In Don’t Passover Easter, Bryan C. Ross takes a pastoral, careful look at the controversy surrounding the King James rendering of pascha in Acts 12:4. The book sets the question plainly: did the translators err in rendering the Greek as “Easter” in that one place where every other New Testament occurrence in the Textus Receptus is rendered “Passover”? Ross frames the matter as rooted in history, transmission, and meaning, and he draws his conclusions from the historical evidence rather than mere polemic (see the book’s Introduction).
Ross recounts the objection faithfully: pascha occurs twenty-nine times in the Textus Receptus and the KJV renders it “Passover” twenty-eight times, leaving Acts 12:4 alone as “Easter,” which critics have seized upon as an anachronism or mistranslation. He quotes the critical line of argument — exemplified by James R. White — that the context (the days of unleavened bread) points to the Jewish festival and that modern translations uniformly read “Passover” there (as Ross summarizes from his source material).
He also fairly presents the standard KJV-defensive reply represented by Dr. Samuel C. Gipp: defenders have argued that the context of Acts 12 points to a different observance and that the King James translators, by providence, rendered pascha as “Easter” with that sense in view. Ross lays out Gipp’s reasoning as given in The Answer Book — the chronology claim about the 14th and 15th of Nisan, the Days of Unleavened Bread, and the suggestion that Herod, a pagan, would more naturally tie his actions to a pagan festival — all as the book records (see the chapter summarizing Gipp).
Ross then turns to etymology and the history of English usage. He shows that the charge “Easter is exclusively pagan” stems largely from Alexander Hislop’s false etymological link to Ishtar, but that the real linguistic trail runs to the Germanic word for east/dawn (Ostern, Eostre) and to long-standing English usage where “Easter” could and did denote the Jewish paschal feast in older English sources. Ross cites the Oxford English Dictionary and examples from pre‑Reformation and early Reformation English (Wycliffe, Tyndale, Luther, and others) to demonstrate that “Easter” has been used in English Bibles and in English usage to signify the Passover season before Tyndale’s later introduction of “Passover” into English (see the chapters on etymology and translation history).
Bringing those strands together, Ross argues that the appearance of “Easter” in Acts 12:4 in the 1611 KJV need not be read as a doctrinal concession to paganism nor as a mistranslation. Rather, given the long history of the English word and the ways translators prior to and contemporary with the KJV used it to render pascha, the translators’ choice is intelligible within their linguistic milieu. Ross even notes practical evidence from the 1611 edition itself — the included table “To find Easter for ever” — which shows the translators treated the term as part of the Christian-English calendar, not as a pagan curiosity (see the chapter exploring usage and the 1611 apparatus).
Pastorally Ross closes with a balanced appeal: Christians who love the King James Bible and who hold a right-division, Mid‑Acts conviction should not be unsettled by this controversy when it is studied carefully. He confesses his own previous adherence to the common Gipp defense and explains that further historical and textual study led him to revise his view (as he recounts). The faithful posture is to study Scripture and its history with humility, recognizing both the strength of the Received Text tradition and the need to read words in their historical and linguistic setting (see the author’s candid reflections).