does anyone even know how easter came about bcos ive heard both that its from a pagan ritual (to do with a german goddess eostre who from what i can tell was only mentioned in one book) and also that it was originally jewish so like

what’s with that

Easter’s an “extension” of Passover. The first followers of Christ considered themselves to be Jewish, and saw Jesus as the “Lamb who takes away the sins of the world” in a similar fashion to the blood of the Passover lamb used as a sign to the angel of death.

There’s some controversy over where western countries got the eggs and rabbit symbolism, but that comes later on, and has more to do with cultural exchange than the religious aspects of the holiday.

You’re also right that Eostre is only mentioned once, in the 8th century by a Christian monk named Bede. Bede liked to muse a lot about the world around him and he wondered why the anglo-saxon word for the month of (March)April was Eostremanth(sp). He also noticed that old cultures had a tendency to name their months and days after deities, so he theorized that there was this goddess named Eostre.

The languages that developed out of the Anglo-Saxon family (English and German) kept the name Easter specifically because the feast day tended to fall in this month. Other countries around the world call the holiday by some variation of the word “Pesach” (Passover).

The whole “Easter is a stolen pagan holiday” idea actually doesn’t show up in history until Jacob Grimm and his contemporaries started romanticizing the proto-European eras in the 19th century. There’s really no basis for this thought outside of linguistics, but people tend to run with it anyway, especially in modern pagan communities.

TL;DR: Easter (and Christianity in general) comes from a heretical reading of Judaism.

g bless this shit, man.