Subject: Christ myth: Pagan Copycat thesis

Central Theme: Three aspects of the Christ myth “pagan copycat” thesis

Objective/Rationale: Every Christian can learn to defend against the Christ myth “pagan copycat” thesis by learning about the three ASPECTS of the thesis

Aspect #1: The theorists

Aspect #2: The arguments

Aspect#3: The answers

Slide 1 – I’ll start today’s teaching with a little quiz – what is this? (Orpheus Bacchus) Acc to some enemies of Chry, this amulet is proof that Chry stole its idea of Jesus being crucified from the pagan religion surr. Dionysus. Sound odd? It’s a growing idea.

Slide 2

The title of this teaching is, ()

(adult: The word Zeitgeist means “the spirit of an age” or a way people think at a certain time. I chose that word for three reasons. The first is because it rhymes with “Christ”. The second is because the idea that the story of Jesus was stolen from pagan religions is one that is growing in popularity, as indicated by the third reason I chose this word: )

(youth: Did you ever play that game when you were 3 or 4 years old? Well, what you see here is a cartoon of one of the apostles at a Zeerox machine, and he’s making copies of papers that have pictures of pagan gods on them, like Mithra, and Attis, and Dionysus.)

Right now, on the Internet, one of the most popular videos being shows is titled “The Zeitgeist Movie” – and one of the main ideas it promotes is that the story of Jesus was stolen from pagan myths. It also promotes an idea that 9/11 was a conspiracy and that the government is out to get you, but that’s another story.

Slide 3

What is the (PCZ/PCT)? A form of the Christ myth, or idea that Jesus never existed. Makes it unusual: Draws parallels between the life of Jesus and those of pagan deities, and claims that Christians borrowed or stole those ideas to create the story of Jesus

Slide 4

People have been promoting the PCZ?PCT for at least 20 years now. Here we see a couple of the earliest authors who stood behind it. The first is a fellow named Godfrey Higgins, who lived between 1772 and 1833 and wrote a major work titled Anacalypsis. You will notice I have a picture of a two-headed chicken next to Higgins. That’s because Anacalyspsis is nearly as hard to get a copy of as it is to find a 2 headed chicken. It is also nearly as normal as a 2 headed chicken. Anacalyspsis consists of two volumes each larger than a New York City phone book. You could never chase down every claim it made, but the here’s a few that stood out when I checked it out:

The world was once ruled by an ancient, advanced civilization. All of Asia was once ruled by black people who were Buddhists. Having black skin makes you dumb and humans became smarter as they moved to colder climates and their skin got whiter. Buddhism is the same religion as Christianity and the same belief system as Freemasonry. And of course, the ideas for the life of Jesus were stolen from pagan myths.

Then there’s this second fellow. Kersey Graves, who lived from 1813-1883. He was known as a moral reformer who fought slavery, but he also was an atheist who thought religion had distorted the truth, and he wrote a book called The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors. He also used Higgins’ book as a source.

That sort of sets a pattern, though. These two old guys, and a few others, are names you will see time and time again in the works of modern advocates of (PCZ/PCT). Let’s look at a set of those.

Slide 5

First we have Tom Harpur, who authored a book titled The Pagan Christ. This book was real big in Canada for a while, not so much here. Harpur is a bit odd because he is now a journalist but he used to be a Bible scholar. Then he discovered the works of people like Higgins and went insane. Well, he may as well have, because he now thinks their works are reliable.

The second picture is an author who calls herself Acharya S. Her major work is titled The Christ Conspiracy, and she is mainly known for shrieking at people who say she is wrong. For example, one of my fellow apologists took some of her claims about Hinduism and Buddhism to a couple of the world’s leading experts in those religions, and when they said she was in error, her response was that they needed to take Religion 101 classes and that they hadn’t read her whole book.

The last pair is Timothy Freke (sp) and Peter Gandy. They’ve written several books, including the one pictured here, TJM. Notice what’s on the cover – that amulet of Dionysus. Remember that because we’ll come back to it later.

Slide 6

So know we know who; let’s move on to what. The PCZ/PCT have a long list of alleged “pagan Christs” that they say were sources for the story of Jesus. How long? This is not all of them. If you want coverage on all of these, I’ll give you an article link n my site for further reading. But in the time we have I’m just going to cover the three in bold here – M, A, and O.

Slide 7

First we have Mithra, and I’m going to talk about only four out of at least 15 parallels alleged by the PCZ/PCT:

Mithra was born of a virgin on December 25th in a cav.

He had 12 companions or disciples.

He was buried in a tomb and after three days rose again.

Cor. 10:4 is "identical words to those found in the Mithraic scriptures, except that the name Mithra is used instead of Christ."

Now if you’re seeing this for the first time, you can imagine what someone might think. “A lot of this sounds very very close to Jesus.” Once you check into each of these, though, you start to get an idea that the PCZ/T aren’t credible scholars. Let’s look at each of these.

Slide 8

December 25th "...the Dec 25 issue is of no relevance to us--nowhere does the NT associate this date with Jesus' birth at all. This is something the later church did, wherever they got the idea from -- not the apostolic church, and if there was any borrowing at all, everyone did it, for Dec. 25th was "universally distinguished by sacred festivities" because it was (at the time) the winter solstice. That’s now Dec. 22 by the way.

Next, the virgin part. Mithra was born out of solid rock, as this picture shows, and he was a full adult when this happened. I suppose technically the rock he was born out of could have been classified as a virgin. But so is your living room sofa.

!2 disciples. It took me some time bout I found out where they get this idea from. In this picture we have a scene of Mithra doing his most famous deed – killing the cosmic bull. Around it we see 12 pictures of what seem to be human faces. What the PCZ/T do is say, “Oh, those must be disciples.” They’re not – those are the signs of the zodiac. If Jesus got an idea for 12 disciples anywhere, it was from the 12 tribes of Israel. I might add that this carving is dated to hundreds of years after Jesus, so it and what it shows could not have been an influence on Christianity.

Slide 9

Died, buried, rose – not. This one in fact is completely false. One Mithraic scholar even said plainly, “there is no death of Mithras.” This is just made up.

Last one – this is the most fun. 1 Cor. 10:4. Really. If you happen to meet someone who says this, let them know to call the Mithraic scholarly community at once, because they will want to know about these Mithraic Scriptures. You see, David Ulansey, the foremost scholar of Mithraism today, tells us that "the teachings of the (Mithraic) cult were, as far as we know, never written down" and we "have been left with practically no literary evidence relating to the cult which would help (us) reconstruct its esoteric doctrines." Maybe they found some Mith Scr on eBay. I dunno.

Slide 10

Let’s now move to PC #2 – a fellow named Attis. I’ll pick just three for this one.

His body as bread was eaten by his worshippers.

On "Black Friday," he was crucified on a tree, from which his holy blood ran down to redeem the earth.

After three days, Attis was resurrected on March 25th (as tradition held of Jesus) as the "Most High God."

Well, once again we have some stuff that might seem convincing – if it were true, or relevant. Is it? Take a guess.

Slide 11

Body and blood eaten by worshippers – sounds like the Lord’s Supper! No. One thing to understand here is that Christianity was not alone in eating bread and wine for a special supper. In fact, all sorts of groups did this, even things like fireman’s clubs. Not that this means much. Bread was the most common food, in fact, it composed a substantial portion of an ancient person’s diet. Wine was a normal drink because the water was often bad, and wine didn’t spoil readily like milk or other drinks available back then. As it happens, we’re not sure what the worshippers of Attis actually had for their meal. One scholar said that they may have had milk, and another said that wine and bread were forbidden at festivals of Attis. And beyond that, we have no evidence that what they ate was considered the body and blood of Attis.

Crucified on a tree on Friday, his blood redeeming. Not quite. Attis died under a tree, but where the story goes from there depends on which version you like best. I like one where the pagan god Zeus makes it so that Attis' body doesn’t rot, his hair continues to grow, and his little finger moves continuously. There’s also a version where he turns into a pine tree. And there was some bleeding yes. What had happened was that Attis got real upset when his girlfriend died and cut off a certain valuable part of himself. I’ll let you fill in the blanks. His blood didn’t redeem anyone, but it did make some nice flowers.

Then the last one – was Attis resurrected? That things with Zeus comes closest, though later on, hundreds of years after Jesus, the worshippers of Attis started a new festival to compete with Christianity in which Attis returned from the realm of the dead. Not close, no cigar.

Slide 12

One last pagan deity, and I’ll just choose one claim on this one. The Egyptian god Osiris, it is said, was resurrected, raised from the dead. I chose this one to illustrate something. What is a resurrection? (ans – raising of a formerly dead body into glorified new life) This is not what happened to Osiris. What happened to Osiris is that he was killed and his body was chopped into over a dozen pieces which his enemies threw all over the place. Eventually someone collected and put them back together – and then Osiris became judge of the dead. Osiris did not rise from the dead – he became the god of the dead. And his body? Well, what happened with that was actually a sort of function of the way the Egyptian gods were, shall we say, being half Frankenstein, half Lego set. There are many stories of the Egyptian gods flinging various body parts around, and to no overall harm, because "divine bodies were thought to be impervious to change". O's dead body parts didn’t rot or decompose as it waited to be put back together. In another story, the Egyptian god Horus had a headache, and another deity offered to loan him his head until the headache went away. Resurrection? Not at all. This is far different than what happened with Jesus.

Slide 13

To close this out, we’re now in a position to summarize the basic flaws in the methods of the PCZ/T.

First, information is often made up or copied uncritically. We saw a couple of examples of that, such as the claim that Mithra was crucified and rose from the dead. The modern PCZ/T get this sort of thing usually from an older sources like Higgins or Graves. Very seldom have I ever seen them use anything up to date.

Second: Parallels are drawn using equivocation. The example I gave of Osiris fits here. The word “resurrection” is used to refer to all sorts of reversals of death but it really meant only one thing – a dead body came back to life glorified by God. Another example is the use of the word “salvation”. Pagan gods were often called “saviors” or were said to “save” people, but the word was not used as we use it to mean a Christian salvation experience. Salvation meant rescue from any difficult situation at all, and the gods were sometimes into saving people like that, sort of like cosmic fireman.

Finally, questionable use or interpretation of evidence. The example of Mithra’s alleged 12 disciples fits here, and there’s one more special one I want to share in close.

Slide 14

Remember this? All over the Internet you will find literally hundreds of websites that claim that this amulet is proof that the crucifixion story of Jesus was stolen from pagan myths. It’s passed on and on as evidence. But there’s a little problem that a friend of mine found when he checked the original book it was taken from….

Slide 15

That’s right! This amulet is a modern forgery! It was declared so by leading experts in Dionysus. A very clear example here of why we have to be constantly on our guard for misinformation.

Slide 16

Further reading