Every year we hear it repeated. Somebody claims that Easter is a pagan festival derived from the worship of the Babylonian Goddess Ishtar. The two names sound alike don't they? So they must be the same, right? Actually they aren't. There is, in fact, no basis for claiming any sort of direct entymological link between the word Easter and Ishtar. The idea is an example of a very naive word-origin fallacy.
Very often the claim is based on the idea that Roman Catholicism is a thinly veiled version of the old Babylonian mystery religion. But the claim won't work. The ancient name of Easter in the Greek and Latin Churches was not Easter but Pascha. This can still be seen in modern languages, all one has to do is check out the various translations of Holy Saturday 2019 news on the Vatican website talking about Easter. Here for example is a picture of an item on tonight's Easter Vigil in English, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish (top to bottom left to right), and in French (separate picture). Notice that apart from English, the name for Easter derives from the ancient Latin name.
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