https://web.archive.org/web/20250418050741/https://www.histo...

[flagged]

[flagged]

It's actually called holy Friday (Vendredi Saint) in France.

> In Old English, the day was called Long Friday (langa frigedæg [ˈlɑŋɡɑ ˈfriːjedæj])—referring to the lengthy observances of fasting and religious services, making it a day of extended devotion—and equivalents of this term are still used in Scandinavian languages and Finnish.[16]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Friday#Etymology

It's more about it being a long day for the faithful. Traditionally, you may have attended three hours agony, fasting, in addition to the liturgy (there's no transubstantiation), etc.

"Why is Good Friday called Good Friday? … What is Good Friday? … Why is Good Friday called Good Friday? … How is Good Friday marked around the world? … When is Good Friday in 2025?"

This is SEO slop.

> to drive home the Christian message

For "the Christian message" the death of Christ is the ultimate good thing. According to Christianity his death brings everyone's salvation, not the resurrection. This is my body which is given for you.

Sad so many Catholic churches fail at actually sharing that message.

In light of recent market turmoil, I would call today "not bad Friday."

Same in Ethiopia

You are probably using an ad blocker.

Wikipedia disagrees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Friday#Etymology

Thank you. I opened the page, saw the layout and ads and bailed within 2 seconds

Article is weird because it’s mass produced SEO slop

No, this is wrong. As the others have said, "Brückentag" is a general term for non-holidays, and it doesn't even apply here as Friday is the holiday and not Thursday.

Good Friday is also still very significant in its religious purpose here, so calling it "bridge day", even if it applied, would be disrespectful.

(Which doesn't keep the racing/modding community from having their own "Car Freitag" on that day...)

Karfreitag can't be a bridge day since it is a public holiday (gesetzlicher Feiertag).

Although Thursday was a regional commemoration day (Gründonnerstag), it wasn't a public holiday, so most people still worked.

Any day between holidays and weekend is a "Brückentag", a bridge day. Friday would be a bridge day, if thursday were a public holiday. So would monday, if tuesday were one. It's not a term a for specific day, but for a type of day.

Well, ascension day and the corpus christ feast are always on a thursday and as such the friday after them are Brückentage, but in my lifetime at least the good friday not once was on a thursday...

I've spent a fair amount of time studying ancient Sumerian culture and religion as a hobby, and the often repeated claim that "Easter comes from Ishtar" just doesn't hold up to even minimal scrutiny. It's one of those internet factoids that sounds plausible on the surface but completely falls apart under actual historical or linguistic analysis.

There's no serious academic support for a connection between the Christian holiday of Easter and the Mesopotamian goddess Inanna/Ishtar. The religious practices, beliefs, and festivals associated with Inanna bear no resemblance superficial or otherwise to Easter. They differ entirely in form, function, and meaning.

The only myth from that tradition that bears a remote resemblance is Inanna’s descent into the underworld: she's stripped of her powers, confronts her sister Ereshkigal, is executed, and later resurrected. It’s a compelling narrative, and yes, there's a resurrection motif but it serves a totally different purpose. It was a cosmological myth, tied to the movement of Venus in the night sky, not a theological cornerstone or community wide festival.

Inanna's rituals were centered on themes like war, sexuality, and divine kingship. Easter, by contrast, is about death and rebirth in a very different theological context. The comparison isn’t apples to oranges, it’s apples to machine learning models.

Also worth noting that the whole "Easter sounds like Ishtar" thing is shaky at best. The similarity is phonetically weak, especially when you consider historical pronunciations. Plus, "Ishtar" isn't even the most common or original name for the goddess Inanna (Sumerian) and Astarte (Phoenician/Canaanite) were more widespread depending on the period and region.

The connection between Easter and Ishtar is a modern myth. It s based more on a coincidence in English phonetics than on anything rooted in actual history or comparative religion.

The holy day of Christian Easter coincides with the Jewish Passover as Jesus celebrated the Last Supper before his death and resurrection. Passover or Seder is on the eve of the 15th day of Nisan which is the first full moon after the beginning of Spring.

By the time of the first Nicea ecumenical council, Christians argued against using the Jewish calendar as by the 300s, it dated Passover before the spring equinox. The early church was now the official religion of the Roman Empire who followed the solar calendar.

In other words Easter and Passover has always been associated with Spring.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passover_Seder

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_of_Easter

> I find it odd how Easter, a pre-Christian Pagan festival (worshipping goddess of fertility: Eostre) has become seemingly-arbitrarily connected to the purported events at the end of Jesus' life..

The Eostre connection is unconvincing. Eostre is a Saxon goddess with earliest sources about her cult from 8th century and:

- Easter has been celebrated before 8th century.

- And it has been celebrated by people that have never heard of Saxons or their gods.

It isn't arbitrary. The death and resurrection of Jesus happened after the Jewish passover, which happens in the spring. It is also easy to see how symbols of renewed life and fertility in the spring could be adapted to symbolize Jesus coming back to life.

> I find it odd how Easter, a pre-Christian Pagan festival (worshipping goddess of fertility: Eostre) has become seemingly-arbitrarily connected to the purported events at the end of Jesus' life.. yet it still includes a good amount of the prior symbolism (rabbits, eggs etc)!

This is an oft-repeated canard for which there is basically no evidence. In particular, there's no evidence for "easter bunnies" prior to 17th century protestant Germany, who then brought it to the US, when they migrated to Pennsylvania (ie: The Pennsylvania Dutch). Those aspects of the celebration aren't Christian or pagan, they're secular things that people do because it's fun for the kids, and that has always been the case.

Easter is not a Pagan holiday. Its only named similarly in German and English. If it's linked to any other religious holiday it would be the Jewish holiday of Passover, in most languages it's name is based on Paschal/Pesach(passover) and the last supper was likely a passover meal. Early Christians timed Easter based on the Hebrew calendar/Passover

As has already been mentioned by others mostly everything except the name is different.

When it comes to the name, the name isn't anything similar in for example Nordic languages:

Påske (Norwegian, Danish) or påsk (Swedish). Finnish seems to have a similar sounding name. Same with Dutch.

German has Ostern, but I the few others I checked were completely different.

That means even the name similarity only exist in a few languages.

And at the time the Christian celebration of Easter started these languages didn't even exist. The closest language I could find to early Christian history on DeepL was Greek and in Greek the name of Easter seems to be Πάσχ.

With that, this idea should be debunked sufficiently I think.

https://youtu.be/0m2ZQaxfpnY?si=t0zQAWhZEW8Uoa2z the Easter Bunny is not pagan, it's a much more recent tradition.

It's literally only called Easter in English.

That being said, the actual etymology for Easter is from the month of April in the anglo-saxon calendar: Ēosturmōnaþ. Easter of course is a name for the entire season of Easter (up until Pentecost), which lasts a bit over a month and usually coincides with Ēosturmōnaþ.

But fittingly, Easter etymologically comes from the Proto-Indo-European word for 'Dawn', symbolizing literally the East, from which the sun rises. The Indian name Usha literally comes from the same word, and would directly translate into Easter.

The first mention of Eostre as a goddess is post-Christianity, by Bede. He writes:

> Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated "Paschal month", and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate that Paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honoured name of the old observance

In many languages "Easter" is a variation of Passover. "Pâques" in French for example, Pascha in Greek and Russian, Pascua in most Latin languages. In others (aome Slavic languages) it's a variation of "Great Day" ("Velikonoce" in Czech for example). " And so on. English and German are the only languages I know with a weird word for Easter.

Edit - also Passover is Pesach in Hebrew. So Pesach -> Pascha in Greek, then onwards to other languages. Or just "Great Day" (which finishes off Great and Holy week which is what the week leading up to Easter is in most languages).

The first month after March equinox has great religious significance across many cultures (in the temperate zone), e.g. Pesach. When different cultures meet, they tend to syncretise.

“Easter" or something similar, is only the name in English and German, which weren't spoken at the time the celebration of the holiday began. There is some evidence that that germanic name came from a pagan goddess with a fertility celebration around the time that the resurrection celebration occurred in the Christian calendar, but the celebration itself didn't originate with that pagan celebration. (And the elements other than the name you refer to have no evidence of connection to the pagan goddess, and appear to have attached to Easter later, not been brought in with the name.)

I find it fascinating that a lot of traditional holidays seem to have acquired multiple, sometimes conflicting narratives over the ages.

Christmas is the most obvious one (what does a bearded dude on the north pole have to do with the birth of Jesus? For Germans specifically: The "Christkind" is Baby Jesus, but its also a kind of spirit of its own who brings presents, and for some reason usually depicted as a girl?)

But you also have a similar thing for Carnival: Traditionally, it's the last feast before Lent (where Lent is also an expanded narrative of Easter!). But there are also all kinds of local narratives layered on top of it, like the Rhineland "Session", which begins in November, is somewhat awkwardly interrupted by Christmas and ends with Carnival as its sort of "grand finale".

And then Easter has the triple narrative as the death and ascension of Jesus, the feast after the end of Lent (so a bit like Islam's Eid al Fitr) and the beginning of spring.

In some way, it reminds me of the sprawling lore and extended universes/fan canons around Star Wars or other Scifi or Fantasy franchises, except on a much, much larger scale. I think it's all pretty fun.

I don't think it is odd at all. In a choice between "our religion can't gain the membership to survive" vs "ok, we can bend the structure of our religion a little to make it more palatable for this huge amount of people", I think the choice is obvious.

You might find it odd that Christians think they came up with Easter (or Christmas, or the Epiphany...) though.

Christmas trees too, and Christmas lights for that matter.

You realise that jewish people have had easter for a certain number of years before christ?

Let’s talk about Christmas then. They deliberately put it at a time where many northern folks had their own traditional end of the year / longest night (opposite to midd summer) festivals. In Germany we have Nikolaus on the 6.12 (goes back to a priest St Nikolaus who did good to people and I believe died on the 6th of December)

But the name is striking to Santa Claus which is just a Anglo version of that name. Interesting is also that half of Germany the Christ baby brings the presents or the Weihnachtsmann. The Weihnachtsmann is what we would refer as Santa. But Santa and Nikolaus are depicted the same. There some other festivals like Jule from Scandinavia etc. But compared to Christmas we at least know that the end of Jesus (or whoever it was) happened at that time due to too many religions and groups in the city. When he was born and how old he even was…

Edit: Also the fact that the holiday follows the moon calendar because it was the Sunday after the Paschal full moon. Which is celebrated by the Jewish as Passover.

embrace. extend. extinguish. Cultural assimilation by the missionaries to spread Christianity, is one of the major reason. This is why different countries have their own "local" version of Christianity with their own unique / weird rituals or practice.

It holds for other christian holidays as well, like xmas.

This is a tactic of zero sum conquering ideologies:

- you take the symbolism of the oppressed and make it evil in your ideology, ie. the pentagram as a symbol of health and women turned into a christian satanic symbol

- you take the oppressed culture's holidays and make them your own, easing the usurping, I know secularists and people of other religions who celebrate xmas "just because"