Jesus: Myth or Messiah? (White vs Barker)

For joining us. My name is Ken Cook, and I'll be moderating the first debate for you. So today, the thesis for our debate is the story of Jesus is cut from the same story as other ancient mythologies.

Mr. Barker will be taking the affirmative, and Dr. White will be taking the negative. James White is the director of Alpha and Omega Ministries, a Christian apologetics organization based in Phoenix, Arizona.

He's a professor, having taught Greek systematic theology and various topics in the fields of apologetics. He's an author who contributed to more than 20 books, including The King James Only, Controversy, The Forgotten Trinity, The Potter's Freedom, and The God Who Justifies.

He's an accomplished debater, engaging in more than 75 moderated debates. Please welcome Dr. James White, who is the co-president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, and the author of the recently published book, Godless.

For your information, we have a coffee shop open in the back, and there is also a table full of books for you to purchase from all of the authors who are speaking today. It's in your program, on the first side.

Mr. Barker will be opening. If you have questions for the book table, and they will be sorted through. To this schedule is that there will be a five-minute break between Dr. White's closing and the audience questions.

Thank you for your time.

Myth, Imitation, and the Charge of Plagiarism

Thank you, Ken. Thank you, James. Good to see you again. And I can see James and I are in the same denomination. We both have Macs. And we are hoping to convert the rest of you by the end of today's, the rest of you troglodytes who are still using the L .A. system.

And thank you, Gilbert Christian, what is it? Gilbert Christian Church. And thank you all for coming. And I was going to start off today by saying that I felt like Daniel in the lion's den, because my name is Dan, but that's an old joke.

But it turns out I was going to only turn on the back up. There's a whole lot of non-believers here as well as believers. And I think a few of the support then, my brother, Darrell, and my dad down here, came down from the Olympian area.

He's got the hat on that says, out of the closet issues. There you go. And some others drove from away. So thank you so much for coming in. And I have to say that Ken and the staff here have been very warm and friendly and generous and welcoming.

And it's a real pleasure to be in a group like this. I'm not an expert. You can start with me. I'm not an expert in ancient mythology. I'm a former preacher who is still preaching, I guess. And this field of ancient mythology is very deep and very wide.

It's a fountain flowing deep and wide. But in my reading, I noticed that the experts in the field often disagree. The scholars of paganism as well as the scholars of Christianity are sometimes locked in fierce debates.

And I think that is healthy. That's how we learn things. There are very few claims about ancient history that have a high level of certainty. Like all scientists, historians have to work with probabilities.

We do have documents. We have monuments. But it is all interpretation. And just as with Christian theology, interpretations vary. I made up my own story, my own myth. Once upon a time, there were three little donkeys.

One of the donkeys built his house out of paper. One of them built his house out of sticks. The other one built his house out of bricks. Then along came a big bad elephant. And he huffed and he puffed and he blew down the house of paper and he got a match and he burned down the house of sticks.

But he couldn't break down the house of bricks. So he came back with a bulldozer and he demolished the house of bricks. Well, I'll tell you the rest of the gruesome story. But what did I base my story on?

The three little pigs. How did you know that? Did I mention the three little pigs? Did I copy the story exactly? How did you know it was the three little pigs? Because I'm appealing to your cultural knowledge when I write a story like that.

Suppose a historian 2 ,000 years from now were to discover my story, not knowing about the three little pigs and the possible political symbolism of donkeys and elephants, and interpret my story. She might doubt that a donkey could build a house, just as some doubt that Balaam's ass could talk or that there was actually a snake in the garden who could talk.

But that's beside the point. She would want to know the purpose and the message of my story. And suppose she were to discover the three little pigs story, would she say, ah-ha, Dan Martin is a thief, he plagiarized.

Suppose she discovered, oh, donkeys and elephants. Suppose she realized, oh, back then, oh, okay, I can see what Dan was trying to say. She would understand that I wasn't plagiarizing, I wasn't stealing.

She would understand that I was building on an earlier form in order to create my own work of art, my own story that I think is a better story. Maybe you disagree with that. There's a difference between imitation and emulation.

A story like Christianity doesn't have to exactly parallel or mirror every little detail of the pre-existing pagan stories in order to be seen as a copy or emulation of the earlier myths. In fact, we expect it not to be identical.

Otherwise, it wouldn't be a new religion. The new religion is trying to outdo the previous stories. So they have differences. All religions are unique. Christianity, Judaism, Mormonism is unique. Scientology, Islam, Rastafarianism, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is certainly a unique religion.

Are some of you here today? Uniqueness is in the modern details. All of these religions evolve from earlier traditions, and that's especially true of Christianity. Last summer, Annie and I were in New York City, and we went to see West Side Story.

We love that musical. The fact that West Side Story is a modern adaptation of Romeo and Juliet didn't detract from our enjoyment. Instead of the Monarchies and the Capulets, we have the Sharks and the Jets.

Instead of Romeo and Juliet, we have Tony and Maria. But it's the same story. The authors admitted it was the same story. They brought it up to date. The fact that many details are different, for example, Maria doesn't die in the end, doesn't mean it's not cut from the same tale.

In fact, it's the differences that prove the point. It's the same with Christianity. In the first century, there was already a huge template, many model stories upon which previous myths had been built.

There were dozens of ancient god men who came down from heaven. They were born of a god and a human female, often a virgin. They performed heroic, miraculous deeds. They were persecuted. They died tragic deaths.

They rose from the dead. Many of them ascended into heaven. But in the gospel story, the gospel version of that old tale, the god man is not called Osiris or Dionysus or Attis or Adonis or Augustus or Romulus.

His name is changed to Jesus. Different name, same story. In his book, Born Divine, The Births of Jesus and Other Sons of God, Robert Miller documents many miraculous births. Hercules, the Agenes, Alexander the Great, Caesar Augustus, Apollonius of Tyana, Pythagoras.

Let's just look at one of them, Caesar Augustus. In the first century BC, there was a resolution in the Provincial Assembly of Asia Minor in honor of Caesar Augustus. Look what it says. Whereas the prophets, or whereas God, which has guided our whole existence and has shown such care and liberality, has brought our life to the peak of perfection by giving to us Augustus Caesar, whom providence filled with virtue, and for the welfare of mankind being sent to us to our descendants as a savior, sotir, has put an end to war and has set all things in order.

Whereas God, having become visible, and whereas finding that the birthday of the God, Caesar Augustus, has been for the whole world the beginning of the gospel concerning him, therefore let all reckon a new era, beginning from the day of his birth.

Here he is. He's a savior. He brought peace on earth. He was a God who was made visible. And that phrase, beginning of the gospel, if you read the book of Mark, the first gospel, how does that gospel start?

The beginning of the gospel of Jesus. Randall Helms in the book Gospel Fictions tells this story. In the first century of the common era, there appeared at the eastern end of the Mediterranean a remarkable religious leader who taught the worship of one true God.

He declared that religion meant not the sacrifice of beasts, but the practice of charity and piety, the shunning of patron and enemy. He was said to have worked miracles of goodness, casting out demons, healing the sick, raising the dead.

His exemplary life led some of the scholars to claim he was a son of God. He called himself a son of man. Accused of sedition against Rome, he was arrested. After his death, his disciples claimed he had risen from the dead.

He appeared to them alive, and then he ascended up into heaven. Who was this teacher and wonder worker? Pope Polonius of Tyana. Tyana was in Nazareth. And you can read this story. He talked about the year 98 A .D., the next generation after Christianity.

You can read about it in Fr. Stratus's Life of Babylonians. Here is a clear example of a pre-Christian story from which the Jesus story was cut. Romulus, the founder of Rome. Romulus was called the son of God.

He was also called God, king, and father. He was prophesied to be the builder of a great city. He descended from heaven, born of a virgin and the god Mars. He became a god incarnate in order to establish a kingdom on earth.

He was murdered by the political elite. Romulus, when he died, darkness covered the earth at his death. The earth shook at his death. His body vanished. He appeared around the break of dawn to a disciple on a road to the city, revealing that he was resurrected.

He would ascend back to heaven to rule from on high. Romulus's death and resurrection were celebrated in annual public ceremonies since before Christian times. And these documents predate the Christian documents.

In her book, Miracles in Greco-Roman Antiquity, Wendy Potter documents many pre-Christian gods and heroes who heal. Hercules, Asclepius, Isis, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Pyrrhus, you can read the list.

She documents exorcisms and exorcists, gods and heroes who control nature, Aphrodite, Poseidon, the sons of Zeus, and Orpheus and so on. She even gives three examples of Dionysus changing water into wine.

The Gospels were not created ex nihilo. Christianity was not delivered by the stork. It had a parentage. Its most immediate parent was Judaism. But neither was Judaism delivered by the stork. It, too, had gone through a long history of evolution before the Christians came on the scene.

In his book, The River of God, Greg Riley describes how the early Israelites were not monotheistic. They did not have a body-soul dualism. They got that from the Greeks. Nor did they have a Satan. That came from Zoroastrians.

As evidence, Riley shows us the well-known contradiction in the Bible between 2 Samuel 24 .1 and 1 Chronicles 21 .1, both telling the same story about how David was pressured to take a census. In 2 Samuel, we read, and again, the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them to say, go number Israel and Judah.

But in 1 Chronicles, the same story says Satan stood up against Israel and provoked David to number Israel. So did the Lord make him do it, or did the devil make him do it? The answer to this contradiction is pretty easy, because it wasn't until the Babylonian captivity in 6th century BC that the Jews got the idea that God had a near-equal adversary who battles for the soul of humanity.

While the Jews were in Babylon, Babylon was conquered by the Persian Cyrus the Great, by the way whom the Jews called their Messiah, because he allowed them to return home. When they got back home, they brought along with them an evil Satan from the Zoroastrians.

So now we see why the Bible contradicts itself. 2 Samuel was written before the Babylonian captivity. 1 Chronicles was written after the Babylonian captivity. The Jewish God could be both good and bad, and the Jews now had someone else to blame.

Christianity inherited its devil from Judaism, which we see was cut from the even earlier pagan story. Dennis MacDonald, in his wonderful book, The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark, makes a strong cumulative case that the author of the first gospel patterned many of the Jesus stories primarily after Judaism, but then after the Odyssey and the Iliad.

I was surprised by this wonderful book, and you would love reading this book. Both were carpenters. MacDonald writes, Odysseus and Jesus both sail the seas with associates who are inferior, who weaken when confronted with suffering.

Both heroes return home to find them infested with murderous rivals and devour the houses of widows. Both oppose supernatural foes. They visit dead heroes. They prophesy their own returns in the third person.

A wise woman anoints each protagonist. Both eat last suppers with their comrades before visiting Medes, from which both return alive. In both works, we find gods stilling the storms and walking on water, meals for thousands at the shore, monsters in caves.

And of course, the Odyssey was many centuries before Christianity. Here's one example, the sleeping sailors. I wish I could show you all these examples, but this is amazing. Odysseus's crew boarded and sat down.

In Mark 4, we have the story where Jesus boarded the boat and sat down to teach. On a floating island, Odysseus told stories to Aeolians. On a floating boat, Jesus told stories to crowds. After a month, he took his lead, boarded and sailed with 12 ships.

When it was late, Jesus took his lead and sailed with other boats. Odysseus slept. Jesus slept at the stern. The greedy crew opened a sack of wind and created a storm, and there was a great gale of wind in the gospel.

The crew groaned. The disciples were helpless and afraid. Odysseus awoke and gave up hope. But Jesus, Mark's improving the story, Jesus awoke and stilled the storm. Odysseus complained of his crew's falling.

Jesus rebuked his disciples for lack of faith. Aeolius was the master of the winds. Jesus was the master of the seas. I wish I had time to read this whole parallel. This is incredible. The next chapter, Mark 5, about the demoniac of the Gerasenes, how point by point by point, even with the exact kinds of words and the phrasings, in terms of phrase, the Cyclops and the demon who both lived in caves are compared.

Obviously, Mark was familiar with Homer's work. The Sons of Thunder. In Mark chapter 3, we see where Jesus picked his disciples. He appointed the 12, Simon, to whom he gave the name Peter. You like to give nicknames, I guess.

James, the son of Zebedee and the brother of James, to whom he gave the name Boanerges. You know what that word means? Boanerges. Well, he translates it for us. The Sons of Thunder. These two twins, these guys who have one name for two guys, and they always speak in one voice, James and John, are amazingly parallel to Homer's Castor and Polydeuces.

Castor and Polydeuces were called the Sons of Tynderes, James and John were the Sons of Zebedee. They were also given another name. They were called the Dioscuri, the Sons of Zeus. The Boanerges, the Sons of Zebedee were given the name Boanerges, Sons of Thunder.

Of course, Zeus was the God of Thunder. Mark is copying or emulating the story here. They were twin brothers who spoke with one voice. They were Argonauts, sailors, or fishermen and sailors. Castor died a violent death.

James died a violent death. Not this James. Polydeuces could have lived forever. John was thought to live until the Parousia. Polydeuces asked Zeus if he and Castor could share a single immortality. Remember on the Transfiguration, the brothers asked if they could sit in Jesus' right hand and left hand.

Zeus consented, but Jesus refused. Here's another amazing parallel, and if we want to come back and look at this, the deaths of Agamemnon and John the Baptist over a sexual affair and the killing during a party, and this whole thing just goes point by point by point.

A fascinating parallel here is the defeating of the multitude. The first one's in Mark 6, the other one's in Mark 8. In the Odyssey, we also have two stories of the defeating of the multitude. Look at this first one.

Telemachus and Athena sailed and disembarked. Jesus and his disciples sailed and disembarked. They found a great crowd on the shore. They found a great crowd on the shore. 4 ,500 men. Well, Mark increases it to 5 ,000 men.

Everyone sat down in companies, nine groups of 500 each. Well, Mark had to say everyone sat down in companies, and he had to make it by ranks. He had to do the math, typically, of 150s. Peisistratus ordered the guests to sit.

Jesus ordered the people to sit. Nestor sacrificed, and others prayed. Jesus offered thanks to God. They took the meat and divided the food. Jesus took the loaves and fish and divided them. Everyone ate, and it was filled in both stories.

I have to skip the second defeating, but it's also quite similar and parallel to it. Now, MacDonald admits, and so do I, that any one of these hundreds of details might be accidental parallels, perhaps a similar way of telling similar stories.

But since there are literally hundreds of details, usually in the same order, and dozens of similar stories, off of the two parallel stories, followed immediately by another two parallel stories in the same order, or close to the same order, the cumulative case for emulation becomes too strong for historians to ignore.

Historians work in probabilities, and the likelihood that all of these coincidences are accidental becomes so tiny, it is virtually zero. Mark was emulating Homer. Now, the stories don't have to be exact to be seen as emulations.

You know, Roman and Juliet, what's that story? Or the Odyssey and Jesus, or those two stories. Pythagoras, he came up with the fish symbol. You take two circles and you put them together, and it's hard to see there.

And then the middle section becomes the sign of the fish, where those two symbols intersect. And Pythagoras worked out the ratio of the width to the height, which is the closest approximation they could get at that time, 265 to 153.

Those became mystery numbers. They didn't reveal those mystery numbers. Pythagoras believed that the numbers were special and mysterious. There's a story, he called it the measure of the fish. There's a story that when Pythagoras was journeying, he met near the shore with some fishermen.

They were drawing their nets heavily laden with fish from the deep, and he told them that he knew the exact number of fish that was in those nets. And he did tell them that, but he didn't tell the reader.

In John 21, John by the way is the most Gnostic of all the Gospel writers, Peter, Thomas, and Daniel, and the sons of Zebedee, were going fishing. They immediately entered a ship and they caught nothing.

But when the morning was now come, Jesus stood on the shore and he said to them, cast the net on the right side of the ship and you'll find it. They cast and they were not able to draw it for the multitude of fish.

Simon Peter went up and drew the net to the land full of great fishes. How many fish were there that they caught? John tells us 153 fish, the measure of the fish. John is obviously putting mystery numbers and things that his readers of his day would have known.

I also read some Christian authors, Jack Finnegan, I think he's an evangelical fundamentalist, myth and mystery in the background of the Gospels. I also read Everett Ferguson's huge book, I have it here, on the mythological background of Christianity.

Ferguson is a strong believer, he strongly believes in the faith of Jesus, but on the last page of his book, he has this two page section, the final payoff, what was unique in Christianity? We finally get to the end of this book, Romans, the Greeks, the Zoroastrians, the Canaanites, the Mesopotamians, the Egyptians and so on.

What was unique in Christianity? Ferguson cannot name one single thing after he surveys all this history. What he does is he says that Christian claims don't rest on its originality or on its uniqueness.

He says in order for Christianity to be true, we have to pass from history to faith. Now it's not just modern scholars, but even early Christians. In the second century, there was a Christian apologist who had been a pagan believer, who converted to Christianity, Justin Martyr, and he was arguing with the pagans about, you should all convert to Christianity.

You know why? Because it's no different. Look what he says, when we say also that the word was the first born of God, was produced without sexual union, and that he, Jesus Christ, our teacher, was crucified and rose again and ascended into heaven, we propound nothing different from what you pagans believe regarding those whom you esteem to be the sons of Jupiter.

Like Mercury, Jesus is the lowest. Like Perseus, he was born of a virgin. Like Asclepius, Jesus healed the sick. If early Christians claimed that the Jesus story was nothing different from paganism, who am I to disagree?

I commend all of you for being here this morning for an exceptionally important discussion on the subject of Jesus and whether he was cut from the mythological cloth of other religions or, as Christians have believed, whether Jesus is in fact unique as the son of God.

Published Arguments, Historical Method, and the Charge of Circularity

Now, in my opening, I can only respond to what Dan himself has published before. I found it fascinating that almost none of the sources that Dan just used, he used in his book, Godless. So in this first, I'll be responding to his published work, then the rebuttal will go to what he has presented this morning.

Can I respond to that? When you're in a scholarly debate and you've published a book, what you've published in the public realm is fair game. It is what you yourself have presented. Now, if you want to say, after I'm done here, I repudiate the book that's for sale in the back, that would be fine.

But I'm not a scholar.

I don't see anything wrong with quoting your book, Dr. Barker, or Mr. Barker. Do you have.

An objection to him? I object because we're not debating my book today. We're debating...

Mr. Barker, I have never engaged anyone in a debate who objected to their own published materials being what was cited. I would love if people would quote my books in my debates because that's what I have presented to people.

I cannot believe that there would ever be an objection to my citation of your own book. I can't imagine... Did you address this subject in your book? Is there not an entire section on this subject?

Yes, but you don't know that I may have changed my mind in the meantime on that, so it's unfair. I may have changed my mind about Meeker, for example.

Is your book for sale in the back? Yes, it is. But we're not debating my book tonight. How can we have a debate?

Let's debate the issues. Let's not debate my book. Let's debate the issues.

Mr. Barker, I have, on the screen, quotations from you. I might be dealing with the sources that you've used and the arguments that you've used. That is the form of scholarly debate.

But we're not debating my book tonight. And for the record, I think it's inappropriate. I didn't quote anything you wrote. I stuck to the actual...

That's the point. That's the problem. We need to deal with what someone has actually put into the public realm. Your book is for sale. I cannot believe on any possible academic or scholarly level. I have done more debates than you have done.

This is the first time anyone has ever objected to the citation of their own published material, which is still in print. If you had pulled it out and repudiated it, that would be one thing. Are you going to do that?

The moderator has already spoken.

I think it's reasonable, then, to use a source that is available on the topic. Isn't it, in your mind? If there's something out there, whether it's quality or not.

This is a presentation that I put together, and Dan has given his objection to quoting him. I'm sorry, but I do not see how you can have a meaningful dialogue on this subject if what the person himself has put into the public realm is not available.

I would just like to say, before I begin my time again and my presentation, that I would be honored if people would quote my books, especially when I address the specific topic of the debate. That shows that you have done your homework in listening to what the other person has to say, and if I put something in print, if I change my mind, I'm going to let people know, and I'm going to pull it out of the print.

So I think that's just simply the way it needs to go. So can I make my presentation now? Okay, thank you very much. All right, we continue on. Dan has written in his book, Godless, which is available in the back, so you can check the references.

I'm now convinced that the Jesus story is a combination of myth and legend mixed with a little bit of real history unrelated to Jesus. And he presented four arguments in his book on this foundation. He said that there is no external historical confirmation for the New Testament stories.

Secondly, that the New Testament stories are internally contradictory. Third, and this is the main subject of our debate, that there are natural explanations for the origin of the Jesus legend. And finally, the miracle reports make the story unhistorical.

That is, the presence of the supernatural in the gospel stories make it an unhistorical source. Now, I need to address each one of these arguments, but I want to focus primarily on number three. The first argument is that there is no external historical confirmation for the New Testament stories.

Now, this requires an amazingly biased view of history itself. The New Testament gospels, acts, many of the epistles are unlike such works as the Book of Mormon because the New Testament gospels, acts, and epistles are filled with rich historical detail, both geographically and politically.

That is, they give us information from the first century demonstrating that these writings came from that particular time period. At one point, Mr. Barker comments on manuscript rival 457, better known as P52, from John chapter 18, dated to AD 100 to AD 125.

And he makes reference to this and says that there is no way to verify from these few verses whether the rest of John or any of the remainder of the New Testament is reliable. The numbers are to the page references in the book, Godless.

Now, let's think about this for just a moment. Surely, on the level of reliability as far as historic accuracy or honesty goes, no manuscript is even relevant to such an inquiry. However, what P52 does tell us is that John, as the Gospel of John, in the form in which we have it today, existed in the first decade of the second century, which puts its initial writing well into the first century.

It likewise tells us that the manuscript tradition we have is, in fact, very reliable. The second argument that was presented is the New Testament stories are eternally contradictory. Now, Mr. Barker's work provides no interaction with serious scholarly works offering consistent, sound, exegetically insightful discussions of any of the alleged contradictions that he offers.

Here are some examples provided from the book. On page 265, Dan writes, even Paul's supposed confirmation of the resurrection, 1 Corinthians 15, 3 -8, contradicts the Gospels when it says that Jesus first was seen of Cephas, that is, Peter, then of the twelve.

Notice the insertion of the word first into Dan's sentence. It is not a quote from the Bible. Paul did not say Peter was first seen by Jesus. And there isn't the first logical reason why anyone would assume that a brief creedal summary was being given as an exhaustive list of all the appearances of Jesus after his resurrection in chronological order.

Paul's statement, coming, as most critical scholars admit, from within the first few years after Jesus' crucifixion, is still not better than the Gospel stories themselves, well known to all who would be reading Paul.

So it is Dan who is creating, out of whole cloth, a contradiction that nowhere exists in any semi-reasonable reading of the text. This is a hallmark of much of what you see in the atheist writings on the Bible today.

Dennis McKenzie is a special example of that. Here's another example. Barker notes Luke's mention of Quirinius as governor of Syria, yet he shows no familiarity with any of the scholarly discussion, the translation of Protei, issues relating to our lack of knowledge of the political situation at the time of Cephas.

The reality is that there are a number of perfectly fair, historically sound explanations for Luke's statements, none of which gets a fair hearing in the discussion that was provided. But the focus is upon the third argument.

There are natural explanations for the origin of the Jesus legend. Now, at this point, Mr. Barker lists eight different natural explanations of the Jesus legend. I would say with the presentation he just made, that's now at least 16 to 20.

It is important to point out that each of these explanations, and this would be true with what he added, is completely contradictory to the other seven. That is, if any one is true, the other seven are false.

Consider the consistency of this kind of argumentation. When you add in the other option, that is, that Jesus existed and that the New Testament documents are more than sufficient to demonstrate this, that's a total of nine options, just in his book, all completely contradictory to the others, meaning any single one in Mr. Barker's offering has an 11 chance of being correct.

And now with the presentation this morning, that number is about half of that. Is that the kind of solid historical argumentation that can carry the day? Now, a debate is not for proper context, but the foundational discussion of how to do serious historical inquiry and thinking.

However, it must be stated that the vast majority of material flowing from Prometheus' books, the Jesus Seminar of Agents, and other proponents of either a Jesus mythology or a Gnostic Jesus theory comprises a mythology all unto itself.

Through selective use of facts and horribly imbalanced application of context, an entire cottage industry has appeared over the past two decades, an industry that makes its living through anti-Christian propaganda, ignoring counter-evidence to volumes of sound historical scholarship standing in opposition to their conclusions.

These writers pursue a single goal, the denial of the Christian message. Double standards abound as these writers draw parallels that are totally unfounded on any serious historical basis. We will, unfortunately, see many examples of this in our examination today.

Now, any fair examination of the New Testament documents demonstrates the following. First of all, they are consistent with the context of Second Temple Judaism in the first part of the first century.

Secondly, they demonstrate a clear firsthand knowledge of Judea and Galilee in the same period. And thirdly, they present a consistent testimony to the Jewish Messiah prophesied in the Tanakh, that is, in the Old Testament scriptures.

Now, some of the naturalistic arguments listed by Mr. Barber are barely worthy of note, such as the pre-Christian Joshua cult theory, which was utterly unsubstantiated, or the Old Testament parallels theory, which was likewise left utterly unsubstantiated.

But the third possible source, the Jesus legend, is very popular amongst atheists today. A compilation of various and divergent pagan mythologies, such as those of Acts, Dionysus, Osiris, and most importantly, the Persian religion of Mithraism.

Now, the number of reasons that has led serious critical scholarship to reject this kind of parallelomania is so great that we cannot even begin to list them all in 20 minutes of time. We can only summarize in general and give a few specifics in reference to Mithraism.

First, these sources regularly use Christian language to describe pagan beliefs, and then feign amazement at the resultant parallels. Witness, for example, the assertion that Dionysus was virgin-born.

He was actually, in most versions of the story, sewn into Zeus' thigh and born from there after his mother was killed. That's not quite a virgin birth in the biblical sense. Or the common statement that Osiris experienced a baptism when, in fact, his coffin was thrown in the Nile.

Or that Osiris was resurrected when, in fact, his dismembered body was put back together so he could become the zombified lord of the underworld. None of these pagan myths have any logical or meaningful connection to Christian beliefs about resurrection, the afterlife, baptism, or salvation.

We must also note the fundamental difference between the monotheistic Judaism that formed the background of Christian belief and the polytheistic mythology of pagan beliefs. The Christian faith is based upon a firm assertion that the events of Jesus' life took place in history at a particular time and a particular place.

Pagan mythology did not ground its stories in history at all. An extended citation providing alleged parallels to Mithraism is provided by Mr. Barker on pages 270 and 271 of the Goddess, drawn from this work, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara Walker.

Mr. Barker identifies Barbara Walker as a historian when, in reality, her only schooling, as far as I've been able to determine, is in journalism. The majority of her published works are on knitting. She is an atheist feminist, but as we are about to see, her willingness to distort historical facts and present historical fiction is simply astounding.

A brief scan of other portions of this work reveal incredible errors of fact and representation, errors utterly beyond defense. The work is grossly anti-Christian, biased, and, as a work of history, completely worthless.

Here are some examples of fallacious historical argumentation from Goddess by Dan Barker, even though in this first number he's quoting from Barbara Walker. Cool. Mithra was born on the 25th of December, which was finally taken over by Christians in the 4th century as the birthday of Christ.

Now, the day of the birth of Christ is not a part of the Christian scriptures. The reality is that January 6th was discussed earlier than December 25th, and what is more, Mithraism coming into the Roman Empire in the 2nd century arrives too late to be relevant to the formation of Christianity.

This has been known and documented for nearly a century. What is more, there is much dispute as to who borrowed from who at this point, as there is reason to identify Christian discussion of December 25th prior to the earliest Mithraic references.