The annual festival celebrating the resurrection of Christ, which now falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox (Mar. 21). The word “Easter” is from Eµastre, Anglo-Saxon name for the goddess of spring during whose month (April) the old Teutonic spring festival was observed. With the coming of Christianity the name was transferred to the Christian Passover, which fell at the same season.
The NT gives no clear evidence of a commemorative celebration of the Resurrection (in Acts 12:4 , KJV , “Easter” is a mistranslation for “Passover”). However, early Christians seem to have continued the observance of Passover ( Acts 20:6 ) and may have thought of it as a memorial of the Passion ( cf. 1 Cor. 5:7 , 8 ). The apostles John and Philip are reported to have kept Passover in this way, and such a celebration seems definitely to have been an established practice from the time of Bishop Xystus I ( c. A.D. 116– c. 125) of Rome.
About A.D. 150 the Quartodeciman (“fourteenth”) controversy arose as to whether Easter should commemorate the Passion and fall always on the fourteenth day of Nisan, the Passover (as was the practice in Asia), or whether it should celebrate the Resurrection and come on a set annual Sunday, regardless of date, according to another tradition that by then had become general practice. These two points of view may reflect differences between the Pharisaic and the Qumran calendars. The controversy was finally resolved at the Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325) in favor of the latter view.
Regarding baptism as the biblical commemoration of the Resurrection (see Rom. 6:3–5 ), and mindful of the pagan origin of the day, early Seventh-day Adventists did not celebrate Easter. In 1887 Uriah Smith wrote that Easter “savors of the customs of the Protestant Church not wholly weaned from Mother Rome” ( Review and Herald 64:179, Mar. 22, 1887). The next year ( ibid. 65:217, Apr. 3, 1888) L. A. Smith gave as the reason for SDA nonobservance of the day the fact that “we find there [in the Bible] no mention of Easter, or of Lent, or of Good Friday, or of any of the numerous other feast and fast days which the Church of Rome has always made, and which Protestant churches are fast coming to make, so prominent.”