Non-Pagan Origins of Christianity

My name is Kris. I am a 22 year old male and a college student majoring in history. Needless to say, I am a Christian layman with an interest in Religion, mythology, and the alleged “origins” of Christianity.

I have another apologetic blog called Debunking Atheism which can be visited by clicking here. On that blog, even though I do deal with the “Jesus-Myth,” it is meant to deal with an even wider range of matters that I do not plan on covering on Non-Pagan Origins of Christianity. This one is meant soley to debunk the claims that 1) Jesus didn’t exist, and 2) that Christianity and Judiasm are rooted in paganism. — But since I may text-link the two, please consider both sites affiliated with eachother.

One has to be living in a cave to not know about the “Jesus Myth,” the claims that Jesus and the Bible are immitations of pagan gods, heroes and literature. — It so happens that I was apparently “living in a cave” because until a couple of years ago, I knew absolutely nothing about most of these claims. Of course, I did hear occasionally that the flood story of Noah was taken from Mesopotamian tablets, but nothing to the extreme of Jesus being a cheep immitation of paganism.

In a discussion, when I was ignorant, I was called a “brainwashed” Christian who didn’t know the origins of his own faith. I was then told that there were twelve disciples and twelve tribes because the Zodiac had twelve symbols. At that point, I had no answer except for my taking exception to his stupidly overgeneralization of Christians being inherently brainwashed. fter all, using his logic, I could have told him, “You’re an Atheist, and therefore brainwashed.”

Then later, I found a Myspace forum that was entitled “Jesus never existed.” The thread’s OP had embedded three videos that listed pagan gods like Horus, Mithras, Attis and Dionysus as having similar stories as Jesus. It then claimed that the Bible was “more about astrology than anything else. It later turned out that the film was part one of Zeitgeist.

I knew not to take the film as gospel because, even though I hadn’t researched the subject yet, it did make some assertions that I already had known for a while to be false. For example, it asserts that Jesus was born on December 25th, and that the Council of Nicaea was the starting point of the Dark Ages. Also, it made the presumptuous claim that Jesus likely didn’t exist because there isn’t much written about him. – All the same, I did find the film disturbing because if enough of it’s claims were true, then my beliefs in Christianity were false.

The same day, I did some Internet searches on crucified and rising savior gods. I instantly ran into a bunch of Atheist sites and a page on ReligiousTolerance.org that made similar claims to those of Zeitgeist which didn’t help matters much.

Next, I found a page entitled “Evidence for Jesus and Parallel Pagan ‘Crucified Saviors’ Examined“ by Phil Vaz, a Catholic apologist which calmed me down somewhat. It is a refutation of a film similar to Zeitgeist, part One called “The God who wasn’t there.” After I had a chance to print it out and then read it, I was pretty confident that even if Christianity had similarities to pagan religions, they tended to be trivial. I then decided to do my own research from encyclopedic sources which served to justify the fact that Jesus is not an immitation of pagan religions.

The point of this blog is to show other Christians and even non-Christians that the claims that Christianity is rehashed paganism are false, and hopefully the information I give on this site will be helpfull.

I want to end this post with a disclaimer : I am not infallable. I may make an occasional factual error, but it should be clear that apparent errors are not an attempt to mislead. It goes against Christian ethics to deliberately mislead on this kind of issue even if it’s for ones own good. — Well, enjoy the site.