Heres something I heard this weekend. My parent watch John Hagee and Cornerstone Church's broadcast. Sunday, after Liturgy, I came home to find that Hagee was talking about something called the "Mother/Child cult that started in Babylon or after baylon where one of the kings of Israel married Jezebel, and when she gave birth to a son, she proclaimed him divine along with herself and developed a ritualistic washing in their honour. The spring celebration in their honour was called Ishtar where we get Easter from. It said that the son rose from the dead. And Hagee went on to say something about the christian faith, once it baceme the religion of the state did not convert to "true" christianity, but held onto the mother child cult, as it has spread over the centuries and ended up being a popular thing in Rome, and so all things were simply a replacement form that false religion. In other words, Jezebel became the Virgin, and Christ the son of Jezebel. According to him, the old religion was never replaced but glossed over, so that Christ was merely a replacement for the rision son of the pagan religion. Has anyone heard about this? What do you all think (even considering the source)?
The only thing I've heard about this is from a linguistic standpoint: in the Early Church when Latin priests and monks traveled to what is now England to convert the pagans residing there, linguistically they opted rather to use concepts and terms already existing in the vernacular Anglo-Saxon tongue, instead of teaching this new faith using foreign Latin words that would alienate the natives. As such, rather than using the Latin "Pascha" for the celebration of Christ's resurrection (which is theologically more accurate of course because it ties Christ to the Paschal Lamb, etc.), the missionaries chose instead to "baptise" the local customs and the term for their annual spring fertility celebration, which was in honor of this goddess Ishtar, and teach the lesson of the new faith by the parallel of "new birth" that both Ishtar the goddess of Spring (or whatever she was goddess of) and Christ both represented. Hence the word "Easter" (comes from Ishtar) in the English language, rather than "Pascha" or some derivative.
I did not know about any connection to Jezebel and her son, nor the whole angle that the Theotokos and Christ replaced them.
As for what I *think* of all this...re: the missionaries of the Anglo-Saxon pagans - while perhaps they spread the faith in this way (using local terms and concepts) out of necessity, I feel they never really explained the TRUTH to the pagans about the new faith they were being baptised into, which I feel has had reprocussions later in history (i.e. now) when in say, America, "Easter" is still tied more to fertility (bunnies and eggs) than it is to Christ's resurrection - the English language as it is used by the majority of English speakers was never baptised into the faith to the extent that other languages have been (hence so many words in OUR faith that we opt rather to keep untranslated), which is unfortunate. re: the protestant guy who thinks the Church merely replaced Jezebel and her son with the Theotokos and Christ, the Son of the living God, even if he is saying this for argument's sake against veneration of Mary or whatnot, in doing so he is degrading the entire faith - to even SUGGEST that God made Man is a leap from an old symbol to a new one, when He is nothing less than God Himself, is blasphemy, IMO.
