Believing Easter

I know I shouldn't be astonished at what people will believe, but am. Most recently the feeling was provoked by a conversation with someone I know who organises a small church fellowship in London attended by people from various alternative scenes around the capital. They're going to be discussing whether Christians ought to celebrate Easter. This is the argument.

Easter is not a Christian observance. The venerable Bede says its name derives from an Anglo-Saxon goddess called Eostre. She is the same as Astarte, who is the same as Isis, who is the same as Ishtar; the names are the same and those goddesses had festivals in the Spring which the early Church took over. The worship of Astarte was brought to Britain by the Druids through their contact with the Phoenicians. Therefore Easter is pagan and Christians should have nothing to do with it.

The things that are true about this argument are: 1. Bede does mention a goddess who gave her name to April before the Anglo-Saxons adopted the Roman terms for the months, and hence the English name for Easter. 2. There were ancient Near-Eastern deities called Astarte, Isis and Ishtar. But that's it. The rest is unhistorical trash. This, very briefly, is why.

1. There's no etymological link between Astarte and Eostre, no matter how similar the names look; they come from completely different linguistic and cultural contexts.
2. There's no historical link either. The only connection ever quoted between Bronze and Iron Age Britain and the Near East is via those elusive Phoenician tin traders, and the only evidence that such merchants ever found their way to these damp northern islands is a statement from the 1st-century Roman historian Strabo, writing centuries after the fact. There are no finds indicating any trading contact, and modern historians believe that if there was trading contact between Britain and the Phoenicians, it was through intermediaries. So, no Astarte for the Druids. Plus the fact that the Roman invasions of Britain under Claudius in the 1st century effectively destroyed Druid culture, so there's a gap of four centuries and more between them and the appearance of the Anglo-Saxon Eostre.
3. There's barely any evidence of Near Eastern mother goddesses being worshipped in Roman Britain, although we happen to know a lot about pagan religion then. There's a bit of a jug and a bracelet with the name of Isis, and that's it. Nothing else.
4. There's no evidence other than the statement by Bede that there ever was a goddess called Eostre; it's just his guess based on the old name for April, Eostremonath, a guess made more than two centuries after the conversion of the English to Christianity began. Again, no placenames, no other literary reports, no archaeology. She may not have existed at all.
5. Isis certainly had a Spring festival, the Navigium Isidis, but none of the other Near Eastern mother-goddesses seems to have done. Also it was held at the start of March, not the end - far earlier than any date for Easter.
6. Why was England (and therefore the English-speaking world) the only part of Christendom that adopted Astarte's name for the feast of the Resurrection of Jesus, while the Christian cultures in the part of the world that did actually worship her invariably and from the earliest times used the term Pasch based on its intimate connection with the Jewish Passover?

The source of all this nonsense seems to be Alexander Hislop's deranged work of obsessive anti-Catholic scholarship, The Two Babylons: Papal worship revealed to be the worship of Nimrod and his wife (1858). I say 'scholarship', because it was about acceptable for an isolated Scottish minister given the state of historical, philological and archaeological knowledge in the middle of the 19th century to come up with this kind of stuff. Repeating it all a hundred and fifty years later, however, is another matter. Much of the Christian commentary I've seen quite happily refers to Hislop's book as a authority; I suppose people lack the apparatus to realise how compromised it is. But shouldn't discovering it was written by an extremist Scottish minister in the mid-1800s ring a few mental alarm bells? Perhaps not, as we're always inclined to believe what confirms our own prejudices. In this instance, the assumptions of radical Christians and modern pagans neatly coincide.

What actually shocks me, sheltered soul as I am, is the utter lack of any historical sense on the part of so very many people who don't lack basic intelligence. There's no real awareness of the passage of time; of the fact that cultures are different, that languages are different, that historical periods are different, that geography makes a difference. Everything can be made to meld together; names, personalities, peoples and cultures merge into an indistinguishable melange.