Easter coincides with the Jewish holiday of passover because Jesus’s last supper was a passover meal.
Passover is the celebration of the Jews escape from Egypt, but it is also their spring festival.
Spring Festivals are common place through the world, and in Europe existing pagan celebrations were happening during the time of Easter.
Like so many other Christian Holidays, the Church co-opted various pagan traditions into the Easter Holiday. Basically saying “You can keep this up, so long as you put Jesus in their somewhere”
So various things like the Eggs, Rabbits, etc are metaphors for spring and fertility that are leftovers from Pagan fertility and spring festivals that were integrated with Easter. Their original meanings functionally lost to history.
This is the same reason that Christmas trees and various other things associated with the Pagan Yule celebration became part of Christmas. The honest truth is we don’t know when Jesus was born, European Christians chose Christmas time as the celebration of Christ’s birth because it coincided with Yule and they wanted to replace it with something far more Christian. (Yule was a pretty crazy drunken party and no really compatible with Christian values)
I was taught that the egg represents the Trinity & it was something devout Catholics gave up for Lent. So, you would be able to eat an egg on Easter morning in remembrance of the Godhead. It’s all crazy but to each his own….. My Grandparents were Eastern Orthodox and we would have a big Easter basket that was blessed by a priest with all kinds of traditional foods that supposedly represented Christ’s sacrifice & resurrection. 🤔
Easter was an appropriation of the fertility holiday for the Goddes Aester/Eostre which is why its in the Spring. She is a fertility goddess associated with eggs and bunnies. She is also sometimes associated with the Goddesses Isis and Ishtar who were still very popular in the Mediterranean region in the first few centuries AD.
The celebration of Easter was usually done via drug ecstasy fueled orgies so it was quite popular.
Originally, the easter bunny is a hare, not a rabbit.
Rabbits give birth inside burrows and their young are blind and helpless. Hares give birth in nests in grasslands and their young are ready for live immediately.
Birds lay eggs in nests also in grasslands and after coming out of the egg, the leftover shells are there. So for a long time the mythology was that hares came from eggs also.
On how the christian mythology came interlinked with this, that is explained in other comments.
After Jesus returned to his home planet they went on the tomb and there was a big rabbit who had a ton of eggs, as these were very trying times. Judas killed the rabbit with a holy hand grenade, then took the eggs. But the eggs melted in the hot sun, and Judas wept, for he had no worlds left to conquer.
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