Christian Discussion Thread IV

[Lantrus]

Anyone care for those personality tests? Those "Which [X] are you?" Here's a Easter themed one, telling you which Saint you are most like:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/0 ... 9812588151

I got St. Francis.

Same as well.

[The Union of the West]

Anyone care for those personality tests? Those "Which [X] are you?" Here's a Easter themed one, telling you which Saint you are most like:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/0 ... 9812588151

I got St. Thomas Aquinas.

[Jute]

Anyone care for those personality tests? Those "Which [X] are you?" Here's a Easter themed one, telling you which Saint you are most like:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/0 ... 9812588151

I'm St. Catherine apparently. Is this a Catholic-centric quiz/test/thingy?

Not sure, actually. Seeing as it came from the Huffington Post, maybe liberal?
Either way, I got St. Valentine

[Angleter]

I'm St. Catherine apparently. Is this a Catholic-centric quiz/test/thingy?

Not sure, actually. Seeing as it came from the Huffington Post, maybe liberal?
Either way, I got St. Valentine

The thing itself refers to the 'Church of the Resurrection', which it transpires is a church in Illinois. After far more digging than should be necessary, their Facebook page said they're part of the Anglican Church in North America, which are a breakaway traditionalist Anglican group. Which probably explains "St. Cranmer" and "St. Wilberforce".

[Aelex]

Anyone care for those personality tests? Those "Which [X] are you?" Here's a Easter themed one, telling you which Saint you are most like:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/0 ... 9812588151

I did the test two time for the lulz and finished with Jeanne D'Arc and Saint Thomas D'Aquin. Was I incousiously influenced by my patriotism?

[Jute]

Not sure, actually. Seeing as it came from the Huffington Post, maybe liberal?
Either way, I got St. Valentine

The thing itself refers to the 'Church of the Resurrection', which it transpires is a church in Illinois. After far more digging than should be necessary, their Facebook page said they're part of the Anglican Church in North America, which are a breakaway traditionalist Anglican group. Which probably explains "St. Cranmer" and "St. Wilberforce".

So, not really liberal.

[Sun Wukong]

Have a happy Easter all.

[Tarsonis Survivors]

Happy Pascha

[Constantinopolis]

Guys, um... it's not Sunday yet...

[Sun Wukong]

Guys, um... it's not Sunday yet...

So wait... Christmas gets like a whole goddamn month, if not more, in which it - and the associated well-wishing - is inescapably omnipresent... but I can't tell someone to "have a happy Easter" even a day early?

[The Alma Mater]

Guys, um... it's not Sunday yet...

Yes, we are celebrating the days that there was no God. Tomorrow we mourn his rising.

[Sebastianbourg]

Guys, um... it's not Sunday yet...

Yes, we are celebrating the days that there was no God. Tomorrow we mourn his rising.

I know you're attempting to make a joke but there was never no God; God didn't die!

[The Alma Mater]

Yes, we are celebrating the days that there was no God. Tomorrow we mourn his rising.

I know you're attempting to make a joke but there was never no God; God didn't die!

THAT is something the opinions within christianity differ about.

[Herskerstad]

I know you're attempting to make a joke but there was never no God; God didn't die!

THAT is something the opinions within christianity differ about.

Not within the main branches. Trinitarians will not view as somehow all 3 persons of the trinity being gone or somehow eradicated. Arians and many other Unitarians that view Jesus as just another prophet which would not imply the death of God. Modalists would likely just have it that the son switch to the father the moment of the death of said body. So you might do yourself a favor and define which branches or individuals who take it as God being completely gone for 3 days since you've made notice with a capital THAT as if it somehow is a massive, schismatic controversy.

[Sebastianbourg]

I know you're attempting to make a joke but there was never no God; God didn't die!

THAT is something the opinions within christianity differ about.

I'll rephrase it; God did not cease to exist.

[Lleu llaw Gyffes]

I know you're attempting to make a joke but there was never no God; God didn't die!

THAT is something the opinions within christianity differ about.

God died on Friday and rose on Sunday.
Jesus is totally and utterly God AND totally totally and utterly Man.
Take no notice of that bearded man hiding behind the curtain!

Creed of St Athanasius: Father is God, Son is God, Holy Ghost is God; yet they are not three Gods, but one God.

Is there anything in Scripture or Tradition to say what Father and Holy Ghost did on Saturday?

[The Alma Mater]

THAT is something the opinions within christianity differ about.

God died on Friday and rose on Sunday.
Jesus is totally and utterly God AND totally totally and utterly Man.
Take no notice of that bearded man hiding behind the curtain!

Creed of St Athanasius: Father is God, Son is God, Holy Ghost is God; yet they are not three Gods, but one God.

Is there anything in Scripture or Tradition to say what Father and Holy Ghost did on Saturday?

No, but many assume the son was being tortured in hell.

Which indeed technically means they still existed; so my claim that people could be celebrating a god-free world is wrong

[The Archregimancy]

Guys, um... it's not Sunday yet...

So wait... Christmas gets like a whole goddamn month, if not more, in which it - and the associated well-wishing - is inescapably omnipresent... but I can't tell someone to "have a happy Easter" even a day early?

A full week early.

Everyone surely knows that Easter is the 12th of April this year

[The Alexanderians]

So wait... Christmas gets like a whole goddamn month, if not more, in which it - and the associated well-wishing - is inescapably omnipresent... but I can't tell someone to "have a happy Easter" even a day early?

A full week early.

Everyone surely knows that Easter is the 12th of April this year

Exactly, don't know why everyone's wishing me a Happy Easter a week early.

[The Alma Mater]

So wait... Christmas gets like a whole goddamn month, if not more, in which it - and the associated well-wishing - is inescapably omnipresent... but I can't tell someone to "have a happy Easter" even a day early?

A full week early.

Everyone surely knows that Easter is the 12th of April this year

Nonsense. The honouring of the Anglo-Saxon godess Eostre was the 20th of march. People are all vastly too late

[The Archregimancy]

A full week early.

Everyone surely knows that Easter is the 12th of April this year

Nonsense. The honouring of the Anglo-Saxon godess Eostre was the 20th of march. People are all vastly too late

Repetition for the sake of pedantry...

Easter falls when it does not because of a hypothetical Germanic goddess whose existence is wholly unrecorded outside of one of the Venerable Bede's more obscure 8th century writings (the De Temporum Ratione), and whose existence is unattributed outside of Bede, but because it's inevitably closely associated with the Jewish Passover - the Last Supper being a Passover seder. One of the earliest dating controversies in Christianity was the Quartodecimanian controversy, where the disagreement was between those figures in Rome who wanted to hold Easter on the Sunday closest to Passover, and those eastern Mediterranean churches who wanted to always begin Easter on 14 Nisan - ie, the day before the Jewish Passover on 15 Nisan [Jewish Calendar] - regardless of whether or not it was a Sunday. Since the Jewish calendar is lunisolar, Passover moves across the Julian/Gregorian calendar; which is why Easter also moves. English and German are in fact highly unusual in using a variant of 'Easter' (whatever the existence of Eostre/Ostara, the month of April seems to have been called some variant of 'Eosturmonath' in post-Classical Germanic societies) as their name for the celebrations connected to the resurrection of Jesus. In most other major European languages, the name of the celebration is taken from a word for Passover; this includes Scandinavian countries.

Hence, for example, we have Greek Pascha, French Paques, Welsh Pasg, Russian Paskha, Spanish Pascuas, Latin Pascha, Swedish Pask, Icelandic Paska, and Gaelic Casca (the initial 'P' having transmuted to a 'K' sound in q-celtic languages). This principle even works in many non-Indoeuropean languages, hence Indonesian Paskah, Hebrew Pascha, Basque Bazko, Finnish Pääsiäistä, Hawaiian Pakoa, or Persian Pak. English speakers attempting to draw a direct correlation between Eostre and the original selection of the date of Easter in the Mediterranean are displaying an almost wilfully ignorant level of ethnocentrism.

None of which is to say that there weren't subsequent later influences on local celebrations of these festivals in Northern Europe once Christianity spread outside of its Mediterranean homeland, or that there might not have been useful points of commonality for early missionaries in existing midwinter and spring celebrations - but the dates of both Christmas and Easter had been set long before Christianity had any substantive interaction with Norse paganism. They were not 'stolen' from Norse paganism - unless anyone cares to claim that Norse paganism influenced the timing of Passover.

Ah, that explains the strange fact I discovered myself a little earlier, namely the weird English and German names for Pascha (which are obvious cognates of each other, but unrelated to the names everyone else uses, including other Germanic languages). Thank you!

By the way, is there any connection between "Eosturmonath" and East/Ost (i.e. the English/German name of the direction from which the sun rises)? In other words, does "Eosturmonath" mean something along the lines of "sunrise month"? Or is that just a coincidence?

We're in the grounds of language reconstruction, which is simultaneously a somewhat speculative art, but also better developed than people might think.

In any case, page 43 of Kroonen's 2013 Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic notes the following (some abbreviation; accent marks left out).

*austera- adv. 'east, eastwards' - ON austr adv. Far. eystur adv. Elfd. oster adv. OE east adv. E east OFri. aster adv. OS ostar adv. MDu ooster adv. OHG ostar adv. - Lat. auster m. 'south wind; south'; YAv. usastara- adj. 'eastern.
An adverb created to the PIE word for 'dawn' (see *austron-) with the constrastive *tero-suffix.

*austron- f. 'Easter' - OE eastre f. 'spring goddess', pl. 'Easter', OHG ostara f. 'Easter'. MHG oster(n) f., G Ostern f.pl. - Close to Lith. ausra f. 'dawn'; also cf. Skt. usas- f., OAv. usa, YAv. acc. usanhem, usqm < Arm. ayg; Lat. aurora f.
The Indo-European word for 'dawn' was an s-stem, viz. nom *h2eus-os, gen. *hzus-s-os. Germanic and Baltic replaced this formation with a form in *-reh2-, cf. Skt. usra- f. 'dawn, morning'. Also cf. *austera-.

From which we can see that your deduction is probably largely correct. The etymological sources of the modern English and German 'Easter' are from the proto-Germanic root for 'East' and early Indo-European root for 'dawn', which also may have been applied to some form of spring Goddess if Bede is to be believed - though Bede is the only source for this. Certainly the etymological roots of 'Eosturmonath' would seem to originally be 'east/dawn month'.

Abbreviations:
ON - Old Norse
Far. - Faroese
Elfd. - Elfdalian
OE - Old English
E - English
OFri - Old Frisian
OHG - Old High German
MHG - Middle High German
OHG - Old High German
OS - Old Saxon
MDu - Middle Dutch
Lat. - Latin
Skt. - Sanskrit
PIE - Proto-Indo-European
YAv. - Young Avestan
OAv. - Old Avestan
Arm. - Armenian

* is the standard linguistic symbol identifying a reconstructed word in a reconstructed proto-language; where the symbol is missing, the word is attested via documentary evidence.

[Jute]

A full week early.

Everyone surely knows that Easter is the 12th of April this year

Nonsense. The honouring of the Anglo-Saxon godess Eostre was the 20th of march. People are all vastly too late

So that's where the name comes from?

[The Alma Mater]

Nonsense. The honouring of the Anglo-Saxon godess Eostre was the 20th of march. People are all vastly too late

Repetition for the sake of pedantry...

Why do you think I quoted it specifically at you

[The Alma Mater]

Nonsense. The honouring of the Anglo-Saxon godess Eostre was the 20th of march. People are all vastly too late

So that's where the name comes from?

No. But Wiccans like to pretend it is.

[Jute]

So that's where the name comes from?

No. But Wiccans like to pretend it is.

They do? Interesting...