The familiar knot of controversy centers on Acts 12:4 as it reads in the King James Version: “And when he had apprehended him, he put him in prison, and delivered him to four quaternions of soldiers to keep him; intending after Easter to bring him forth to the people.” Critics have long seized this lone KJV rendering of pascha as “Easter” (all other KJV occurrences are “Passover”) to argue a mistranslation or corruption of the text. Bryan C. Ross sets this dispute squarely before the reader with a KJV-only and right-division posture, insisting that the matter deserves careful historical and linguistic attention rather than polemical sniping.
Ross surveys the standard King James Only defense—exemplified in Dr. Samuel C. Gipp’s Answer Book—which reasons that Herod, a pagan, would have timed his display to his own festival and that the Passover (on the 14th) had already passed, leaving only a later spring festival to which Luke refers. Ross acknowledges that many KJV advocates historically affirmed that “Easter” in Acts 12:4 could be read as a pagan celebration and that defenders held the KJV translators acted providentially in their word choice. He also admits his own prior acceptance of that line of argument, a humility born of later study.
Ross demonstrates that the quick leap from the single English word “Easter” to an exclusively pagan meaning rests on shaky ground. He traces the influence of Alexander Hislop—whose The Two Babylons popularized a spurious link between Easter and Ishtar/Astarte—and shows why that false etymology should not decide our reading of Luke. The book appeals to English-language history and lexicons (not modern conjecture alone) to show that “Easter” in English has deep Germanic ties to east/dawn and that sunrise imagery is a fully biblical way of speaking about Christ’s rising and the coming of the Lord (an image the church rightly took up in its own tongue).
Ross presses English translation history: the West-Saxon Gospels and Middle English usage show the English term for the spring feast long before Tyndale’s 1530 coinage of “Passover.” Wycliffe’s Middle English and the early Reformers used forms of the word that we render “Easter” to represent pascha; Luther and Tyndale likewise rendered pascha in their vernaculars with cognates of “Easter.” Ross notes the Textus Receptus has pascha 29 times and that the KJV translators rendered it “Passover” 28 times and “Easter” once. Those facts, he argues, make it historically improbable to insist that pascha never bore the sense “Easter” in English usage prior to modern revisionists.
The book’s conclusion—drawn from careful exposition, historical lexicography, and a refusal to let a single false etymology overturn long usage—is plain: in Acts 12:4 the KJV’s “Easter” functions as reference to the Jewish feast season (the paschal season), not the later Christianized or paganized spring observance critics imagine. Ross therefore counsels KJV believers to resist the easy charge that this verse disproves preservation or translation fidelity, while also urging critics not to press a modern etymological caricature onto early English practice.
Practically, Ross models a pastoral temper: do not abandon the KJV over an argument born of imprecise history; neither accept uncritically every pious-sounding defense. He himself once taught the Gipp explanation and later reexamined the matter—an example of measured humility and Scripture-centered study. The right-division, Mid-Acts reader is thus invited to weigh the linguistic and historical evidence carefully and to hold both the Word and proper hermeneutics in balanced esteem.
If we will read Luke within the KJV’s own historical and lexical context, Ross insists, Acts 12:4 need not be waved like a red flag against the Authorized Version. The matter calls for clear-headed study and pastoral restraint: guard the faith, examine the words, and let careful history settle what rhetoric would unsettle.