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Sunday 12 April 2020
The catholic church as a confused confuser: According to the catholic Douay-Rheims Bible, "Azymes" is The festival of the unleavened bread, or the pasch, which answers to our Easter
Douay-Rheims Bible
Acts 12: 1-5
[1] And at the same time, Herod the king stretched forth his hands, to afflict some of the church.
[2] And he killed James, the brother of John, with the sword.
[3] And seeing that it pleased the Jews, he proceeded to take up Peter also. Now it was in the days of the Azymes.
[4]
And when he had apprehended him, he cast him into prison, delivering
him to four files of soldiers to be kept, intending, after the pasch, to
bring him forth to the people.
[5] Peter therefore was kept in prison. But prayer was made without ceasing by the church unto God for him.
[3] "Azymes": The festival of the unleavened bread, or the pasch, which answers to our Easter.
This devil inspired catholic Douay-Rheims
Bible lies that "Azymes"means the festival of the unleavened bread, or the pasch(passover). This
implies that the feast of unleavened bread is the same as the feast of Passover.
This means that the feast of unleavened bread is synonymous with the feast of Passover.
In other words, Passover is unleavened bread and unleavened bread is Passover.
This is absolute nonsense because these are two separate feasts. The Passover was
celebrated from the 10th to the 14th day(Exodus
12:3&6) while the Passover was celebrated from the 14th to the
21st Day (Exodus 12: 16). The Catholic Douay-Rheims bible vaguely retorts that, the festival of the
unleavened bread, or the pasch(Passover), answers to our Easter . The divinely ordained feasts
of unleavened bread and Passover cannot answer to the catholic pagan festival
of Easter.
Acts 12:1-5King James Version (KJV)
12 Now about that time Herod the king stretched forth his hands to vex certain of the church.
2 And he killed James the brother of John with the sword. 3 And because he saw it pleased the Jews, he proceeded further to take Peter also. (Then were the days of unleavened bread.) 4 And
when he had apprehended him, he put him in prison, and delivered him to
four quaternions of soldiers to keep him; intending after Easter to
bring him forth to the people. 5 Peter therefore was kept in prison: but prayer was made without ceasing of the church unto God for him.
The word Easter
appears once in Acts 12 in the KJV bible. Acts 12: 1-4 tells us that Peter was
arrested during the days of unleavened bread. This means that the Passover had passed
because the Jews celebrated the days of unleavened bread after the
Passover(Exodus 12:18). Therefore, Herod, a pagan could not look into the
offence of Peter because he had to celebrate the pagan festival of Easter first .
Peter’s arrest coincided with the celebration of the pagan festival of
Easter. Thus, he had to be kept in prison until after the celebration was
finished. Counterfeit catholic bibles say that Peter was to be brought for
judgment after Passover. This a contradiction because the Passover had already
passed(Exodus 12: 3 &6 ); and was being followed by the feast of
unleavened bread. This is a very simply logic.
MUST READ:
When Fr. William Saunders a confused catholic
priest used confusion to defend the pagan festival of Easter
Why Easter is called Easter, and other little-known facts about the holiday
Lecturer in Religious Studies, University of Texas at Austin
On April 12, Christians will be celebrating Easter, the day on
which the resurrection of Jesus is said to have taken place. The date of
celebration changes from year to year.
The reason for this variation is that Easter always falls on the
first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox.
I am a religious studies scholar
specializing in early Christianity, and my research shows that this
dating of Easter goes back to the complicated origins of this holiday
and how it has evolved over the centuries.
Easter is quite similar to other major holidays like Christmas and
Halloween, which have evolved over the last 200 years or so. In all of
these holidays, Christian and non-Christian (pagan) elements have
continued to blend together.
Easter as a rite of spring
Most major holidays have some connection to the changing of seasons. This is especially obvious in the case of Christmas. The New Testament gives no information about what time of year Jesus was born. Many scholars believe,
however, that the main reason Jesus’ birth came to be celebrated on
December 25 is because that was the date of the winter solstice
according to the Roman calendar.
Since the days following the winter solstice gradually become longer and less dark, it was ideal symbolism for the birth of “the light of the world” as stated in the New Testament’s Gospel of John.
Similar was the case with Easter, which falls in close proximity to
another key point in the solar year: the vernal equinox (around March
20), when there are equal periods of light and darkness. For those in
northern latitudes, the coming of spring is often met with excitement,
as it means an end to the cold days of winter.
Spring also means the coming back to life of plants and trees that
have been dormant for winter, as well as the birth of new life in the
animal world. Given the symbolism of new life and rebirth, it was only
natural to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus at this time of the year.
The naming of the celebration as “Easter” seems to go back to the
name of a pre-Christian goddess in England, Eostre, who was celebrated
at beginning of spring. The only reference to this goddess comes from
the writings of the Venerable Bede, a British monk who lived in the late
seventh and early eighth century. As religious studies scholar Bruce Forbessummarizes:
“Bede wrote that the month in which English Christians were
celebrating the resurrection of Jesus had been called Eosturmonath in
Old English, referring to a goddess named Eostre. And even though
Christians had begun affirming the Christian meaning of the celebration,
they continued to use the name of the goddess to designate the season.”
Bede was so influential for later Christians that the name stuck, and
hence Easter remains the name by which the English, Germans and
Americans refer to the festival of Jesus’ resurrection.
The connection with Jewish Passover
It is important to point out that while the name “Easter” is used in
the English-speaking world, many more cultures refer to it by terms best
translated as “Passover” (for instance, “Pascha” in Greek) – a
reference, indeed, to the Jewish festival of Passover.
In the Hebrew Bible, Passover is a festival that commemorates the
liberation of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt, as narrated in
the Book of Exodus. It was and continues to be the most important Jewish seasonal festival, celebrated on the first full moon after the vernal equinox.
At the time of Jesus, Passover had special significance, as the
Jewish people were again under the dominance of foreign powers (namely,
the Romans). Jewish pilgrims streamed into Jerusalem every year in the
hope that God’s chosen people (as they believed themselves to be) would
soon be liberated once more.
On one Passover, Jesus traveled to Jerusalem with his disciples to celebrate the festival. He entered Jerusalem
in a triumphal procession and created a disturbance in the Jerusalem
Temple. It seems that both of these actions attracted the attention of
the Romans, and that as a result Jesus was executed around the year A.D.
30.
Some of Jesus’ followers, however, believed that they saw him alive
after his death, experiences that gave birth to the Christian religion.
As Jesus died during the Passover festival and his followers believed
he was resurrected from the dead three days later, it was logical to
commemorate these events in close proximity.
Resurrection.Fr Lawrence Lew, O.P., CC BY-NC-ND
Some early Christians chose to celebrate
the resurrection of Christ on the same date as the Jewish Passover,
which fell around day 14 of the month of Nisan, in March or April. These
Christians were known as Quartodecimans (the name means “Fourteeners”).
By choosing this date, they put the focus on when Jesus died and also
emphasized continuity with the Judaism out of which Christianity
emerged. Some others instead preferred to hold the festival on a Sunday,
since that was when Jesus’ tomb was believed to have been found.
In A.D. 325, the Emperor Constantine, who favored Christianity,
convened a meeting of Christian leaders to resolve important disputes at
the Council of Nicaea. The most fateful of its decisions was about the
status of Christ, whom the council recognized as “fully human and fully divine.” This council also resolved that Easter should be fixed on a Sunday, not on day 14 of Nisan. As a result, Easter is now celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon of the vernal equinox.
The Easter bunny and Easter eggs
In early America, the Easter festival was far more popular among Catholics than Protestants. For instance, the New England Puritans regarded
both Easter and Christmas as too tainted by non-Christian influences to
be appropriate to celebrate. Such festivals also tended to be
opportunities for heavy drinking and merrymaking.
The fortunes of both holidays changed in the 19th century, when they
became occasions to be spent with one’s family. This was done partly out
of a desire to make the celebration of these holidays less rowdy.
Children on an egg hunt.Susan Bassett, CC BY-NC-ND
But Easter and Christmas also became reshaped as domestic holidays
because understandings of children were changing. Prior to the 17th
century, children were rarely the center of attention. As historian Stephen Nissenbaumwrites,
“…children were lumped together with other members of the lower
orders in general, especially servants and apprentices – who, not
coincidentally, were generally young people themselves.”
From the 17th century onward,
there was an increasing recognition of childhood as as time of life
that should be joyous, not simply as preparatory for adulthood. This
“discovery of childhood” and the doting upon children had profound
effects on how Easter was celebrated.
It is at this point in the holiday’s development that Easter eggs and
the Easter bunny become especially important. Decorated eggs had been
part of the Easter festival at least since medieval times, given the obvious symbolism of new life. A vast amount of folklore surrounds Easter eggs, and in a number of Eastern European countries, the process of decorating them is extremely elaborate. Several Eastern European legends describe eggs turning red (a favorite color for Easter eggs) in connection with the events surrounding Jesus’ death and resurrection.
Yet it was only in the 17th century that a German tradition of an “Easter hare”
bringing eggs to good children came to be known. Hares and rabbits had a
long association with spring seasonal rituals because of their amazing
powers of fertility.
When German immigrants settled in Pennsylvania in the 18th and 19th
centuries, they brought this tradition with them. The wild hare also
became supplanted by the more docile and domestic rabbit, in another
indication of how the focus moved toward children.
As Christians celebrate the festival this spring in commemoration of
Jesus’ resurrection, the familiar sights of the Easter bunny and Easter
eggs serve as a reminder of the holiday’s very ancient origins outside
of the Christian tradition. This is an updated version of a piece published on March 21, 2018.
