Christianity
The Copy Cat Saviour 1
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, November 23, 1998
Is Jesus a Copy Cat Saviour?
Our old adversary, The Reverend Professor Dr Bent Scholar with his Crucifixers has been at it again. Under the guise of The Christian Think Tank he has been writing articles attempting to answer the criticism that Jesus owes much of his legend to that of the earlier dying and rising saviours. Apparently Bent Scholar and his friends—amazed that the question of whether the Jesus cult copied from earlier models is still asked—decided to settle it for good.
The allegation is that there are significant similarities, between Jesus Christ and other dying gods or saviours, best explained if the myth of Jesus is derived from or influenced by the older models. In short, either Jesus was mythical or he was partly mythical.
Typically the Reverend Bent Scholar starts to put up his defence against this by claiming that a list of assertions must all be true for this—or apparently any other—criticism of Christian mythology to stand. Even then the criticism would only be possible not probable because, for it to be the most probable explanation, it also must be a better one than the traditional explanation!
Now for anyone but a Christian, any theory which kept the story of Jesus out of the realms of the supernatural would automatically make it a better one. And the tortuous list of conditions is purely special pleading. To impress the gullible with the apparent infallibility of Christian philosophy, Bent Scholar puts together an obstacle course that we have to traverse before any theory can be considered as a possible rival to the Christians’. And their impregnable theory? God—overcome with guilt at his poor treatment of his creation—dressed himself up as a man and deliberately had himself crucified!
Having told us that if any one of their conditions cannot be adequately demonstrated as true then the traditional theory stands, Bent Scholar hopes to demolish each of them piecemeal. The Christians have picked the ground for the fight and set the rules. Their opponents are bound hand and foot. Now they will bravely start punching the opposition.
Christians have drugged themselves with the idea that Christian belief is the norm and any other must be measured against it. They like to put the burden of proof of any dissenting or alternative philosophy on to their opponents. That is why they sound convincing when they put out their lists of conditions, requirements and objections. A proof in symbolic logic or mathematics requires many preconditions to be met and, when they are, the proof is flawlessly true, but a proof in a civil court of law does not have to be flawless. It does not have to be 100% true, only the balance of probability is required.
Bent Scholar and his Christian friends pretend that Christianity as a theory only falls if a flawless proof is offered against it. It is nonsense. Christianity itself has never been flawlessly proved, nor can it be. Christians believe it without proof. For rational people, it will suffice to show that alternative ideas to the Christian myth are more likely, on the balance of the evidence, than the traditional one.
Remember, the norm the Christians are talking about here is that God came to earth to show the whole of mankind is now relieved of original sin. The dissenting view is that this fairy tale is a variant of earlier myths. The Christian belief they have always sought to force on us all is that, to save us from the consequences of sin, God pretended to be his own son to be punished by human beings for the sins he, as Creator, had given us. By his self-sacrifice everyone in humankind was to know that they were free of the burden of sin he had imposed, as long as they believed this incredible story.
If God really were contrite about his diabolic act of making humans sinful and his yet more diabolical act of then punishing them in the eternal fires of Hell for being how he had made them, then one might have thought it quite important that he got the message across to all human beings quickly to alleviate the unnecessary suffering going on. Yet the god who went to all this trouble didn’t think it important to stage his repentant act where people could see it. The bulk of humans in the world 2000 years later are still unaware of the trouble he took, and so they, and all those who died unknowing or unbelieving, between then and now remain lost. This alone is sufficient to prove that no god could have come up with such a plan, especially when he had foreseen the outcome of whole caboodle.
Anyone who would believe all this would believe anything their religious leaders told them—and that is just what Christians do. Such sheep-like behaviour has always been the danger of religion. Christian believers are no different from any other loony sect except that Christianity is accepted as conventional in our society. Indeed many loony sects of today claim to be returning in one form or another to fundamental Christianity.
Christians therefore cannot benefit from this exercise in reasoning whether to decide upon the influence of earlier cults on their religion or anything else that might detract from their belief. In 2000 years they never have. They offer arguments—on their own terms, note—but, even when they lose the arguments, they still believe. Arguing to a Christian is a shady ploy—it is, in short, dishonest. They try to fool the simple and unwary with conditions which amount to, Heads I win. Tales you lose. Their hope is that someone who is insecure or doubtful will be persuaded by their arguments, but when they meet someone who is secure and assertive in their disbelief, chooses a level playing field and wins the game, the result for them is always a win to the Christians.
So I do not enter this debate expecting any Christian to read what I have to say. Few Christians will have even got as far as the last paragraph. This reply is for those who are confused by the Christian pretence to base their faith on evidence and logic. They do not—and their arguments are a sham. The alternative to the Christian fairy tale is that it is simply a continuation and extension of previous fairy tales of a similar nature—the belief that gods died and were resurrected for human benefit. What then does Bent Scholar and co have to say about the dying and resurrected gods of old?
Well, for a start, they only say anything about them when punters find about them for themselves. Few Christians will have been taught at school that Jesus was not the first god who died and was resurrected, whatever distinctions between them the Christian professor might find. It simply is too risky for the indoctrination of their little charges to expect Christian teachers to explain such a matter before their pupils have been fully brainwashed. If they eventually do find out, the clergy offer some such programme as this one, hoping to rehabilitate them. And, in this one, having nodded through the initial list of conditions, Bishop Bent Scholar issues even more warnings before we get any reply.
We must not use Christian terminology, like “baptism” or the “Last Supper,” for old religious practices because it will mislead the reader into thinking they had precisely the same meaning in pre-Christian religions as they have under modern Christianity. Well, of course, the first Christians were the Simple of Ephraim, but modern Christians must surely be brighter.
And, if it does not mislead the reader, it will mislead the scholars who are persuaded by their own misuse of words into seeing what is not there. This is, of course, inexcusable—unless it is done by a Christian when it is essential.
It must be plain to anyone that a ritual dip in water is a baptism, whatever its precise purpose in the dogma of any particular religion. And it is common knowledge that baptism need not be by water, other media or even spirits sufficing if the water is absent—or for any other reason. Furthermore, since religious practices, like most things, evolve, it is quite unlikely that the self-same ceremony observed 2000 years apart in time will be understood in the same way, yet it is the same practice. And what right has a Christian to claim ownership of a word like baptism or any other?
Closer to the subject, Bent Scholar insists, would be the symbol of the cross. He concedes that the cross as a religious symbol in various shapes can be traced back to the earliest civilisations in Egypt and Mesopotamia, apparently arguing our point for us, but then demands:
Does this mean that the story of the crucifixion of Jesus on the Roman instrument of execution was borrowed from that symbol?!
Posing quite absurd extremes, as if they were the views of his opponents, is a typical Crucifixer ploy. So Bent Scholar yells at the reader that crucifixion in the Roman Empire was common and not motivated by religious concerns or traditions—as if someone over here had suggested it was. Warming to his ridiculous theme, he stridently continues:
How preposterous it would seem to the historian to suggest that the writers of the New Testament constructed the entire passion narrative involving Pilate and the cross because of a religious motif!! The level of detail and political intrigue and aberrations of Jewish legal praxis screams out for the judgement of authenticity. The similarity between the Cross as the symbol of Anu in Sumeria and the execution instrument of the Roman Empire used on Jesus in no way implies borrowing or dependence.
Now it is always easy to win when you are playing yourself. Bent Scholar sets up a straw man which no one recognises and begins to punch it vigorously. What he writes is indeed preposterous, but he is the one to suggest it. For those of us who are sceptical but accept that Jesus was a historical figure, the relationship of the cross and the crucifixion is explained in this way.
Jesus was a Jewish religious figure who was punished by the Roman authorities as an insurrectionist. Crucifixion was the prescribed punishment. At a somewhat later date, his followers already convinced he was a special man, realised that the cross was a symbol of superstitious significance. They therefore made the cross central to their desire to deify their erstwhile leader and to win over the Pagan people for whom the cross had Pagan meaning.
The Taurobolium
The author selects as an example some descriptions of the taurobolium of the cult of the Mithras and the Great Mother or Cybele and her son Attis. The taurobolium was a sort of bloody baptism. An animal, either a bull or, for those who could not afford a bull, a lamb (the Criobolium) was slaughtered. The initiate stood beneath a grid and was splashed with blood. Some think it the basis of the Christian’s redemption by blood and Paul’s imagery in Romans 6 of the believer’s death and resurrection. Christians consider it important to refute these suggestions and therefore try to show that the Taurobolium was later than the date of the New Testament books.
The taurobolium in the Attis cult is first attested as late as the time of Antoninus Pius, 160 AD, and Bent Scholar wants us to think it therefore had suddenly appeared fully formed. Plainly it was much older but records of its evolution do not exist. One reason is that the rites of the mystery religions were kept secret. The other is that Christians destroyed as much of the evidence of earlier Pagan religions as they could. So whatever attestations to ancient ritual we now have is only a result of an oversight by the Christian censor.
Originally it seems to have been an initiation for a priest but was extended in the second century AD to punters who sought its benefits as a personal consecration. We have it on the authority of Christians that washing in the blood of either animal only gave limited immunity from eternal death. But the reward of the sacrament increased to eternity when the idea of a rebirth through the taurobolium emerged in the fourth century AD—Christians tell us, to compete with Christianity. So far from influencing Christianity, those who used the taurobolium were influenced by Christianity. Thus Bruce Metzger, an editor of The Oxford Companion to the Bible, says:
One must doubtless interpret the change in the efficacy attributed to the rite of the taurobolium. In competing with Christianity, which promised eternal life to its adherents, the cult of Cybele officially or unofficially raised the efficacy of the blood bath from twenty years to eternity.
This is important to Christians because they realise that, if the ritual were practised in Cilicia a hundred years before its first attestation, it could have been the source of Paul’s teaching in Romans 6. Bent Scholar says:
The chronological development of the rite makes it impossible for it to have influenced first-century Christianity.
You will note that Bent Scholar suddenly gets omniscient when it suits him. He now claims to know the chronological development of the rite. Though no one knows what the purpose of the taurobolium was, Christians uncannily know what it was not.
Now Christians always tell us that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” It is a neat shield to deflect certain criticisms of Christianity. It is equally true here however. And if much of the evidence is gone, destroyed by those who feared it most, it can also not be assumed that it favours the religious status quo of the fourth century, which had just become a syncretic religion called Christianity. The sacrifice of bulls goes back to almost to the beginning of human consciousness. It was prevalent in the Mediterranean long before Jesus and was associated with the sun god. It is idle to pretend that these sacrificers of bulls only thought about consecration through its blood when Christianity appeared on the scene. Christians will pretend it nevertheless—but it is idle.
Yet the Reverend Bent Scholar tells us that we are presumptuous, given the paucity of the data, to consider the taurobolium in the same category as “washed in the blood of the Lamb” (Rev 7:14) or “sprinkled with the blood of Jesus” (1 Pet 1:2). The bull was a sacrifice just as Jesus was a sacrifice. Attis was killed by a boar not a bull but Mithras killed the bull. In both myths the god and the animal were identified so the god, as an animal was killed by the god or vice versa. In other words the god killed himself. Bent Scholar says:
The bull was in NO WAY (his emphasis) identified with the deities!
He is technically correct because he restricted his comments to the cult of the Great Mother and Attis where the animal should have been the Boar of Winter according to myth, but we do know that syncretism was levelling the main religions of the Empire. By the fourth century perhaps the bull had replaced the boar as Attis worship and Mithras worship came together.
The Christian objects to the recipient of this blessing being described as “washed in the blood of the lamb.” The reason is that the expression belongs to Christianity since it sort of appears in Revelation 7:14.
These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.
Bent Scholar complains that the critics have it wrong in identifying the taurobolium with this passage in Revelation, but the critic merely uses the expression as a description of what happened when the sacrificial animal was a lamb rather than a bull. It is the Christian who objects and then turns round and says: “You were wrong anyway,” because robes are washed, not people.
Now the reference to blood being white is an allusion to the scapegoat of the Jewish scriptures which carried away the sins of the people, a manifest allusion to the lamb, meaning Jesus, being a human scapegoat with the same function. A piece of wool was sprinkled with blood and tied to the horns of the goat which is driven into the wilderness to be eaten by wild beasts. On the occasions when it was not and was found again, remnants of the wool were white, the blood having been bleached out of it or washed out by rain. Freed of sin the blood was made white. The same allusion occurs in Isaiah 1:18.
Saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.
How can scarlet be as white as snow or crimson like wool—white—and what has it to do with sin? Because it is a reference to the scapegoat. The passage in 1 Peter is an indirect reference to the sprinklings of the people with blood by Moses (Ex 24:5-8), as Bent Scholar points out, but he does not point out, and deliberately omits the previous verse of the reference that contains it, that the blood Moses sprinkled was that of an ox.
And he sent young men of the children of Israel, which offered burnt offerings, and sacrificed peace offerings of oxen unto the Lord. Moses took half of the blood and put it in basons, and the other half he sprinkled on the altar. Then he took the Book of the Covenant and read it to the people. They responded, We will do everything the Lord has said; we will obey. Moses then took the blood, sprinkled it on the people and said, This is the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words.
So we find that the Christian, trying to find no identity with the washing or sprinkling of blood in the taurobolium, gives us better evidence of the antiquity of the practice from his own holy book. Moses was the legendary leader of the first Hebrews to invade Canaan, allegedly before 1000 BC. And here we have the founder of the Jewish religion sprinkling ox blood as a sacrament confirming his covenant with God.
The link with Christian practice here is much closer than any Christian can accept. The association of the sprinkling of ox blood and the covenant with god extended into traditional Judaism. A heifer became the symbol of God’s covenant and when the Jews developed an aversion to blood, wine was substituted for it. Thus the sprinkling of wine became a symbolic sacrament which confirmed God’s covenant with the Chosen People, or their expectation that he would fulfil it in his kingdom on earth. That is exactly what Jesus did at the Last Supper. It was a traditional rite inviting God to open the gates of his kingdom, not a new sacrament asking Christians to remember Jesus as some sort of egomaniac.
Details like this matter only to Christians, who can hide behind the results of their own vandalism. We know the religions were growing together. It was imperial policy to glue the empire together with a strong religion. The religion which emerged was Christianity but it was not the religion of the Jesus who is assumed to have founded it. It was a religion melted together from the religions of the sun god popular at the time. Christianity was one of them.
The Virgin Birth
Another similarity between Christianity and earlier religions is the virgin birth. Other gods and some heroic humans such as Alexander the Great, were honoured with a miraculous birth, some of which were virgin births.
The good Reverend counters this by appealing to a “highly respected tome” on the birth narratives of Jesus. What do we find there? The author admits that the heroes of other world religions like Buddhism and Hinduism, of Greek religion, of Roman myth, of Egyptian religion, of classical history and even some philosophers have all been divinely engendered. But he denies that any of them were virgin births. These others have a divine male—not necessarily in human form—impregnating the woman—not necessarily through normal intercourse—and making use of some sort of divine semen or holy seed. These are quite different from Jesus being begotten through the creative power of the Holy Spirit on Mary.
Even Bent Scholar has to concede that this perspective is sympathetic to the Christian view. It is not sympathetic, it is gross special pleading! The “highly respected” author plainly knows exactly how the Holy Ghost impregnated Mary and it was not through vaginal penetration. All the others however were! So there! The truth about Mary is far from clear from the gospel birth narratives. Matthew 1:18;20 tells us:
Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost. The angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost.
Our “highly respected” author did not find any details of Mary’s sexual life with the Holy Ghost here. What then of Luke 1:28-38?
And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women. And she was troubled at his saying. And the angel said unto her, Thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son. Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? And the angel answered, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee.
Luke tells us that the “creative power of the Holy Ghost” sounds quite sexual. It does not explicitly say it is, but the virgin is overshadowed and come upon by the Holy Ghost and then she conceives in her womb. If one had to briefly and coyly describe sexual intercourse, this would be a good effort. Luke actually seems to almost say that the Angel Gabriel was responsible. He came in unto her, a euphemism for sexual intercourse in Genesis 19:31 when Lot’s daughters plotted to have sex with their father, she was troubled, there is a lot of sweet talk and she succumbs. Mary was only twelve and doubtless quite naïve. A handsome youth might have seduced an impressionable young girl with talk like this.
Few can be unaware that Christianity from the beginning had to contend with the rumour that Jesus was a bastard son of a Roman soldier called Panterus. Offered the choice of their daughter’s explanation that her pregnancy occurred through visitations by angels and impregnation by ghosts or their suspicion of a visit and impregnation by a handsome young soldier, which would anyone accept today? No Christian would believe their daughter’s supernatural explanation. And because it is alleged to have happened 2000 years ago the ghost and angel explanation is no more likely.
Elsewhere Bent Scholar finds other distinctions. The pre-existent Buddha was not conceived because he already existed but entered the womb of his mother, somehow, and she gave birth. This was not a virgin birth, Bent Scholar discovers, because the mother of Buddha was already married! Well here we are scraping the barrel of fine distinctions. Lest anyone should forget, even in the gospels Mary was betrothed to Joseph and was living as part of his household. She was not yet married to him, the implication being that she was too young to marry and therefore under age—she was less than twelve and a half. But she was nevertheless living with Joseph as a wife. So we have to believe that Buddha’s birth was not a virgin birth because she was married but Jesus’s birth was a virgin birth because the man she lived with had not had intercourse with her!
Bent Scholar tells us the mother of Zagreus, the Orphic Dionysus, was not a virgin because Zeus had sex with her in the form of a serpent. How does a woman have sex with a serpent? However it is done it results in the breaking of the hymen according to the all wise Bent Scholars of this world, so Dionysus was not born of a virgin. The fact is that the mother of Dionysus in this legend was not a virgin because she was Persephone or Kore, a dying and resurrected goddess, not a mortal woman at all. A goddess can be impregnated however she likes, hymen or no hymen.
In the other legend of the birth of Dyonysus, his mother, Semele, was not a virgin because she was seduced by Zeus in the form of a man. The miracle of this birth was that Zeus carried out a sort of Caesarian section on Semele before she died and sewed the immature foetus into his thigh until it matured.
In truth the Christians know no more about how Zeus in the form of a serpent or even in the form of a man impregnated his conquests than they know what the Holy Ghost did when it overshadowed the virgin Mary. They know nothing about either because it is mythology—the invention of stories to explain things. Christians had lots of things to explain. They had historical explanations but the bishops could not let them be known so they wrote books called gospels to explain them falsely. This is called God’s Truth.
Christmas and Mother and Child Images Conceded as Pagan
Bent Scholar now gives us another condition before continuing. We must confine ourselves to the Jesus of the gospels and of the message of the post-ascension early Church. Anything borrowed from other religions after the Edict of Toleration in 313 AD does not count. The reason why doctor Bent Scholar and his cohorts introduce this condition is that they find that they cannot deny that a lot of modern Christianity was introduced from alien religions after this time and is well documented. Since they cannot deny it they simply exclude it from the argument. Nice one!
The Christmas date of 25 December was originally the birth date of the Roman version of Mithras. When the fourth century Church decided to borrow that date for the sake of establishing a national holiday, it had nothing to do with the nature of Jesus. So the Christians concede that the later church adopted from other religions but yet tries to pretend that the earlier church did not. Is that a consistent or a reasonable view?
They are keen to get this point over to claim that Jesus has nothing to do with the Persian god, Mithras, with whom he had so much in common. Note that the date was borrowed from Mithras, Bent Scholar claims, simply to have a national holiday. But even if this were true the believers of both Mithras and Jesus must have seen their two gods as already closely similar to allow it. Neither was appalled at the thought of some heathen religion sharing their festival. Christians particularly must have been happy to move their birth festival to the date of the heathen Mithraic birthday. Only a few years later all gods had become devils for Christians. Why then should they have been so tolerant about accepting a common festival with a devil? The answer, I repeat, is that the two gods were almost identical in every important aspect of worship.
Nor does Bent Scholar want to argue about the iconographic evidence of the mother and child images. The reason is that the Christians have to concede that images of the Child Horus on the lap of his mother Isis were certainly used by the post-Constantine church as models for the newly fashionable art of Mary and the child-Jesus. Indeed no changes were made and it is often quite impossible to tell which is which. The Bent Scholars warn us:
This does not in any way equate the two or support a view that the New Testament adopts the baby Horus and mother motif for Jesus and Mary and indeed, note Jesus’ almost trivialization of the entire matter in Luke 11.27-28!
Christianity began by accepting no other god but God, we are told, and many were burned as human torches or thrown to lions rather than bow their heads to an image of Caesar. Can you imagine a first century Christian agreeing to having the birthday of Christ coincide with the birthday of Nero so that everyone could have a national holiday? Yet it seems 300 years later, at the time of Constantine, it had no inviolable principles. Is this what Christians want to say? They would rather say it, it seems, than admit that Christians at the time readily accepted festivals and icons of supposedly quite different gods from Jesus because believers saw them as the same.
Now Bishop Bent Scholar wants us to appreciate that some elements are always common to religions and their leaders but imply no copying. Krishna did miracles then Jesus did miracles but no one should believe that Jesus therefore copied Krishna. Jesus copied Krishna because neither of these legendary people did miracles. Miracles are not just rare events like a man falling out of an aeroplane and surviving. Miracles are impossible. Therefore when they happen, according to believers of various kinds, they are proof of divinity.
That explains why extraordinary gentlemen of the world sometimes become gods. Their followers are determined it should happen and provide the doubtful with the evidence—miracles. The miracles of two rivals for godhood need not be the same but when they are the same as those previously honoured as gods, especially if they are peculiar in circumstance or detail, then copying is more likely than that the punters have reinvented the same miracle.
Words, Terms and Concepts Conceded as Pagan but with Christian Refinements
Bent Scholar then explains away the plain fact that the unique god-sent religion, Christianity, uses precisely the terms and symbols of many other earlier religions. The reason is that words such as light, darkness, life, death, spirit, word, love, believing, water, bread, clean, birth, and children of God can be found in almost any religion. It is simply that religious people like to talk using such words. Parallels, Bent Scholar explains, mean nothing. Two Christian scholars independently draw up a list of parallels between words and expressions in a well known biblical passage (Jn 1.1-18) and other sources. Their lists of over 300 parallels only overlap by 7%.
Apparently this proves something called parallelomania, which strange little nonsense word is meant to make us realise that finding parallels is nonsense, and so we should ignore it. What it shows, of course, is that Christians are desperate and that neither Christian scholar exhausted the list of parallels which might extend to 1000 in fact. Of the 1000 one scholar was aware of 100 and the other scholar was aware of 200. Evidently 21 of their choices were the same ones. Why should the overlap have been better? Bent Scholar seems to think that both of them should have had the full 1000. If there is any lesson in the story it is that however many parallels we think we have between Christianity and Pagan religions, there are a lot more still to be found.
Anyway Bent Scholar hopes he has successfully discouraged us from scratching our chins in curiosity when we read that Horus was called the “Son of the Father” and that Mithras was called the “Light of the World” or that Krishna was called a “Shepherd God.”
Immediately Bent Scholar shoots himself in the foot by admitting that early Christians “might have used Pagan words” but they “radically changed their content.” So what was the point of the previous paragraphs arguing that the parallel use of words was a general religious phenomenon or was a result of parallelomania. It is typically Christian. Ever since Paul, the apostle, Christians have been happy to be “all things to all men.” They want it all ends up and when their argument is inconsistent, they don’t care because the argument is irrelevant. It’s nothing more than a fancy box to fool you into thinking what is inside is worth having.
Bent Scholar has to concede that Christians adopted Pagan words because even his Christian textbooks teach it. The reason they do is that Justin Martyr, almost at the outset of gentile Christianity conceded it when he rightly said Christians did not claim anything about their saviour god that the Greeks did not say about theirs. It is undeniable that in the Hellenistic period the Greeks and Romans and other Mediterranean cultures often had “saviours.” Saviours were either demigods, hybrids of mortals and gods or they were gods incarnate. Demigods were born as humans but behaved as gods, doing wonderful things for mankind. On their, usually premature death, they were immortalised in heaven. Incarnated gods came to earth to save a people or the whole world as a human saviour.
It is quite impossible to deny this honestly because it is well founded yet Christians have always continued to do so. What can one conclude? Why is this debate happening? We seem to be debating what is already conceded in Christian textbooks. The answer has already been given—Christians used Pagan concepts and terms but they used them exclusively of their own god, denying them to others, and they gave them new meaning! There you have it. The Christian is not saying to us that the concepts and terms used by them have not been taken from earlier Pagan religions, as we have been asserting all along, but that when they did they applied them only to Jesus and gave them a few new twists. Admitting that they took their concepts from the Pagan world surrounding them, Bent Scholar’s source even says: How could they do otherwise? Exactly! How could they? So what are we arguing about? It turns out the argument is simply that Christianity gave old ideas new meaning.
Note that when the Christians promoted their exclusiveness with slogans like:
Neither Caesar, nor Asklepios, nor Herakles, nor Dionysos, nor Ptolemy, nor any other God is the Saviour of the world—only Jesus Christ is!
they were adamant that Jesus could not share his role as saviour with any of these others. Yet, as we saw above, soon he was sharing a birthday with sun gods like Herakles (Hercules) and Mithras, and tawdry little icons of mother and child with Horus and Isis. The Bent Scholars try to claim exclusiveness as a merit having just admitted that only a couple of centuries later they were happy to share festivals and images with other saviour figures.
To illustrate the change of meaning of the words they adopted, Bent Scholar again quotes here from Justin Martyr (Apol 1:13):
People think we are insane when we name a crucified man as second in rank after the unchangeable and eternal God, the Creator of all things, for they do not discern the mystery involved.
Here are a couple of puzzles. First the irrelevant one. Justin Martyr calls Jesus a crucified man. He has no idea that Jesus and God are of the same rank and indeed substance, as the doctrine of the Trinity maintains. It is so unlikely as to have been impossible that Jesus could have regarded himself on a par with god, as the fourth gospel pretends and even parts of Matthew and Luke suggest. All of the "I am" passages in John’s gospel mean God. They are simply a literal translation of the meaning of God’s name into Greek. In each case Jesus would have said "God" not "I am". The author of John consciously and deliberately elevates Jesus in his own words. But the lie is plain because the earlier gospels do not.
The second puzzle is that saviours quite often died an ignominious death. The punishment of the Titan, Prometheus, is worse than that of Jesus because it is eternal not for just a few hours. What then did Justin mean? The clue might also be in the reference to a “crucified man.” The opportunities which later arose to re-write history had not then occurred so it is likely that there were enough people in the Empire who knew Jesus’s true nature that to them it was insane for anyone to want to worship him. In other words we have hints that people knew something about Jesus which is now forgotten, having been wiped from the history books in the fourth and fifth centuries.
The Bent Scholars also here admit that the Apostle and other Christians used and reshape all of the familiar concepts to communicate their new religion. Do I have to continue? Everything is being admitted. The emphasis on new meanings the Christians can keep if they wish. The point at issue is not whether Christians gave aspects of the old religions new meanings or not. The point is that they took aspects of the old religions, and evidently that point is now conceded. Words always evolve and acquire new meanings. No two gods and no two mythologies were alike. So every use of a standard word or ritual must differ in some way from religion to religion. If the religion is trying to distinguish itself from others, it is natural that it will deliberately seek novelty within a standard set of features. It is the best way of attracting essentially conservative punters while offering more radical ones something new. The apostle Paul, from the outset aimed to do precisely this.
The Bent Scholars even concede on the cross, a major symbol in world religion since humanity began. Their condition is that the church radically transformed its meaning. As proof of this Bent Scholar quotes this meaningless claptrap:
Tthe cross is endowed with transcendent significance. The cross is considered inseparable from the mystery of the divine Logos. Hence, it takes on a cosmic dimension, a biblical dimension, and a soteriological dimension.
Bent Scholar concludes from this that even if similar words are used, we must never assume that the content is the same. Well, old boy, no one in their right mind would make such an assumption. To suggest it is merely part of the implication that critics of Christianity do not understand simple things. It is a subtle slur to make the Bent Scholars seem cleverer to the simple and the gullible than their opponents.
Christians pretend to understand complex mysteries that exist nowhere in the real world and like all quacks and magicians fool people into believing it by sleight of hand. Note, for example, the “hence” in the morass of confusion in the three short sentences quoted. It implies reasoning yet the words are unintelligible. The Christians have not given commonplace words new meaning they have taken meaning away from them. Instead we have the occult gibberish of every lunatic arcane cult that existed. Astrology makes more sense, and once that was illegal.
Bent Scholar now changes his argument once again. It is conceded that the Pagan religions used the same concepts and terms as later Christianity did—albeit modified. Having began by denying that Christianity had anything to do with Pagan religions we have arrived at the point where the Christians try to explain why the Pagan practices and expressions they “borrowed” were acceptable. The Christian answer—God built into us the “basic conceptual apparatus” that would enable us to receive his message when it came. Before the message came, the basic apparatus was used by a variety of heathen religions all over the place. But when the message came, the Christians were able to take all the old and misused rituals and expressions and apply them properly. Beginning by denying that Christianity had anything to do with mythology, our tutor has now shown us exactly why mythology has so much in common with Christianity. Can you credit it?
Not only that but:
Without common mythic concepts or structures, one could simply not hear the Good News about the True God and the acts in history of His unique Son, incarnated in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
The common features of Christianity and Pagan religions are not only accepted, they are necessary for anyone to hear the “good news.”
At this point the good minister, Bent Scholar, also concedes that the religions of the Roman world at the time of the growth of Christianity were syncretistic. He admits that it is a special problem because it means religions incorporated appropriate elements of the myth and ritual of other local cults. The problem is that it suggests that Christianity in that milieu would have behaved in the same way, probably did and therefore explaining similarities between the unique revealed religion and all the rest.
Often a deity similar to another would simply change name to the other and the two religions would merge. This was Roman imperial policy to get unity throughout the empire and a prime reason for the cult of the Emperor. The identity of many of the gods and goddesses of Greek and Roman mythology is the result of this process. Diana of the Romans became the same goddess as Artemis of the Greeks who had been identified with the Great Mother Goddess, Cybele, of their neighbours, the Phrygians. So Diana of the Ephesians was really Cybele.
Bent Scholar claims the problem really is that syncretism gives rise to multi-featured gods, some features of which are sure to overlap with the features of the True God. He quotes Horus, Mithras, Buddha and Krishna as syncretistic gods. Since Christianity came later than any of them, however, the problem is obscure. As Bent Scholar has already conceded that saviours had similar characteristics and these gods were all, among other things, saviours, they all had the key characteristics that the first Christians evidently thought essential to a religion. They saw them in these pre-existent gods and thought how nice it would be if their own god had a similar history.
