Thanks for the article and links. Truth will out.

I can't lay claim to too much orthodoxy as a Christian, but my understanding is that the Easter story is a celebration not only of the specific rising of one man from the dead two thousand years back, but a general celebration of humanity's freedom thenceforth from the power of Satan into which Adam's and Eve's original sin had landed us. That seems to me like a fairly generalised celebration of freedom. OK, it isn't a political liberation, but your point as I understand it is that neither is Passover merely a celebration of political liberation from Egypt.

I wonder if it is wholly coincidental that the two festivals occur at corresponding points in teh Christian and Jewish calendars? Yes, I realise the arrest/trial/execution/resurrection took place historically at the time of Passover according to the Gospels, but in the same way that the date of Christmas is happily fitted onto the old Roman Saturnalia, one almost feels that if it hadn't taken place then the temptation to rewrite the chronology to make it fit would have been strong.

Is there a New Testament scholar in the house? Or, given the precise nature of the KT "house", lurking in its antechambers?

In Catholic theology, Easter, the Resurrection of Christ, represents freedom from death. In striving to be like Christ, one accepts the earthly losses of righteousness and natural disappointments, the identification and transformative power of Christ leading to one's heavenly life with G-d. Original sin seems to have been established with St. Augustine circa 470 CE. To me it represents the subterranean Roman legalism in Catholicism. St. Augustine was, before, his priestly vocation, a hedonistic Roman lawyer. One could, I was told, read The Confessions.. to prove this. In spite of his ample experience of sin, it seems St. Augustine was concerned with implications of the argument that 'Christ died for your sins.' Now that's all well and good if you have some but what if somebody, somehow, at least theoretically, doesn't. Thus ever since, there is the idea of original sin as you spoke of it. It is a serious philosophical issue as it bears on the nature of man. Rebelling against the general conception of a 'sinful (or aggressive) nature' as Rousseau and leftists have done tends to lead to spitting out, as it were, unwelcome aspects of the self and making them properties of 'the capitalist class' or 'the mercantilist conspiracy' etc.