Christians believe that Jesus was God-incarnate who came to this world to die for their sins. Unbeknown to most of them, the story surrounding Jesus’ existence is just a carbon copy of the fairytales regarding many human-made deities, such as Osiris, Dionysus, and Baal who existed long before Jesus was allegedly born. The general narratives of their respective lives mostly follow this pattern: a savior who has come to this world supernaturally to save the innocent and punish the evildoers. Born of a virgin mother, he would suffer and be killed for the sins of the world, but death wouldn’t be able to overpower him. He would rise a few days later and go straight to heaven where he would reign forever. He would come later to rapture his followers to heaven.
This should make many people laugh and shake their heads, “When the early Church fathers learned of the much earlier stories of the pagan dying and resurrecting gods, which were similar to that of Jesus Christ, they blamed the devil for the ‘deception.’ Tertullian, a prominent Christian historian and apologist, declared that ‘the devil had plagiarized Christianity by anticipation in order to lead people astray.’ The devil simply copied his life in advance and created the myth of Osiris, Mithras, etc”(Licauco, 2018x). That means the devil is powerful enough to sabotage God’s message; God acts at the mercy of Satan. We don’t think so; do you think so? It seems some people are too far deep inside a pile of rubbish.
The category of dying and rising gods, combined with its mythic and ritual displays, received its earliest full presentation in the influential work of James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, which offered two interpretations: 1) Euhemerist theory, which focused on the figure of the dying god; it was held that a sacred king would be slain when his fertility waned. 2) naturist theory, which covered the full cycle of dying and rising, assumed the deities to be personifications of the seasonal cycle of vegetation (Smith, 1987x).
In regard to the naturist explanation, our opinion is, personifying the natural death and rebirth of crops shouldn’t be compared with a conscious being who has body and soul. Human beings are much more than crops, and their life cycles are not the same. Out of the two things (body and soul) that come together to form a human being, the crops are only relatable to one aspect—the body because they are both made of dirt and bound to die. When you dig up a hole and bury a crop, it germinates and brings forth fruits of its kind. If you bury a body, it does not germinate; it decays. You can’t grow a watermelon seed and expect it to bring forth apple fruits. But that is not the case with human beings. If a human dies, his body and soul are involved here; his soul transforms to different entities as the case may be. His virtuous deeds or bad deeds could mutate his soul to a better aspect of him or a lower aspect of him, unlike crop, which only has one pattern of rebirth. Thus, to transubstantiate the existence of crops for more than what it is, is farfetched to us. However, those who criticize Frazer on the basis of Euhemerist narrative are just bothering themselves for nothing. How are they going to gerrymander their way out of this situation to trivialize the lives of all these gods, but accept Jesus’ storyline as unique? (For everyone to follow clearly, Euhemerism is the evaluation of how humans’ propensity to overpraise their heroes, especially after death, gradually morphed into the deifications of the dead heroes, and this thereby gave birth to the various mythologies of the ‘dying’ gods. Unsurprisingly, Christians don’t want the history of Jesus to be viewed as a myth, in spite of the fact that the description sounds very much like that of the older myths.)
Krishna, another deity, is said to have been an incarnation of the god Vishnu. The popular story about him is that a “conflict broke out while he was at a festival, he left and went to the bush to meditate, but unfortunately, a hunter thought he was a deer and killed him. He was cremated, but being a god, he managed to ascend to heaven” (LordZB, 2013x).
One other god was Quetzalcoatl. He “was one of the great gods of the people of Mesoamerica who got drunk and slept with his sister. When he got sobered, he became ashamed of his action; and therefore, laid in a coffin by the seaside and burned himself to death, but his ashes turned into birds, and his heart entered the sky as the Morning Star. After four days in the underworld, he returned to heaven” (LordZB, 2013x).
The prevalent account of Osiris’ existence is that he was an Egyptian God, who roamed the earth about 5000 years ago. He was born by a virgin mother named Nut, who was the goddess of the sky. His father, Geb, was the God of the earth. “He was born in a cave on Dec. 25, before three shepherds”(Licauco, 2018x). Osiris was the eldest among his siblings who were: Set, Nephthys, Horus the Elder, and Isis (his sister, who also became his wife, and mother of his son, Horus the Younger, who was miraculously conceived after Osiris’ death). (On a side note, we want to remind you that incest has been one more problem associated with the religious tendency in us, humans; we are always looking for things or people to worship. If they are not readily available, we create them and turn them from ordinary things or human beings to gods—our saviors. Before you know it, stories will emerge that they directly came from out of space; they are the direct descendants of God. Once people are elevated, they will no longer see themselves as human beings. They will no longer allow themselves to marry ‘commoners’; therefore, incest is the only way to go from one succession to another.)
Plutarch, a Greek biographer and philosopher, narrated that Osiris’ brother, Set (who is regarded as the god of death and destruction), killed him and cut his corpse into pieces and dispersed them. But his wife and her sister, Nephthys, gathered the pieces and buried them, except the phallus because they viewed it as a representation of the generative power in nature; with that, they were able to give new life to Osiris, who remained in the underworld as the ruler, passing judgment on the dead and granting life to all things (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2021x).
It is said that since more than 4,000 years ago, Egyptian kings became united with Osiris at death and inherited eternal life just by associating with his power of resurrection. Licauco said that, “According to a noted Egyptologist E.A. Wallis Budge, ‘the central figure of the ancient Egyptian religion was Osiris, and the chief fundamental of his cult is the belief in his divinity, death, resurrection and absolute control of the bodies and souls of men’” (2018x). Furthermore, Carrier quoted Plutarch saying that, “Osiris’ soul is immortal, but his body frequently disjoints and disperses all over the place, and Isis picks them up and fits them together again” (2018x).
You need to realize that people ran far and wide with tremendous imaginations in those days; every group was slightly editing the allegories of other groups so as to feel superior or feel ecstatic for being chosen by the God of heaven. The Bible is a typical display of such inventions. When the cyclical-eternal story about the dying-and-rising god was being imported into Judaism it had to be altered slightly to conform with the singular apocalyptic theology of the Jews (Carrier, 2018x).
Christians ought to thank the people who are doing research to discover the truth. It is not the fault of your opponents that those who canonized the Bible didn’t care to find out whether the biblical stories were merely duplicates or not. They were only stuck on the belief that some guy died to take their sins away and paved the way for them to go to heaven. They were so absorbed that if anyone had tried, he wouldn’t have been able to shake their beliefs with any of these other myths; reality wouldn’t have remotely begun to sink in for them. The few of them who cared to review other myths, claimed that their myth is not the same as the other myths; hence, it’s authentic. Some of them blamed the devil for trying to sabotage their beliefs. They decided to remain in their euphoric state just like many Christians do today.
No matter what the people around a ‘god’ might have pompously called him, you have to take every one of their stories with a grain of salt, no exception. If there is any ‘deity’ before or after Jesus who had a similar storyline like that of Jesus, he has to be treated or accepted the same way as Jesus. If you believe Jesus died and rose from death, you have to apply the same belief to other similar deities—they are all fables, anyway. Please, do research (just google something like, ‘Deities who resurrected before Jesus’) and you will find out that just about everything (baptism, original sin, the trinity, lord’s supper, virgin birth, easter, miracles, disciples, death, and resurrection) that is attributed to Jesus, is a carbon copy of stories regarding many ancient gods who predated him.
It is not as if all these numerous stories about virgin birth, death, and resurrection of many deities were simply made up by a modern man just to discredit the supposed deity of Jesus; the stories have been circulating around long before Jesus was allegedly born. If you agree or read similar stories about other deities, at least that indicates Jesus’ story is not unique. If it is not unique, there is nothing special about it. Your only way out is to show that, ‘although his story is not unique, he did exist as stated in the Bible.’ However, we assume that you are not going to make your argument worse by citing the Bible. Remember, copy-catters are critics too, they try their best to edit each story they duplicate to make it more believable. Thus, if Jesus’ story looks more authentic to you, it doesn’t mean it’s not a replica of older myths. If you, for whatever reason, still don’t get it that the fable about Jesus is just a retold story of many other man-made gods who were believed to have died and resurrected, then you have to accept them all as your gods.
One funny thing about these apologists is that if you come up with a narrative that postdates the biblical account of Jesus, they will quickly label it as a duplicate of Jesus’ account, but when you show them similar stories that predate Jesus’ they will tell you Jesus’ account is not a duplicate of those stories, yet, they have no viable data to back up their claims. Sorry, apologists, we too wished at least some of the stories about Jesus were real, but they are not. Hopefully, this will be understood by everyone very soon.
The alleged death and resurrection of Jesus is all what most Christians focus on. They have never asked themselves, ‘What kind of a crooked God would be behind such an atrocity?’ God is not capable of committing the crime you believe he has committed. Only the devil or evil humans could act that low. Moreover, the ascension story that states after Jesus had resurrected, he ascended to heaven 40 days later and sat at the right-hand side of God, the father, is not true. Why do people have this false belief that heaven is up there in the turbulent sky? It is sad to see that many people have decided to ignore reality and instead, wrapped themselves up inside a hollow promise. Based on the face value of the Bible, a self-righteous society nailed a guy to the cross because of his alleged rudeness –that is all you have, Christians. Stop smearing God’s decent image.
Modern Age Movement (MAM)
–Universal Cordial Beliefs (UCB)
References:
Carrier, R. (2018x, March 29). Dying-and-rising Gods: It’s pagan, Guys. Get over it. Retrieved from https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/13890
Licauco, J. (2018x, Dec. 11). Pagan parallels of Jesus Christ. Philippine Daily Inquirer. Retrieved from https://lifestyle.inquirer.net/316940/pagan-parallels-of-jesus-christ/#ixzz7HQyzs2As
LordZB. (2013x, March 30). 10 Resurrected religious figures.Retrieved from https://listverse.com/2013/03/30/10-resurrected-religious-figures/
Smith, J. Z. (1987x). Dying and rising gods. Retrieved from https://www.encyclopedia.com/environment/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/dying-and-rising-gods
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2021x, Nov 30). Osiris. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/Nephthys
