Jesus Borrowed from Pagan Mythology?

Pagan Mythology Claims and the Jesus Mythicism Question

Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Eli Ayala, and today we are going to be talking about Jesus mythology stuff, okay? Was Jesus borrowed from pagan mythology? Were various elements of the Bible borrowed from, you know, pagan myth?

This is something that is not as popular as it used to be, but it's still floating around, and I think is an issue that is worth addressing. If you want a more in-depth look into the question of whether the idea of Jesus was borrowed from pagan mythology, I mean, definitely check out Michael Jones' YouTube channel, Inspiring Philosophy.

He's got an entire playlist where he provides responses to these alleged parallels between Jesus and various pagan deities of the mystery religions. So you definitely wanna check that out. Well, just a few things before we invite Michael on to join us.

I will be having Dr. Phil Fernandez on, today is Wednesday, isn't it, right? On Thursday, he will be coming on at 10 p .m. with me, Dr. Phil Fernandez, he's a Christian apologist, and we'll be discussing kind of general apologetic stuff, but it's definitely going to be an interesting discussion.

So hopefully you guys can join in that discussion tomorrow at 10 p .m. Also, for folks who are interested in learning apologetics, I offer an online course in which I teach on my website, Revealed Apologetics.

You can sign up for that if that interests you. And for those who recognize the importance that a good, solid theology is related to having a good, solid apologetic, I will be offering a systematic theology course that I'm currently working on.

And when that's released, I'll let folks know you can sign up for that. And of course, that will be a wonderful course to take in conjunction with apologetics, since they're very much related. In Jude chapter one, verse three, we are told to earnestly contend for the faith once for all delivered.

And so we are contending for the faith that has been delivered, the body of Christian truth. And so we need to know what that Christian truth is. And of course, that is something that very much strengthens our apologetic, all right?

So folks can definitely sign up for that when that's out. So just giving all those little heads up. And without further ado, I'd like to invite Michael onto the screen with me. Michael, how are you doing?

Good, how are you doing? Thanks for having me. Well, thank you so much for coming on. I know you're super busy, but I'm excited that, just a little busy, but I'm excited that you agreed to come on and discuss this topic, which you've probably discussed ad nauseum, I'm sure.

Is that the case? Have you talked about this topic beyond?

Probably not at this point. I find it funny and a little bit of fun because it's such an easy one to address to the point where it's just like, okay, yeah, let's do it again.

This will be like, practice round for a little more hard topic. Yeah, I'm actually glad you said that because a lot of skeptics who use this sort of argumentation assert it with such confidence. But it's really cool to hear that, if I were to ask Michael, does the Jesus was borrowed from pagan mythology objection or argument, does that make you lose sleep as a Christian?

How would you respond to that?

No, because I've read a lot of the scholarship on it, like from JZ Smith to Jan Bremer, Martin Hengel, you name it. I mean, very, very few scholars are convinced Jesus is borrowed from pagan mythology and they're very, very fringe ones.

And a lot of them try to like downplay it. They won't say Jesus is borrowed from pagan mythology. He's like the Jewish version of like this dying and rising God motif from the ancient world, which is just nonsense and easy to address as well.

Show Me Your Source: Horus, Serapis, and the Problem of Fabricated Parallels

Yeah, well, that's good to know for folks who are well-versed in these sorts of debates. Maybe that's not a big deal, but for those who are probably listening and you really deal with this sort of stuff and maybe on the internet or with interactions with friends, that should be encouraging that Christians who study these issues don't lose sleep over these sorts of objections.

Christianity has been around for 2 ,000 years, at least as Christianity, labeled Christianity. Of course, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever, but Christianity has been around for quite some time.

And there has been a lot of interaction with objections and things like that. And Christianity has done a pretty darn good job in withstanding the various assaults throughout history. So, well, let's begin then.

I wanna begin by reading a quote and then we'll just jump right into our discussion. The quote comes from a very, very scholarly source. Perhaps you'll be familiar with it. It comes from the movie Religulous that was put out by Bill Maher some years ago.

We can laugh, but there have been some Christians who were shaken up from that sort of bad argument. So here's the quote here. Written in 1280 BC, the Egyptian Book of the Dead describes a god, Horus.

Horus is the son of the god Osiris, born to a virgin mother. He was baptized in a river by Anup, the baptizer, who was later beheaded. Like Jesus, Horus was tempted while alone in the desert, healed the sick, the blind, cast out demons and walked on water.

He raised Asar from the dead. Asar translates to Lazarus. Oh yeah, he also had 12 disciples. Yes, Horus was crucified first and after three days, two women announced Horus, the savior of humanity, had been resurrected.

Okay, so there you go, Michael. You blind faith Christian, you are basically just worshiping Horus or some variation. How would you respond, not simply to that idea, but the interesting use of vocabulary?

The quote there uses a lot of Christian-sounding vocabulary. And that's usually what draws people, kind of pulls people aback. How would you address this issue of the apparent similarity of language with how folks use this sort of argument against Jesus?

I ask for their source. You gotta be like, well, where are you getting this from? Like just because you heard this somewhere on the internet, that doesn't mean it actually shows up in Egyptian mythology.

And I never get sources for this stuff. I'll get things like, well, it's on the walls of Kemet or something. It's in those inscriptions or it's in the book of the dead. You know, the Egyptian book of the dead is online.

You can find a translation just by Googling it and you could go through and read it yourself. None of that is an Egyptian mythology. Sometimes all you have to do is ask for their source. And a lot of people bring up Horus or Serapis today or like Hebrew Israelites and they'll try to use it.

You know, like everything comes from Africa or any kind of thing. And the way to respond to that sometimes is just to be like, well, what's your source? Where are you getting this from? Because there is no sources say Horus had 12 disciples or that he was crucified or rose from the dead or healed anyone like that.

It's just based on late, sometimes from the 19th century writers who just were making things up whole cloth or sometimes 20th century authors. So where's your, what's the evidence? Where are you getting that from?

Just because you found a claim. So Michael, real quick then. So when someone says, oh, he had 12 disciples, there are people who use this argument, they're literally making that up. There's not a source that they're drawing from or maybe they're drawing from secondary sources that are misinterpreting the original source.

I mean, are people just literally making this up and saying, I think I'm gonna say he had 12 disciples just like Jesus.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of this comes from like someone like Gerald Massey from the 19th century who just made a lot of this stuff up. He was like laughed out of a room by Egyptologists. Like, it's like, there's nothing else to really say.

It's when someone makes claims like that, they need to show the evidence it comes from. Like if you see in my videos, I'm always putting quotes. I'll give you like the book, the page numbers. You can go check it yourself.

If it's like, I'm getting something from a follow about January, I'll give you the reference. I'm getting something from Tacitus, I'll give you the reference. A lot of the people just make those claims without sources.

There's nothing other to do than say, well, you've not given me the evidence, so let's move on.

Why Correlation Is Not Causation in Ancient Religion

So let's jump specifically then. So someone says, hey, the concept of Jesus was borrowed from Horace. And what are some things that you could respond more specifically instead of just saying, show me your source?

And that's which obviously is a death knell to their position because if there's no source, then they're making it up. But what are some specific things that we can equip people with when they hear those sorts of things?

Well, you gotta point out just how illogical this sounds on the surface. So you're telling me like pious Jews that were trying to separate themselves from paganism, decided to adapt pagan myths and incorporate them into their own beliefs.

I'm sorry, like that just, that does not fit with the Jewish context from which Christianity emerged from. Then you gotta assume that this does not apply in other circumstances. And they don't want it to apply in other circumstances.

So I've used this before. In Australia, there's a tribe called the Nui Nui tribe. And they had a story about where death came from, how death came into the world. The first man and woman were forbidden to go near a sacred tree that a divine being that manifested as a bat lived in.

One day, the woman was too close to the tree and the bat flew away and death came into the world. Clearly that's evidence they knew about Genesis and Adam and Eve and everything. And I've seen some younger creationists use that as evidence that they had knowledge of like Genesis.

Well, you know, Aboriginal scholars, scholars that are experts in this religion just say, this is actually just a coincidence. Like Ezra Rowing, he says like, they both evolved out of their own like sex symbolism.

Like this is just an independent tradition from Australia. There's no connection to Genesis. Sometimes there's just coincidences. Now that's a real, that's actually a real story. Like that's actually in his book.

Yeah, that's a real story that they actually believed. And it's just a coincidence. So correlation doesn't necessarily mean there's a causal link there. Now, even if the horror stuff was true and it isn't, there's no evidence for it.

That doesn't even demonstrate there's a causal link because correlation isn't causation. So they want to say the correlations in some of these instances, like maybe Osiris or Baal or Zalmoxis, Asclepius, those correlations are enough to draw a connection to Jesus.

But they were going to reject a young earth creationist who might use that same argument. And a young earth creationist could do with other tribes. Like there's, you can find similarities to Genesis among Native American tribes.

Sometimes, given the plethora of religions out there that have existed, you're going to have coincidences sometime. We humans don't like coincidences, but sometimes they exist. But I mean, again, it boils down to the fact that when it comes to something like Horus, there's just no evidence.

Or when it comes to something like Osiris, when you dive into those alleged similarities, they're not really similarities. They're just vague generalizations. And in a sense, a skeptic is committing a logical fallacy known as a hasty generalization.

So when they say, okay, he had 12 disciples. Hey, he was betrayed and he was killed and he was raised from the dead. The Christian is well within his rights to say, I have no reason to believe that's true.

Show me the source. That's it, the end of argument, because there's no source that they can give that doesn't already come from a source that is misusing the material. Because you can quote books that say that, right?

Don't do their homework for them. A lot of time, we as Christians, we wanna respond with like, well, let me go look and let me find the scholars that debunk this. Make them do their own work.

Like don't do the work for them. They don't just make claims without evidence. Right, right, okay, very good. Now, okay, so when you say, well, pious Jews, why would pious Jews borrow from these pagan mythological deities, things like that?

When we look at, for example, in the ancient Mediterranean world, first century, you had a lot of religions that were syncretistic. And of course, Judaism was famous for, or infamous, I guess, in the ancient world for being exclusivistic.

But what happens when someone says, well, wait a minute, there is historical evidence that Jews in certain situations were syncretistic. I mean, you have depictions of Zeus in some Jewish artwork and things like that that have been discovered.

And so it wasn't impossible that Jews can include in this syncretistic way, these other elements. How do we know Jesus' disciples or Jesus' earlier followers or followers, or I can't say followers, because Jesus is a myth.

I guess people who are constructing all this, how do we know they weren't those sorts of Jews?

How would you respond to that? Well, because there's just no evidence of that. For example, we can see syncretism, we can see ancient writers trying to merge like Belhadad with Zeus, or Zeus and Thor, or they're doing like Serapis, they're mixing Greek ideas into Egyptian mythology.

We have evidence of that. We have no evidence of that when it comes to the founding of Christianity. It's all inferred from vague generalizations, very, very minute similarities, and you ignore this vast swathe of differences.

There's just no textual evidence of a causal link there. So once again, they need to provide some sort of evidence that that actually happened, other than just mere hasty generalizations. Like, oh, Jesus is the son of God.

Romulus is the son of God. Therefore, like, come on, you need more than that. Right, now, I like what you said.

You can't just make the assertion. So if someone says, for example, well, there were Jews who were syncretistic, that doesn't demonstrate, nor is it evidence for the specific case of the early Jewish followers of Jesus.

So the existence of syncretistic Jews doesn't automatically say that the followers of Jesus were syncretistic Jews. Would that be correct?

Right, and we don't really have a lot of evidence that they would do such a thing. Do they, like, share similarities in terms of, like, structural writing? Yeah, like, the Gospels share similarities with Greco-Roman biographies.

Luke, it's been argued that Luke is writing like a physician writes in that same sort of structure. Okay, just because there's similarities in that, that's just more part of the cultural river. That doesn't mean they were going, I really like this stuff about this Delmoxus.

Let's throw a little bit of that in there, and let's go down to Egypt and take some stuff from Osiris. I mean, that's, again, that's a leap in logic. You gotta give me more than just that. So, like, let me give an example.

Everyone knows, and you know, people who know Greek mythology know the story of Zeus. He turned himself into a swan and slept with the Spartan queen, Leta. That's proof that the Mayans stole mythology from the Greeks, because in their mythology, one of the hero twins, one of the most famous deities in that culture, turns himself into a hummingbird and sleeps with the daughter of a mountain goddess.

Therefore, you just can't have that kind of coincidence. Clearly, the Mayans took the story of Zeus and Queen Leta and adapted it to their own mythology and their own needs, just like the Christians took, like, these pagan myths and adapted them for their own needs.

Like, you can find similarities across a vast array of different religious ideas. Just because you can find this stuff doesn't mean there's actually a causal link there. And mythicists, a lot of these mythicists want to take these correlations and run wild with it, but they wouldn't apply it for, like, Mayan and Greek mythology, because obviously that's absurd.

Parallelomania and the Problem of Overreading Similarities

Now, a lot of things that Christians use in response to, and not even just Christians, I guess scholars who are acquainted with this material will often accuse Jesus mythicists and people who use this sort of argumentation of parallelomania.

Why don't you define what parallelomania is and why it's a problem in addressing this specific area of drawing these comparisons?

Yeah, I like the term parallelomania, because it's like It's fun to say. Parallelomania, yeah. It's fun to say, too. I can say it five times fast. Yeah, you're finding parallels wherever, you know,.

Anywhere you look. Do you know, if you say it five times in a row, Richard Carrier appears. I mean, it's kind of like a Bloody Mary sort of thing.

Yeah, I remember reading his stuff on Pagan Deities, and then I went and read one of his sources, Trygve Mettinger, The Riddle of the Resurrection, and I was like, a lot of this stuff you're getting is not what Mettinger is saying.

Like, I even mentioned it in my video on Baal. But yeah, parallelomania is this idea you just find parallels in anything. When it comes to the Bible, it's like the Jews could never have had an original thought.

Everything had to come from some Pagan tradition or author somewhere else. They had to get it from Berossus or Herodotus or Babylon. It's like, no matter where you look, there's gotta be some sort of similarity there.

And it's like, guys, sometimes coincidences just happen. Like, there's sometimes you're just gonna be overlapped just because humans have lived through so many stories or have come up with stories or have so many tales of their past.

You're gonna find similarities. Like, you can do that with like, in the modern world, there's a lot of similarities between Admiral Nelson, the great British general, and a Korean general named Admiral Yi.

I mean, they're both famous generals who do basically one war single-handedly kind of attitude. It's like, look, just because you can find similarities, that doesn't mean there's necessarily a connection.

And you gotta do more than just find similarities.

So, yeah, I was thinking, well, why couldn't the Jews just get their idea of Jesus as the Messiah from the Old Testament? I mean, why does it have to be drawn from these other Pagan, you know? I mean, it seems to be that that Jewish context was the main context of the early disciples.

I don't see why Yeah, so now, okay, so we have the Old Testament, okay? And we have a lot of these mystery religions in the first century going on. Does the, do the mystery religions predate the Old Testament data or any of it?

So for someone says, well, look, they've got all these similarities, and someone says, well, wait a minute. We don't need those similarities because we have the Old Testament and Jesus, you know, all the things that we say about Jesus can be drawn from the Old Testament.

And some people might say, well, some of that material predates the Old Testament. You know, how would you respond to something like that?

Some of the similarities don't even predate the New Testament. So Jan Bremer, Glenn Bowersock, Martin Hengel, they'll make a lot of the similarities you see in the mystery cults. There were no mystery religions in the ancient world.

Mystery cult was like a vitamin supplement to the Paganism or the polytheism of the day. It was like a little something extra you could do. It's sort of like today, you can be like, you know, you mean like in the Elks Club, for example, or you can be like a Mason.

It's like, it's a supplement. Yeah, it's sort of like that. But like Martin Hengel says, on the contrary, we should reckon rather that there were strong Christian influence on the later evidence of mysteries from the third and fourth centuries AD.

Jan Bremer says the same thing. Glenn Bowersock wrote a book, History is Fiction. He argued that during the Neroan persecution, after that, just after that, we see a lot of the mystery cults start taking Christian ideas and borrowing them.

Like Dionysus doesn't turn water into wine until after that event.

Well, so that's key, Michael. So that's key, Michael. So if someone does draw a genuine parallel, then it's easy to show that the genuine parallel is only genuine in its parallel nature because it is developed after the fact.

And so because these Pagan religions or cults were by its nature syncretistic, it makes sense that they would borrow as opposed to, say, Christians borrowing from them.

Well, take something like Zoroastrianism. I mean, some will say that Jesus is sort of like an amalgamation of Zoroaster or that the Jews during the Babylonian exile borrowed from the Zoroastrian religion.

So there's a pretty big parallel they always are claiming. Sure. It's funny. I always make this, point this out. The Bible is always guilty until proven innocent. It's always the Bible that's the guilty one.

Could it be that maybe the Zoroastrianist borrowed from the Judeo-Christian side? No, no, never. Never can be that. It can never be that. However, scholars will note that the Avesta, the original Avesta was probably lost.

The history's burned at some point. And the Avesta we currently have was written down like the fourth century AD. And then it was changed and modified up to the ninth or 10th century AD. So scholars like Jimmy Rose and Michael Berger will argue that actually the Zend-Avesta was changing and modifying based on influence from Islam and Christianity.

Because it was really being challenged as these religions grew. And so they put forth the argument that actually all these alleged similarities may have come from Christian influence. Now we have no way of actually knowing, or I mean, Christian and Islamic influence.

But it's funny how the Bible's always the one that's guilty until proven innocent. If there's a similarity with Zoroastrianism, it's gotta be that the Bible borrowed. It cannot be that the Zoroastrian texts borrowed from Christians, even though the texts like the Avesta, they post-date Jesus.

And we know they were changed and modified from the one after that. It's funny that skeptics will, they can't trust the gospel so they were in a couple of decades after Jesus existed, but they can trust the Avesta written like millennia after like the battle of exile to accurately tell us what the Zoroastrian beliefs were during that period.

It's like It exposes an extreme bias against the Bible, which demonstrates that a lot of these skeptics are not as objective as they claim to be.

Yeah, the Bible's always the one that's guilty until proven innocent. We can't judge it like we judge other ancient documents. And a lot of skeptics hate me or attack me when I say that, but I mean, I can find so many examples where that happens.

Well, I suppose the only,.

One skeptic that you debated that I thought was the most unbiased was Aaron Ra, who has no presuppositions or biases. By the way, I just recently, you had a question of my aptitude as an apologist if I actually meant that.

Well, he's not biased and we can test that. That's right.

And you can test that. No, no, you have to say it with the, and you can test that.

If anyone says they're not biased, they're either a computer or a bias liar. Yeah.

There is a gentleman who has a YouTube channel called the Wise Disciple. He used to be a debate teacher and he did a review of your, I think your cross-examination with Aaron Ra. That was great. Yeah, I love that.

And I thought he gave an excellent analysis there. So, all right. So in your opinion, what is the best and most, how can I say this? What is the best parallel that has been drawn where, okay, you're wrong, but I have to deal with this objection you're bringing up.

What's the best and what's the worst?

I would say the worst is Horace, obviously. I mean, that's just, he just makes stuff up out of thin air. And, you know, even like very like, like mysticists like Richard Carrier won't even acknowledge that's just nonsense.

But the best, and this is like, this is not saying it's like, this is like a worthy challenge. It's the best by like, you know, it's like not, it's like saying like, you know, it's the best by like, you know, just comparison, like it's been grading on a curve almost, is Bale.

And the reason why I say Bale is just because there is cultural competition in the Bible. You know, Bale is a rider of the clouds and the biblical authors are like, you think your God rides the clouds.

Actually, it's our God that's the cloud rider. Or you think your God's the most high. Actually, it's Yahweh that's the most high. It's really Mount Zion that is really, you know, the height of, you know, out there.

And so there's that going on. Now, in the Bale cycle, this Eugretic myth, parts of it are missing. And so there's a debate if Bale actually dies and comes back to life in it. There's this idea where Bale goes and he fights the God of death, Ma.

He goes down to the underworld, fights him, but that part is missing. We don't know what happens. And in the myth, the Bale myth is confusing. Like at one point, they find Bale's body at the edge of the world, but then the God of death, Ma, says he swallowed Bale whole.

So it's like, well, what happened to Bale? Well, there's a debate if Bale actually dies in that. And there's just not enough evidence to make a solid conclusion, but I don't think he does. There's like a later like Arabic inscription that says, that I mentioned in my video, where it doesn't say, says Bale has not died.

He has just been cut off. And Bale's a storm God. He's not a sun God, despite what crazy fringe conspiracies there say. He's a storm God. And he's got a lot of similarities to like Hittite storm gods that don't die.

They just disappear. They come back. It's like the storms, like the rainy season comes back and goes away. They don't die in the Hittite myth. They just sort of disappear for a while. And the Bale cycle never says Bale was resurrected.

It just says Bale's alive. He's alive. Oh my gosh. So like the other gods, like Ale and Anut may have been confused and thought he was dead, but he was just hiding somewhere. We don't know. Bale cycle's been, it's fragmented.

So we're missing all these sections, but because it's got, Bale is mentioned in the Bible. There's cultic competition. That's going to be the closest because that's, you know, that's the closest to what the biblical authors would have been aware of.

I guess the nature of that competition is going to, it's going to draw out various similarities, just like the nature of the case.

But when you start to look, but I mean, the connected that Jesus is just, it's just a long stretch at best. I mean, by the time you get to the new Testament, Bale's not even in picture anymore. I mean, like, there's like vague mention.

You're like, you know, sure. Bale's above is sort of like a variation. I forget the exact connection to that, but it's some sort of means like Lord of the underworld somehow. But I mean, it's that point.

Bale's just not even picture anymore. They're more worried about, you know, the influence of Rome and the Greco Roman influence. I mean, Bale was more of a problem during like the iron age period. So for like so much of Jewish authors to say, we're just going to make our own version of Bale and say that he was a man on earth.

It was crucified and died is it's just absurd nonsense. You're, you're drawing way too much on vague generalizations and not enough differences, but, you know,.

It's like with all the pagan deities, there's just no connection there. Now I remember interacting with a skeptic online back in the day before all this YouTube stuff. And they said something to the effect of, you know, why don't you go, go home and worship your God?

Hey, Zeus, instead of Jesus, of course, but, but, but he was dead serious. You know, I kind of continued on the discussion and he was convinced that Jesus is just made up from Zeus. How would you speak to something as sin?

And I asked that question on purpose because it is, it was part of my second question. What what's the best argument they use? What's the worst? That's pretty bad. How would you address something as bad as bad as that?

I mean, it's like, what, what are you talking about?

Like, I mean, that's not how you even say Jesus in Greek. It's like, just because there's a connection in Spanish, like a couple thousand years later. He's trying to relate to me. He's trying to relate to me.

I'm Puerto Rican. He was trying to make that connection. Yeah. It's like, there's, there's no similarities between Zeus and Jesus. I mean, Jesus comes a human dies, resurrects Jesus or Zeus just can't keep it in his pants.

That's all of Greek mythology in a nutshell. That's very accurate.

Zeus cannot keep it in his pants. That's a very,.

That's all of Greek mythology in a nutshell. Okay. Okay. So, all right.

So a lot of, a lot of informed skeptic. I'm going to use that. I'm going to use that language sparingly, because if you are informed, then you'll, you will know that these are bad arguments. However, you do have some smart people who, who still find these arguments convincing.

What are some of the sources they use? I mean, not all of them are just shooting from the hip. You know what I'm saying? If we can kind of throw a bone to some of these, these guys, they're not shooting from the hip.

They are getting their information from some sources. What are some of the sources that people used when constructing these sort of arguments and parallels and things like that? Well, there are various sources.

What a lot of them will try to say, the more sophisticated skeptics will not be like the Jesus was directly borrowed from paganism. They'll be like, there was a motif in the ancient world, like a dying and rising motif, like every culture of dying and rising God, based on like, it wasn't so much they were copying one another.

It's like they, they saw the same cycle of the sun. And so they had a deity based on that. The sun seems, you know, metaphorically dies in the winter and comes back to life in the summer or the agricultural cycles.

Yeah. And those exist. And there are deities that are surround those types of cycles. The problem is, is that there's just, that's not at all the gospels. Christianity is not related to that whatsoever.

You really got to bend things in the gospels and make that fit to the way that just most like 99 .9 of scholars just reject outright. But so a lot of the more sophisticated schools will try to do something like that.

And they'll look at the, it is like maybe like a Nana or it's like I mentioned bail, or then they'll do something like maybe make a milk cart. Who is a Tyrian deity. Sometimes he's like synthesized with Hercules and they'll do things like that.

They'll try asclepias as well. Who's not one of those deities, but you know, he's a healing deity. So Jesus healed. So they try to connect that as well. So it depends. They tried to build like these, these grand ideas that there's this dying and rising motif in the ancient world and every culture had to have one.

And so the Jews just had to have one as well. And when you start, and so when you start to get into the details of it, the argument really starts to break down and you start to question so much assumptions and there are correlations and the arguments just start to break down quite easily.

The Historical Roots of the Jesus Mythology Theory

Why don't you explain for us? Cause I think one of the key differences between a lot of these mystery cults and you know, not even the mystery cults, just like even the worship of Zeus and some of the Greek Pantheon, the Roman Pantheon, something that is uniquely is unique about the Christian faith is that it's very much rooted in history, which unlike a lot of these other religious perspectives, these mythologies and things like that, I just want to read real quick for folks.

I mean, when you read mythology and you read the gospels, there is no similarity that's relevant and worth talking about. I just want to read Luke chapter three, verses one through three. So people can get an idea that the author of Luke really sees himself writing history.

So let's take a look real quick. Luke chapter three, verse one through three. Now in the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, Herod being Tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip, Tetrarch of Iteria and the region of Trachonitis and Lysanias, Tetrarch of Abilene.

While Annas and Caiaphas were high priests, the word of God came to John, the son of Zacharias in the wilderness. And he went into all the region around the Jordan, preaching a baptism of repentance for the remission of sins.

I mean, that short little paragraph looks like it's terribly concerned about the historical details of what's going on. Why don't you speak to that? How, I mean, I just gave one example. How does the Bible uniquely differ with respect?

I mean, what about these other, you know, mythic cults and things like that? I mean, don't they take place in a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away? Why don't you speak to the ambiguity of the context of those myths in comparison to the context of the New Testament?

Yeah, a lot of them do.

A lot of them are, they don't, they're not trying to base themselves in history. I mean, some of them might say, you know, this ancient king or something, whatnot, but there's no way to like date that sort of thing.

And the biblical authors are very much concerned with dating things. And especially Luke, he's phenomenal when it comes to that. But even if you go back as far as like Genesis two, I mean, they really want you to know where Eden was in its geographical location.

These are the rivers. This is what the land was like. I mean, it was out East. And so you, we can identify that today, or at least what we think most likely was that place. So they're very much concerned with making sure that this is based upon in history.

A lot of these mystery cults were not doing that. Like the descent of Inanna, it's based on like vegetation cycles or with regards to fertility. It's not supposed to take place on our plane of like space-time.

It's not supposed to take, you know, Inanna didn't go down to the underworld in 3 ,600 BC and came back up, you know, six months later. Like that's not what they're doing. They're trying to parallel certain things.

Like the Baal cycle yet again is trying to parallel, you know, crop cycles and whatnot. It's not trying to base it in history. And so, you know, this is why most scholars reject the mythicist position because clearly they are talking about a historical time when Jesus actually did certain things or they believe he did certain things or walked the earth.