exvigilare

What’s the difference between Easter and Pascha? I’m glad you asked. As a new Orthodox Christian I’m learning, too. This series also helps me to set things right in my head as well as in yours. There’s actually not a ton of difference between the two celebrations, or even how liturgical churches recognize them. The date and the title are probably the most significant differences.

Pascha normally falls either one or five weeks later than the Easter feast as observed by Christians who follow the Gregorian calendar. However, occasionally the two observances coincide, and some years they can be two, four, or six weeks apart (but never three).

Some Orthodox Christians discourage the use of the word Easter, believing that the term has roots in pagan rites of the spring equinox and overtones of fertility. Most English speakers are unaware of the etymological origins of Easter, however, and use it without any sense of pagan connotations, and so Easter is also used by many Orthodox English speakers. For the most part, “Easter” is used only in English and German, though.

According to BELIEVE, Easter was originally a Saxon word (Eostre), denoting a goddess of the Saxons, in honor of whom sacrifices were offered about the time of the Passover. Hence the name came to be given to the festival of the Resurrection of Christ, which occured at the time of the Passover. In the early English versions this word was frequently used as the translation of the Greek pascha (the Passover). When the Authorized Version (1611) was formed, the word “passover” was used in all passages in which this word pascha occurred, except in Act 12:4. In the Revised Version the proper word, “passover,” is always used.

Pascha is the Greek form of the Hebrew word, Pesch - “Passover” in English (thanks to Phyllis Meshel Onest). We know that Passover is the Jewish feast commemorating the Israelites freedom and exodus from Egypt. Thus the Israelites passed over from “death and slavery” in Egypt to “life and freedom” in the Promised Land. For Orthodox Christians - and apparently for non-English and German Christians - Pascha best identifies our passover from sin’s “death and slavery” to “life and freedom” through Christ’s Resurrection. Christ not only fulfilled the Old Testament prophecies, but became the “Passover” Himself. What Moses, the prefigure of Christ in the Old Testament, inaugurated for the people of Israel on the temporal level, Christ inaugurated for all people on the eternal level.

There is no equivalent word for “Easter” in the Greek language because the word is an Anglo-Saxon word for a pagan festival. Therefore, a direct translation is impossible. Via the Orthodox Research Institute,

Pascha is derived from the Jewish word Pesah which means “Passover”. And here there is a direct link with the New Testament. In 1 Corinthians 5:7 we read, “for our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed”. According to St John, Christ was crucified at the very time that the paschal lambs were being killed….So for Christians Christ was clearly the Paschal Lamb, the fulfilment of all that the Passover had foreshadowed since the first Passover which celebrated the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. Let us remember that because the word “Pascha” is in its origin a Hebrew word, by using it we are a witness to the Jewish community, for whom the Passover is still one of the most important words in their religious faith.

There are plenty of differences between the two, not the least of which is culinary!