Roger Patterson Interview

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the

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Apostle Paul said, but we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

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In short, if you like smooth, watered -down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.

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By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her

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King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Avendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. My name is

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Mike Avendroth, and we're glad to have you here. I don't know why every time I tape a show, it's pouring rain out.

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It must be a Seattle weather or something here in New England. Today, we have a very unique show, and about once a year or so,

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I'm wrong, and so then I have to admit it. And today is one of those days. So let me fill you in, listeners, to an email

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I received just a short time ago. Mike and Steve, I'm a transfer listener via that Todd Friel guy.

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Love the show most of the time, and listen regularly as I sit in my little cubicle here at Answers in Genesis.

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I heard you both mention Easter slash Resurrection Sunday on a recent show. I was a former

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Easter hater, so I decided to do a little research. I wrote three articles for Answers in Genesis website dealing with the name, date, and customs of Easter, for which

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I received much hate mail. I humbly suggest that the Asheroth connection is dubious at best and has perpetuated legends started by Alexander Hislop.

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There may be some connection to a British goddess, but there is another linguistic explanation as well.

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As to the egg -laying bunny, he's not real, and he's a glory robber just like that Santa guy.

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In Christ, Roger Patterson. And so I wrote back to Roger and said, I read your articles,

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I repent, you're right, and I want to have you on the show. And Roger, welcome to No Compromise Radio Ministry.

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Thank you, Mike, good to be with you. I think this is a first, Roger, where a reader writes, a listener writes in and corrects me, and I agree with them.

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Well, it's good that you're willing to learn, I guess. And I think that was part of my impetus in the article.

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As you read there, I was one of those people who disliked the word Easter, having heard it came from pagan origins.

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And really, as I set out to write these articles, I assumed

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I would be confirming those feelings of hatred. But I actually ran into lots of things that led me away from those conclusions.

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Well, Roger, good to have you on the air today. Let me just give our listeners a quick bio and background.

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You went to Montana State University, and then you're on the curriculum development team at Answers in Genesis.

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Tell us a little bit about how you got the job with Answers in Genesis, and then we'll get into Easter, Asheroth, et cetera.

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Okay, actually, my background, I grew up as a Mormon, became an atheist, went to college to be a biology and chemistry teacher, trained for that, actually taught in Wyoming for eight years.

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And in the meantime, God saved me and opened my eyes to the truth in his word and understanding the world from a very different perspective, rather than looking at an evolutionary view of millions and billions of years to the biblical view of a young earth and trusting what the

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Bible says regarding those issues. And with my background in curriculum development with the state of Wyoming and things, the job came up here at Answers in Genesis.

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And after having been saved, I was teaching in a classroom and teaching things

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I didn't believe anymore and expressing those things to the students, expecting to get fired at any time.

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And so this job came up at Answers in Genesis, and I moved out here to Kentucky from Wyoming to work here in the ministry and help correct some of those wrong things

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I had taught before. I have your short sentence that you wrote me, and this is probably what sealed the deal,

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Roger, for me to want you on the show. Here's how Roger describes himself. In short, I'm a Bible -thumping,

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NANC -counseling, street -preaching, creation -believing, gospel -loving, ex -Mormon, atheist, evolutionist,

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God -hater, saved by a glorious Savior. I like that. Roger, give us your quick testimony, if you would.

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Really, having grown up in the Mormon religion, was familiar with the

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Bible and the idea of God, very disenchanted with that system as a kid.

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Parents were divorced, and I went to live with my dad and turned away from God completely about age 14.

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And then this cute little girl came to my school and started dating her, and she was a believer.

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Was she dressed like the Easter Bunny? No, she wasn't. She came along, and also my best friend's father was a elder at the local

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Lutheran church, and so they were working on me. And we got married,

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I pretended to be a Christian, lied to everybody, played the game for a number of years.

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And at one point in college, studying biochemistry, looking at this amazing complexity,

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I became a deist, and said, okay, there's gotta be some kind of God. And then probably a theistic evolutionist.

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And then one summer, I was just tired of playing all the games after I'd been teaching for a number of years, and picked up the

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Bible and read it and said, either all of this is true or none of it's true, and I can't trust this book that says it's written by God if there are inconsistencies and mistakes in it.

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And over that summer and fall, reading scripture and thinking through those things,

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I didn't have one of those epiphany moments, but by the end of that winter, God had saved me and I was a radically different man, and I just praise

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Him for working in my life that way. We're talking to Roger Patterson with Answers in Genesis.

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You can go to the website answersingenesis .org and pull up these articles we're going to talk about.

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Let's talk, Roger, first of all, with the claims that Easter is of pagan origin.

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And again, listeners, we're discussing this whole idea is it even okay to say, happy Easter, or we could correct ourselves, happy resurrection,

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Sunday. Give us the background regarding how Hislop and others have claimed that Easter equals some fertility goddess.

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Well, Alexander Hislop wrote back in the early, late 1800s, early 1900s, and one of his major beefs was with the

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Catholic Church and how they had imported many pagan mythologies and rituals into their ceremonies.

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And I'm sure you'd see those things and agree with those things too, Mike, but there are a lot of claims that Hislop made that were just a real big stretch.

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It was like he was hunting for a demon behind every bush and symbol and cup and word written on a page.

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There had to be some pagan origin to it. And so, as a result of that, he kind of stretched some of the ideas a little farther than we would normally allow in logical conversation.

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And the main one that leads to this topic is the idea of Easter being a goddess from the

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British Isles and Anglo -Saxon tribes, her name being connected back to Ishtar, Ashtoreth, Ostara, lots of different names we see for goddesses back to the

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Babylonian culture. Part of the problem is a lot of the archeological information he was working with was fairly flawed.

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Some of it's been corrected since then, and we have new information to describe those things.

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Another concern was he doesn't really worry about chronology much.

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He's willing to jump many, many centuries and continents to connect these ideas based on some of their similarities, which on the surface do seem to be related, but he rejects fundamental arguments, especially concerning the dispersion of the

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Tower of Babel. Now, certainly people would have spread out from Babel and taken these ideas with them, but he jumps back and forth in time as he's making these connections and really discredits himself by doing so.

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Roger, tell us a little bit about when we think of the word Easter and he's made these jumps, are there places in old

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Bible translations that use the word Easter or something close to it?

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When we think about Easter in the Bible, there are no instances of that word in the

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Greek manuscripts. We'd find the word Pesach, which translates into our modern translations as Passover.

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Now that use actually doesn't come along until Tyndale coins that idea way down the line.

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So we have many over 1300 years of just a transliteration rather than a translation of the word

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Pesach and in older translations in Latin and earlier translations, we just see the word

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Pasch or Pascha or some form of kind of turning the

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Greek word into a form in the language that's being translated. So most translations would use that word.

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However, when we get up to people like Wycliffe, one of our first English translations, he still uses

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Pasch, but then Luther, when he writes his translation of the

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Bible, he uses a German word Oster as he translates the word

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Pasch. Tyndale then comes along following in the footsteps of Luther and uses the

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English cognate of that Esther. So those are the first times in history where we see that.

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And in fact, English and German root languages are the only place we see the word

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Easter being used to describe those events surrounding Passover in our modern translations of the

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Bible. I thought you did a great job working through those, Roger. And when you have Luke 2 .41,

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KJV, now his parents went to Jerusalem every year at the Feast of Passover. And then you've got

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Luther's translation there and I won't read the whole thing since my Deutsch isn't that good, but it's

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Osterfest at the end. And then Tyndale and his father and mother went to Jerusalem, or with an

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H sound, every year at the Feast of E -S -T -E -R. And then you do the same thing with good documentation in Acts 12, verse four.

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Why the hate mail then, Roger? People just don't want to be corrected? Are they hate Roman Catholicism that much?

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Or how do you explain that? I think a lot of the reaction is just emotional.

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We've been teaching our kids that we should hate Easter and we shouldn't have anything to do with Easter.

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And now these guys are trying to tell us, I thought they were a scriptural authority ministry and you're not standing on the authority of scripture.

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But I'm really trying to go back to the original languages. And I spent months researching this and trying to organize it in my mind to communicate that.

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But another issue is the idea that we should still be keeping the

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Old Testament feasts. That's another complaint against celebrating

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Easter. And that we would not see as a necessary condition in the new covenant.

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And the idea of celebrating Christ's resurrection with what we call Easter today is not forbidden by scripture and we can use that as a time to really focus ourselves on what

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Christ has done for us. And certainly you're not saying anything derogatorily about Christ and his resurrection.

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You make that very clear in your first article, the centrality of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ.

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And so I commend you for that. Roger, do you think some of the people who don't like it that you say we're not under the

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Old Testament feast laws, are they Messianic Jews? Who are they? That's one group.

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There seems to be a very large group of people who are trying to return to what the

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Old Testament taught and seeing that as a godly lifestyle. And I certainly don't fault people for desiring to seek after godliness.

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We're called to that in scripture in many places. But understanding those feasts as feasts that were given as part of the old covenant versus being in the new covenant now, that's where the difference comes in.

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We're talking to Roger Patterson from Answers in Genesis. You can go to answersingenesis .org and find his articles there.

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Or he's written a book we'll talk about in a moment, evolutionexposed .com. Roger, I have to read 1

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Corinthians 5, 7 as well because you just list them out. Wycliffe, Luther, Tyndale, KJV.

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For Christ our Passover is sacrificed. And that was the KJV. Then Tyndale, for Christ our, and it's

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Old English spelling, O -U -R -E, Estherlam, E -S -T -E -R -L -A -M -B -E, one word.

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And I find that just fascinating. And like I said in my email, I've already repented. So I think

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I'm good. I'm not gonna correct people anymore if they say happy Easter. And that was an amazing point to me and something that struck me as I was researching this.

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We trust, based on their writings and their testimonies, that Luther and Tyndale were godly men.

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Even if this word, Easter, does have some inkling of a pagan goddess, even at the time of their writing in the mid 1500s, that word had either lost its meaning and had nothing to do with that goddess to the point that Tyndale and Luther were both willing to call

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Christ the Easter lamb in reference to the Passover and the perfect lamb sacrifice.

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Or there's another explanation. And there've been several men who have put forth the idea that the word

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Esther is actually a form of the German word for resurrection. And so then they're calling

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Christ the resurrection lamb. And in either case, we don't have any reason to reject the use of the word

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Easter because even in the 1500s, it had lost its meaning in that sense.

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And it isn't until 1900 when Hislop proposes this idea that this controversy comes back into focus.

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Roger, probably some of the people that don't want to say Easter have named their children Esther and other Bible names.

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Probably a different root there. Look at that. Hebrew, but that's one of the common mistakes.

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We can't just take something that sounds the same in Greek and English and assume that they're related words.

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Think of the Potomac Indians, and that has nothing to do with the Greek word Potomac. Well, that's what

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I think you did really, really well as you work through these word studies. I like it when you quote

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Woodrow in the updated title, The Babylon Connection. By this method, one could take virtually anything and do the same, even the golden arches at McDonald's.

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The Encyclopedia Americana article Arch says the use of arches was known in Babylon as early as 2020

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BC. And since Babylon was called the Golden City, Isaiah 14 .4,

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can there be any doubt about the origin of the golden arches as silly?

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Yeah, Woodrow actually bought into a lot of Hyslop's ideas and wrote the book in the 60s supporting that.

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And he has actually, like you, repented of that and understood those false claims and retracted his statements in trying to present the truth now.

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What would you say, Roger, to a family? Easter's going to be a long way away from now because the show will air sometime in June, probably, 2011, so when

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Easter comes in 2012, how would you shepherd a family through the

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Easter services, the Easter Sunday? What do you do with eggs and rabbits and all that?

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I don't know if you know, but my mother gave us rabbit for Easter. That's what we got for Easter Sunday lunch.

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Well, we had the tradition when I was a kid of going rabbit hunting on Easter Sunday. Oh, you did? Well, shepherd us through a family that comes to you.

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They're new Christians. Roger, how should we work through the concept of Easter? What should we do and how should we think?

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We have to think to the principles that Paul lays out in Romans and Corinthians of dealing with these things that offend our conscience.

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And we should never practice anything that violates our conscience.

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And a lot of new believers will be reacting against some of the pagan things that they've done in their former life, and they'll want to run far away from those things.

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And they might toss the Easter baskets out into the trash and try and explain those things to their kids.

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But really, we have to examine our motives. Now, we certainly can't take pagan symbols and use them in the direct worship of our

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Savior. But we also have to remember things like eggs. Those are creations of our

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Creator. And we can use those things as symbols. I know many people use the resurrection eggs, and they'll hide those and find those and try to communicate the message of what happened with Christ's death and resurrection and how that offers us new life.

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We see grass growing in the spring, and that's often associated with the Easter celebrations.

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But we can't let them steal grass from us. Grass is a creation of God, not a counterfeit by Satan.

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He's used that to deceive many people and used in pagan rituals and fertility rituals with the eggs and the bunnies.

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But that doesn't mean that we have to abandon them. But if we're doing it just to be part of the culture and look like the culture, then we're sending it that way.

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And we have to be careful to guard our hearts and make sure we're using those things rightly and with the right motives.

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Well, when we were having a small family, Roger, I would just tell my kids, well, today's

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Saturday and tomorrow's Sunday, resurrection Sunday, Easter. And so today on Saturday, we're going to hide some eggs, or you're gonna have some chocolate bunnies, or we're going to dye some eggs.

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I don't know what we did, but we try to do those things on Saturday. So then the focus on Sunday was the empty tomb and Christ is alive and he's coming back.

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And so, I mean, what are we going to do? Not go out of the house on Monday because it's associated with moon day?

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Yeah, and those are the things that each believer, working together with your family, with your pastors, you need to be talking through those things and working through those things.

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And considering how you're passing an understanding of scripture, not being legalistic, but then not being licentious in the same sense.

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I think some people who don't want to celebrate Easter do celebrate Christmas along with a tree. And so I just would ask for consistency.

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If you want to have a tree in your house, we do. And we just say to the kids, as in first Peter, Jesus died on a tree and here's this symbol of evergreen and he's alive.

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And we don't worship the tree. It's not some Jeremiah thing where we're bowing down and singing to the tree. And so if you can celebrate

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Christmas with a clean conscience and have a tree, I think you could probably have some rabbit on Easter.

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Yeah, and there's probably the same community of people who would be against,

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Easter would be against the celebration of Christmas. It's not commanded to celebrate the birth.

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It's not commanded to celebrate the resurrection apart from drinking the cup and taking the bread on times of gathering together as believers.

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And so they'd make the same basic arguments. Bodie Hodge, another one of our researchers has written some great articles dealing with the

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Christmas connections as well. And we'll be publishing all of these holiday misconceptions and misunderstandings in a book soon, hopefully this fall sometime.

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Oh, great. Tell us, Roger, about your book, Evolution Exposed. Why did you write it? And who would be a good audience for reading that book?

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Well, the Ministry of Answers in Genesis in general is a Bible -upholding ministry trying to promote the authority of Scripture.

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And one of the biggest areas of controversy in our culture today is around the idea of evolution and our origins.

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And as a former biology teacher, I'm being trained to teach from the evolutionary perspective.

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I was offered the opportunity to write this book to kind of counter some of those ideas.

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So in one sense, it was kind of penance for deceiving the children in the past, but knowing that Christ had forgiven me of that.

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And I joke about that, but I do really hope that that book, Evolution Exposed, will go out to high school students and college students and junior high students and help them to recognize all the evolutionary bias that's in their textbooks and how that is a constant barrage.

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It's not like there's a two -week lesson on evolution. It's everywhere through those texts. And what

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Evolution Exposed does is points out all of those things from the public school textbooks and then gives a biblical explanation for those things so that we can indeed provide an answer for the hope that we have in Christ when we're challenged with evolutionary ideas of man evolving from monkeys and the

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Big Bang and those types of things. Roger, we only have about a minute left, but give me your minute critique or exhortation regarding the whole

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Biologos disaster as they push theistic evolution and other nonsense.

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I guess the most important thing is the connection that we see with Paul in 1

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Corinthians 15, Romans 5, that sin and death came into this world through a man named

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Adam, the first Adam, and it's the last Adam, Jesus Christ, who takes away those sins.

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If there wasn't a real man named Adam who God created from the dust of the ground and his wife,

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Eve, from his rib, then they really didn't bring sin into the world and we really don't need a savior.

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And that's, here at the Creation Museum, we walk through that history and explain all those pieces and those important connections and end with a film called

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The Last Adam, an evangelistic explanation of that connection. Well, we've been talking to Roger Patterson today, curriculum writer for Answers in Genesis, and I'm thankful to call you also a

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No Compromise radio listener. Oh, every day. Roger, thank you for your time. You can find his book at evolutionexposed .com

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or you can go to answersingenesis .org. Roger, thank you. Blessings, Mike. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life -transforming power of God's Word through verse -by -verse exposition of the sacred text.

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Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at six. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston.

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You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

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The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff or management.