Huh? How Did That Happen?

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I was putting something in my phone's calendar and noticed a dot on Sunday, March 27. I clicked it and saw that it's Easter. That's interesting, I thought. Passover isn't until April 23. Jesus celebrated Passover the night before his crucifixion. Huh? How can Easter come nearly a month before Passover? The answer can be found in the antisemitism of early church fathers. Most Christians today wouldn't recognize the real Jesus. You see, he was a Jew. An observant Jew. That means he didn't look like Don Felder back in his Eagles days (see picture) or someone at a Grateful Dead concert in the late 60s. No, he looked like a Jew. That's easily proved, too: In Luke 6:7 it says the Pharisees watched Jesus to see if they could accuse him. If he looked like all these paintings they wouldn't have to "watch." Jewish men were required to wear tzitzit (the fringes hanging on the end of a garment -- if you've seen Fiddler on the Roof then you've seen these). If Jesus looked like these pictures of him they would have dismissed him as not Torah observant...and so would his followers. In other words, he wouldn't have had a following. So how did a Jewish man who was promised as a Jewish messiah to the Jewish people become the central focus of worship in a church that hates Jews? The quick answer is Jews have always been hated by various groups, nations, and religions. There are a number of Islamic countries that don't even show the nation Israel on textbook maps. That, for centuries, included the Catholic Church. St. John Chrysostom was particularly vile: "The synagogue is worse than a brothel. I hate the Jews." (There are a number of books, such as The Roots of Christian Anti-Semitism and Why the Jews?, that will give you many more abhorrent quotes...if you can stomach them.) The goal, then, was to remove all traces of Judaism from Christianity. That included moving the celebration of the resurrection of the messiah, which had been celebrated on the feast of First Fruits (Jesus referred to as the "first fruits" of the resurrection in 1 Cornithians 15:23), to a pagan festival, the feast of Ishtar, the goddess of fertility. Her feast was celebrated with things such as symbols of fertility -- eggs and rabbits -- and sacrificing pigs. In the 4th century the Catholic Church decided to move the date of celebrating Jesus' resurrection from First Fruits, or the first Sunday after Passover, to "the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox" (or start of spring). As a result, this year Easter comes nearly a month before the Passover meal that the Bible clearly says Jesus celebrated and partook of before his death. Go figure.