Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, January 23, 2002

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.

Exclusive Faith?

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

What are we to think of Pliny only 50 years after Paul went to Rome finding Christians singing hymns to the sun? Either these people had introduced a practice into Christianity they were familiar with, as Mithraists perhaps, or Christ was seen from the inception of Christianity as an aspect or allegory of the sun just like Mithras. Moreover, however intolerant Christianity was at the level of the shepherds, the sheep were tolerant former Pagans and doubtless saw no harm in continuing practices that they had thought harmless for most of their lives. Remember that there was little formal organization in these early years among the gentiles, and worship was usually conducted in someone’s home where Pagan forms of pious expression could not easily be suppressed by authority.

Since history shows that every significant religious practice of the Pagans was taken over by the Catholic Church, it is sheer effrontery and blatant mendacity to pretend that it did not happen, as these Protestant evangelicals want to do. These professors of philosophy and religion forget that their own churches seceded from the Catholics in the Reformation largely because Catholicism was considered to be Pagan. Philosophy and religion must now mean sophistry and dissemblance.

Metzger contrasts the Christian divine being who was a real man on earth and the “deities of the Mysteries who were nebulous figures of an imaginary past”. Whether the Christian divine being was once real or not is immaterial to anyone who knows only that they are told he was once real. In other words, to call this god real and that god mythical is purely arbitrary when the only standard is itself arbitrary—what people are told. The figure of Christ is supposed to be historic but he is no less nebulous than king Arthur, Hereward the Wake, William Tell or Robin Hood. Egyptians thought Osiris was a historic king of Egypt. Thracians thought Orpheus was a historic prince of Thrace. Romans thought that their god, Quirinus, had appeared on earth as Romulus, the founder of their city. It is a lie not to tell the whole truth, and here the Christian doctors are not telling the whole truth. Christianity does not differ from any of these and many more religions whose devotees believed, as Christians do, that their god had once been a man on earth. Again Metzger knows this.

The point about the heroes mentioned above is that their stories are like those of Christ. Mostly, they lived real lives, but nobody is sure about what it was because myths have accumulated around them. Many books of their mythology and the exegesis of it have been written, and it seems likely that had Christianity not been so oppressive that any one of them might have become a god.

Judaism and Paganism

Metzger can write:

The early Palestinian Church was composed of Christians from a Jewish background, whose generally strict monotheism and traditional intolerance of syncretism must have militated against wholesale borrowing from Pagan cults.

Needless to say, he is happily shoving beams into the eyes of the already blind. The early Palestinian church was surely comprised of Christians, if it was a Christian church, but the Christians in it were Jews! Jews certainly commonly come from a Jewish background, but Metzger seems unable to say that they were in fact Jews. We know it because the Christian New Testament tells us. Does that strengthen Metzger’s brief argument? That is what is hard to say, although Metzger shows no doubt.

Though Jews today are a fairly uniform bunch of people in that they are not divided into anything like the 30,000 varieties of Christianity, in the mid-first century it was different. Judaism was spallated by sectarianism. It is argable to what extent the many sects were strictly monotheistic. Metzger writes what he wants to be true following the directions of his Lord that it will indeed be true—enough for Christians to believe! If Metzger bases his deduction on anything at all, it is that modern Rabbinic Jews call themselves monotheistic, and that the Christians in the Roman empire were monotheistic enough to prefer to be eaten by lions than to nod in acknowledgement of an emperor god, or so the myths tell us. Pagans were polytheistic so, the conclusion to be drawn is that the only source of Christianity was its parent Judaism.

The sheep might be happy with such reasoning, but monotheists do not believe in only one god! Jews and Christians certainly do not. They believe in so many gods no one can even count them. It is likely that most so-called polytheistic Pagans were probably more monotheistic than Jews or Christians, at least in their belief that only one or at most a few gods were significant. Most Pagans were monotheistic to the extent that they favoured a particular god. Unlike Christians, however, they recognized that others might prefer another god, and they were happy to let them have their own choice, even if they thought the other god was ineffective or non-existent. It was a personal choice for them, but Christians want to tell everyone what they should believe. By the time of Christ, Pagans generally believed the separate gods they worshipped were “daimones”, agents of a supreme God. Pagans were happy to visit the shrines of other gods when they had a speciality such as Aesculapius and Poseidon, but this is no different to Christians who are happy to pray to saints who also have a speciality.

As for Jews and their offspring, the Christians, they believed in a high god called Yehouah and another wicked god who opposed the high god, called Satan, in practice the equal of the good god. That’s two gods then, in these monotheistic religions. In the Jewish scriptures, we find that Yehouah is not even the high god, and has a large number of equals in the court of his father El, but somewhere along the line Yehouah seemed to have taken over from his father. That then is a whole host more gods, but although they are there, they are ignored in the Judaeo-Christian scheme.

What is not ignored and are important is a whole raft of lesser gods called angels, that Jews and Christians pretend are not gods at all, even though they are immortal and have supernatural powers of their own. Satan is supposed to have been one of these, and plainly he is a powerful god, so we can assume that the other angels are too. Some of these angels however, are specially powerful and work for the high god. These are called archangels and are given names—but the Jews and Christians still deny that they are gods, to preserve the title “God” for the high god alone, and pretend that their religions are therefore monotheistic.

Some of the angels besides Satan were wicked too and joined their chief in spreading wickedness in the world. The high god could not stop them, even though he sent his son, another god, into the world to save human beings by deliberately getting crucified. Another god was the Holy Ghost who spent his time going around spreading fire about people’s heads called the apostolic succession, and otherwise inspiring people to do good, write gospels and generally become Christians, although he often seems to make mistakes.

How all this prevented Jews and the newly instituted Christians from accepting Pagan gods—their daimones—as angels of God is hard to understand, since mostly they only ever wanted to do good themselves. Aesculapius wanted to save people from sickness and Poseidon to save people from storms at sea, but the perverse Christians decided that all of these were the wicked angels who were the servants of Satan. The “daimones”, the Pagans considered good, the Christians called wicked, and to this day wicked angels and Pagan gods are still called “demons”. It was not that the Christians did not believe in the daimones. They did. They believed they were singlarly wicked, and came to believe that anyone who persisted in worshipping a god, such as Aesculapius, was a Satanist worshipping a demon that could be conjured and spread awful terror in the world. Lots of Christians still believe it, so they are no more monotheistic today than they were then.

Jews invented an aspect of the monotheistic Yehouah and called it Sophia. That’s yet another God. They had the Angel of the Lord, another god. Perhaps the Shekinah was another. These were not monotheistic religions in any proper sense of the word monotheistic. It meant they had a high god, but so did the Greeks and the Romans and they identified them all as the same high god. Jews were exercising in gymnasia and arguing in the porticoes of Herod’s temple modelled on the Stoa of Athens. What stopped Jews and Christians identifying the Suffering Servant of Isaiah with, say, Attis? Perhaps they did and called him Jesus.

Does Metzger really know that in all this there were not Hellenizing Jews who were not seeing Michael as Mithras—for that is who he was!—who were happy to see Yehouah as Jupiter and Zeus? This is precisely what the Maccabees were supposedly fighting against 200 years before and it is impossible to believe that the degree of Hellenization had been stopped then. The evangelic voice of the Holy Ghost whispering in Metzger’s head refuses to let him countenance any of this. The evidence is absent!

Ronald H Nash warns us:

The earlier mysteries (including those during the first Christian century) reveal a conflicting pantheon of deities and superhuman mythical beings.

The good professor means to contrast this with Christianity, which will doubtless leave any reader writhing on the floor with laughter. He wants to impress us with the idea that Christianity is a monotheistic religion, but to add “with a conflicting pantheon of deities and superhuman mythical beings” to introduce a little truth and balance quite spoils his intention, which he will be certain is that of the Holy Ghost.

In the Christian pantheon, Yehouah conflicts with Satan, angels conflict with demons, superhuman beings like the Blessed Virgin and a multitude of saints appear all over the place, Jesus is on the side of Yehouah and so is the comically inept Holy Ghost, the Jews are on the side of Satan, though Jesus is himself one, and poor Judas does everything that is required of him to make God’s plan succeed and is then branded a traitor. This is God’s revelation to the world which must be believed if we are to be saved from eternal torture, and is quite different from the merely “heterogeneous, confused cult legends” of Isis, Cybele and Mithras.

The uncomfortable fact for Christian befuddlers and befoggers is that Christianity was the very syncretistic Jewish-Pagan religion that they deny! Perhaps the Jerusalem Church was unable to take the full syncretistic step away from Judaism, but Hellenized Jews elsewhere took the step, and Paul was their spokesman.

Paul and Judaism

Metzger goes on with his sins:

It is quite inconceivable that Judaizers who attacked Paul with unanswered ferocity for what they considered his liberalism concerning the relation of Gentile converts to the Mosaic law, should nevertheless have acquiesced in what some have described as Paul’s thoroughgoing contamination of the central doctrines and sacraments of the Christian religion.

Metzger is being opaque here while contriving to convey an impression to the sheep that Christian critics are dunces unable to distinguish a “Hebrew” from a “Greek”, as they are described in Acts. It sounds suspiciously as though Metzger cannot distinguiish them, because he does not, but he must have been able to. It is just that he does not want the sheep to know, perhaps! Doubtless there are dunces among critics of Christianity but the Christians fall into one of two castes, the larger one of which consists of dunces and the smaller one of cheats. Metzger and his ilk are not dunces.

Why does he call the Jews who attacked Paul Judaizers? The so-called Judaizers were Jewish Christians who wanted to remain Jews and remained loyal to the Mosaic law. It is a Christian term used to abuse the original Jewish Christians of the Jerusalem Church who actually followed the teachings of their master, Jesus. They are the “Hebrews” of Acts. They had no idea—like Jesus himself—of changing any jot of the law! With hindsight, Christians label them reactionaries trying to undo the work of Jesus, when they were really the honest preservers of the work of Jesus. It was Paul who was trying to make Christianity non-Jewish, a sin that Jesus could never have considered.

The Jews attacking Paul were Jews who, unlike Paul, were zealous for the law and resented Paul’s determination to undermine it. Non-Jews who sought to be proselytes had to obey the law—every jot and tittle of it, Jesus said—including circumcision. Why then should Jews or even Jewish Christians have acquiesced in what Paul did? And, if some Jewish Christians did acquiesce, who says it was the same set of Jews as those who attacked Paul? The Jews who saw the strict observation of the law as a hindrance in the Greek world were the Hellenizers, the “Greeks” of Acts, and these were the ones that Paul joined, and who acquiesced in his innovations.

Believers accept uncritically the assessment of the New Testament, largely written by Paul himself, that God’s man was a strict Jew. It is questionable, even on the basis of his story as told by Christians, and unusually there are other sources here. Ancient traditions were that Paul was a proselyte or at least his parents were, though they might have been gentile godfearers. Christians are trained to be too uncritical to consider that their holy books are anything other than true. From that comes a multitude of additional untruths.

Paul seemed to have no great trouble in abandoning the religion he held so dearly and strictly. He was such a devoted Jew that he easily became an apostate from Judaism that Jews were happy to stone, and instead he founded a rival religion to Judaism. Despite this, apologists hang on to the idea that this man was a “strict” Jew, a conservative, traditional Jew, not a liberal or Hellenized Jew. The evidence offered is that he was proud of his Jewishness, as if a liberal Jew should have been ashamed of it. J G Machen’s last century book, The Origin of Paul’s Religion, a sort of evangelical bible, it seems, says:

It is very difficult to conceive of such a man [as Paul] with his excessive zeal for the Mosaic law, with his intense hatred of Paganism, with his intense conciousness of the all-sufficiency of Jewish privileges—as being susceptible to the Pagan influences that surrounded his orthodox home.

Machen, in typical apologetic fashion, is so carried off by his own evangelical zeal that he has forgotten that Paul abrogated the Mosaic law, most notably the insistence on circumcision, to make it easier to recruit gentile males, who otherwise were chary of, for them, a dangerous and unnecessary operation. Paul evidently agreed it was unnecessary and dangerous, but no devout Jew could have done. It was not a question of personal choice. For a devout Jew, the law of Moses was God’s law! If Paul knew anything of what Jesus said, which is questionable too, he would have known that Jesus refused to concede a jot or tittle of the law, so he was defying, not only God, but the son of God. Paul openly preached his own gospel describing it as “my” gospel. Perhaps this is the mystery that Christians have not spotted.

If Paul was demonstrably not committed to the Jewish law then why should anyone believe the evangelical flannel that he was uncompromisingly against Paganism? Paul was evidently devoted to gentiles and is the self-appointed apostle to the gentiles. He devotes the rest of his career to the gentiles. For gentiles read Pagans. “Gentiles” meant non-Jews and the non-Jewish religions were Pagan ones. Paul was the apostle to the Pagans. Paul knew that the law of Moses was a no-no to most Pagan men and with no sign of compunction he ditched it to make converts. That is the level of zeal for the law that Paul had.

It is therefore impossible to accept the apologetic pleas that Paul was antagonistic to Paganism because of his devotion to Judaism. He proved he had no lasting devotion to Judaism, so why should anyone believe any antagonism he had to Paganism was any more strongly held? Ditching the Mosaic law is testimony to his opportunism. The use of the popular religions of the day to propel his own syntheric religion must have been a natural step. Even if Paul was not consciously opportunistic—a hard thing to accept—he had been influenced to the core of his being by the Pagan ambience of his world. Christians want to deify Paul as well as Jesus, making him supernaturally able to resist the effects on his psyche of the world he lived in from birth, without finishing up insane. Sometimes they weakly admit that “subconscious” influences might have come into play but only when Paul consciously overcame his presumed antagonism to Pagan practices.

Yet, if Paul showed a conscious antagonism to the worship of Pagan gods, then psychologically it could signal an unconscious attraction to them, causing guilt, suppression and a counter reaction. Latent homosexuality in our still homophobic society has a similar effect manifesting itself in an angry homophobia. Curiously some scholars have suggested that Paul was a suppressed or guilty homosexual.

Paul and Paganism

Otherwise excellent Christian scholars, rare creatures, can also be deceitful. Even Albert Schweitzer would not allow Paul to be influenced in his milieu except in vocabulary. So far as his conceptions were concerned, he lived on another planet. A D Nock clumsily moves the goalposts, another popular Christian trick, to save his hero from contamination with mystery terminology in a world suffused with it:

It is not clear that S Paul’s linguistic practice points to first hand knowledge of the mysteries, still less to the reading of theoretical literature about them.

Here Nock places the goal posts so close together it is impossible to score! In other words, Nock sets up a straw doll that does not even need knocking over! No one except a Christian is suggesting that Paul was a theologian of the mystery religions, or even practised any of them. What Nock puts forward is meant as an absurd distraction, and is actually irrelevant, as anyone except the sheep can see.

Paul lives in a Pagan world in which Pagan allusions were as commonplace as biblical ones are to us today. Completely irreligious hacks will use biblical references in their scribblings in our newspapers to influence their readers without a thought about it, and atheistic scientists think it is good for their pockets if not for science to refer incessantly to the “mind of God”, the “God particle” and other misleading religious “metaphors”.

Paul admits to being an opportunist and the Acts of the Apostles say he was brought up in a great metropolis which featured major mystery cults. Tarsus was the center of several eastern religions such as Cybele and Mithras, and the sensible view is that anyone brought up in such a culture and did not have a bucket permanently over his head, or was not locked, like Kasper Hauser, in a celler throughout their formative years, must have been influenced by the prevalent religious ideas of the city. To pretend he was blind and immunized against all this is not only deceit but self-deceit on the part of Christians. Yet that is what Christians claim.

Their argument is that Paul was a strict Jew of the dispersion who would have studiously avoided any Pagan influence. To imagine that people can avoid the subtle effects of the society they live in is imbicilic. Paul should then have grown up refusing to use Greek, but it is clear enough from his letters that he did use it. Furthermore, the Jews, whether of the diaspora or of Palestine, were already Hellenized long before the time of Paul. The Greek culture which Christians designate as Pagan had dominated the whole of the known world for 400 years by the time Paul was writing letters. Despite the mythology that constitutes most of the Jewish scriptures, they are themselves largely a product of Hellenistic times. In short, Judaism itself would not have been as it was but for Hellenization.

To say that Paul absorbed no more of Hellenistic Paganism than a modern priest knows of biblical criticism or an evangelical knows about theosophy, as Schweitzer foolishly did, is to compare apples and pears. Neither biblical criticism or theosophy have impacted upon popular culture. They are not heard being discussed in market places, cafes or bars. Fads, films and record releases are, because they are the popular culture of today. Then, it was magic, miracle and mysteries, all of which Christianity utilized to make itself popular. In those days culture mainly was religion, and it was the fact that mystery religions excluded rif-raff in favour of people of high moral standing, that Christianity was able to make converts among the low-life.

Paul did not therefore have to choose to study Mithraism or the cult of Attis—they were discussed around him.

Other apologists, although still trying to distance the first Christian missionary from his environment, feel they have to accept the central point made by Christian critics. Gunter Wagner, in Pauline Baptism, writes:

Paul knows only words that have been common property for a long time, and he uses them in a sense that does not correspond with the specific meanings accorded them in the mysteries.

Wagner knows all about the specific meanings of technical terms used in the mysteries although professor Nash told us we know little or nothing about the mysteries. They were mysteries. Again, we find that Christians have God’s own omniscience when it suits them, and the reason is that God has told them it is impossible for a Christian to lie. That is their belief, but to honest folk they are just liars, whether they are lying for God and with His consent or not.

Paul and Mystery

In case you have not yet been persuaded by this fatuous Christian reasoning—reason itself being used dishonestly by Christians who do not need it to simply believe—Christians have another tack—Paul does not use many words that the mystery religions do use. In case you had not noticed, this is another shifting of the goal posts. The Christians are not now denying that Paul used some of the words used in the Pagan religions. He did not use them all and that is what is important! The Christian rogues are really setting up a new straw doll—that the critics are claiming Paul was copying the mystery religions in toto. Why otherwise would anyone expect him to use all the technical terminology of the mysteries? The straw doll is easily knocked over. Paul never used the word “mystes” as a name for a new Christian initiate. QED.

It is hard to see who would be impressed by this idiocy, but clappies obviously are, proving both their intellectual level and the abject cynicism of their evangelical caste of learned professors and doctors.

What is more interesting is that Paul was singularly interested in the word “mysterion”, translated variously as “mystery” or “secret”. The mysteries were called that because the initiates had revealed to them certain “mysteries” during their initiation ceremonies. Since Paul claims precisely the same thing—that the Christian convert would have revealed to them certain mysteries—there is no difference in the approaches of the two types of religion. Thus Paul writes:

According to the revelation of the mystery, which was kept secret since the world began.

Romans 16:25

Paul uses the word “mysterion” like this no less than twenty times in his letters. Since this use exactly parallels the Mysteries, it is easy to see why the Christians have to find a simpler target and so pretend that the argument is that Paul is copying the whole of the Mysteries and not simply cutting and pasting the bits he likes. The next turn the Christians use is to say that Paul did not mean the word in any sense like the mysteries—a secret to be revealed to the mystes—but simply as a mystery of God! As J G Machen puts it, it was a mystery “formerly hidden in the counsels of God” but “now was to be made known to all”. The clear headed reader will be wondering how this differs from what the Mystery initiate expected to receive, accepting that the god whose counsels were to be revealed was a different one from Yehouah.

For the sake of the inattentive renatus, the evangelists make it clear that the two were quite different because the “mysterion” of Paul was the “Good News”. You will turn to your epistles in vain to find this expressed so clearly by Paul, and it is puzzling to understand why something that was supposed to be widely acclaimed as the Good News is, should so perversely be called a mystery by God’s original missionary, especially as it was a technical term used by the hated mystery religions, and could so easily be misunderstood. The skeptic can do nothing but wonder why God, and his servant, the Holy Ghost, were so thoughtless about what they put into the vacated heads of the apostles.

The truth is that the apologists make it up as they go along. Their explanations are nothing of the sort. They are attempts at rationalizing their sacred texts, and history in a suitably “Christian” way. And this one flounders as soon as anyone cares to check the “explanation” by turning to Paul’s epistles. The explanation that “mysterion” means Good News simply does not fit in several places. The Christian intellectual, is up to the challenge—“Ah! Well, yes, sometimes it just means a secret!”

The mystery is God’s Secret, that is, his decision to save men through his son Jesus Christ.

Or so Mircea Eliade describes it. It must be clear by now that the Good News is God’s secret that should be told to all of mankind. Christians are fond of their ability to reinterpret the technical terms of the ancient religions and here they have reinterpreted “a secret” to be something which everyone must know!

Paul, Flesh and Spirit

Paul seemed to distinguish the imperfect world of the flesh from the perfect world of the spirit. Plato believed in duality. Plato sees that the real world is imperfect and hypothesized a perfect one, but the only world he knows is the imperfect one. He saw a perfect world as the model of the imperfect material one. Ideas or forms were the content of the perfect world and existed there forever independent of the material world. The Good was a major idea and the Greatest Good equated with God. So it was that Christians and Platonists found common ground. The soul was the form of any individual person trapped in the imperfect body of the material world as if imprisoned—“soma sema”.

It is plain why Christians loved Platonism. Christianity also calls the world imperfect and invites its followers to secure immortality for themselves by believing a tissue of fancy. The similarity of Christianity to Platonism gave it a spurious respectability from an apparently independent source, though it was not really independent. Zoroastrianism is the joint source of both, and this common origin explains the similarities. But Christians insist that Christianity is not dualist.

Now Paul, the apostle, repeatedly distinguishes the flesh (sarx) from the spirit, but Christian commentators keen to keep Christianity a uniquely revealed religion insist that there is no hint in this of Plato’s dualism—the distinction between body and soul. They tell us, quite contrary to the plain words of Paul himself that “body” really means “sinful thoughts”, or some similar distortion of plain truth. Paul’s “flesh” is not Plato’s “body!” This is self-evident apparently to modern evangelists but it was not to Paul who meant solid bloody flesh when he said “sarx”, and not some circumlocution such as “sinful intent” or “abrogation of duty” which he could have said just as easily, had he wanted to. Just in case any modern Christians should wrongly imagine that “flesh” means “flesh” in Paul’s letters, the New International Version of the bible translates the perfectly clear Greek word “sarx” as “sinful nature” instead! Paul writes (Rom 7:18):

For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not.

The alteration of “flesh” to “sinful nature” reads perfectly well, but surely in clarifying “me” to mean “my flesh”, Paul is emphasizing the material basis of his problem, but the alteration deliberately makes it abstract. Paul considers the material world of the flesh to be itself evil because “no good thing” dwells in it, and no effort of will can overcome it. A sinful nature can surely be overcome by living properly.

A large part of the Christian desperation here is that they want to hang on to the original Christian idea that the reward of righteousness is resurrection of the body! Yet, the body is material and, if flesh is sinful, then a resurrected body must also be. What they have lost is the idea that that flesh is not forever sinful. It is the victory of God, the hosts of heaven and the righteous in the cosmic battle against Evil that allows flesh to be resurrected as incorruptible and therefore as immortal. This was the idea held by Jesus, if he was an Essene, as seems evident. Evangelists are too stupid to accept this, because they would have to concede a long held position—that Paul refutes Plato’s hypothesis that matter is wicked. Instead to uphold Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 15:12-58, they would have to adopt the Essenes’ position, and that would show that Christianity evolved and was not revealed.

They also have to maintain that Paul also did not believe that “spirit” equated with “Good” because there were evil spirits. They forget that the “spirit” that Paul associated with the body resurrected into eternity is necessarily “Good” because only the righteous are not destroyed having been judged, resurrected wicked people being destroyed in hell at the second death! So, Paul did not “equate” spirit with Good but nevertheless is consistent when he implies or assumes that spirit is Good in the context of surviving the eschaton. The intention of this discussion is not to apologize for Paul but to show that Christians themselves are utterly confused in their own ideas, and here they find Paul confusing because he is using Essenic arguments.

Evangelists find solace in Genesis 1:31, where God pronounces the Creation as Good—pure Zoroastrianism—proving that flesh cannot be wicked. While this is true, it does not dispose of the issue. The bible’s is a false recollection of the Zoroastrian Creation which was naturally Good, but which was corrupted by the Evil Spirit and therefore became subject to decay and death. The defeat of the Evil Spirit and his hosts in the Last Battle meant that the Good Creation would be restored to its pristine state of incorruption. The absence of the full and proper reasoning of Zoroastrianism from the poor Jewish copy makes much of it unfathomable, but the Zoroastrian original is quite understandable. Paul and the Essenes understood it. Gentile Christians did not. They have continued in ignorance ever since.

Though it looked the same, the body resurrected into the incorruptible world could not be of the same flesh as the body in the world corrupted by Evil, and to signify the difference, it seems that Paul somehow considered it a “spiritual” body—though it was still an earthly body, not floating about in heaven. The phenomenon that allowed it, Jesus and the Essenes thought, was that heaven and earth would unite, but, if the gospel stories of the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus mean anything, it is to confirm that the incorruptible flesh looked exactly like corruptible flesh but it no longer decayed. So, “spiritual” might be a suitable description of a body that was not subject to the laws of the material world that we are used to, but it was not what spiritualists call an “astral” body. Many modern Christians are simply spiritualists, but the churches have lost any interest in maintaining proper doctrine. The simple of the flocks can be spiritualists as long as they pay up.

It brings us to another node in the Christian litany of excuses that they call theology. The eschaton expected by Jesus and the Essenes, and believed by the followers of Jesus to have begun with the resurrection, never was completed—or rather never started at all! If Jesus was resurrected as the first fruits of the dead, then the kingdom of God had begun. Heaven had begun to join to earth and Jesus was the first of the righteous to rise in an incorruptible body. Jesus thought he would see the victory in the Garden of Gethsemane. His death necessitated a revision. The Last Battle began with the resurrection of Christ and would last forty years. Then he would return with the hosts of heaven and defeat Evil. His failure to return and defeat Evil necessitated a revision. There would be a millennium before the proper return. Two millennia have gone by, but evangelical Christians parrot that Christ will return “soon”. No further revisions are therefore necessary. The brain dead Christian believers will believe anything, consistent or not, and sing their parrot song till death.

The New Testament itself is witness to the doubts that Christians already had when its books were being written. Revelation and 2 Peter are both plainly intent on reassuring Christians 19 centuries ago that the failure of the Son to turn up is no reason not to continue believing! Should anyone have doubted it, 2 Peter 3 reminds them that the end of the world would be by fire, the belief that began in the Zoroastrian scheme.

Paul and the Hellenizers

Christian intellectual bandits try desperately to deny that the “logos” of John’s gospel is Greek. The idea was respectably Greek 500 years before the gospel was written, but its use in the gospel, a book written in the Greek language and in a Greek country is apparently not Greek! Admittedly, the idea of God’s attributes being personified and acting in their own right is not Greek but Persian, but the Greeks called the logos an attribute of God. In the Persian religion, the seven Amesha Spentas of Ahuramazda were attributes that took on independence as “yazatas”, the original angels. The idea of the Amesha Spentas appeared in Judaism as the seven archangels of Yehouah, but the logos was not one of them. Some have argued that “the word of God” could be considered a personified attribute of God, but it never clearly appears as such until it appears in a Greek gospel. Philo, who was a Hellenizing Jew of Alexandria, calls the logos, the “First Born Son”, the Mediator and the “Image of God”. Similar descriptions appear in the epistle to the Hebrews suggesting that the author had a similar background as Philo.

Professor Nash still tries to persuade his clappies that Paul was more influenced by Jerusalem than Tarsus, as if the relative degree of the respective influences, given that both were there, can be considered to have made an assessible difference. W C van Unnik is the man roped in to bear witness to the importance of Jerusalem. The Godly omniscience that all Christians, particularly of an evangelical bent, think they have says that, though Paul was born in Tarsus, he was brought up in Jerusalem and educated there. This is the omniscience that allows Christians to write complete fiction while imagining it to be somehow true—the sacred helper, the Holy Ghost planting it in their heads. The boyhood of Paul matching the boyhood of Jesus. Yet all that van Unnik seems to say is that the “possibility” that Paul was educated in Jerusalem “weakens” the hypothesis that Paul was conditioned by the city of his birth. The cow jumps another hedge. Ignatius Loyala would not have cared where Paul went as long as he had him in Tarsus until the age of seven. The Jesuit theory is that the first seven years form the mind of the adult.

Paul was not an original follower of Jesus. He spent time oppressing them, and then he did experience a sudden change in behaviour—his so called road-to-Damascus experience. Thereafter, he hardly ever met the original apostles appointed by Jesus who mostly have no role in the transmission of the new religion. The few he met, he met briefly and, as his own epistles show, he disagreed with them strongly, a disagreement played down in Acts. He chose to be the apostle to the gentiles, and began his career in the Greek metropolis, like Tarsus, of Antioch, away from the base of the Jerusalem Church.

Many Hellenized Jews lived in Antioch who were ready to believe that a Jewish messiah had arrived and had fulfilled the same function as the popular Pagan saviour gods of the mystery religions. Judaism had long been popular among gentiles but had failed to gain many proselytes because of the requirement of circumcision. Paul realized that the combination of a dying and rising messiah, a son of God, who had recently visited earth, and a relaxed form of Judaism, could be a winner among Hellenized Jews and Pagans, and so it proved. The key point about Paul’s psychology is that he overcame the guilt of his youth, casting off Judaism and any dislike he had of Paganism to forge a new synthesis of the two, acceptable to the many Hellenized Jews of particularly the eastern empire and also the godfearing Pagans. He convinced himself, if he needed to, that the religion was still Jewish even without a law of Moses, having the same High God and a new Jewish saviour. His attraction to religions like that of Attis were fulfilled by the invention (if it was his) of Christianity.

Metzger, of course, knows all this, but as a shepherd, a member of the ruling caste of Christianity, he considers it his duty to educate the under-caste of sheep in ignorance. If Metzger were a scholar and not an apologist, he would have open-endedly considered all of the influences that had a bearing on the remarkable synthesis that Paul achieved whether as its inventor or as its chief publicist. He does not do it because Christian apologists are diametrically opposed to discovering the truth about the foundation of Christianity. Objective scholarship is too dangerous and might uncover something different from their long held beliefs. Other scholars, more honest ones, have been here before and have had to leave the church, or have been obliged to leave it, through publicizing their conclusions. Most apologists have neither the courage nor the honesty to do it.

A final distraction put by Metzger is that the mysteries were influenced by Christianity. The goalposts have inevitably slipped again because professor Nash had been careful to restrict his terms of reference to the origins of Christianity and the New Testament in the first and early second centuries, but he cites Metzger with an example of the dependence of the mysteries on Christianity from the fourth century. Allow us to go that far forward and the Christian case for ritual and doctrinal purity is found to be full of holes. That is why Nash imposed his initial restrictions. In fact, Metzger is commendably cautious in saying that “in certain cases” it was “probable” that syncretism out of Christianity into the mysteries occurred, but we have already noted the syndrome of the cow. Christians do not notice that Metzger is not saying anything with any sureness.

The example they cite is the promise of immortality of the late Taurobolium in the fourth century. Considering that the apologists have argued until they are blue in the face that Christianity was not influenced by anything other than some idealized concept of Judaism, its accepted parent, they willingly admit an opposite syncretism. The truth is that they do not know that the Taurobolium and the dying and rising god associated with it did not already confer immortality on to those who undertook it, because that is what the mystery religions did, among other things.

Christians throughout history did the same as the Taliban did when they destroyed the Buddhist images that they disapproved of. Christians have destroyed and destroyed, leaving us with a thousand year long dark age when learning died and ignorance and filth became virtues. The whole of Pagan culture was erazed from the face of the earth except for a few broken pillars and a few textbooks to allow monks to learn Latin. The lack of evidence of Pagan practices that critics of Christianity can bring to bear is the result of Christian hooliganism and doctrinaire vandalism. This is a motto that everyone should remember:

The Vandals were Christians, and the Christians are Vandals.

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