The Case for the Real Jesus by Lee Strobel

Author:Lee Strobel
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-01-03T16:45:27+00:00

CHALLENGE #4

“CHRISTIANITY’S BELIEFS ABOUT JESUS WERE COPIED FROM PAGAN RELIGIONS”

Why should we consider the stories of Osiris, Dionysus, Adonis, Attis, Mithras, and the, other Pagan Mystery saviors as fables, yet come across essentially the same story told in a Jewish context and believe it to be the biography of a carpenter from Bethlehem?

Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, The Jesus Mysteries1

There is nothing the Jesus of the. Gospels either said or did... that cannot be shown to have originated thousands of years before, in Egyptian Mystery rites and other sacred liturgies.

Tom Harpur, The Pagan Christ2

As a young reporter at the Chicago Tribune, I watched in sympathy as a heartbreaking spectacle unfolded in the newsroom. The editor received an anonymous envelope containing a recent column by an up-and-coming Tribune writer, as well as a photocopy of an article written eight years earlier by Pete Hamill of the New York Post and reprinted in a collection of his works.

The theme and substantial parts of the language were virtually identical, resulting in a charge of plagiarism — a humiliating and career-stunting allegation that led to the reporter’s suspension for a month without pay. Subsequent disclosure of another impropriety resulted in the writer’s resignation. It was painful to see a colleague’s promising career derailed, but as the Tribune’s editor said at the time, “We condemn deception in others; we cannot accept it among our own without penalty.”

Through the years, allegations of plagiarism have vexed lots of journalists, scholars, politicians, and students —even a young Helen Keller. It’s a serious and escalating problem at universities. Today’s ready access to the Internet has made cut-and-paste plagiarism much easier for students who are facing imminent deadlines for term papers, prompting entrepreneurs to create Web-based resources that help professors detect previously published passages.

Technically, it’s not a crime to commit plagiarism, but it can be a serious civil offense to claim another person’s words or literary concepts as his or her own.Most of the time, though, the penalties are informal but nevertheless devastating: an embarrassing loss of credibility.

In an analogous way, a wave of recent books has claimed that Christianity’s key tenets about Jesus — including his virgin birth and resurrection — are not historical but rather were plagiarized from earlier “mystery religions” that flourished in the Mediterranean world. The allegation that Christianity is merely a “copycat” religion, recycling elements from ancient mythology, has decimated its credibility to many people.

“Nothing in Christianity is original” is among the most famous lines in one of publishing’s greatest success stories, The Da Vinci Code. The book charges that everything of importance in Christianity, from communion to Jesus’ birthday to Sunday worship, was “taken directly from earlier pagan mystery religions.”

Indeed, even those claims aren’t original. More than a century ago, scholars published books and articles pointing out similarities between the life of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels and mythological gods like Mithras, Osiris, Adonis, and Dionysus. Popular books and Internet sites have elaborated on these themes in recent years, making this issue one of the most damaging current objections to the historicity of Jesus.

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