Whether dinosaurs of all types laid eggs or gave birth to live young it is certain that they were often caring parents.

Who Lies Sleeping?

Paul and the Mysteries in Apologetics 1

Liars, Damned Liars, and Christians
False Cause?
Pagan Eucharists and Baptisms
Wrong Dates?

Abstract

Apologists say Christianity could not have been influenced by Paganism because it was an exclusive faith that demanded the sole attention, not only of the devotee, but everyone else as well! Christianity was not tolerant! Paganism on the other hand was tolerant of other tolerant religions. The gentile convert had to give up their Pagan beliefs, even if they had been sincerely held for a lifetime. Christians think converts just wiped their minds clean of all previous Pagan contamination and were born again pristine and unencumbered as Christians. The plain impossibility of this in reality is sure proof that before long Pagan practices were being introduced into Christianity, no doubt with a new interpretive gloss.

Liars, Damned Liars, and Christians

Christianity is flannel from beginning to end. How could it be other when Christians can say whatever they like and it will be God’s own word?

Take no thought how or what ye shall speak: for it shall be given you in that same hour what ye shall speak. For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father which speaketh in you.
Mt 10:19-20

Now even though a simple experiment would prove those who indulge in this to be indulging in utter bunkum, Christians have taken it as God’s permit to lie themselves blue, in the certainty that God’s agent, the Holy Ghost, would ensure it was God’s truth. They have learnt not to be too obvious in their lies, but they are quite happy to lie over matter which are difficult or impossible to verify, such as historical matters and whatever God putatively wants.

Professor Bruce M Metzger wrote a paper on Christianity and the mystery religions about forty years ago which has been cited innumerable times since by Christian apologists of many shades. Metzger is considered to be a great authority on early Christianity, and here he purports to be explaining methodology in the study of the mystery religions and early Christianity. He is a professor with doctorates and other degrees, but he is barely less dishonest than other Christians, his only saving grace being a welcome modesty in his assertions. Statements hedged with qualifiers do not faze the Christian evangelist. He knows, and doubtless Metzger does too, that the simple minds that make up Christian congregations are not refined enough to understand that qualifying adjectives can often virtually negate a statement, and in any event tell us that it is not necessrily true. It will be for Christians, though.

For any sheep who might be reading, here is a simple example concerning a cow. A cow became spooked, jumped a hedge and got run down by a lorry. The farmer pleaded that generally cows do not jump hedges, but the magistrate fined him a good sum for negligence anyway. Here is the sort of qualified statement that Christian apologists love to abuse, just as the farmer did, but failed. Just to say, “generally cows do not jump over fences” gives the impression that cows do not jump over fences. It did not impress the magistrate, who had a case before him when the “generally” did not apply. He thought the farmer should have considered the exceptional case as a possibility. This might seem quite an obvious instance that would fool no one, but it is used commonly by evangelical types and it fools millions of people dying to be “renatus”. They ignore the qualifier.

Christian apologists depend heavily on maintaining that Christians had different meanings from other religions even when they used the same terms. Faced with Pagan eucharists and baptisms, they might say, “So what?” They claim that religious rituals can only take on a limited number of forms that relate to common aspects of life. The meaning of the common rituals is what was important. This is the final rampart in the deep defenses of the Christian excusors. Effectively, it concedes that the Christians did indeed use the same rituals as the Pagans but they changed their meaning. They cannot deny that early Christians did use the same terms.

The Mysteries and Christianity, being products of the same age, were almost certain to use the same forms of expression.
G H C MacGregor and A C Purdy, Jew and Greek: Tutors unto Christ

Evangelical Christians are desperate not to concede this, if they can avoid it, but they do ultimately, with the proviso that it is not really “borrowed” because it means something different! It is no argument against syncretism that Christians interpreted these forms of expression differently, as MacGregor and Purdy concede. If all religions had the same meaning for the restricted set of rituals that Christian apologists claim are possible, then all religions would be the same one! It sounds much more like what it is, namely an excuse.

Christians are quite ready to suspend part of their beliefs when it is necessary. If there are only limited ways of worshipping, it does not go well with the idea that the God of the universe can do whatever He wants. The onlooker wants to know why the jealous God would want to commemorate a supposed unique revelation in ways that are in common use in the Pagan religions that he urges his acolytes to disdain and destroy. God ought to have more imagination. Since he has not, his dutiful followers have to go about devising new meanings for commonplace old functions like washing and dining. But despite the new interpretation, the old ritual has still been “borrowed” from another source because God could not think of something original. Religions do use common rituals that they adopt from each other or that evolve throughout time, as religions undergo schism, but Christians refuse to accept that Christianity took any previous rituals from anywhere.

Professor Metzger informs us that an important distinction between the sensible Christians and the superstitious mystery devotees is that the mystery rituals worked “ex opera operato”, meaning, in English, “by magic”. Here, incidentally, is another wonderful ploy used by evangelists to impress their sheepheads with their God-given intellects—they love to baffle them with scholarship, here by giving an alien looking Latin phrase. In truth, this is no different from what the magicians did throughout time, to impress their gullible believers! Magic spells are commonly recited in an unfamiliar language, quite often Latin or Hebrew for English speakers, but it might be Greek for a Hebrew speaker, and so on. It is mocked in the Arabian Nights stories by words like “Abracadabra” and “Sesame”. The aim was to imply secret knowledge.

Anyway, Christian ritual naturally is not magic, Christians tell us, but works “dona data”! This is not magic because it is God’s gift in response to the supplications of the believers. It is a fine theological distinction but quite what the practical distinction is cannot easily be perceived. The magicians always considered their magic worked by appealing to a god. The only peculiarity of the Christian magic is the god that they appeal to. The evangelists are indulging in special pleading, a common ploy. In short, it is simply that “we are different!” It is the same as the indulgent parent saying: “Your ignorant son breaks windows because he is a lout, but my creative son needs an outlet for his frustrations”.

False Cause?

Now besides the huge knowledge that Professor Metzger brought to his refutation of the mysteries as a likely source of any aspects of early Christianity, another evangelical professor, Ronald H Nash, who is so clever that he understands philosophy as well as religion, tells his sheep that the critics of Christianity commit the logical fallacy of false cause in seeing a dependence of Christianity on the mystery religions. False cause is defined by the professor himself:

This fallacy is committed whenever someone reasons that just because two things exist side by side, one of them must have caused the other.

Christians see nothing wrong in saying that Pagan religions depended on Christianity, but reverse subject and object and it is suddenly a case of false cause! Given that there are enough similarities to show some dependence one way or the other, we are not devoid of additional information that decides the issue. It is certain that an effect does not precede its cause in the natural world. Causes precede effects. The choice over which is cause and which is effect therefore becomes a decison of which preceded the other. It follows that Paganism must have influenced Christianity because Paganism preceded Christianity. There is no false cause here. The earlier of the two must have been the cause, both evolving independently having been discounted.

Needless to say, it is not critics of Christians who are guilty of simple errors like this, although Christians practice them so diligently that they make them virtuous. False cause is the primitive misconception that is the basis of magic. Christians fall for the fallacy all the time when they attend church expecting felicitations from God and when they pray for a blessing. If sometimes something beneficial happens, by false cause, they attribute it to God or to prayer. Commission a mass for a sick relative, or pray for them, and when they recover thank God, but when they die? Christians will probably thank God again, but they will not curse God that the mass did not work or the prayer was not answered. Christian belief is substantiated among the credulous by their careful selection of the evidence.

Apologists say that Christian language has been used to describe Pagan rituals, falsely making them seem more similar than they really are. It is blatant special pleading. The Christians here lay claim to words as being their own copyright. Yet they say they are perfectly entitled to use the language of mystery religions because they use the words with new meanings!

Critics of Christianity or even careless Christians, some of whom are now saints should not have used words used by Christians to describe Pagan ceremonies. The devotees of Isis were not baptized but merely ritually bathed. The devotees of Mithras did not know of a Last Supper before their Lord (forbidden) ascended to heaven, they merely had a celebratory meal. Saviours are not saviours unless they are also called Jesus Christ. Christian critics and those silly Christian saints were stupid enough to call a ceremony a baptism and then said in astonishment, “Look! They had a baptism!” They called the Mithraic meal a Last Supper, then reading their Last Sentence declared in amazement, “My Goodness! Mithras had a Last Supper!” As Edwyn Bevan put it:

You first put in the Christian elements then are staggered to find them there.

We are meant to take this seriously! Yet the staggering thing is that Christians have done this in a far more important context for years. It is the basis of all biblicist fieldwork in biblical archaeology. The elements inserted by the Christian “archaeologists” are what they expect to find according to the bible. Should they find something that does not suit biblical assumptions they merrily drop it into a ditch somewhere else, add it to a skip or just jumble up the excavation so that they can claim the strata were “disturbed”. As in the case of lying to their hearts content, no Christian archaeologist has a moment of guilt at doing this. The bible is God’s word and if the archaeology is wrong, it is the work of the devil! These people are criminals, if they are not insane.

Bevan, in the sentence quoted above, meant to indict Alfred Loisy on this matter. It is probably a slander because Christians will try to discredit difficult critics now that they are not permitted by law to roast them into silence. Their own God used heavy irony over this sort of issue, but Christians are far too thick skinned, when they are not simply thick, to bother about what their God told them:

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.
Mt 7:3,5

Pagan Eucharists and Baptisms

Apologists are confident that Christian baptism is completely different from all other ritual washings because the latter were just… washings! They were baths to make the celebrant clean for the ceremony and nothing else. Christians insist that their baptism is not parallelled in the mysteries because:

The mysteries had different purposes for baptism
Jewish sects were familiar with it.

What this boils down to is that some form of immersion was almost universal in religions, whatever distinct interpretations were put upon it. C H Dodd (Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel) confirms this for us:

Frequent ritual lustrations were common in most ancient religions including Judaism.

The Christians are using special pleading, as they always do. All religions had a baptism, but ours is different! It is double talk. Even Dodd tried it, distinguishing Christian baptism from the other lustrations, having written the above, as being once and for all and not repeated. The explanation of the difference is obvious—converts to a religion expecting the end of the world at any time had to make do with a once and for all baptism!

What then does a Christian baptism do? It washes away sins, of course! It is indeed a different interpretation from just washing away sweat and grease, but quite why this particular immersion washes away sins, should not be asked, and, what evidence is there that it is effective in its purpose, should also not be asked or, if it is, should not be answered scientifically but only by selective anecdotes. Doubtless Christians believe that baptism leaves them free from sin, if they are old enough to know anything about it, but that is because the ignorant masses who first took up Christianity among the gentiles misunderstood the ceremony. If the bishops understood it themselves, they were happy to leave the flock in bliss. Christians now continue the error convinced that they have a unique revelation.

The Christian convert was cleansed of sins by repentance not by baptism. Baptism was originally the symbolic recognition of the proselyte’s repentance, an outward cleansing to match the inner cleansing of repentance. Nothing more! It was in fact just a washing, the very thing that Christians cannot bear it now to be. If Christians believe that baptism washes away sins, as early Christians like Constantine did, then they believe in ritual magic and might as well practice Voodoo.

Concerning the eucharist, Christian apologists are also on tricky ground because ritual meals of bread and water, wine or beer were also common to most Pagan religions. Still, the apologist can always turn to the ploy of citing an authority—people of the same beliefs with a reputation as an intellectual or an author—or airily dismissing what they cannot explain away. This they do for the Mithraic meal and the Orphic omophagia. Early Christian witnesses confirm that the Mithraic meal was indistinguishable from the Christian eucharist. The eating of raw flesh by the Orphics had been abandoned by the rise of Christianity, the apologists tell us, knowing nothing about it, in fact. It is inconceivable that, even if eating the raw flesh of a goat had ceased as too unpleasant for refined urbanites in the Roman empire, it had not been replaced by a simpler and less unpleasant ceremony, such as eating wafers perhaps!

Professor Nash, the philosopher as well as the theologian, declares:

We still know very little about the sacred meals of the ancient Pagan cults.

But within a sentence or so, in his plausible but utterly dishonest book, Christians and the Hellenistic World, he expects his readers to have forgotten what he had already said, because he then boldly states:

Careful study reveals the supposed parallels and analogies break down completely.

He suggests to his gawping flock that the critics of Christianity cannot make out any arguments about the similarity of the mystery repasts to the Christian eucharist because they know nothing about it, but Christians, presumably with their supernatural assistant, the Holy Ghost, know every possible refutation of it. “Careful study” here does not mean objective scholarship, but careful study of tendentious work like his own book. It illustrates as clearly as possible the deceit of these unscrupulous people.

What the careful student should note is that Nash admits that ancient mystery cults often had sacred meals. Christianity, which was formed in a society in which mystery cults were growing in popularity, also instituted a sacred meal. These straightforward statements are sufficient. Christianity took up the same practice as other contemporary religions. The student need not be surprised that each cult put its own interpretative stamp upon the significance of the meal, but the meal was de rigeur!

It is impossible for Christians to deny the dependence of the eucharist on the Jewish Seder, even if the Christians did change the interpretation of the meal into one that any Jew would find disgusting, and ultimately changed its nature into a merely symbolic meal used as a magic ritual. The dependence of the eucharist on the Seder described in the gospels as the Lasy Supper is plain. What the Christians blatantly deny is that their new interpretation of the Jewish ritual meal is the very interpretation of some of the mystery religions—a communion—a uniting of the communicant with the god by notionally consuming part of his body! That is precisely what the Orphics meant by their own communion.

Even such clever exegetes as Martin Hengel bury their heads over such matters. Contrary to all reason and evidence, he asserts that it does not necessitate dependence of the gospels on the mystery cults. The trick here is the use of the word “necessitate” which forces certainty. There are few things in old history that we can be certain about and less in religious history where various gods’ attendants feel a need to destroy or wangle the evidence. What we use then is our brains. If religions commonly had a meal and this new religion suddenly comes along with a meal, should we believe that common practice had no influence on the new religion? To believe that the meal was a great new revelation in the circumstances invites observers to kill off their remaining brain cells and go, “Duh? OK, Lord!” That is the reaction expected and received.

The same pathetic excuse for an argument appears over titles like “Lord” and “Son of God”. It is impossible to pretend that these common titles for gods are uniquely Christian. The special pleading emerges as ever: “Christians understand the titles in a new and distinct way”.

Wrong Dates?

Christianity could not have been influenced by Paganism because any evidence we have of it is too late, the Christian doctors declare. Here is a real example of false cause. The Christians professors think that the evidence is the cause of the influence and being too late cannot have caused it. If the evidence is truly late then it is legitimate to say that there is no evidence that Paganism influenced Christianity because what we have is too late to count, but that does not mean that Paganism did not influence Christianity. It does mean that the evidence we have does not prove it, but Christians are particularly keen on the mantra, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”, yet here they are claiming it is. In any case, it is not true, for anyone but Christians, who demand impossibly secure evidence against their beliefs but negligible evidence for them. Such dishonest twisting of the evidence suits them but simply makes them look what they are to anyone else—crooks!

The use of the large organ in the skull, grievously underused by Christians, is sufficient to make out the case for those prepared to use it. Presumably, Christians will accept what the Jewish scriptures say as evidence. Let them read:

And Melchizedek king of Salem brought forth bread and wine, and he was the priest of the most high God. And he blessed him, and said, Blessed be Abram of the most high God, possessor of heaven and earth.
Gen 14:18-19

The king of Jerusalem is thanking Abram for saving them from the four warring kings. Melchizedek is the ruler of Jerusalem and this is supposedly a millennium before it was captured by king David from the Jebusites. It was therefore a Pagan city, unless the Christians will now tell us that Judaism preceded Abraham. Melchizedek was therefore a Pagan priest-king. Yet his Pagan ritual to thank Abram and to bless him involves bread and wine.

The Christians will not allow us to call a ritual with bread and wine a eucharist, so let us defy the Christians and use the word despite them, but define it clearly so that everyone knows what we mean when we use the word eucharistic. “It describes a symbolic meal of bread and wine, often used as a thanksgiving and a blessing”. If that is not a eucharist for Christians, then they can have it their own way, but it is our definition of a eucharist. They can decide what they think a eucharist is and we shall decide what we think it is. The definition seems to fit the Christian usage, so we can feel doubly certain that this Pagan priest supposedly in around 2000 BC, the believers tell us, before there were any Israelites and therefore certainly no Jews, offered a eucharistic blessing to Abraham, the father of the Jews, Christians and the Moslems. Pagans, according to the bible itself, were offering a ritual of bread and wine as a thanksgiving 2000 years before Jesus told his disciples to do it. Why should they doubt that other Pagans did it too, long before Christianity.

The guardians of Christianity accuse the critics of Christianity of being cavalier about dates, citing late witnesses to supposedly pre-Christian practices, but they will certainly find some excuse for the Pagan priest Melchizedek anticipating Christian practice by 2000 years. Yet again, the Christians are guilty of these tricks themselves rather than their critics. Indeed, much of Christian apologetic is what psychologists call projection—attributing your own faults to others, because they are not honest enough to say, “mea culpa”. Christian evangelists consider themselves all bijou saints waiting and expecting to be recognized by God. They will not be disappointed because they will be dead, so they will never know!

Paul’s epistles are dated from the internal evidence and the stories in Acts to about 40 to 60 AD. Yet Christians ignore the strong evidence that they have been heavily edited and perhaps reassembled from scattered pages, if not partly rewritten. There is, indeed, a body of scholarly opinion that the epistles are forgeries, politely called pseudepigraphs in scholarly circles. There is no mention of them until over a hundred years after they were supposedly written.

In the case of the sacred word of God preserved in the Jewish scriptures—purloined by the Christians from their rightful owners, and here not even the deceitful word “borrowed” is used as it is of other practices stolen from other cults—the confusion over dates is worse. Ask any churchgoer when Daniel was written. The answer is almost certain to be 400 years before its true date. The Christian apologist cannot see because of the tree trunks in their own eyes but undertake to correct their critics. So, Christians are hardly in a position to criticize others over inattention to proper dates. Their religion depends upon it.

Admittedly, no one should use evidence falsely, but Christians have no moral high ground to stand on here, despite the excessive respect they are still granted. They are only able to use arguments against their critics like this on the dates of the evidence because the critics suffer from a scarcity of evidence, through Christian vandalism in defence of their superstition throughout history, that they again refuse to accept. Late evidence obviously cannot prove dependence of Christianity on Pagan ritual forms but the hard dateable evidence is not only what there is. The whole weight of circumstantial evidence is against Christianity appearing small but perfectly formed through a miraculous act of God.

Christians will not accept this as evidence because they will hear only of hard evidence against them, whereas a story with miracles unsubstantiated anywhere is sufficient for them to believe. Intelligent people will reject this pathetic selectivity in the evidence for and against as utterly dishonest.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.