that this is a deity that became flesh became human and actually you know, went through horrendous torture and pain and humiliation and shame, only to then rise again from the dead three days later. So this is the big one. And in terms of Christian theology, so in other words, the way that Christians understand the world and their relationship with God and their place in the world, this is the moment that basically they are promised an eternal life. So in other words, we can cast off our biological, physical bodies, death will happen, but it doesn't defeat us. We will continue to exist after death because

Jesus has proved that this is possible and he's sort of shown us the way. And all you've got to do is basically follow Jesus, believe in him and subscribe to all of those various terms and conditions that Christianity imposes and you know Bob's your uncle or rather Jesus is your messiah and and you've got eternal life okay well let's go back as you so brilliantly always do to primary sources the historicity of easter and the resurrection story is this is this around from right from the beginning of christian i mean is this the key i mean like for example this is more important than the virgin birth in terms of the spread of very very early christianity is it more important than the miracles and the loaves and the fishes it's the thing that everyone goes right from the beginning we're going to get excited about this yeah this is the key thing so our earliest written sources um are the new testament writings so they're the

earliest um literature that we have now that reflects what the first followers of jesus um what we're sort of saying about this guy and paul is our first historical witness if you like and i'm using witness in that very loose sense because because he never actually met Jesus when he was alive. He supposedly encounters the risen Christ, you know, several decades, basically, after he's supposed to have died. So, you know, this is basically a guy who is so, he's a Jewish guy. He was at one point a persecutor of these, what he felt were basically heretical Jews who were following Jesus and believed in the stuff that Jesus said and did. He used to persecute them. He then has this encounter with the risen Christ and he's converted. And he then goes around preaching, writing letters to various early Christian communities all around the Eastern Mediterranean and basically saying that this is God made flesh he resurrected from the dead um on the third day

you know he'd been buried for a couple of days resurrected on the third day and this is the moment of what he calls God's salvation it's a turning point in cosmic history. And this is the point at which he realizes that he can be saved through belief in this risen Christ. So it's one of the earliest, if you like, traditions within Christianity. It comes before all of the stuff that we read about in terms of his miracles and all that kind of stuff, you know, supposedly the virgin birth, the star of Bethlehem, all of that comes much later because the gospels are written after Paul was writing. So Paul is our earliest kind of written source. And he doesn't really talk about things like the virgin birth or anything like that.

He doesn't give a monkeys about that. What he cares about is this idea that Jesus was resurrected from the dead. Which is why we should call Christianity Paulinity. Exactly. Or Pauline for short yeah exactly like I mean but obviously he's but he was in he was just like one of the you know history is always written by the winners isn't it and there were other churches particularly the church the early church in Jerusalem um that Paul basically seems to have had a lot of arguments with um and it's his version of Christianity that sort of won out at the end of the day, rather than the Palestinian version of Christianity.

So we don't know the extent to which some of their beliefs about this risen deity might have differed from the version that we've got in Paul's letters in the New Testament. But that's basically what Christianity, as we understand it today, that's what it's based on. OK, so let's talk about the timing. okay so let's talk about the timing yeah and then let's get into some of the exciting and dangerous territory around because christmas we know there was always a midwinter festival around that time now easter always strikes me it's the the days are getting longer the daffodils are coming out here in the uk and the leaves are coming on the trees so did numerous pre-christian pagan societies have a kind of spring awakening festival? Yeah, of course they did. I've been, and the weird thing is though, is that in, particularly in the UK and in the US, we get really obsessed about, oh, you know, is Easter originally a pagan festival? But really

the secret of Easter is that it was originally in a sense, a Jewish festival, because you really need to understand Easter and its timings. You need to understand the Jewish context of the events around the stories of Jesus' death and resurrection. So Jesus was Jewish and according to the gospel texts, he goes to Jerusalem for Passover. So Passover is the huge Jewish festival that happens around the first full moon of the month of Nisan. So Jews operated on a lunar calendar and so jesus as a good jew would have gone to jerusalem and this is what's celebrated by christians with the palm sunday stuff you know when jesus rides in on a donkey and everyone's waving tree branches at him so he goes to jerusalem he causes some kind of controversy he kicks off in the jerusalem temple

and he's arrested by the Romans who were in charge at the time. They're the ones that crucify him. So they basically put him to death as a criminal. So Passover is the big festival around which Christian Easter is then associated. So it's known as, it's Pesach, it's the Hebrew word for Passover that becomes Pascha within the Greek tradition. And so Christians very, very early on, Christians were already, well, they were firstly, they were Jewish and they were already associating themselves with this very Jewish festival, which is in itself a springtime festival. It's the first full moon of spring, essentially. And so it's a time of celebrating rebirth and fertility, the regeneration of all forms of life, including the cosmos. So Christians say before sort of before the Council of Nicaea, which is in 325, they were celebrating.

They were either celebrating the resurrection of Christ on the day of Passover itself or on the Sunday after Passover, because the gospel writers say that when the women go to the tomb that Jesus was laid in, it's the first day of Passover itself or on the Sunday after Passover, because the gospel writers say that when the women go to the tomb that Jesus was laid in, it's the first day of the week. And the first day of the week is a Sunday. It's the day after Shabbat. So some are celebrating on the Sunday after Passover. Some are celebrating it on Passover. Some are also celebrating it according to the solar calendar, which was underscored the Roman Empire's calculation of time and events and rituals. So people are celebrating it in all sorts of different ways, but it's always tied to the spring. So when we talk about, oh, is Easter basically, you know,

is it hijacking sort of European springtime festivals, a pagan festival? Well, it was already hijacking a Jewish festival in the first place, which was already associated with spring. So the shifting kind of date that we get depends on whether some Christians, so like Eastern Orthodox Christians still operate on an older version of the calendar, which is based on the cycles of the moon. So they're much more in keeping with the Jewish traditions of the earliest Christian movement. Whereas Western Christians, so Catholic, Roman Catholic Christians and now Protestants, they operate on a different solar calendar. So basically

it means that Easter is always a bit out of kilter, it moves around, it's a movable feast. But essentially, yes, it's a springtime festival. Now, whether it originally is named in the sort of Germanic and English languages, the name Easter, some people have said, derives in the sort of germanic and english languages the name easter some people have said derives from the name of a pre-christian pagan germanic goddess but there's no there's no sort of real evidence for that our only evidence for that is um is one text in in the writings of the venerable bead that very famous english monk who was writing, you know, basically around sort of the 7th century, early 8th century. And he wrote a history of Christianity and the history of England. And he basically said, oh, yeah, the Passover or the Pascha celebration of Christians is being identified with this worship of this particular spring goddess,

this pagan spring goddess, whose name basically gives us the name Easter. So we don't really know. I mean, yeah, it's kind of pagan in the sense that we've got bunnies and we've got eggs, we've got all those, you know, the signs of the regeneration of life, which naturally kind of align really neatly with the idea, with the Christian theological idea that Jesus is life and then death and then resurrecting to life again. It's all about the regeneration of cosmic fertility. So that's it in a nutshell, but I know that's quite complicated. That is extremely complicated. I mean, you mentioned the gathering at Nicaea there.

Yeah. You've got the Synod of Whitby going on here in the British Isles, where they were arguing about the date of Easter. And I mean, I didn't want to go all down here, but let's do this because it's quite funny. It didn't that come about because they had to work out the Irish and then the continental traditions of Christianity had different Easters, if you obviously tell me if I'm wrong. And then wasn't there an issue with the ruler of Northumbria and his wife were celebrating different Easters, and there was a problem with her observing a period of celibacy. And then they ended up having to have loads of weeks of the year when they weren't having sex they had to get easter sorted they could all agree on basically like

most good religious traditions it but it boils down to food and sex and so what happens is that it's the 7th century um kingdom of northumbria you've got king osway who's who's king of in this particular little and provincial kingdom um he's on the kind of Irish or Celtic calendar for Easter. So it's a solar calendar, but it's out of sync with the Roman calendar that his wife is on. She's on the Julian calendar. And so basically all the way through her period of Lent, so you didn't just give up eating nice stuff for Lent, you also gave up sex. So she's basically not able to have sex and not able to eat all the nice food that he begins then to eat because Easter for him comes a lot earlier than her Easter does. And so within his royal household, yeah, there's a lack of sex and she's having to watch her husband feast on all this delicious food. And so that's when the synod of Whitby is

called so they can finally try to align the different calendars and and that's you know and that's what happens so everybody ends up on the same calendar for Easter in in you know the British Isles roughly um but all over the world still Easter is celebrated by different Christian groups at different times so when I go back to Greece for Greek Easter, most usually that's at least a few weeks after Catholic or Roman Western Easter. So you kind of get to have double the Easter eggs really, which is quite nice. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. This is the truth about Easter. More after this. experts. We've got the big topics, from ancient Vietnam to the fall of Rome. Subscribe to the Ancients on History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History,

we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. That would not be the last time that a king's sexual desires radically transformed British religion and constitutional matters. Exactly.

Exactly. Sex, basically, it always comes down to sex. Francesca, let's talk then about some of the traditions around Easter. You mentioned eggs and bunnies and things. Are those just plainly pagan or are they a modern invention? Have they got anything to do with the Christian story? No, they haven't got anything to do with the Christian story. There are no bunnies in the Bible. But basically what seems to happen is that eggs were already associated with certain sorts of springtime festivals. All peoples all over the world, you know, throughout history, spring has always been a very important time.

Because it's the burgeoning of new life. It's when, you know, the days get longer, coming out of the darkness and sort of the death time of winter. And so, you know, before the time of battery hens in spring was also when hens began laying again and so it was so eggs were already associated with fertility the the easter bunny is really interesting it seems to be like a german tradition whereby it used to be a hare um a hare who was again associated with fertility because you know this whole idea that bunnies and and and hares um obviously they they have a lot of sex supposedly because they have a lot of offspring um but they were particularly associated in in german tradition with bringing eggs particularly to children but that's quite

late that's kind of 17th 18th century and that tradition gets picked up by a lot of kind of northern european and american um communities a bit later interestingly, there are some medieval traditions. We know that eggs were associated, like decorated eggs were associated with Easter. There are some medieval traditions that talk about Mary going to the tomb to find the tomb is empty and Jesus' body is gone. And she's taken with her some eggs.

And as soon as she realizes that the tomb is empty, the eggs turn red. So red eggs in particular are associated within the eastern orthodox traditions of christianity so quite often so again in greece um easter bread is this like really delicious doughy bread that's got a a red egg baked into the middle of it so that's really important but you know eggs again sort of the idea of um having an empty egg like so blowing it out and so it becomes hollow that is supposed to represent you know the empty tomb but obviously like Christmas Easter became increasingly commercial but was also increasingly used to be a more sort

of family friendly way of getting kids involved in religion so just as as at Christmas, you've got, you know, St. Nicholas who brings children presents if they've been good, so kind of teaching them morality, basically. So too, you get the idea of the Easter Bunny who brings eggs to children if they've been good. I read somewhere, you know, the notion that basically, both Father Christmas and the Easter Bunny are ways of trying to teach children about behaving well in order to get a reward you know before they can really comprehend the notion of this kind of invisible sort of impersonal god who's going to reward them for their good behaviour so yeah it's basically it's a mixture of kind of European custom and tradition with the eggs and bunnies and stuff like that mixed in with a bit of kind of family friendly morality. And here in the UK, we've just had our Prime Minister who has recently

refused to comment on some rather striking affairs going on in the world at the moment. But she did take time to make a statement about how outrageous it was that Easter eggs no longer had the word Easter on them. Now, when you hear things like that, do you just sort of do face palms? Well, yeah, completely. I mean, the fact that she didn't comment on some of the awful things that were going on in Syria about the way in which the things that Donald Trump has said and done and yet felt that it was important enough to talk about chocolate eggs. I mean, she she is you know she she does strike me as being um a woman who doesn't really like saying very much about anything unless she really wants

to or has to um so it was interesting that she chose to speak out about chocolate easter eggs um which were invented like relatively late i mean they're only around sort of i think they come from sort of northern europe in in 19th century i think that's the earliest attestation we have of chocolate eggs around the time of Easter. But you know, our Prime Minister, she's a vicar's daughter, you know, a good Anglican vicar's daughter. And maybe she feels that, you know, labelling on things needs to be explicitly religious when it comes to Christianity in this country. But yeah, it is one of those facepalm things. But it's one of those things again it's it's interesting what people pick and choose to to emphasize about religion so even with something

like easter i mean the thing that gets overlooked is that this is basically not just this kind of story this myth about um a god who becomes flesh dies and then rises from the afterlife i mean that's that's not an original story. That's recycling much older myths that we know from all over ancient West Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean. So they long predate Christianity. But the way that Christianity puts a spin on it is the idea that, you know, we eat lamb, for example, at Easter. You know, roast lamb is very common at Easter because in the Gospels, John the Baptist, who's kind of Jesus' best mate before they kind of have a bit of a falling out, I think, he says, he sees Jesus and he says,

behold, here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. And what he's basically saying is that Jesus is the sacrificial lamb that's going to be killed by God and sacrificed, you know, and his blood kind of poured out to rescue everybody else. But this is directly riffing off the other big child sacrifice theme in the Bible, which is the Jewish festival of Passover, because Passover happens when the people, the Jewish forefathers are enslaved in Egypt. Pharaoh refuses to let the Jewish people go. And so God sends a series of plagues and

the tenth and most deadly plague is this angel of death that is going to go over all the households in egypt and kill the firstborn firstborn of every human the firstborn of every animal and god tells the people via moses he says the way to protect yourself is to sacrifice a lamb, then put its blood on the doorposts so that when the angel of death passes over, he won't kill your firstborn, he'll just kill the Egyptian firstborn. And then the Israelites, they then eat, they sacrifice this lamb, put its blood on the doorposts, and then they share this sacrificial meal with their god, Yahweh. They roast the lamb and eat it. So at the center of both the Passover traditions and the Easter traditions is this idea that there's basically, you know, God is this kind

of the killer of the firstborn who is going to offer up these children as sacrifices in order to rescue or save or redeem his chosen people. And that's exactly what the earliest Christian interpretations of Jesus' death and resurrection, that's what they were riffing on. And that's exactly what the earliest Christian interpretations of Jesus' death and resurrection, that's what they were riffing on. And at one point in John's gospel, you know, God says, you know, here is my beloved child, my beloved son, my firstborn, and then it talks about his death in this very sacrificial language, the language that's used of the sacrificed lambs in the Passover. So, you know, it's one thing for Theresa May to get all upset about, you know, chocolate eggs and for us to like talk about Easter bunnies, but there's

a very dark myth right at the heart of both Passover and Easter that I think would be much more fun to talk about. Yeah, I just wanted to actually talk about some of those other traditions because I know that in the Norse tradition, there's this idea of Odin sacrificing himself to save. That of course could be later and it could be a loan from Christianity. So you're saying that there are pre-Christian traditions of gods or heroes that sacrifice themselves and then were reborn? Yeah, or they don't necessarily sacrifice themselves. They get into a battle with another deity and they're killed and then they rise to life again so um osiris the ancient egyptian deity is a really good example um he is killed by his brother um in this big battle his brother dismembers him and cuts him up um

his wife isis then retrieves all his body parts and she can find everything except for the penis which was swallowed interestingly by a perch a fish in the Nile that supposedly Egyptians then refused to eat after that and she puts him back together and he rises again to life my favorite one of my favorite deities is the god Baal from the city of Ugarit so supposedly this is a Canaanite city so a pre-Israelite pre-Jewish pre-Christian deity called Baal and he has a big fight with the god Mot, who's the god of death, who kills him. And he's buried in a tomb by his sister, interestingly. And then three days later, he rises again to life. So Christianity, it sort of presents itself as having this exclusive claim on resurrection. But actually, as I said, it's just recycling much older myths.

And then I don't want to get into it because my head will explode. But obviously, through the early medieval period, there are the most extraordinary fights about the resurrection myth and what it represents. And was he actually human or was he not? And did he actually die or did not? Just briefly, can you talk about some of the sort of conflicts and some of the resolutions that's ended up in the consensus that emerged, you know, centuries later? Yeah, well, basically, you know, Christians, early, you know, the earliest Christians were Jews. And a lot of Jewish people believed in the afterlife and in the resurrection of the dead on a particular kind of apocalyptic day, but a lot of other Jews didn't. So that carries over into Christianity. And you've got the idea that, you know, Jesus never says that

he is God made flesh in the Gospels. So for some of Jesus' earliest followers and in the first generations of early Christians, they didn't think that he was a deity. They thought that he was the son of God, which was a royal title, you know, for a human king of Jerusalem. It wasn't the kind of divine title necessarily that we think about it today. So some people felt that he was basically a martyr. So he wasn't this divine figure. He was a martyr for the cause, a bit like John the Baptist. Others felt that others, so Gnostic Christians who had a very sort of dualistic sense of the world, some Gnostic Christians believed that the fleshy material world in which we live is somehow lesser than the more spiritual world of the soul, and that when we die, our soul will go up to heaven. So they felt that basically this divine man kind of almost put on a flesh suit, a skin suit,

to kind of become this sort of human. So he kind of suffered, but didn't quite suffer enough because if he wasn't properly human, because he was a deity, then therefore he couldn't really have suffered. So therefore his death couldn't have been a real death. Therefore his resurrection couldn't be a real resurrection. So all of these controversies raged for centuries, but actually it's the Council of Nicaea. So Nicaea is a place now in modern day Turkey, but it was the emperor of the Roman emperor Constantine who called the Council of Nicaea. So Nicaea is a place now in modern day Turkey. But it was the emperor of the Roman Emperor Constantine who called the Council of Nicaea in about 325. And not only did they fix the date of Easter,

because you've got all these different Christians worshipping either according to the lunar calendar or Judaism or the solar calendar of the Roman Empire. They agreed lots of things at this council. One of the things they agreed They agreed lots of things at this council. One of the things they agreed was to fix the date of Easter to be the first Sunday after the first full moon of the spring equinox following Passover. But the other thing that they agreed on was to say that Jesus Christ was both fully human and fully divine. So they were trying to put an

end to those people that said he was only half human, half God, or he was a God masquerading as a human, or he was simply a fleshy martyr who was very spiritual, you know, kind of a holy man. So that was one of the big things that the Council of Nicaea sought to address. But those controversies didn't end with Nicaea, just like, you know, the date of Easter kept moving around after Nicaea. around after Nicaea. Because, you know, whether we like it or not, humans are really good at arguing, particularly about religion. And they kept arguing about the nature of Jesus and about the date of Easter and when to open your Easter eggs. So I don't think we're ever going to get rid of any of these kind of theological arguments as such. But yeah, some of the more interesting ones were about how human was Jesus and did he really die and did he really resurrect? Well, Francesca, that was an absolute tour de force as ever. See, guys, I told you it was going to be awesome.

We had fish swallowing penises. We had celibacy within marriage, gorging yourself on food, Easter eggs. Anyway, the main thing is, everybody, enjoy Passover. Enjoy Easter. Enjoy your spring festival hope you're all together with the family and uh and having a lovely rack of lamb or something else francesca thank you so much please come back on the podcast soon there's lots to talk about of course and uh enjoy your long weekend

all this tradition of ours our school history our songs this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished.