Origins of Christianity:
Pre-Christian Gods
The life of Jesus as portrayed in the gospels corresponds to the various archetypical mythic heroes featured in pagan religions for thousands of years, in which a divine hero's birth is supernaturally predicted and conceived, the hero as an infant is aided in escaping attempts to kill him, demonstrates his wisdom as a child, receives a divine commission, defeats demons, wins acclaim, is hailed as a king, suffers ignominy and is betrayed, loses popular favor, is executed (often on a hilltop), and is vindicated and taken to heaven. These features are found worldwide in heroic myths and epics. The more closely a supposedly biography, such as that of Apollonius of Tyana or various Buddha figures corresponds to this plot, the more the historian is likely to conclude that a historical figure has been transfigured by myth.
In the case of Jesus, where virtually every detail of the story fits the mythic hero archetype and there is essentially no secular biographical data, the historicity may even be questioned, as is the reality of most of the "heroes." The stories of the suffering, death, and resurrection in the gospels is too close to myths of dying and rising savior gods, including Osiris, Tammuz, Baal, Attis, Adonis, Hercules, and Asclepius, not to engender considerable skepticism over the derivation of the story of Jesus the Christ. It is noted that, outside of the gospels, there is scant pagan, Jewish, or Roman reference even to the existence of Jesus.
Christian apologists have contended that these myths were plagiarized from the gospels by pagan imitators. They point out that some of the evidence is post-Christian. While this is correct, much of the evidence is pre-Christian. It is also significant that the early Christian apologists argued that the parallels to the gospels were counterfeits in advance, by Satan, who knew the real thing would be coming along later and wanted to throw people off the track. This is similar to the 19th Century attempts of fundamentalists to claim Satan had created fake dinosaur bones to tempt the faithful not to believe in Genesis. The point to keep in mind is that no one would have argued this way had the pagan myths of dead and resurrected gods been more recent than the Christian.
Of course, there have been comments by Christian apologists that all the pagan stories were myths, but the Christ story was the one that actually happened. (One Christian apologist described the Mesopotamian, Sumerian, Babylonian, and Hebraic creation stories in typical fashion: "...of course they are all myths except the one in the Bible." An appropriate response to this is to suggest the apologists imagine themselves staying overnight at a friend's house and observing that the guest bathroom is decorated with a variety of towels from the Hilton, Ramada Inn, Holiday Inn, etc. Then pose the question, which is more likely, that representatives from all the hotels had visited the host's bathroom and left one of the towels or that the host had swiped them from the hotels? Or perhaps the host created the various towels and supplied them to the hotels?
Following is a compilation of the similarities of the myths of several of the various pre-Christian savior-gods - Dionysus of the greeks, Hercules of the Romans, Mithras of the Persians, Osiris, Isis, and Horus of Egypt, Tammuz of the Babylonians and Assyrians, etc. - and the story of Jesus. If one were to consolidate all the mythic stories to create a story of one "mythic" god character, a biography suitable for the Christian Jesus could be readily created.
The newly created god character would:
