Christianity
The Copy Cat Saviour 2
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, November 23, 1998
A Spectrum of Saviours
The Reverend Professor Dr Bent Scholar with his Crucifixers, under the guise of the Christian Think Tank has been attempting to answer the criticism that Jesus owes much of his legend to that of the earlier dying and rising saviours. Some of his dishonest arguments have been considered in Part 1.
Bent Scholar now finds other objections. Jesus must either be compared with all the manifestations of his rival simultaneously or with one at a time. We must also focus on the critical and radical similarities. Finally we have to be careful when there is little or no textual material but only images. What is it all about? It seems that having conceded the general point, Bent Scholar is rolling up his sleeves to argue every particular one. The difficulty over Christian vandalism of Pagan buildings and records has been noted. Bent Scholar gleefully cites one of his sources to show what problems it poses to Christian critics. These are even pleased with themselves that they were vandals!
Bent Scholar cites in this context the The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors by Kersey Graves, an old but noble account of just what Bent Scholar has been accepting above. Besides its age for a book still quoted, it is largely based on iconographic studies, unsurprising since the Christians destroyed Pagan archives. Graves identifies 16 of these crucified saviours but modern scholarship disagrees. Bent Scholar quotes the “brilliant and thorough” German scholar Martin Hengel but what we get, as usual from such people, is special pleading for the Christian case. Hengel readily admits that the Hellenistic world was familiar with the death and apotheosis of some demigods, but he proves his partial stance by calling them “predominantly barbarian.” It is pure prejudice. Since barbarian means uncivilised and by our standards everyone was uncivilised then including Christians, it is intended purely to prejudice.
Hengel gives as examples, Attis and Adonis, killed by a wild boar—Osiris, torn to pieces by Typhon-Seth—Dionysus-Zagreus torn to pieces by the Titans—Heracles burnt himself to death on Mount Oeta. Then again Hengel begins his special pleading. All this took place in the distant past and was narrated in “questionable” myths. Compared with these, Hengel says, it would have been madness to worship the one pre-existent Son of the one true God, the mediator at creation and the redeemer of the world, who had appeared in very recent times in out-of-the-way Galilee as a member of the obscure people of the Jews, and even worse, had died the death of a common criminal on the cross.
It is hard to accept this form of argument as serious. He seems to consider himself and his ilk so immensely superior to the ancients that it is laughable. The Christians leave us with not much evidence about the mystery religions, but that in itself is evidence. Why were they so keen to destroy everything about them if they thought they were so stupid and primitive—or barabrian and primeval as Hengel prefers to call them. The mystery religions were modern religions when Christianity arose. Hengel says that only mad people would have worshipped the Christian god, nailed up on a cross as a common insurgent. Plainly he is right. Is it meant to be a joke or is he just following Justin Martyr who said the same. It would have been like the Americans being invited to worship Che Guevara. This self-evidently superior religion took another 300 years after its founder’s death on the cross to become the state religion. How then was it self-evidently superior to the mystery religions? By this time it is certain that the religions of the Roman Empire were perfectly proper. The Orphics were superior in everything to the Christians. They actually were good! Drunken Bacchanalian parties were social affairs in drinking clubs only incidentally connected with Dionysus as the god of wine. Men, particularly soldiers and merchants, worshipped Mithras because his mysteries demanded honour and honesty.
Remember, Bishop Bent Scholar has told us that Herr Hengel is “thorough and brilliant.” He is thorough and brilliant to a Christian, but to an impartial observer he is no scholar and, if he is joking, he had better stick to theology. Anyway, Bent Scholar gets to the point, at last. It is the crucifixion. No other god died on the cross. That is where Kersey Graves got it wrong. Well wrong or not about crucifixion, per se, there is a long tradition of hanging men as sacrifices on a tree and the cross is a stylised tree, as Bent Scholar will find out if he reads any of the books on mythology he is fond of quoting.
Bent Scholar now sets himself the task of addressing each of the types of gods, identified with Jesus in turn. He lists them as dying and rising gods, the gods of the mystery religions, avatars of the Hindu religion, and last a miscellaneous group to clean the remainder into.
Dying and Rising Gods
First there are the “Dying and Rising Gods” (Adonis, Baal and Hadad, Marduk, Osiris, Tammuz or Dumuzi, Melquart, Eshmun), popularized in James G Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Bent Scholar tells us that there is a major weakness in the copy cat hypothesis applied to these—their citations are out of date! Apparently skeptics never cite scholarly works of the past twenty years. Critics are scolded for using secondary sources (gasp!), for quoting seminal works which are allegedly out of date (gasp!) or for quoting trivial works which are not well founded (gasp!). One could take all of this seriously in terms of scholarship but not in terms of Christian hypocrisy. The works which they revere and quote most often of all are 2000 years old, secondary and not well founded, but to criticise them, Christians demand that you have the methodology of Whitehead and Russell.
It is all part of the Christian slewing of the playing field to favour themselves. You will recall that Bent Scholar has conceded the central points about these ancient religions already, contenting himself with the fact that the crucifixion might be unique. But he has to seem as though he has won the argument even though it has been conceded so he quibbles about the sources of some of the critics being out of date. That makes them look like real dumbos compared with Bent Scholar himself who has compiled an immense list of his up-to-date sources. It serves to show one thing. That Christianity is extremely wealthy and a prime reason why it survives in the world is that it is a comfortable sinecure for clever and not too scrupulous people. The true purpose of religion has always been two-fold—first to control the people; second to provide a comfortable living for priests. Today the word priest is largely unfashionable, so let us refine it to “professional Christians.”
Bent Scholar claims that the reason the poor skeptics do not quote modern scholars is because the latter have abandoned the position! That would not be surprising since much such scholarship is financed by Christian organisations, and though there are honest scholars among them they have to build up a secure reputation to swim against the Christian tide and hang on to their tenures. Most don’t bother.
Then again when something is well established, work on it stops. What is the point of repeating old work? If it has been satisfactorily established that Christianity owes much to the Pagan saviour gods then who is going to publish work covering the same ground. New discoveries might change scholarly opinion but, if a new judgement is merely based on the extant material, it would have to be compelling to displace the old one. A new interpretation is not better than an old one because it is newer, and old work is not necessarily wrong.
How many scientists actually cite Newton? An observer might consider the lack of citations of Newton proof that he was wrong and his views discarded. Yet classical mechanics still are Newtonian. Newton was not wrong, and anyone who wanted to make an assertion about classical mechanics could justifiably quote Newton. No one bothers because no one disputes that classical mechanics validly describe the normal world.
Things are different in the field of religious history. A childish superstition dominates our world and its professors spend much of their time trying to overlay critical work with layers of obfuscation. The few skeptics who can be bothered to combat the Christian paradigm are quite justified in pointing to old work which is not necessarily wrong but has been sidelined by Christians who did not like it, have rubbished it with little foundation and then claimed it is old-hat.
Bent Scholar gives a long quotation by a J Smith from the religious encyclopaedia edited by Mirca Eliade to prove that the dying and rising gods did not die and rise but either just died and stayed dead or disappeared for a while and returned. Dead gods are discussed below. What of gods who disappear? Where do they disappear to?
Smith is indulging in another ploy much loved by Christians to keep their Christian rituals and myths unique—redefining terms. The dying gods of the Near East did not die they merely disappeared! They come to this conclusion because the seasonal variation is caused by the presence or absence of the god. In winter or the dry season, vegetation dies so the people thought the god of vegetation must have gone away. Similarly the Children of Israel thought their god had gone away from them in times of tribulation. Perhaps the god had gone away, but the myths pictured the god as having gone away into the underworld—he had died!
Now before we proceed let us give an interpretation of the myth of Jesus from the events of the gospels. He was tried as a seditionist and crucified to death as a punishment. Any rationalist would say that, if he really died, well then he was dead for good and any other tale was fancy. If he did not die, as some claim, including hundreds of millions of believers in the Moslem religion, it seems, then he merely disappeared for awhile and then returned. Evidence about any god, including Jesus Christ, is subject to interpretation. I can interpret the story of Jesus, from the fairly detailed gospel accounts into one or other of Smith’s categories by ignoring what I, quite reasonably, take to be false.
Smith tells us the idea of dying and rising gods is a misnomer based on “imaginative reconstructions of ambiguous texts.” In these reconstructions they were considered young male figures of fertility arising in agrarian societies. Their lives were often associated with virgin goddesses. In some areas, they were related to the institution of sacred kingship, often expressed through rituals of sacred marriage. There were dramatic re-enactments of their life, death, and putative resurrection, often accompanied by a ritual identification of either the society or given individuals with their fate.
Sir James Frazer who established much of this had a historical and a naturist theory for the rising and dying gods which interlinked. The historical theory was that a sacred king was ritually murdered. The naturist theory was that the god represented the cycle of the seasons. Smith tells us there is only limited and ambiguous evidence for the practice of killing kings and, where it exists, it cannot be shown that it has led to the idea of a dying god. The naturist theory is rejected outright because modern scholarship has rejected “for good reasons” gods as projections of natural phenomena.
Bent Scholar concludes that anyone still using this model in trying to understand ancient Near East sacral kingship and mystery religions is unaware that the comparative data has moved out from under them!
Now considering that Bent Scholar has berated critics of Christianity for poor scholarship or for not citing sources, you will note that the source he just quoted itself makes very broad generalisations without giving a single reference other than the subject of his attack, Sir James Frazer who published the Golden Bough in 12 exhaustively researched volumes between 1890 and 1915. Bent Scholar invites you to reject this because the anonymous J Smith in some obscure article tells us Frazer was a dolt. Until anyone knows more about J Smith and his opinions, they would be better off sticking with Frazer.
Anyway, since we have no idea who J Smith is and only have his broad generalisations to go on, our answer to Bent Scholar has to be broad and generalised.
It seems Frazer was a fool because he reconstructed imaginatively ambiguous texts. The immediate question is, if these texts are indeed ambiguous, why are modern—or should we just say, Christian—reconstructions any the less imaginative? Bent Scholar is telling us that the imaginative reconstruction he prefers to cite, Christian imaginative reconstructions, doubtless, are better than the earlier ones. Then, because a clear link has not been shown, the evidence being slight, Bent Scholar likes to suggest there is therefore no such link.
Whenever evidence is only slight, we have to use our intellect and imagination. We know that in some places there was a tradition of murdering a sacred king. There is a lot of circumstantial evidence, which Frazer catalogues at length, that the practice was probably widespread, there is evidence, though less than there might have been because of Christian fear of it, that other gods died annually and were resurrected. How is it that Frazer’s views are so cavalierly rubbished?
The only evidence allowed to survive the last 1700 years is Christian evidence other than traces the Christian censors overlooked. We find that the only dying and rising god who is at all well written about is Jesus Christ. So indisputable proof that these earlier agrarian gods did essentially the same things does not exist, but there are volumes of circumstantial evidence that they did. Nevertheless the Christian insists on his proof positive.
It is sheer nonsense as I have repeatedly noted. It arises because the Christian has to believe that the revelation of his religion occurred once only. Everything we see in human culture develops by parents teaching their children and one generation teaching the next. That means that society, culture and religion all evolve. But in this particular case, religion did not evolve—it was revealed. Despite that, it was revealed in a way that made use of terms and concepts that God had pre-programmed us with and these were used in other pre-Christian religions, albeit wrongly. Yet no humans used the pre-programmed thought of a dying and reborn god to arrive at a god who annually died and was resurrected in imitation of the seasonal cycles. Frankly, the argument could only be put by a Christian—it is so unlikely.
Anyway it is sufficient for Bent Scholar to claim victory, gloating that he should be able to end the matter since most of the alleged pre-Christian Christs are the dying-and-rising deities which never existed. This alone, he says, is sufficient to destroy the copy cat hypothesis totally. Well, if it were true his conclusion would be wrong by his own admission because he allowed the little word “most” into his premise. Anyway, feeling on a roll he is eager to continue, still quoting from the anonymous Mr J Smith who looks at the individual dying and rising gods.
Here we immediately find an odd fact apparently discovered by the anonymous Smith—the late texts of the legends of these gods, in which resurrection, he claims, was freshly introduced where it never was before, were often written by Christians. He writes:
This pattern will recur for many of the figures considered—an indigenous mythology and ritual focusing on the deity’s death and rituals of lamentation, followed by a later Christian report adding the element nowhere found in the earlier native sources, that the god was resurrected.
And,
The majority of evidence for Near Eastern dying and rising deities occurs in Greek and Latin texts of late antiquity, usually post-Christian in date.
Even Bent Scholar has to note that this is curious and ironic since it has created the very problem he is addressing. So what is Smith’s or the Christian explanation of this odd fact which seems to go against everything the Christian has ever stood for? We get no suggestion except that it is the pre-programmed Christians reading their programming backwards into pre-Christian religions! Let us therefore make up a more reasonable one.
In surviving pre-Christian accounts the death of the god only had been noted because everyone understood that the rise followed the death as part of the same cycle. The plain reason why this must be so is that the god cannot die again without meantime being revived, reborn or resurrected. And, if the festival really commemorated the final death of the god, what did it achieve for the worshippers? A dead god cannot be of use to anyone. To be worth worshipping the god has to be alive.
The Christians had their own peculiar interest in the resurrection aspect of the dying and rising god. The central fact of Christianity from its inception was the resurrection. When Christians observed the festivals, they were particularly struck that other gods were also, in some sense, resurrected and specifically commented on it. Note also that in the short quotation, Smith refers to the “majority of the evidence” being post-Christian. He admits that there is evidence for them that is pre-Christian. How then can he, or Bent Scholar, conclude that there is no such evidence.
Smith says there is no evidence of Adonis rising in either variant of his myth. Only late texts, largely influenced by or written by Christians, claim that there is a subsequent day of celebration for Adonis having been raised from the dead. What evidence does he want—the god to appear direct to him like Jesus appearing to Paul?
The myth tells us that the judgement on the care of the infant Adonis was that he had to spend part of the year with Venus and part of the year with Persephone. Part of the year was in the over regions and part of it was in the nether regions. Adonis was originally a vegetation god and the myth explained the variation between the seasons. Now a descent into the nether regions is death. Ascent into the higher regions is birth. What more does Smith want?
His mention of a “day of celebration” suggests that his complaint is that pre-Christian reports of the festival of Adonis tell us only of the lamentation at the god’s death. From this he concludes that they did not celebrate his rise. Even though he must have risen in order to die again the following year, it was not celebrated. These worshippers of Adonis did not celebrate the winter solstice, universally celebrated as the birthday of the gods?
Moving on, Smith tells us the myth of Baal, Hadad or Adad is not an annual cycle of death and rebirth nor one of death and resurrection but simply a disappearing-reappearing story, although he concedes that Aliyan Baal, or Triumphant Baal, might have been a dying and rising god. At least here Smith seems to agree that the annual cycle of death and rebirth equates with the concept of death and resurrection, but he denies that Baal had anything to do with it in any form, except perhaps one. Bent Scholar adds that Ugaritic scholars Cyrus Gordon and Godfrey Driver also reject Baal as a dying and rising god, and, since, according to Bent Scholar, it is one of the best examples is not a good sign for the “Copy Cat crowd.” Bent Scholar thinks he has neatly won this one because he seems to think that gods who die and rise do not, in any sense, disappear then reappear!
Smith claims the mythology of Attis is irrelevant to the quesion of dying and rising gods because, although the god dies, in no tradition does he return to life. He concludes that neither myth nor ritual warrants classifying Attis as a dying and rising deity. Strange one this because there is no doubt that Attis dies and is commemorated annually on the instruction of the Great Mother, Cybele, who, in one variant of the myth resurrected him so that they ruled conjointly. Smith invites us to believe that the god died and died finally so that any festival was purely a memorial, which has the objection mentioned above—what value has a dead god to his worshippers. The explanation would have to be that Cybele was still alive and the festival was of her worshippers joining in her grief at the annual commemoration of her bereavement, as she had instructed.
That would be the complete story except that the Emperor Claudius, who specified that the festival of Attis should be 15 to 27 March each year also decreed that Attis should be worshipped as the equal of Cybele. The implication is that Attis was considered alive not dead. Claudius died in 54 AD while Paul was still writing letters and before Christianity had any influence. Yet the festival of Attis was at Easter and descriptions of it tell us that 25 March, called Hilaria, indicating that the festival was joyous, was when the god arose. Remember this calendar was laid down by Claudius before Christianity was a force yet the date chosen eventually by the church for the crucifixion was 25 March.
The myth of Osiris is that he was murdered and his body dismembered and scattered. The pieces of his body were recovered and rejoined, and the god was rejuvenated. So he died and was resurrected. Got that. Our Christians immediately do one of their favourite tricks to help them win all arguments. He did not return to his former mode of existence but rather journeyed to the underworld, where he became the powerful lord of the dead. Bent Scholar, or is it J Smith, concludes that in no sense can Osiris be said to have risen in the sense required by the dying and rising pattern
Now here is a bit of non sequitur for you. The Reverend Bent Scholar has sworn that there is no such thing as a dying and resurrected god. How then can there be a pattern of dying and resurrected gods? What he means is that this particular example differs from others. But then others differ from yet others—and they all differ from Christianity. The pattern present in the dying and rising gods is that they die and rise.
Can we say that Osiris was arisen if he finished the god of the underworld? Well, most dying and rising gods seem to rise further still to heaven but instead this one was given a supernatural throne over the dead because he had experienced it. Bent Scholar and his friends have been complaining that other gods were not resurrected. When they find one who even they cannot deny was resurrected, even in distant antiquity, they change their tune to—he wasn’t the same afterwards. Strange one, that. In my understanding of the myth of Jesus he also was not the same after his resurrection. Despite the eternal Word many Christians thought—and my guess is that some still do—that Jesus only became a god at his crucifixion. That is why the cross is so important. In any event a man who ascends to sit on God’s right hand in heaven after his putative resurrection is hardly the same as he was before. Christians talk total baloney.
Moving on to Tammuz, Bent Scholar, quoting J Smith again, tells us:
It is a relentlessly funereal cult. There is no evidence for any cultic celebration of a rebirth of Tammuz apart from late Christian texts where he is identified with Adonis.
It is a relentlessly funereal cult until Christians notice that there is a rebirth involved. Bent Scholar, a Christian, tells us that these Christian observers were utterly mistaken, merely projecting their own beliefs on to these savages. In brief, he is saying that you cannot believe what they say. Bent Scholar and I come to an unexpected agreement. Christians are Cretans! The implication here is that we cannot even believe that Tammuz and Adonis are the same god transferred from Asia to Europe. The reason why they want to claim this after all these centuries, is that it makes it harder to show that each god is a dying and rising god. If we can accept that Tammuz is Adonis and the Attis is also Tammuz then what is true of one variety of this vegatation god is more likely to be true of another. By implying that the Christian observers who noted the connexion were wrong, they ease their own task of isolating Jesus from others like him. It is dishonest but no more than we should expect of Cretans.
Smith summaries that the category of dying and rising deities is dubious. It has been based largely on Christian interest and tenuous evidence. The evidence is tenuous because Christians have destroyed it and no one destroys what is favourable to their own viewpoint. And, it is quite laughable that the religion which above all others was jealous to preserve its unique identity in the first centuries of this era should, according to its modern adherents, attribute the unique characteristic of its own god to the Pagan gods they saw around them. That they should get themselves into this absurd pickle shows how concerned Christians are about the issue.
It has always been hard for me to understand why these fervid believers should think that Jesus, if he is God, should need a load of intellectual crooks and physical vandals to defend him. If they believe in an absolute God then he knows the truth even if his lunatic supporters destroyed everything on earth. And, if God is the God of truth, then they are condemned by their own god for being thoroughly dishonest in fiddling the truth and the evidence. They cannot seem to see that it denotes a lack of faith. If God exists he will have noticed.
The Mystery Religions
Turning to the Mystery Religions of Mithras, Dionysos, and Isis and Osiris, Bent Scholar begins by trying to tilt the pin board machine before the first flip. He warns us that any traces of dying and rising gods we find in these religions must be post Christian because J Smith says so!
Bishop Bent Scholar turns to God’s truth, as ever, when he claims that the mystery religions were small, local cults up until 100 AD, apparently trying to imply that they were unimportant until after Christianity had become important. If The Holy Trinity Church down the road is a small local cult then so were the mystery religions. Of course they were local. Most religions were in the sense that there was not the massive apparatus of the Christian churches which was developed precisely to copy the imperial secular organisation. Nevertheless their worship was widespread before 100 AD. Christianity, in any case had itself not been noticed in the Empire until after 100 AD to judge by citations of the classic authors.
Mithraism was the last mystery cult besides Christianity to percolate into the Empire, being introduced during the first century BC. The Isis cult was a Roman cult in about 100 BC and Dionysos had preceded her in 186 BC. So by the time Paul began spreading his own distortion of whatever Jesus originally taught, these three religions had been worshipped in Rome for anything from a hundred to over two hundred years. Is that local until 100 AD?
Why should Bent Scholar want to make such a mistaken statement? He soon explains his concern. It is, “Who borrowed from whom?”
If the New Testament was completed before the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD and the mystery religions in the Roman Empire only started flourishing after 100 AD and were almost certainly not present in Jerusalem before its fall, then any alleged dependence of the gospels on the mysteries is a bit tenuous.
The reader will have noticed how difficult it is discussing with Christians like Bent Scholar. The ground is not solid but loose sand with a holy spring beneath. Every time you try to build a point the ground shifts. Bent Scholar is now concerned about what happened before the fall of Jerusalem only. He knows that in the fourth century Christianity was unashamedly syncretistic and took many practices from the other religions of the empire, but has pretended that he can show otherwise. Then suddenly he shifts the ground. Many readers would not notice. The argument has suddenly become much narrower and therefore more difficult for the opponent. Having made this shady change, Bent Scholar hopes to make a coup.
The point he makes in any case is invalid as you can see. Bent Scholar realises it and puts in a weak apology saying that the case of Mithras is best served by this argument but that it applies to a lesser extent to the Hellenistic version of Isis/Osiris and Dionysos too. If Mithraism was worshipped in Rome for a hundred years before Jesus, the inhabitants of Palestine who lived much nearer to Persia the original centre of Mithraism would have known more about it. The Jews had supposedly been captive in Babylon and had been released by the Persian king, Cyrus. In fact, they were moved into Yehud intentionally to colonize the place, and turn the local religion Zoroastrian. Either way, they would have known more about Persian religion than anyone other than Persians.
Similar arguments apply to the cults of Osiris and Dionysos. Palestine and Egypt have always been in close contact as neighbouring countries and only a few centuries before, Palestine was ruled from Egypt under the Ptolemies. But equally the culture of these kingdoms was Greek. Dionysos was a major god of the Greeks. Before the Maccabees, 200 years before, Judaea had been ruled by the Syrian Greeks, the Seleucids. The only point I am making is that Bent Scholar talks nonsense to pretend that the Palestinian Jews could have known little or nothing about these important cults.
Nevertheless Bent Scholar wheels out his wheelbarrow of quotable quotes intended to paint sceptical scholars as dunderheads, suggesting now that they are “jumping to conclusions” about Christianity’s dependence on ancient religions. What he means is that any such conclusion must be ill-founded because Christians think otherwise. Yet another quotation comes from Bruce Metzer, a teacher in a theological seminary, who seems an unlikely candidate to be seeking reasons why his unique religion is not.
It must not be critically assumed that the Mysteries always influenced Christianity, for it is not only possible but probable that in certain cases, the influence moved in the opposite direction.
Then since this quotation actually came from another source, he quotes him too. All this quoting incidentally is a Christian trait. They are unable to decide anything for themselves because they have been brought up to accept the authority of the bible which they quote endlessly as though it had meaning. The habit stretches into other areas of life as a sort of pseudo intelligence. Anyway the conclusion is that it should not be surprising that leaders of cults that were being successfully challenged by Christianity should do something to counter the challenge. What better way to do this than by offering a Pagan substitute? Pagan attempts to counter the growing influence of Christianity by imitating it are clearly apparent in measures instituted by Julian the Apostate, who was the Roman emperor form 361 to 363 AD.
In case you didn’t notice, Bent Scholar has taken the argument back to the fourth century when syncretism was the rule and used it as if he were still defending the New Testament as he was a moment ago. What he is saying boils down to this—Christians could not have borrowed from the mystery religions because they were unimportant until 100 AD but mystery religions borrowed from Christianity because it was important in 361 AD. Can you make sense of this? At best you have to conclude that our Reverend Wisdom, Dr Bent Scholar, is doing what he has told us we cannot do because it is poor scholarship. So much for Christian scholarship .
Meanwhile Bent Scholar has surprised us with the information that we have almost no contemporary data about the Hellenistic mystery cults and are almost totally dependent on third century sources. The reason has been given above. Christianity was accepted as the state religion in the fourth century. From then on everything Pagan was destroyed. Nearly all of what we now know about Paganism comes from Christian polemicists whose works were preserved, because they were Christian, though they contained quotations and synopses of the books they were criticising.
So Bent Scholar and his Christians have us over a barrel again. They destroyed the evidence except for the late material they allowed us to read because they were already arguing against it, then say, that we cannot assume this material applied earlier. Not only that but they tell us it is “exceptionally bad scholarship” because we have “uncritically” reasoned back. What they are doing is not being exceptionally fine examples of scholarship, but trying to intimidate the reader into disbelieving anyone other than a Christian because they are untrustworthy as bad scholars. Needless to say only Christians are untrustworthy, first because they have a strange idea that a god needs a mortal to defend him, and second because they think the god will reward them for any ploy, plot or perjury that they commit in his defence. The 2000 years of history of this “loving” religion proves what I say.
Bent Scholar now takes us into nitty-gritty details of six differences between the death and resurrection of Jesus and the Pagan myths of a dying and rising saviour-god.
- Only Jesus died for mankind.
Response: the saviour gods all died for mankind because their origin was as vegetation gods whose purpose was the rebirth of the crops though their sacrifice.
- Only Jesus died for sin and the form of their deaths was quite different (hunting accident, self-emasculation).
Response: The evolution of agrarian gods into city gods requires the focus to be changed from renewing the life of crops to renewing the life of people. The second part illustrates Christian blindness through their conditioning. How does the criminal death of crucifixion relate any more to the relief of sin than does self-emasculation? Both gods commit suicide.
- Jesus died once and for all. In contrast, the mystery gods were vegetation deities whose repeated deaths and resuscitations depict the annual cycle of nature.
Response: This doctrinal difference is the only new feature of Christianity but, in practical terms it makes no difference since the once and for all death is commemorated each year just as if it were an annual event.
- Jesus’ death was an actual event in history. The mystery gods are not.
Response: Who’s scholarship is poor again? How does Bent Scholar know whether Osiris or Dionysos was real or not? The fact that their lives were mythologised does not mean they were not historical. Note that besides this gross assumption, no Christian considers that the same might have happened to Jesus. In my view that is exactly what happened. Read The Hidden Jesus.
- Unlike the mystery gods, Jesus died voluntarily.
Response: Is the author of this item the man who wrote the second item above? Or has he forgotten already? Death by self emasculation must be voluntary. On the other hand, what is voluntary about being caught for a serious crime and punished?
- Jesus’ death was not a defeat but a triumph.
Response: This is absolute uncritical baloney. All of the dying and rising gods were triumphing over death. Do these so-called Christian scholars really think that the poor dicks who worshipped the gods of the mystery religions found nothing uplifting in them? Frankly this is incredible.
Bent Scholar concludes this section by claiming that though there might be similarities, dependence can be proved only with difficulty. Mainly, one might add, because of Christian vandals! Well, proof is generally desirable but really it does not matter whether the matter is proved or not. If it were proved beyond any doubt, the Christian would not believe it. Given a choice of accepting proof that Christianity is false or continuing to believe in it, Christians will continue to believe. Those of us who do not need supernatural fathers and brothers will look at the evidence as it is and, despite its gaps, see a continuity from antiquity to Christianity. Call it “dependence” if you like. I prefer to call it evolution. But then Christians cannot bear evolution either because it digs at another of their dogmas, the once and for all act of creation. Ho hum.
Anyway, Bent Scholar invites us to examine the individual mystery religions. Beginning with the cult of Isis and Osiris (or Serapis) Bent Scholar tells us it was not the same religion as the Egyptian worship of Osiris. He kindly explains what we have said above that the Greeks and Romans had a policy of syncretism to meld together their divergent empires. The cult of Isis and Serapis was one such religion established by Ptolemy I, the Greek successor to Alexander the Great as ruler of Egypt from 305 to 285 BC.
Serapis was a Most High god considered as an amalgam of several gods with desirable attributes or specific characteristics recognisable by divergent nations in the Ptolemaic empire. Osiris the god of the underworld and Apis the god of the higher regions were joined into a god of all. In effect he was a Jehovah as the huge bust of him kept by the Roman church in the Vatican City doubtless shows. Bent Scholar assures us with Christian bravado that Serapis (Asarhapi or Osiris-Apis) was not a dying god even though he has already agreed that Osiris—one of his aspects—was a dying and resurrected god, the only one, in fact, Bent Scholar was willing to accept. Now here’s a mystery. A Most High god is also a dying and resurrected god. Impossible! Yet that is what the Christians believe.
Neither Christians nor I know enough about the Serapis cult to say whether it had this strange characteristic, but the history of it cannot exclude the possibility. Furthermore, one thing is certain about the old Apis and that is he was worshipped as a sacred bull, and bulls usually represent the sun god on earth who was killed to fertilise the earth and initiate a new vegetative cycle. Serapis therefore had some of the features of Mithras, a sun god, who killed himself in the form of a bull. Sacred suicide is a feature of some of the dying and rising gods.
Bent Scholar has nothing to say about Dionysos except that he was the god of wine, and that in earlier times it was an excuse for revelry and the similarities with Jesus are few and insubstantial. This is a bit coy because there are quite a few similarities between Jesus and Dionysos, related to Jesus describing himself as the True Vine and initiating, so the Christians say, a wine ceremony. Bawdy revelry is not thought of as a Christian characteristic today, but that has not always been true as the New Testament itself reveals. Drunken excesses were the very reason why Paul commanded the first Christians to treat the love feast as a solemn occasion and not a booze up. He tells them the story about how the Eucharist began. The rest is history. In other words the Eucharist is Paul’s response to Christians behaving just like worshippers of Dionysos, and that doubtless arose because Jesus was seen to have features in common with Dionysos.
Bent Scholar totally ignores Orphism, the development of Dionysos worship and a most moral religion.
Bent Scholar moves on to Mithraism and begins by claiming that scholars have established that the Roman god Mithras had nothing at all to do with the Persian god Mithras—except the name. Most people would concede that the Roman religion, having a lot of Babylonian astrology in it as well as its elements of the Greek mystery religions, was a lot different from the original. Indeed originally in the Persian religion, Mithras was a minor god or an angel.
Nevertheless he grew in stature and assumed attributes which evidently he retained in the Roman version. His name, for example, means “contract” and he was always highly regarded as the epitome of truth and honour by Roman merchants. Plutarch says that the mysteries of Mithras began among the pirates in south eastern Asia Minor during the first century BC and were introduced by them to Rome. The region mentioned is Cilicia, the main town of which was Tarsus! It is plain that Tarsus was a major centre of Pagan cults at the time when Paul was born and lived there.
However Bent Scholar claims that the Persian Mithras has nothing to do with bulls whereas the centre piece of all the Roman Mithraic grottoes was a mural of Mithras killing a bull. In fact it is not true that the Persian Mithras had no association with bulls. Under the Achaemenians, who ruled an empire almost as big as Alexander’s, the dynasty wanted to fuse its disparate nations together by use of religion and promoted the worship of Anahita, a goddess identified with Aphrodite by Strabo.
Now Anahita was one of a Trinity consisting of Ahuramazda, Anahita and Mithras. The Achaemenian inscriptions link Anahita closely with Mithras and it seems they were so closely linked that Herodotus was fooled into declaring that the Persians called Aphrodite, Mithras. The point however is that a bull was slain in honour of Anahita. It seems likely that this ritual was associated with Mithras because the god and goddess were so closely linked and because Mithras was himself associated with the sun, whose animal was the bull.
Again Christians have no more idea than anyone else what the worshippers of Mithras thought or did, though it would have been dualist—recognising a cosmic struggle between good and evil, in which humans must chose their role. Mithras was a mediator on behalf of mankind with the Most High god, Ahuramazda. These are roles he had in Persia and evidently retained in Rome. Bent Scholar is happy to believe that the Persian Mithras could have had some of the features of a dying and rising god, but thinks Persia far enough away not to matter. Christianity is quite different from Judaism although it began as Judaism for gentiles and still has many common features with its parent. It is purely wishful thinking to imagine that Roman and Persian Mithraism had no point of contact other than the name, as Bent Scholar and his Christian compatriots like to think.
Anyway, Bent Scholar has another argument—shifting sands! The major reason why no Mithraic influence on first-century Christianity is possible is the timing—it’s all wrong! No monuments for the cult can be dated earlier than 90-100 AD. So Mithraism flowered after the close of the New Testament canon, much too late for it to have influenced anything that appears in the New Testament. Curious then that the centre from which Mithraism spread into the empire in the first century BC was Tarsus where the chief author of the New Testament was born!
Avatars of the Hindu Religion
Bent Scholar now turns to the remarkable similarities which exist between the Hindu gods Krishna and Buddha and Jesus. He gives a short list from some source or other of similarities with the Buddha but most of them are similarities of straw so can be ignored.
However it is claimed that Buddha was born of a virgin, the Great Maya. For Bent Scholar she was a married woman so could not have been a virgin, but he then discovers that she had taken a vow of sexual abstinence. His remark to this—astonishing from a Christian—“a bit odd?” Can you beat that? A man who thinks it normal to believe that a man dead for four days and stinking in his grave cloths in a hot climate could be brought back to life thinks it “odd” that a holy woman should take a vow of abstinence. He grudgingly concedes it possible then quotes from a first century life of Buddha that the Great Maya did have sexual relations with her husband from which she conceived but it left her undefiled. Bent Scholar just leaves it at that, apparently thinking it needs no comment. So I’ll comment. This is a greater miracle than the biblical one! In the biblical one Mary is impregnated through her ear (or so the professors of Christianity always thought). So the holy hymen was never ruptured. But here the holy hymen was never ruptured even though the holy parents were having it off. Whether the miracle is a Hindu one or a Christian one, it is absurd.
Rather than look at the similarities Bent Scholar prefers to look at the differences. Let us do the same.
- Buddha did not suffer a cruel death but died of indigestion at 80 years old.
Response: No one knows for sure how or why Buddha died. All great men of antiquity were mythologised. Buddha perhaps did die of indigestion at a ripe age. Most of us would not quibble with any such normal death. But Christians think Jesus died nobly when he manifestly—by their own accounts—died as a rebel against the authority of the Emperor. And nothing more!
- Buddha said “there is no saviour;” Jesus said “I have come to seek and to save the lost” and “I came not to judge the world but to save it.”
Response: Is Bent Scholar trying to prove the superiority of Buddha? If he really said “there is no saviour,” he is a man highly to be esteemed. He had plainly foreseen the hoards of quack saviour sellers who were to gull the people when Christianity arrived on the scene. Regarding the sayings of Jesus quoted, anyone who understands Jesus as a historical figure will accept that, if they are genuine, Jesus will have been teaching God’s intention. He habitually avoided the pronoun ”I” as too conceited, preferring to call himself ”this son of man”. If he really claimed these abilities himself, he failed and died as a seditionist.
- Buddha did not experience a bodily resurrection from physical death—Jesus did.
Response: Then the earth is flat!
- The single alleged prophecy of Buddha’s coming applied only to a future Buddha (Maitreya), not the historical one. The prophetic stream from which Jesus stepped is rich, varied, prior to him, and established before his arrival.
Response: No one denies that there were prophecies of a messiah but only Christians identify the messiah with Jesus. People whose faculties have not been destroyed by Christian belief can see that most of the messianic prophecies could only be applied to a warrior king like king David, and indeed were modelled on that mythical Jewish sovereign. And many of the prophecies which Christians apply to Jesus are not actually prophecies but arbitrary bits of the Jewish scriptures that Christians find suitable to apply to Jesus.
Our conclusion to this section is that Bent Scholar has deliberately selected some straw men to pull apart and does so. It fails because no one has heard of the straw men but even unreligious people will probably know some important analogies between Jesus and earlier gods like the various sun-gods.
Krishna
Indian religions and philosophy is far too big a subject for any sensible person to get into in a discussion like this—and that applies to both camps. Nevertheless Bent Scholar has a go at the supposed advocates of Krishna as a pre-Christian Christ. It would be silly to pretend there are not startling similarities but if there is anything in them, it is up to their advocates to make out the case. I shall just note one or two logical errors on Bent Scholars part.
Regarding the claim that Krishna was virgin born, Bent Scholar makes two points, one that the legend is too late to influence Christianity because most of the tales of the young Krishna are late (about 1000 AD) and the second is that his mother Devaki had already had seven children. If many of the tales of Krishna are late no one can be sure that the relevant ones were around before Christ, and that will suffice for Bent Scholar. However, though it lets the Christian off the hook, it also does not prove the opposite. In other words the relevant Krishna legends might have preceded Christianity but nobody is sure now. Devaki was plainly not a virgin which seems to let Bent Scholar off the hook but she was considered a perpetual virgin, she was so holy. This differs not one whit from Mary who is considered in the same way. The only difference is that Krishna was his mother’s eighth child while Christ was his mother’s first of about seven or eight. Furthermore, Krishna’s conception was without normal union. This surely is the point of such births. All that the western tradition did was make the girl a physical virgin to prove that the union was supernatural.
Bent Scholar denies that Krishna is the second person in the Trinity, Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, but he admits that he is an avatar of Vishnu who is the second person, and then he switches the argument into the claim that this was a late development.
Next Bent Scholar attacks the claim that the tyrant, Kansa ordered the slaughter of thousands of infants. If someone made that claim they were perhaps exaggerating though the legend does say all children. Anyway Bent Scholar agrees, as he must that Kansa ordered and carried out the killing of children who he thought were his rivals. If some enthusiastic infidel has multiplied this into thousands then it is an exact parallel of what Christians did in respect of Herod. Herod also never killed thousands of children but only a few of his own, and them only as adults, but Christians have multiplied those into the slaughter of thousands of innocents—14,000 according to one Christian commentary. As an insulation, Bent Scholar tells us that it is in any case a common theme found in the lives of Gilgamesh, Sargon, Moses, Cyrus, Perseus, and Romulus and Remus. Bent Scholar here seems to be agreeing with and confirming the point being made by the sceptics. Christianity has adopted the story from other sources, some of which go back into antiquity.
The Reverend Bent Scholar indulges in a little gloat then that Krishna carried out miracles, as gods do, so he asks whether he copied from Buddha or Thor or Horus (Ha, Ha). Of course the joke is on him because the answer is, “yes he did copy,” though not from those. When Bent Scholar asserts it as a commonplace not worth considering, that gods all do miracles, it shows that there is a common view of how gods behave—supernaturally. That is precisely what sceptics are saying about Christianity. Jesus was depicted as acting in certain ways because people came to believe he was a god. As a god he does what gods do—miracles.
Dealing with the claim that Krishna died on a tree, Bent Scholar comes back to the same “defence(?)”—the tree has always been a mystical and religious symbol for humanity so it is not surprising that Krishna died in that way. Anyway, he didn’t die on a tree and the tree is not a despicable object like a cross. Really Bent Scholar tries to extend the similarities beyond their tolerance to try to discredit them all. The real point is that gods before Christ were known to die and to rise again. No one is trying to say that all of them were crucified. Most died in other ways. The story here arises because there are strange iconographic features of Krishna’s death which suggest crucifixion. Who knows that the old pictures do not actually show that but that it became distasteful for the faithful to contemplate and was watered down?
Now the crucifixion to Christians has always been the symbol of the cruel suffering of their god to save mankind and they have retained the image for that reason. However perhaps that was only possible because Constantine banned crucifixion as a Roman punishment in the fourth century out of respect to the god of the new religion. Either the way the Christian god died had to be protected or the way the god died might well have changed. If public crucifixion had remained the preferred way of death of traitors, Jesus’s way of death would have been changed, probably to stoning to place the whole blame on the Jews. The process might already have begun and is depicted as the stoning of Stephen (“The Crowned One”), the first Christian martyr.
Concerning Krishna ascending to heaven, Bent Scholar categorically states that heaven is not a place in Hindu thought, nor does one ascend to it, especially not bodily as did Jesus. This is pure nonsense. In the Mahabharata, the Pandava brothers, in old age, ascend to heaven by climbing the Himalayas where the one still surviving at the end of the journey meets the king of heaven—Indra.
Bent Scholar concludes complaining about the youthful Krishna, in stark contrast to Jesus, being mischievous and stealing cheese from villagers. But Jesus was insulting to his parents and to his best friend—even more ungodlike behaviour.
The purpose of all this turns out to be that the differences between Krishna and Jesus are huge compared with the similarities. Once more this is a Bent Scholarian ploy. No one, to my knowledge is claiming that Jesus is Krishna so that there is a one to one correspondence between everything in their respective mythologies. The argument is that there are similarities because religions are linked by common features arising either from their common origins or from adaptation of features one to another. Bent Scholar seems ready to accept this in some respects but not others. But, although he argues passionately in defence of the uniqueness of some crucial aspects of Christianity, he readily concedes others. The impartial observer will wonder what basis he has for distinguishing one category from the other.
Horus
Horus was allegedly born of a virgin on December 25th, but Bent Scholar denies it because an ancient Egyptian relief depicts this conception by showing his mother Isis in a falcon form, hovering over the erect phallus of a dead and supine Osiris in the Underworld! And he denies that the December 25 issue is relevant because the date does not appear in the New Testament. Response: Bent Scholar is again indulging in his double standards. He has berated Kersey Graves for using iconographic evidence but here attempts to seal his own case with—iconographic evidence! If it were not for the centuries of torture, misery and death that Christianity has caused directly in the world, or engendered through its imposing selfishness and lack of principle on society, it would be a joke.
Bent Scholar rejects iconographic evidence because, with no other clues to help, the interpretation of pictures is purely subjective. Here we do have other clues and Bent Scholar’s interpretation is wrong. When Osiris was torn apart and his bits scattered, the only part that Isis could not find was his phallus. According to myth, she made an artificial one and this engendered Horus. Horus was a sky and sun god and his image was that of a hawk or falcon. Plainly the falcon on Bent Scholar’s relief is Horus, not Isis and the erect Phallus is the artificial one from which Isis made him. Unless the Christian is suggesting that Horus was born of union between Isis and a dildo, this was an asexual birth.
Bishop Bent Scholar also objects that Horus was not born on 25 December but on 20 July. To come to this conclusion he actually quotes from the work of the famous Egyptologist E A Wallis Budge who published his book, The Gods of Egypt in 1904. Yet at the beginning of this diatribe Bent Scholar was decrying the critics of Christianity for quoting old sources. I argued above that this was nonsense and now Bent Scholar, having forgotten what he said before, confirms that it is by quoting an old source. Bent Scholar is obviously guided by the Holy Ghost as one might expect for a man who has received the apostolic succession, and it shows. The Christian bible is also putatively inspired by the same Holy Ghost and it is so shot though with inconsistency and illogic that no one left with any critical faculty could accept it as true, let alone sacred truth.
Wallis Budge is an authority that most people can respect. What Bent Scholar neglects, apparently consciously because he says he is referring to the “original big” Horus, is that Horus had as one of his aspects, that of sun-god, Ra-Horakhty, and was depicted as a winged sun disc. As a sun god his birthday was 25 December. Incidentally the birthdays of the five main gods being placed in the five intercalary days at the end of the years is plainly a calendrical convention to identify the days. They have little religious importance.
Bent Scholar denies that he had twelve disciples saying he had only four, but that it is a trivial similarity even if true. The point is that sun gods always have twelve disciples. They are the zodiacal signs or constellations through which the sun passes. It is no coincidence that Israel had twelve tribes. The Hebrew god was a sun god and it was necessary for there to have been twelve tribes to match the constellations. In fact there were more than twelve tribes. Jesus had twelve disciples, rationalised as one for each tribe and therefore, indirectly, one for each constellation. This was a feature which allowed the Romans to think in the fourth century that Jesus was a solar god. The halo is not merely an artistic depiction of an aura of holiness but a sun disc showing that Jesus was seen as an aspect of the sun. The artistic convention came later and now prevails to the extent that the original intention is considered blasphemous!
Bent Scholar’s source says Horus was buried in a tomb and resurrected, which Bent Scholar denies because he could find no references to Horus ever dying, until he later becomes merged with Ra, the sun god. Bent Scholar adds that thereafter he is “reborn every single day as the sun rises!!!” (sic). Bent Scholar is just being silly in an attempt to denigrate the suggestion. There is nothing wrong with the idea that the sun is reborn daily. Each day the sun was considered to traverse the heavens and at night was consigned to the underworld. In distant times the public were scared of night, and darkness in Christianity is still a metaphor for evil. To see the sun reborn or resurrected daily after his journey through the underworld was a great relief. To pooh-pooh this idea is pure prejudice because it is likely to be the very root of the Christians’ primitive beliefs.
Bent Scholar ignores the commonality of terms like the Way, the Truth, the Light, the Messiah, God’s Anointed Son, the Good Shepherd, because God has put them in everyone’s heads in anticipation of Christianity (giggle).
Bent Scholar agrees that gods perform miracles and it means nothing. He actually says “carries no force” but it means nothing anyway because there are no miracles in Christianity or anywhere else.
Bent Scholar finally disposes of a few spurious claims but one which he does not highlight is the fact that Horus’s enemy is Seth, plainly cognate with Satan and probably its root.
Divine Men
Coming finally to the miscellaneous class of figures such as miracle workers, saviours or those born of virgins—divine men or heroes, without an explicit death/resurrection notion, Bent Scholar claims any similarities are easily explained as falling into his general category of phenomena common to all religions—God’s primeval revelation to humanity.
Bent Scholar curiously admits that Greek mythology is replete with gods and men doing miracles, some very much like the ones in the gospels, destroying any case he was trying to make. He cites Alexander the Great who was also considered a god and who Plutarch said was born of a virgin. Bent Scholar says:
The earliest sources on Alexander depict him as normal (Arrian of Nicomedia), but a millennium later he is a god. But in the gospels, the earliest strata still portray Christ as a miracle worker.
In fact Alexander demanded and was granted the status of a god in his lifetime and later he was also said to have been a son of god. Incidentally, Plutarch wrote only about 400 years after Alexander died, not a millenium.
Bishop Bent Scholar continues with a longish discussion of the Life of Appollonius of Tyana, a contemporary of Jesus who also had a miraculous life as a divine man and saviour. Bent Scholar shows to our satisfaction that Philostratus, who wrote the eulogy, had, among his model texts, the New Testament, or parts of it. He gloats that any copying here was from Jesus to Appollonius. Well Philostratus apparently had several sources and got his ideas from all of them, perhaps including the New Testament since he was writing about 200 AD. So here is an interesting thing. Bent Scholar has proved copying! But only in one direction—from Christianity to other religions! Once again he inadvertantly damages his own case. No one other than a Christian will accept that copying, given that it is proved it occurs, only occurs in one direction. If Philostratus used Jesus as an example of godly behaviour, who can reasonably deny that the gospel writers would have done the same?
Bent Scholar absurdly summarises that there is an absolute uniqueness about this Jesus of Nazareth that is not duplicated anywhere—in whole or in part. Anything unique cannot be duplicated and remain unique. Everybody born on earth is unique, even identical twins. As Bent Scholar noted inadvertantly above, however, the stories of dying and rising gods form a pattern. Often they do not behave uniquely, but have common features as gods of this type. It is left to the reader to judge.
Comment
Eucharist—Brad
Christian apologists will claim with such certainty that the New Testament did not borrow from other belief systems when the New Testament exposes itself as doing exactly that. I wrote an essay on this subject of pagan influence on the New Testament. Excerpt from my essay:
“The New Testament itself points out that Christianity introduced a new ritual as part of it’s formula to obtain eternal life. Jesus tells his followers that they can have eternal life if they eat his flesh and drink his blood.
Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.John 6:53-54
Where did this ritual come from? Is it something that God told his people to do, or is it something pagan which became incorporated into the Jesus savior story? What’s wrong with this picture? This new ritual directly contradicts the Word of God in the Old Testament. The consumption of blood, in any form, is abomination in the eyes of God.
And whatsoever man there be of the house of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among you, that eateth (consumes) any manner of blood; I will even set my face against that soul that eateth blood, and will cut him off from among his people. Therefore I said unto the children of Israel, No soul of you shall eat (consume) blood, neither shall any stranger that sojourneth among you eat blood.Leviticus 17:10,12
Are people to believe that God, whose eternal law (Psalms 119:152,160) is very clear about not consuming any type of blood, completely changed his mind, and then decided to advocate the drinking of blood as part of a salvation ritual?
An often employed Christian rationalization is that since the blood Jesus told his followers to drink was only wine, there was no real violation of the law. This doesn’t hold up to scriptural examination. Symbolic sin is still sin. Even Jesus proclaimed that symbolic sin was still sin (Mt 5:28). Drinking wine and pretending that it’s really the blood of a human sacrifice makes a mockery of God’s law.
This new blood drinking ritual for salvation certainly didn’t come from the God of the Old Testament.
Skeptics are to believe that the Bible God of the Old Testament, who ordered a man put to death for gathering sticks on the Sabbath will look the other way while Christians perform an abomination by drinking symbolic blood, pretending it’s actual blood, as part of a new ritual to obtain eternal life. Skeptics are to believe that the Bible God, who Christians claim is unchanging, decided that his perfect(Ps 19:7) and eternal (Ps 119:152,160) Law was not longer applicable to his people. This is the same God who instructed his people to follow his laws to obtain salvation and righteousness in his eyes.
Yet, this same God sent his “son” to void out his prior instructions and replace them with new rituals in their place. How tightly do we want to close our eyes to this massive inconsistency? There isn’t any wiggle room for even the most artful apologist to weave a credible rationalization with this issue.
The New Testament exposes itself as adopting a new ritual as part of it’s formula for eternal life. However, this new ritual is a mockery to God (Yahweh) and makes a shambles of his holy instructions.
