The grinches are at it again. Every year at Easter and Christmas the tired old wheels start squeaking and some of the detractors of Christianity start wheeling out a few predictable canards, all connected to the idea that Christianity is just a copycat religion and that the accounts of the life of Jesus of Nazareth that we have in the New Testament were just borrowed from other older religions.

Generally these attempts are now limited to personal websites and message boards on the internet, as they are so discredited that bringing them up at, say, a conference on New Testament studies, would get one laughed all the way home. But, unhappily resigned to the fact that some people only know what they know about theology or biblical studies because they read it at a website, it’s worth addressing some of these claims.

I’ve already dealt with the claim that the virgin birth was borrowed from Buddhism and the claim that Jesus’ life is just a re-hashed version of the life of Osiris. Another common “copycat” theory that floats around online is the claim that Jesus is a mythical character copied from Mithras.

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A while back I started chipping away at a blog entry on the supposed fact that the virgin birth of Jesus is just a copy cat tale used by the early Christian church, borrowing this fictional element of the life of Christ from countless other myths. The view, although not well attested in scholarly literature, gained some popularity with online skeptics with the release of the sensationalist but unscholarly documentary Zeitgeist. You will not find this claim in serious scholarly critiques of religious belief, but the sad fact is, sceptics with an online platform and lots of anger to spend  often gain influence among a credulous sceptical audience that simply doesn’t know any better. I’ve decided not to put it all into one blog entry. Every now and then I’ll blog on one of the figures that the virgin birth Jesus was supposedly copied from.

(For that reason, please do not waste your time replying by saying “sure, THAT connection might not be correct, but what about this OTHER myth that Jesus was copied from?” Like I said, I’ll do them one at a time.)

Candidate #1: Gotama (Gautama) Buddha

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gautama_Buddha

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Is Jesus just Osiris with a new face? In Episode 19 I look at the sceptical argument claiming that Christianity was really just a collection of beliefs borrowed from pagan religions, and that Jesus was just a re-hash of one or many other Messiah or god-man figures. As there would be no way to deal with all of these other religions in one episode, I’ve chosen to use the example of the ancient Egyptian deity Osiris. In short, the sceptical argument is not particularly well supported by the facts.

HERE is a transcript of this episode.

Glenn Peoples

Episode 019: Osiris and Jesus [ 35:57 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download