The real name of Easter is...First Fruits Sunday

Pentecost Sunday, marking the end of the Easter season on the Christian calendar,
is May 23 this year. Pentecost/Holy Spirit Connection And Why Jews Don’t See It
By Thomas S. McCall, Th.D.

For Believers in Jesus the Messiah, the dating of Pentecost is one of the most exquisite examples of type and fulfillment in the Scriptures. Pentecost means fifty,
and is actually fifty days from another Feast, First Fruits. These calculations are explained in Leviticus 23:10–11, 15–17. The Feast of First Fruits was to occur on the day after the Sabbath (verse 11), therefore always the Sunday of Passover week. Pentecost, then, was the day after the seventh following Sabbath (verses 15–16), which would be the fiftieth day after First Fruits
and also on a Sunday.The fulfillment of these Feasts is striking. Jesus died the Friday of Passover week and had to be buried hastily before sunset, which is when the Sabbath begins. His body remained in the borrowed sepulcher throughout the Sabbath day, but on that Sunday
morning, when the priest was to offer the First Fruits offering in the Temple,
Christ arose from the dead, the first fruits of them that slept (I Cor. 15:20).

For forty ensuing days, the Lord appeared to His disciples in His resurrection
body, and then ascended into Heaven. Ten days later, the Sunday of
the Feast of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descended upon the Believers in
Jerusalem and created the ekklesia, the called out body of Christ, the Church.

These fulfillments were obviously no coincidence, but were part of the overall plan and purpose of God in verifying the powerful meaning of the death and resurrection of Christ, and the establishment of the new body of Believers.

From then on, the Jewish Believers in Christ must have repeatedly informed the people of Israel about the nature of the fulfillment of Passover, First Fruits, and Pentecost.

It must have made a great impact on the Jewish people who lived between the resurrection of Christ and the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, a span of about forty years.

By way of response, Judaism’s rabbis decided that in this case the term Sabbath did not mean Saturday, but something else: the first day of Passover, or, more precisely, the first day of Unleavened Bread (the second day of Passover). What justification do they have for changing the meaning of Sabbath that way? There must have been a very strong motive to cause the Sages to interpret Sabbath as something
other than the regular sacred Saturday Sabbath.

Though we have no proof, we suggest that the change came some time after the resurrection of Christ and before the destruction of the Temple. Think of the impact the Jewish Believers must have had as they described the Lord’s resurrection on
the Sunday of Passover week at First Fruits and the coming of the Spirit seven Sundays later on Pentecost. The leaders must have been hard pressed to explain away the relevance of the Feasts and their fulfillment in Jesus.

The solution they came up with was to obfuscate the calendar in such a way as to make the connection less clear between the Feasts and their fulfillment in Christ and the Holy Spirit.

The strategy apparently worked because most Jewish people today—
like Christians—see no connection whatever between the Feasts and the
Messiah.

Instead of causing Jewish leaders to marvel over the relationship between
the Feasts and the Messiah, the current festival schedule leaves Jewish scholars
scratching their heads. They are perplexed over the vagueness of the dates
of First Fruits and Pentecost, and why there is no clear statement in the
Torah that Pentecost is the day Moses received the Law, which is the teaching
of the Sages.

Such appears to be part of the veil over the eyes of the majority of Jewish people that so tragically obscures the truth about the Messiah in the Law.

Nevertheless, many Jews today and a lot of gentiles who have no background
in these matters are being graciously enlightened and are receiving the Lord.

Please see pp. 18, 19 Levitt Letter
May 2010 edition to
order our study booklet,
CD, and/or audiocassette
The Spirit of Pentecost.