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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am a Christian, but I'm not concerned about this as a Christian. I have no problem with "baptizing" useful pagan customs. I have a problem with these stories, because they fail as history. There simply isn't evidence for them, and people believe them because they show up on the History Channel between showings of Ancient Aliens.[/quote]

Translation:  I refuse to believe the scholars, including contemporaneous writings by Bede, because it disagrees with my presuppositions, and I will say they fail as history but provide no evidence of that claim, and hope no one calls me on my bullshit.[/quote]

I waited a bit to respond to this, because I needed to get to where I could lay my hands on my copy of [i]Winters in the World[/i] Eleanor Parker's excellent recent book on the Anglo Saxon year. Parker is a specialist on medieval English and Scandinavian literature at Oxford and a scholar by anyone's definition. Here's what she says about the connection between Eostre and Easter celebration:

[quote][I]t's important to recognize that even if Easter does take its name from a goddess, that only tells us about the origins of the [i]name[/i]- not the origins of the festival. The Christian festival of Easter long pre-dated the Anglo-Saxon conversion, and its essential features, including the principal behind its dating, had been established for centuries. What's more, we have no evidence of any symbols, customs, or rituals that may have been associated with Eostre in Anglo-Saxon England or anything to suggest how her festival might have been celebrated. Bede mentions "feasts," in the vaguest terms, but he probably has no idea what those might have involved. Today it's popular myth that symbols linked in modern Britain with Easter, especially eggs, hares or rabbits derive from worship of Eostre, but there's no Anglo-Saxon evidence to support that. None of these symbols were linked to Easter in the Anglo-Saxon period; eggs weren't associated with Easter in Britain until the later Middles ages, hares and rabbits not until much later still. There's nothing to suggest any continuity between the pre-conversion festival and the Anglo-Saxon Christian Easter, and the modern observance of Easter owes nothing to Anglo-Saxon paganism, with the sole exception of its English name.
[/quote] (Page 126)

She also relevant to your odd description of Bede as "contemporary":
[quote]Most likely Bede wasn't relying on personal knowledge but was using a written source for month-names and adding his own speculation about the meaning- and in some cases he may have just been guessing.[/quote] (Page 15)

She also notes with regard to the name that:
[quote]Some have gone so far as to suggest that Bede invented Esotre as a scholarly hypothesis to explain a name he didn't understand[/quote] (Page 125) (There's a citation here to "Anglo-Saxon Paganism: The Evidence of Bede" by an R.I. Page a Cambridge scholar who was an expert on Anglo-Saxon runes)

So basically, what I'm saying is that I'm satisfied that my opinions are based on scholarship, including giving Bede his proper due.[/quote]

So we agree then, that it is the origin of the name.  Great!  Kind of a stretch to suggest that is the only connection, don't ya think?

While her scholarship is impressive, the rest of her statements are unsupported by citation.  They are just statements of her opinion.  "He may have been guessing"  or "He may have invented" .  Which are ironic accusations!

As for the symbology, we know the rabbit wasn't biblical.  Leviticus 11:6 states that the hare is an unclean animal: “The hare, for even though it chews the cud, it does not have divided hoofs; it is unclean for you”

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/virginity-fertility-or-just-chocolate-the-opaque-history-of-the-easter-bunny/

[/quote]

It's actually quite a stretch to suggest that a connection to rabbits existed in pre-Christian times then disappeared entirely from the historical record before reappearing almost a thousand years later. It's technically possible, but there's zero evidence for it.

No one claimed the rabbit association was biblical, just that it likely arose in a Christian culture rather than being a surviving pagan element. There's simply no credible modern scholarship based on primary sources that makes this connection. Even your own link makes clear that the connection is entirely supposed: "the Easter Hare is unintelligible to me, but probably the hare was the sacred animal of Ostara." Just a guess.

Your link also, I believe confuses who made that statement. Based on this: https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2016/04/ostara-and-the-hare/ from folklorist Stephen Winick, the quote there isn't from Jacob Grimm but Adolph Holtzmann. Grimm's contribution is to invent the idea of Eostre being a manifestation of a more widespread goddess he called Ostara, but there's no evidence for that outside of his supposition.

It's a myth that makes sense to modern ears, but when I say there's no evidence for it, this is what I'm talking about.[/quote]

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