eight bits, on 04 April 2012 - 11:31 AM, said:
Yes, that is why the question of whether Christians may wish to celebrate the occasion comes up in the first place.
This is the characteristically Protestant view of the event. Compared with the majority of Christians, Protestants place a great deal of emphasis on personal belief, specifically the belief that Jesus, by his death, accomplished the work necessary for a Protestant's personal salvation.
Anything that happens after Jesus' death, then, can only be important because it affects a Protestant's belief that Jesus' work had already been completed. In this case, an unusual reappearance may have been offered as a "proof" that Jesus is a person of divine stature.
The secondary significance given to the event in the minority perspective, and that believing the proof is hardly less of a stretch than believing what it supposedly proves, help to explain the relative willingness of Protestants to abandon the celebration, or to celebrate what they reckon to be the principal Jewish Passover day instead, looking for a more immediate commemoration of what is most important to them, Jesus' death.
For the majority of Christians, however, the Resurrection is an intervention by their God in history which is significant in its own right, and carries an importance independent of whether anybody believes it or not, or believes something else because of it. This complements the majority's view that belief is neither necessary nor sufficient for personal salvation anyway.
The majority does see Jesus' death as having been necessary, and so worthy of commemoration. Since there is an obvious way to integrate commemoration of both events, and for the majority, the events are each incomplete without the other, that's what the majority do, celebrate a liturgical unit, Holy Week.
Both Rabbinical Judaism and Christianity (especially the majority, but many Protestants agree here) present themselves as rival legitimate successors to the Second Temple Judaism that definitvely ceased to function in 70 CE. It is utterly unremarkable that these independent Jewish-heritage movements should now disagree about the date for Passover (which is typically the word for "Easter" in the Romance and Greek-influenced languages). Christians disagree among themselves. Orthodox Easter is a week later than Roman Easter this year, for example.
I have a number of issues with your view, none of them major, but I believe they are in need of clarification.
1st, Protestants like all other christians do not amphasize the death of Jesus more than his resurrection, which is what I gathered from your post. They pay as much attention to the resurrection if not more than many other christians. It is one of the main reason why we don't really use crucifixes in our churches, we use the empty cross, symbolizing that Jesus is not there anymore, that he arose.
Without the resurrection, the death becomes meaningless, because there would be no ultimate victory over death and sin.
2nd, the willingness of a number of christians to abandon the Easter celebration is not just because it has become meaningless with its modern symbology of having a good time with the family (along with the chocolate bunnies and eggs), but rather that it has always been meaningless, since the christian church purposefully changed the date so that it would NOT coincide with the Jewish Passover. It was a decision based mainly on an ancient anti-semitical view of Jews, as well as a supposedly logical need for the christian church to affirm its independence from its Jewish roots. Something I am sure God frowned upon from the 1st moment of said decisions.
It coalesced into an official doctrine of the church, cheered on by Constantine himself in and around the time of the Council of Nicaea, but it started soon after the beginning of the 2nd century, when christians and Jews started having problems with one another.
3rd, No-one disagrees with the date of Passover, that has remained unchanged over the last 3,300 years or so. What did change was the purposeful alteration of the passover feast within the christian church, Passover is a 7 day event, it is also called the Feast of unleavened Bread.
14th Nisan, Day 0 - sundown Tuesday to sundown Wednesday - Erev Pesach (the day before the Sabbath), Preperation day, The night of the Last Supper. The day Jesus was crucified.
15th Nisan, Day 1 - sundown Wednesday to sundown Thursday - Pesach I (Passover), 1st day of Unleavened Bread.
16th Nisan, Day 2 - sundown Thursday to sundown Friday - Pesach II, 2nd day of Unleavened Bread
17th Nisan, Day 3 - sundown Friday to sundown Saturday - Pesach III, Sixth day Sabbath, 3rd day of Unleavened Bread
18th Nisan, Day 4 - Pesach IV, The day of Firstfruits, Resurrection in the early Morning. In rising from the dead, Jesus became the first-fruits of all those who die and yet will be resurrected to live forever.
Passover is always on Nisan 15th, it never changes. Can we say the same for Easter?
4th, Christians do not agree among themselves for a number of reasons. One of these is a dating problem which arose because of the Gregorian calendar reform. The Orthodox Church refused to alter their feast days to acknowledge the 10 days dropped from the Gregorian Calendar by the West. The also calculated Easter differently from the Western Church, being in my opinion, slightly more accurate than their counter-parts in the west. And it could all have been avoided if they had simply followed biblical custom as demonstrated by the Jews.
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Of course, anyone may profess that one rival is "more legitimate" as a successor than another, and so that rival's date for the indisputably Jewish feast of Passover is "correct." Fine. It's not like there're any Second Temple Jews around to tell you you're worng.
They don't need the Second Temple for that, Their calendar has not changed for thousands of years. The average Hebrew year is slower than the average solar year by about one day in every 216 years. That means that today, we celebrate the holidays, on average about 8 days later than did our ancestors in 359 C.E. at the time that the fixed calendar rules were published.
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It is perfectly obvious that the origins of the feast are Jewish, and so therefore by definition not pagan. That speakers of Germanic languages, such as English, call the integrated Passver feast an old word for the pagan spring festival has the same significance as that they call YHWH an old word for generic pagan divinity. None. Gott doesn't make YHWH pagan, calling the Pasch Easter doesn't make it pagan, either.
As you say the Feast is Jewish, but its called Passover not Easter. Easter isn't Jewish or christian for that matter, it is an invention by the church, taking over a pagan festival that already existed, called Ostara which celebrated the Vernal Equinox. The Church laid a thin veneer of christian information over these days, thereby legitimizing the continued pagan practices of local populations, instead of keeping the faith.
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), thus proving that he was the son of god (or something along those lines).
RAW Berris... Dare you enter?
