I wrote a fairly lengthy post covering the problems of Alexander Hislop's work "The Two Babylons" in regards to its claims on Easter. I went very in depth as to its claims, and I realized it was perhaps too in depth; plenty of people will be uninterested in reading for dozens of pages through all of that and might just want the quick parts. Therefore, this will be a much shorter and summarized version of that post. Should someone want more detail on these things, I recommend looking at that post.
Even in this shorter post, however, I should explain the purpose of this. Alexander Hislop was a 19th century writer who wrote "The Two Babylons", which basically tried to claim that the various pagan religions came from an old religion by the Babylonians and that the beliefs of this religion were merged with Christianity to form Catholicism. Its main influence, however, has been that it is the source for various accusations of supposed pagan origins of Easter.
There have been various criticisms of the work, such as this article in The Saturday Review from back when it was published, or Ralph Woodrow's work "The Babylon Connection?" (Woodrow previously was a believer in Hislop's claim and wrote an earlier work advocating for them, but later realized the errors in them, withdrew the old work, and then made the "The Babylon Connection?" pointing out the prior errors, and if someone wants to just get a summary of The Babylon Connection, here is a post. However, those don't go into too much depth on Hislop's specific claims on Easter, and I thought this post would be useful given how many of the "Easter is pagan!" claims end up tracing back to Hislop.
Hislop covers several different claims in his section on Easter and I'll be dividing them up with some headings. Here we go.
The Name "Easter" and the Holiday's Origin
Hislop's first claim is that the name of Easter "bears its Chaldean origin on its very forehead" and says it comes from Ishtar. No proof is actually offered for this etymology aside from the fact they sound similar; the idea that because two words look or sound similar, they must be related is how Hislop usually approaches his claims about etymology. But many times words in different languages will sound similar by coincidence. And "Easter" is not even the term for the holiday in most of the world. Most languages take it from the Latin pascha; for example, it is pascua in Spanish. German uses "Ostern" which is a bit similar, but sounds even less like Ishtar. Oddly, Hislop mentions that the term Easter is "peculiar to the British
isles" but appears unaware of how much this hurts his claim. Worst of all, the original spelling for Easter was sometimes Estre. It appears it was only later on through linguistic shift that it consistently became Easter and sounded (sort of) like Ishtar. So the name means nothing.
After spending some time attempting to argue for the possibility of Ishtar worship in Britain, which is fairly irrelevant for our purposes (however, see Roger Pearse's post here for some issues with it regardless), Hislop offers the following quote from the Christian historian Socrates:
""Thus much already laid down may seem a sufficient treatise to prove that the celebration of the feast of Easter began everywhere more of custom than by any commandment either of Christ or any Apostle." (Hist. Ecclesiast., lib. v. cap. 22.)"
Hislop is using someone else's faulty translation here, and one he apparently did not verify despite the fact he cites a different remark of Socrates later on in what seems to be his own translation, indicating he had the work available to him in the original language but did not bother to verify the earlier translation. A more accurate translation is "But the instances we have adduced are sufficient to show that the Easter Festival was from some remote precedent differently celebrated in every particular province." As we can see, this has a rather different meaning.
Hislop also makes an odd remark that should be noted; he writes that the date of the crucifixion "in the days of Tertullian, at the end of the second century, was believed to have been the 23rd of March" with a footnote citing "GIESELER, vol. i. p. 55, Note. In GIESELER the time is printed " 25th of March," but the Latin quotation accompanying it shows that this is a typo graphical mistake for "23rd.""
Why is this odd? Because despite Hislop's claim, Gieseler is not wrong here. In his work An Answer to the Jews, Tertullian says the crucifixion occurred on "die octavo Kalendarum Aprilium" or in English, "eighth day of the Kalends of April." An explanation of what this means can be found here, but the eighth day of the Kalends of April corresponds to March 25; the first Kalends is April 1, the second Kalends is March 31, the third is March 30, and you count back like that until you get to the eighth Kalends, March 25. This is confirmed by this translation of Tertulllian's work, which in a footnote mentions it is March 25. So Hislop went out of his way to talk about how the work he was referring to was in error, when it was right and Hislop was the one in error.
So ultimately, Hislop is unable to provide any real evidence of a connection to Ishtar, and makes some unforced errors along the way.
Lent
Hislop's next major argument is to try to claim that the 40-day Lent period came from paganism and refers to several supposed cases where pagans had a 40-day fasting period, but his examples come up short. Let's go through them one by one briefly.
Yezidis: Hislop says that the Yezidis (which he says are the "Pagan Devil-worshippers of Koordistan") have a 40-day fasting period and claims (without offering any proof) that they learned it from the Babylonians. But the Yezidis' 40-day fasting period is almost certainly taken from the Christian Lent. We have no documentation whatsoever that they observed it prior to Christians doing so; Hislop's source referred to contemporary observance among Yezidis, not anything going back to the early Christian period, let alone the Babylonians.
Pagan Mexicans: Hislop's source here says there was a 40-day fasting period after the vernal equinox. His source is ambiguous as to where this information was from, but does earlier mention "the calendar of Mr. Gama". In a work by Antonio de León y Gama we do see a mention of a 40-day fasting period... but he is astoundingly ambiguous in his citation, only saying this was stated by Fray Juan de Torquemada, a Spanish writer who wrote a very lengthy multi-volume work on the Aztecs. But his work is more than 3,000 pages long, and Gama does not tell us where it is (which is odd, given in other cases he is quite specific in citing Torquemada). Fortunately an online version of it does include an index; I looked up all the cases for fasting (ayuno) listed in the index and could find no such 40-day spring fast; there was a mention of a 40-day fast due to the death of an emperor, but this was a one-time thing. Even if there was an annual 40-day spring fast, an examination of Torquemada's work shows they had a lot of fasts of differing periods; in the many fasts he details, we see fasts of 4 days, 5 days, 60 days, 80 days, 9-12 months, or 4 years. Even if they were to have a 40-day annual spring fast somewhere in their large list of different fasts, it can be chalked up to nothing more than coincidence.
Egyptians: In a stunning misrepresentation, Hislop claims his source as demonstrating the existence of a 40-day fast among Egyptians, but what his source actually says is that "A grand ceremony of purification took place previous and preparatory to
their fasts, many of which lasted from seven to forty-two days, and
sometimes even a longer period". 40 falls between 7 and 42, but this is not describing an annual event and certainly not one with a fixed length of 40. As for his other source, which claims a 40-day period for Osiris (no mention of fasting, though), if one traces the citations back to their origin (the letter of Theophilus to Autolycus) one finds there is no mention of a 40-day Osiris period in the original source at all.
Proserpine/Ceres: Here Hislop takes one writer mentioning a 40-day weeping period for Proserpine (perhaps better known as Persephone) that appears to be a highly localized phenomenon and makes no mention of fasting. Then he takes a completely separate mention by a different writer of a fast to Ceres (perhaps better known as Demeter). He then, based on speculation, supposes the two are the same and claims it demonstrates a 40-day fasting period. The problems should be self evident.
So these do not actually back him up.
Hot Cross Buns
Having failed to prove any connection to paganism from Lent (or even demonstrate there was any annual 40-day fasting period among pagans predating Lent), Hislop then moves to hot cross buns. Hislop attempts to prove pagan connections for these also. The problem is that hot cross buns, as far as I can tell, are an invention of just the last few centuries.
That should, right then and there, disprove Hislop's entire contention. It is absurd to claim that an invention of the last few centuries somehow was adopted into the Christian church over a thousand years ago, and Hislop offers no response to this problem or evidence that hot cross buns go back farther than the last few centuries. While that should be enough to finish his claim off, I will nevertheless look into the evidence he does try to offer.
First, Hislop attempts to provide etymological proof of how the word bun comes from paganism. The problem is, not only was he clearly not an etymologist (his methodology generally seems to have been little more than "these two words look similar so clearly they must be related!"), there were some major strides in etymology that occurred after the publication of his work that he would have been unaware of. Quite frankly, one should disregard anything Hislop says about etymologies of words. It's out of date and even in his own day was highly speculative.
But as to this specific case, much could be written about the fallacies in his attempts, which are essentially just imaginative speculation.
But what destroys his claim here, much like what defeats his claim in general of hot cross buns, is when the word "bun" entered the English language. The word "bun" first came into English in the late Middle English period, in the 14th century! This is absurdly late for the pagan connections he tries to bring up. Even worse, its original spelling was bunne or bonne, only becoming 'bun' later still. As for the attempt to find some connection between hot cross buns and the cakes mentioned in Jeremiah 7:18, there is simply not evidence the two are in any way related; all Hislop can do is point to his speculative etymologies that are simply his own imagination and do not work with the fact "bun" didn't enter the English language until the 14th century.
Easter Eggs
Next is Easter Eggs. The first problem we have is that Easter Eggs, while of earlier origin than hot cross buns, still appear to have come so late into history that they could not have plausibly been any kind of pagan accommodation, as paganism in Europe had gone extinct by then. The second is that Hislop's attempts to prove how important eggs were to pagans fails because his examples are so different from the usage of Easter eggs; you can't simply point to pagans using eggs, because eggs are used everywhere. Further, some of his sources give no real sources for their claims. One of Hislop's claims is to point to a large egg in a pagan temple, but if one looks at later photos of it, one sees that it hardly looks like an egg at all and is really just a big vase. The only real thing Hislop can point to that resembles Easter eggs is him referring to how in China they paint eggs, but no evidence is given that this could have had any plausible connection with Easter eggs.
Oranges
Hislop gets off in some tangents in the final portion of his section on Easter that actually have little to do with Easter, but the one thing that relates is his attempts to try to find a pagan origin of the usage of oranges in Easter. The obvious problem is that oranges are rarely a symbol of any kind for Easter outside of Norway, and even Norway appears to have only started with this after The Two Babylons was written. Maybe oranges were a thing during Easter in Scotland in the mid 19th century when The Two Babylons were written, but clearly aren't much of anything nowadays in regards to Easter, Norway excepted. No doubt that is why when people regurgitate claims from the Two Babylons on Easter, this portion is normally ignored.
Even if we were to accept oranges are a major symbol of Easter, he is unable to actually demonstrate any importance of oranges to pagans. The best he can offer is try to point to pomegranates being used by pagans, and then wildly speculates that since pomegranates were unavailable, oranges started being used for Easter. But even if his claims about the importance of pomegranates to pagans were true, this claim about orange being a replacement fails; this link (from a scholarly source), going over the history of oranges in Europe, says they only came in the 15th or 16th century, long too late for this to work.
Conclusion
Thus, Hislop's ideas on Easter are generally not based on much other than his own imagination. A recurring problem we indeed see is that he takes contemporary Easter practices, assumes they go back to the days of paganism, even though so many of these only arose long after the point he claims they entered the church. Hislop can be given a little (though not much) leeway for his errors given that he lived in the 19th century, but people nowadays who blindly parrot his claims do not.
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