Where do these traditions of men come from?
Who cares? Individual traditions that are not universal to the celebration do not reflect on the celebration. You’re far too rigid and way too afraid of things that shouldn’t scare you. If you don’t like Easter then don’t celebrate Easter. I don’t. But don’t go on outrage fueled rants accusing anyone who does of apostasy.
No pagan is celebrating the resurrection of Christ. Painting eggs could have developed in a number of different places for a number of different reasons. Certainly there were no known pagan egg decorators for vast swaths of western history while the traditions around Easter were being developed. The truth is that we don’t know where most of this stuff came from.
We do know that the claims about its pagan origins almost universally originate with late enlightenment atheists, or actual pagans. Accusing the roots of Christianity of being pagan is an actual pagan practice. Are you going to stop doing that? No. Of course not. Pagans breathed too. That doesn’t make breathing pagan.
This vitriolic hysteria whereby we attack everything that has ever existed in between Christ and us is illogical and ridiculous and drives people away from the very real good that exists in our community.
Meanwhile we don’t bat an eye at any depredation inflicted on the New Testament and even Christ as long as it comes from someone who some how keeps some version of a non-Sunday sabbath.
We will blithely excuse any alteration to the sabbath that isn’t Sunday. We will joyfully participate in any bastardized Passover service that bears not the slightest resemblance to what was commanded while we strictly keep Purim and Hanukkah which were never commanded, all while damning to hell as heretics anyone who decorates their house for Christmas.
We risk becoming ridiculous caricatures of hypocrites.
This past two weeks alone I have run into four different Torah keepers who have essentially rejected Christ as having any divinity; two of which claim to have no need of a sacrifice for forgiveness and one who rejects the New Testament entirely.
Christmas and Sunday worship, and by the way worship was never commanded for the weekly sabbath anyway, are not worse sins than that. We have our own problems. Leave the Greeks to their Greek things. They have to comply to Acts 15. And whether they do or not is none of our business.
We have to comply to John chapter 1 and whether we do or not will determine whether or not our movement is allowed to grow or whether we are rightly throttled in our infancy.
