The Faith Once Delivered — Installment Four of Seven
The Myth Merchants
How Bad Arguments Against Real Corruption Became the Corruption's Best Defense
A Series for FirstSentencePerspective.com
Estimated reading time: 13–15 minutes
In Installments One and Two, we recovered the Pascha in its original power and watched the Nicene Council surgically sever it from its Hebrew root by imperial decree. In Installment Three, we took the ancient fertility nemesis seriously on the actual biblical and archaeological evidence — Asherah, Ashtoreth, Ishtar, the Queen of Heaven — forty references in the Hebrew scriptures, inscriptions in the Sinai desert, idols in the temple itself. The enemy is real. The corruption is documented. Now we turn to the people who claim to be fighting that corruption — and examine what happens when the weapons they choose are made of cardboard.
"If you build your case against real corruption on false foundations, you do not weaken the corruption. You hand it a shield. Every time a careful thinker dismantles your fabricated argument, the real argument gets buried in the wreckage."
I. The Book That Launched a Thousand Memes
In 1853, a Scottish Presbyterian minister named Alexander Hislop published a book called The Two Babylons, or The Papal Worship Proved to be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife. [1] It is, without question, the most influential and most methodologically dishonest work of popular Christian historiography ever written. It argued, with great confidence and very little evidence, that virtually every practice of the Roman Catholic Church — Christmas, Easter, the papacy, the mass, celibacy, the veneration of Mary — was directly derived from the ancient Babylonian mystery religion of Nimrod and his wife Semiramis.
Hislop's method was to find surface similarities between Christian practices and ancient Near Eastern religion, then assert a direct causal connection without demonstrating any historical transmission pathway. He drew parallels across millennia, across languages, across entire cultural worlds — with no philological rigor, no archaeological grounding, and no apparent concern for chronological plausibility. Semiramis, for instance, whom Hislop makes the fountainhead of all pagan religion, is a figure from Assyrian legend who has no documented historical connection to the religious practices Hislop associates with her.
The book was critiqued in Hislop's own lifetime by serious scholars. In the twentieth century, it was systematically dismantled. Ralph Woodrow, who had himself written a popular book based on Hislop's arguments, conducted his own reinvestigation of the primary sources and published The Babylon Connection? in 1997 explicitly retracting his earlier work and documenting Hislop's errors in detail. [2] The historian and theologian Carl Olson called Hislop's scholarship "a classic case of parallelomania — the tendency to see connections between unrelated phenomena and to treat coincidental similarities as causal relationships." [3]
And yet The Two Babylons never went away. It became the founding document of the "pagan origins" genre of Protestant polemic — and its core arguments, stripped of their source, circulate freely today on social media, YouTube channels, and church bulletins as if they were established fact. The Ishtar-equals-Easter claim is Hislop's. The Easter Bunny as Nimrod's fertility symbol is Hislop's. Christmas trees as phallic Babylonian symbols are Hislop's. The methodology is his. The credibility is his — which is to say, very little.
◆ PULL QUOTE / SOCIAL: On Hislop
"Hislop's method was to find surface similarities between Christian practices and ancient religion, then assert a direct connection without demonstrating any transmission pathway. He drew parallels across millennia and languages with no philological rigor. The Ishtar-equals-Easter claim is his. The methodology is his. The credibility is his — which is to say, very little."
II. Ishtar Does Not Equal Easter: The Linguistic Case
The internet claim that "Easter" is derived from the name of the Babylonian-Akkadian goddess Ishtar is not merely unproven. It is linguistically impossible. This requires a brief but important explanation.
Ishtar is an Akkadian name. The Akkadian language belongs to the Semitic language family — related to Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic. Its phonological patterns, its consonantal roots, its grammatical structures are Semitic. The word Ishtar (Akkadian: Ištar) likely derives from a Proto-Semitic root related to the Ugaritic Athtart and the Hebrew Ashtoreth. [4] It is a Semitic word in a Semitic language family.
Easter is a Germanic word. Old English Ēastre, Old High German Ōstara — these belong to the Indo-European language family, specifically the Germanic branch. Their phonological patterns, their root structures, their grammatical behaviors are entirely distinct from Semitic. The Proto-Germanic root *Austrō means "dawn" or "east" and is cognate with Latin aurora and Greek eos (dawn) — all Indo-European, all pointing to the direction of the rising sun. [5]
There is no documented historical, archaeological, or linguistic pathway from Akkadian Ištar to Old English Ēastre. They are words from different language families, separated by geography, chronology, and entirely distinct phonological systems. The claim that one derives from the other is equivalent to claiming that the English word "God" derives from the Sanskrit word "ghee" because they both begin with a g-sound. It is not scholarship. It is pattern-matching dressed as etymology.
This does not mean the goddess is irrelevant to the history of the spring feast. Installment Three documented her relevance in full. It means that the particular argument — Easter derives from Ishtar — is false, and using a false argument to make a true point is not faithfulness. It is the same epistemological error the fertility cults always exploited: the substitution of feeling-certainty for evidential rigor.
"There is no linguistic pathway from Akkadian Ishtar to Old English Ēastre. They are words from different language families, separated by geography, chronology, and entirely distinct phonological systems. Using a false argument to make a true point is not faithfulness. It is the substitution of feeling-certainty for evidential rigor."
III. Jacob Grimm and the Romantic Invention of Ēostre
The Venerable Bede, writing in A.D. 725, mentioned in a single paragraph that the Anglo-Saxons called the month of April Ēostur-mōnaþ — named, he said, after a goddess called Ēostre, in whose honor feasts were held in the spring. [6] This is the entirety of ancient attestation for the goddess Ēostre. One paragraph. One source. No corroborating inscriptions, no archaeological remains, no other ancient author.
Jacob Grimm — the Grimm of fairy tale fame, and one of the founders of modern Germanic philology — took this single paragraph and, in his Deutsche Mythologie of 1835, expanded it into a full-fledged Germanic spring goddess named Ōstara, complete with sacred hares, eggs, and spring festivals. [7] Grimm was a gifted philologist. He was also a German nationalist constructing a mythological heritage for the emerging German national identity — a project with obvious political motivations in the decade before the 1848 revolutions. His Deutsche Mythologie is brilliant, learned, and in significant portions, invented.
The hare connection — now treated as established fact in popular accounts of Easter's pagan origins — is Grimm's construction, not ancient attestation. Bede never mentions a hare in connection with Ēostre. No ancient source does. The earliest documented association of a rabbit or hare with the spring Christian feast appears in a German Lutheran text of 1682 — Georg Franck von Franckenau's De ovis paschalibus — describing a folk custom of children searching for eggs hidden by an Easter Hare. [8] This is not ancient paganism. It is late medieval German folk custom — quaint, harmless as a cultural artifact, and entirely undeserving of the theological weight that has been heaped upon it by two centuries of romantic mythologizing.
The damage Grimm's romantic construction has done to honest Christian historiography is considerable. Because his work was scholarly in appearance and authoritative in tone, it was absorbed into popular Protestant polemic and treated as established ancient history. The Easter Bunny, in this account, became not a 17th-century German folk custom but a 4th-millennium B.C. Babylonian fertility symbol. The inflation is so extreme as to be almost comedic — if the consequences for honest truth-telling were not so serious.
◆ PULL QUOTE / SOCIAL: On Grimm's invention
"Bede never mentions a hare in connection with Ēostre. No ancient source does. The hare-goddess connection is Grimm's 1835 construction — a German nationalist's romantic invention, dressed in scholarly clothing. What began as a single paragraph in Bede became, two centuries later, the foundational myth of the Easter-is-pagan argument."
IV. The Santa Claus Parallel — A Complete Anatomy
The structural parallel between the corrupted Easter and the corrupted Christmas is precise enough to deserve its own careful anatomy — because both corruptions follow the same pattern, and understanding the pattern is the beginning of the cure.
Nicholas of Myra was a real person — a 4th-century bishop in what is now southern Turkey, present at the Council of Nicaea, known for extraordinary generosity to the poor. [9] The historical record is thin but credible. He gave dowries to poor girls to prevent them from being sold. He is said to have thrown bags of gold through a window at night. The core of the legend is grounded in documented character.
The Dutch Sinterklaas tradition adapted Nicholas into a gift-giving bishop arriving on December 5th — but surrounded him, in Germanic folk adaptation, with Zwarte Piet and figures like Krampus and Knecht Ruprecht — demonic companions who threatened and punished bad children. [10] These figures have clear roots in Germanic folk demonology. The 4th-century bishop of Myra would be unrecognizable in this company.
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was created in 1939 by Robert L. May as a promotional booklet for Montgomery Ward department stores. [11] Gene Autry's recording of the Johnny Marks song in 1949 made it a cultural institution. [12] The Coca-Cola Santa — the rotund, red-suited, jolly figure who is now the canonical image of Santa Claus in Western culture — derives from Haddon Sundblom's illustrations created for Coca-Cola advertising campaigns beginning in 1931. [13]
The complete genealogy runs: 4th-century bishop of extraordinary generosity → medieval hagiography → Dutch folk tradition → Germanic demonological companions → 20th-century department store promotion → global soft-drink advertising campaign. Each layer further from the origin. Each layer more commercially and mythologically loaded. The 4th-century bishop is buried under so many layers of accretion that he is functionally invisible to the children tearing open presents on December 25th.
This is not paganism in any meaningful sense. It is something more modern and in some ways more culturally totalized: the complete commercial displacement of a historical person by a manufactured mythology. The saint has been replaced not by a pagan god but by a marketing character. Which is, if you think about it, a more complete form of displacement than paganism ever managed.
"The saint has been replaced not by a pagan god but by a marketing character. Commercial displacement is, if you think about it, a more complete form of erasure than paganism ever managed — because paganism at least took the sacred seriously."
V. Why Bad Arguments Hurt Good Causes
Here is the pastoral question at the heart of this installment — and it is the question this series has been building toward from the beginning: if the corruption is real, why does it matter whether our arguments against it are accurate?
It matters for several reasons, each of them serious.
First, false arguments are easily dismantled. When a careful thinker — or a sincere believer whose child has just asked why Easter is evil — investigates the Ishtar-equals-Easter claim and discovers it is linguistically impossible, the entire "pagan origins" argument gets discredited by association. The real corruptions — the Nicene severance, the fertility goddess's ambient cultural presence, the theological amnesia produced by catechetical failure — get buried in the wreckage of the false ones. The debunking of Hislop becomes, in popular perception, the vindication of the Easter Bunny. That is not a minor collateral damage. It is a catastrophic own goal.
Second, false arguments violate the standard we are claiming to defend. If this series is a call to contend for the faith once delivered — the faith grounded in the Tanach, the Torah, the apostolic witness, the primary sources — then our epistemological standard must be the same standard we are calling others to. You cannot defend the truth of scripture with the tools of mythology. You cannot call the church back to accurate, primary-source fidelity while yourself trafficking in internet fabrications. The standard cuts both ways. It must.
Third, false arguments are themselves a form of the error we are fighting. The fertility goddess works precisely by substituting emotionally satisfying symbolic associations for rigorous covenantal obedience. Feeling-certainty in place of evidential discipline. The confidence that comes from a good story rather than from a hard-won truth. When we fight pagan mythology with our own mythology — when we build our indignation on Hislop's fabrications rather than on Jeremiah's documented outrage — we are using the goddess's own epistemological tools against her. We will not win that way. We never have.
◆ PULL QUOTE / SOCIAL: On the standard
"You cannot defend the truth of scripture with the tools of mythology. You cannot call the church back to primary-source fidelity while trafficking in internet fabrications. The standard we are calling others to must be the standard we apply to ourselves. It must. Or we have already lost."
Coming in Installment Five: Decorated Corruption
We have now cleared the field on both sides — the real corruption documented, the false arguments dismantled. In Installment Five, we turn to the most personal and in some ways the most challenging section of this series: the question of sincere celebration.
Because the people filling Easter baskets on Sunday morning are not pagans. They are not apostates. They are, in the majority of cases, people who have encountered the risen Yeshua in the context of those celebrations, whose faith is genuine, whose love for God is real, and whose sincerity is not in question. And sincerity is not the question. The question — the one Dt. 12:4 raises and will not let go — is whether sincerity is sufficient. Whether the form can be separated from the content it carries. Whether you can pour Passover theology into an Easter basket and have it hold.
The answer requires honesty about what folk custom actually does to theological substance — and honesty about my own history on both sides of that question.
◆ PULL QUOTE / SOCIAL: Teaser for Installment Five
"The people filling Easter baskets are not pagans. They are sincere believers who have met the risen Yeshua in the middle of those celebrations. Sincerity is not in question. Whether sincerity is sufficient — whether you can pour Passover theology into an Easter basket and have it hold — that is the question Dt. 12:4 will not let go."
Footnotes
[1] Alexander Hislop, The Two Babylons, or The Papal Worship Proved to be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife (Edinburgh: James Wood, 1853; expanded 2nd ed. 1858).
[2] Ralph Woodrow, The Babylon Connection? (Riverside, CA: Ralph Woodrow Evangelistic Association, 1997). Woodrow had previously written Babylon Mystery Religion (1966) based heavily on Hislop; this later work constitutes an explicit retraction and refutation.
[3] Carl Olson and Sandra Miesel, The Da Vinci Hoax (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 218. The broader critique of Hislop's methodology appears in multiple scholarly reviews; see also Lester L. Grabbe, "The Scapegoat Tradition: A Study in Early Jewish Interpretation," Journal for the Study of Judaism 18 (1987): 152-167, for methodological comments on parallelomania.
[4] On the etymology of Ishtar/Ashtoreth, see John C. de Moor, The Rise of Yahwism: The Roots of Israelite Monotheism, 2nd ed. (Leuven: Peeters, 1997), 61-63.
[5] On the Proto-Germanic root *Austro and its cognates, see Julius Pokorny, Indogermanisches etymologisches Worterbuch (Bern: Francke, 1959), 86-87. The connection to Latin aurora and Greek eos through PIE root *aus- is standard in comparative linguistics.
[6] Bede, De Temporum Ratione, ch. 15. Trans. Faith Wallis (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), 54.
[7] Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, 4th ed. (Berlin: Harrwitz und Gossmann, 1875-78), vol. 1, 180-182. English translation: Teutonic Mythology, trans. James Steven Stallybrass (London: Bell and Sons, 1882-88).
[8] Georg Franck von Franckenau, De ovis paschalibus (Heidelberg, 1682), cited in Adolf Holtzmann, Germanische Altertumer (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1873). The text describes the Osterhase as a folk figure hiding eggs for children.
[9] The historical Nicholas of Myra is attested in early Byzantine hagiography. See Charles W. Jones, Saint Nicholas of Myra, Bari, and Manhattan: Biography of a Legend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 1-50.
[10] On Krampus and Knecht Ruprecht in Germanic folk tradition, see Clement Miles, Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912), 218-225.
[11] Robert L. May, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (Chicago: Montgomery Ward, 1939). The booklet was created as a promotional giveaway; approximately 2.4 million copies were distributed in 1939.
[12] Gene Autry recorded "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" (written by Johnny Marks) for Columbia Records in 1949. It became the second best-selling Christmas single in history.
[13] Haddon Sundblom's Santa Claus illustrations for Coca-Cola appeared annually from 1931 to 1964. See Penne Restad, Christmas in America: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 158-160.
— End of Installment Four —
FirstSentencePerspective.com
Installment Five: "Decorated Corruption" — Coming Soon
