Easter
In the English the KJV inherited, “Easter” was a name for the Passover feast itself.
Modern versions: “Passover” (all modern versions)
Pascha comes 29 times in the New Testament. The KJV renders it “passover” 28 times, and “Easter” once, in Acts 12:4: Herod, having taken Peter in “the days of unleavened bread” (12:3), meant to bring him out “after Easter.”
“Easter” was the English Bible’s first word for the Passover. William Tyndale, the first to translate the New Testament from Greek into English, used it throughout: “after ii. dayes shalbe ester” (Matthew 26:2), and for “after the days of unleavened bread” in Acts 20:6, “after the ester holydayes.” In that English, Easter named the whole Passover season, not only the Christian feast that fell in it. Noah Webster still defined it so in 1828: “It answers to the pascha or passover of the Hebrews.”
The KJV’s translators, revising the earlier English Bibles, made “passover” their word for the feast and kept Tyndale’s “Easter” here. Their preface says they kept the familiar English words and shunned Latinisms like “pasche,” which the Catholic translation of 1582 had used.
Where the King James Bible Has It
Sources
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…entendynge after ester to brynge him forth to the people. … And we sayled awaye fro Philippos after the ester holydayes.
Checked against: Wikisource, 2026-10-16 -
Ye knowe that after ii. dayes shalbe ester and the sonne of man shalbe delyvered to be crucified.
Checked against: Wikisource, 2026-10-16 -
Noah Webster, American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), “Easter”
A festival of the christian church observed in commemoration of our Savior’s resurrection. It answers to the pascha or passover of the Hebrews.
Checked against: webstersdictionary1828.com, 2026-10-16 -
We have on the one side avoided the scrupulosity of the Puritans, who leave the old Ecclesiastical words, and betake them to other … as also on the other side we have shunned the obscurity of the Papists, in their azymes, tunike, rational, holocausts, prepuce, pasche, and a number of such like.
Checked against: Wikisource, 2026-10-16
