“Christianity’s Beliefs about Jesus Were Copied from Pagan Religions”

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.³ 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.⁴Most 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.”⁵

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.

“Christianity began as a cult with almost wholly Pagan origins and motivations in the first century,” said former Anglican priest Tom Harpur.⁶ “Christianity in its final orthodoxy was simply a reissuing of an ancient wisdom in a literalized and highly exclusivist form. The result was a kind of plagiarism, but in a badly warped and weakened edition.”⁷

A book called The Jesus Mysteries, which promoted similar themes, was named Book of the Year by London’s Daily Telegraph in 1999. “The story of Jesus and the teachings he gives in the New Testament are prefigured by the myths and teachings of the ancient Pagan mysteries,” said the authors, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy.⁸ They added:

Each mystery religion taught its own version of the myth of the dying and resurrecting Godman, who was known by different names in different places. In Egypt, where the mysteries began, he was Osiris. In Greece he becomes Dionysus, in Asia Minor he is known as Attis, in Syria he is Adonis, in Persia he is Mithras, in Alexandria he is Serapis, to name a few.⁹

In his book Those Incredible Christians, Hugh J. Schonfield said, “Christians remained related under the skin to the devotees of Adonis and Osiris, Dionysus and Mithras.”¹⁰ Philosopher John H. Randall maintained that, thanks to the apostle Paul, Christianity “became a mystical system of redemption, much like the cult of Isis, and the other sacramental or mystery religions of the day.”¹¹

At first blush, the parallels between the story of Jesus and the myths of ancient gods appear to be striking. For instance, writers have said that the pre-Christian god Mithras was born of a virgin in a cave on December 25, was considered a great traveling teacher, had twelve disciples, promised his followers immortality, sacrificed himself for world peace, was buried in a tomb and rose again three days later, instituted a Eucharist or “Lord’s Supper,” and was considered the Logos, redeemer, Messiah, and “the way, the truth, and the life.”¹² Sound familiar?

“The traditional history of Christianity cannot convincingly explain why the Jesus story is so similar to ancient Pagan myths,” Freke and Gandy said.¹³They believe, however, that they have the answer. “Christianity,” they declared, “was a heretical product of Paganism!”¹⁴

Said Harpur: “Not one single doctrine, rite, tenet, or usage in Christianity was in reality a fresh contribution to the world.”¹⁵ He went on to say:

The only difference — and it was quite radical — between the Jesus story of the New Testament and the many ancient myths . . . is that nobody among the ancients, prior to the full-fledged Christian movement, believed for one moment that any of the events in their dramas were in any way historical. . . . In Christianity, however, the myth was eventually literalized. Jesus was historicized. . . . The Church converted a whole mass of romantic legends or myths into so-called history, a multiplication of “fictitious stories.” What emerged was in many ways a cult of ignorance.¹⁶

If these allegations are true, then the so-called “real Jesus” has no more authority than an imaginary “sun god” worshiped by primitive tribes millennia ago. If his life, teachings, and resurrection are merely echoes of mythological characters, then there would be no good reason to follow, worship, or rely on him. He becomes as impotent as the make-believe Zeus, as irrelevant as the long-forgotten Mithras.

But are these charges accurate? I decided to focus initially on the allegation that Jesus’ resurrection—the pivotal event that Christians say confirmed his deity—was essentially plagiarized from earlier pagan stories. Among those giving credence to that theory is Skeptic magazine religion editor Tim Callahan. “The possible influences on the Jews that might have produced a belief in resurrection are the myriad fertility cults among all the peoples of the ancient world,” he said.¹⁷

My first step was to raise the issue with historian and resurrection expert Michael Licona, coauthor of the award-winning book The Case, for the, Re,surre,ction of Jesus and the authority I questioned earlier on challenges to Jesus rising from the dead.

A NEARLY UNIVERSAL CONSENSUS

“Why,” I asked Licona, “should the story of Jesus’ resurrection have any more credibility than pagan stories of dying and rising gods—such as Osiris, Adonis, Attis, and Marduk—that are so obviously mythological? ”

Licona was well-versed on this controversy. “First of all, it’s important to understand that these claims don’t in any way negate the good historical evidence we have for Jesus’ resurrection, which I spelled out in our earlier discussion,” he pointed out. “You can’t dismiss the resurrection unless you can refute its solid core of supporting evi-dence.”¹⁸ I agreed that was an important caveat to keep in mind—and one which “copycat” theorists typically forget.

“Second, T. N. D. Mettinger—a senior Swedish scholar, professor at Lund University, and member of the Royal Academy of Letters, History, and Antiquities of Stockholm—wrote one of the most recent academic treatments of dying and rising gods in antiquity. He admits in his book The Riddle of Resurrection that the consensus among modern scholars—nearly universal—is that there were no dying and rising gods that preceded Christianity. They all post-dated the first century.”

Obviously, that timing is absolutely crucial: Christianity couldn’t have borrowed the idea of the resurrection if myths about dying and rising gods weren’t even circulating when Christianity was birthed in the first century AD.

“Then Mettinger said he was going to take exception to that nearly universal scholarly conviction,” Licona continued. “He takes a decidedly minority position and claims that there are at least three and possibly as many as five dying and rising gods that predate Christianity. But the key question is this: Are there any actual parallels between these myths and Jesus’ resurrection?”

“What did Mettinger conclude?” I asked.

“In the end, after combing through all these accounts and critically analyzing them, Mettinger adds that none of these serve as parallels to Jesus. None of them,” Licona emphasized.

“They are far different from the reports of Jesus rising from the dead. They occurred in the unspecified and distant past and were usually related to the seasonal life-and-death cycle of vegetation. In contrast, Jesus’ resurrection isn’t repeated, isn’t related to changes in the seasons, and was sincerely believed to be an actual event by those who lived in the same generation of the historical Jesus. In addition, Mettinger concludes that ‘there is no evidence for the death of the dying and rising gods as vicarious suffering for sins.’ ”¹⁹

I later obtained Mettinger’s book to double-check Licona’s account of his research. Sure enough, Mettinger caps his study with this stunning statement: “There is, as far as I am aware, no prima facie evidence that the death and resurrection of Jesus is a mythological construct, drawing on the myths and rites of the dying and rising gods of the surrounding world.”²⁰

In short, this leading scholar’s analysis is a sharp rebuke to popular-level authors and Internet bloggers who make grand claims about the pagan origins of Jesus’ return from the dead. Ultimately, Mettinger affirmed, “The death and resurrection of Jesus retains its unique character in the history of religions.”²¹

BOWLING IN HEAVEN

Mettinger’s assessment was extremely significant, but I wanted to dig deeper into the mythology. “Do I understand correctly that these ancient myths were used to try to explain why things died in the fall and came back in the spring?” I asked.

“Yes, things like that,” Licona replied. “When I was a kid, I asked my mom, ‘What’s thunder?’ She said, ‘It’s angels bowling in heaven.’ Obviously, that’s just a story. Similarly, in ancient Canaan, a kid would ask his mom, ‘Why does the rain stop in the summer? ’ And his mom would tell him the story of Baal.”

“Is this one of the myths that Mettinger thinks predates Christianity?” I asked.

“That’s right. In one of the more popular stories, Baal is the storm god in heaven. He’s responsible for the rain. His nemesis is Mot, who’s in the netherworld. One day Mot and Baal are trash-talking each other. Mot says, ‘You think you’re so tough, Baal? You leave behind your clouds and lightning bolts and wind and rain and come on down here—I’ll show you who your daddy is.’ So Baal leaves everything behind and goes to the underworld—where Mot swallows him. How do we know this? It stopped raining!

“Later, Baal’s mother goes down and tells Mot, ‘Let my son go!’ Mot says, ‘No!’ So she brutalizes him until he finally says, ‘Okay, mercy! Go away and I’ll let him go! ’ She leaves the netherworld, and a couple of months later, Baal’s dad says, ‘Our son’s alive.’ How does he know? It’s raining again!

“This is like my mom trying to explain thunder to me as a child. They talked about this every year: Baal died and Baal came back. Nobody ever saw it. There were no eyewitnesses. It supposedly occurred in the gray, distant, undated past. It was a fable to explain why there’s no rain in the summer—and nothing more. Now, does that sound anything like the resurrection of Jesus? Absolutely not! It’s totally different. Jesus’ resurrection is supported by strong historical data that is by far best explained by him returning from the dead.”

That’s just one myth, I thought to myself. There were still others to consider. “How about the other fables that are commonly mentioned?” I asked.

“Attis? This myth is older than Christianity but the first report we have of a resurrection of Attis comes long after the first century. Adonis is more than a hundred years after Jesus. There’s no clear account in antiquity of Marduk even dying—and so a resurrection is even less clear. Some scholars say Tammuz is an account of a dying and rising god—but that’s disputed, and besides, it’s not a good parallel since there are no reports of an appearance or an empty tomb and this myth was tied to the changing of the seasons.”

“What about Osiris?”

“Osiris is interesting,” he said, smiling. “The most popular account says Osiris’s brother killed him, chopped him into fourteen pieces, and scattered them around the world. Well, the goddess Isis feels compassion for Osiris, so she looks for his body parts to give him a proper burial. She only finds thirteen of them, puts them back together, and Osiris is buried. But he doesn’t come back to this world; he’s given the status of god of the netherworld—a gloomy, shadowy place of semiconsciousness. As a friend of mine says, ‘This isn’t a resurrection, it’s a zombification!’ This is no parallel to Jesus’ resurrection, for which there is strong historical support.”

I spotted an apparent flaw in Licona’s reasoning: one of Christianity’s earliest apologists, or defenders of the faith, was Justin Martyr, who lived from about AD 100 to 164. In a letter he wrote in about 150, he discussed several parallels between Christianity and the rising gods of pagan religions. I pointed this out to Licona and asked, “Isn’t that evidence that Christians recognized that Jesus’ resurrection was merely a form of mythology? ”

Licona was quite familiar with Justin’s writings. “First, we have to look at why Justin was writing this. The Romans were severely persecuting Christians, and Justin was telling the emperor, ‘Look, you don’t persecute people who worship other gods who are similar, so why persecute Christians?’ Basically, he’s trying to use some arguments to defuse the Roman attacks on the church.

“But look at the parallels he gives. He has to strain to make them. He talks about the sons of Jupiter: Aesculapius was struck by lightning and went to heaven; Bacchus, Hercules, and others rode to heaven on the horse Pegasus. He describes Ariadne and others who ‘have been declared to be set among the stars.’ He even mentions that when the emperor Augustus was cremated, someone in the crowd swore that he saw his spirit ascending through the flames.

“These aren’t resurrections! I know of no highly respected scholar today who suggests that these vague fables are parallels to the resurrection of Jesus. We only hear this claim from the hyper-skeptical community on the Internet and popular books that are marketed to people who lack the background to analyze the facts critically.”

Licona’s answers had quickly deflated many of the claims I had heard and read about Jesus’ resurrection having been plagiarized from antiquity. I still had questions, however, about the broader implications of the “copycat” allegations. I decided to seek out a leading scholar of ancient history who also is an expert on Mithraism, a “mystery religion” that was once a major rival to Christianity—and, some charge, the source of many beliefs that Christians took and applied to Jesus.

My trip to picturesque Oxford, Ohio, was almost cancelled because of torrential winter rains. Local rivers were swelling toward flood stage. But I managed to arrive on one of the last flights of the day. The next morning, using an umbrella to shield me, I knocked on the door of an immaculate green house where Edwin Yamauchi lives with Kimie, his wife of forty-four years.

INTERVIEW #5: EDWIN M. YAMAUCHI, PH.D.

With a doctorate in Mediterranean studies from Brandeis University, and having taught at Miami University of Ohio for more than thirty-five years, Edwin Yamauchi has been called “a scholar’s scholar.”²² As one admiring colleague put it, he has “dug archaeologically, taught brilliantly, read voraciously, researched meticulously, and published endlessly.”²³

Yamauchi has studied twenty-two languages, including Akkadian, Aramaic, Greek, Hebrew, Chinese, Comanche, Coptic, Egyptian, Mandaic, Syriac, and Ugaritic. He has received eight fellowships from Brandeis, Rutgers, and elsewhere; delivered eighty-eight papers on Mithraism, Gnosticism, and other topics at scholarly societies; published nearly two hundred articles and reviews in professional journals; lectured at more than a hundred colleges and universities, including Cornell, Princeton, Temple, Yale, and the University of Chicago; and participated in archaeological expeditions, including the first excavation of the Herodian temple in Jerusalem.

Yamauchi’s seventeen books include the 578-page authoritative tome Persia and the Bible, which includes his findings on Mithraism, as well as Greece and Babylon, Gnostic Ethics and Mandaean Origins, The Stones and the. Scriptures, Pre-Christian Gnosticism, The Archaeology of the New Testament, The World of the First Christians, and Africa and the, Bible,. In 1975 he was invited to deliver a paper at the Second International Congress of Mithraic Studies in Tehran, a conference hosted by the then-empress of Iran.

Born into a Japanese Buddhist family but a Christian since 1952, Yamauchi has a sterling reputation in the academic world. One book called him “a scholar known for his extreme care and sober judgment with historical texts.”²⁴ Award-winning historian Paul Maier said Yamauchi wields “crystal logic and hard, potent evidence,” adding:

No one in the academic world today can better sniff out sensationalism in place of sense, excesses beyond the evidence, and speculation instead of scholarship. Whatever historical or theological fad might come along—and so many have! — one brilliant article by Yamauchi supplies the evidence to skewer any bloated pretensions against the cause of truth.²⁵

That’s exactly what I needed for this topic, where so many voices of questionable credibility are making such serious claims. And that’s why I interviewed him for my earlier book, The Case for Christ, about the evidence for Jesus in ancient sources outside the Bible.²⁶ At the time, I found him to be unassuming, soft-spoken, thorough, and highly credible. He was not as loquacious as some scholars I’ve questioned, but his statements tended to be heavy with meaning.

He and Kimie greeted me at the door before she departed to do some volunteer work in the community. Although recently retired from Miami University, Yamauchi continues to teach a few history courses there. Now on the cusp of seventy years of age, the bespectacled scholar was spry and focused, his hair highlighted with silver.

He walked me down into his basement, much of which was a warren of bookshelves, and we sat at a small table on which I saw stacks of papers. I immediately knew what they were. I had let Yamauchi know in advance the topics I wanted to cover, because I was aware of his penchant to back up his own opinions with scholarly articles by other experts. I could see he was ready for me.

THE MYSTERY RELIGIONS

“Maybe you could start by giving me some background on the mystery religions,” I began as we claimed chairs on adjacent sides of the table. “When were they popular? What traits did they have in common?” “The so-called ‘mystery religions’ were a variety of religious movements from the eastern Mediterranean that flourished in the early Roman Empire,” he replied, sipping from a cup of coffee. “They offered salvation in a tight-knit community. They were called mystery religions because those who were initiated into them were sworn to secrecy. They had sacred rites, often a common meal, and a special sanctuary.”²⁷ “What was the oldest of them?” I asked.

“That would be the Eleusinian cult of Demeter, which was already established in the Archaic Age of Greece, which would be from 800 to 500 BC. The latest, and certainly the most popular in the later Roman Empire, was the mysteries of Mithras, who started as a Persian god. There were also the mysteries of Cybele and Attis, which were restricted to non-Romans until the middle or late first century.”

“Were some of these religions tied to the vegetation cycle?” I asked, thinking back to Licona’s comments.

“Oh, yes, many of them were,” he confirmed.

Trying to narrow the topic a bit, I asked, “Who popularized the idea that Jesus’ resurrection was derived from the worship of dying and rising fertility gods?”

“In the scholarly world, these comparisons were promoted by a group of scholars called the Religionsgeschichtliche schule,” he said, the German rolling off his tongue. “That’s the so-called History of Religions School, which flourished at the end of the nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries. The seminal work by Richard Reit-zenstein was published in German in 1910 but not translated into English until 1978.²⁸ He thought the sacrifice of Christ aligned itself with the killing of a bull by Mithras. Carsten Colpe and others severely criticized the anachronistic use of sources by these scholars.

“On the popular level, Sir James Frazer gathered a mass of parallels in his multivolume work called The Golden Bough, which was published in 1906,” Yamauchi continued. “He discussed Osiris of Egypt, Adonis of Syria, Attis of Asia Minor, and Tammuz of Mesopotamia, and concluded there was a common rising and dying fertility god. Unfortunately, much of his work was based on a misreading of the evidence, but nevertheless this helped introduce these ideas to popular culture. Later, in the 1930s, three influential French scholars claimed that Christianity was influenced by the Hellenistic mystery religions.” Yamauchi picked up a copy of an article he had written and scanned it for a quote. “One of those scholars,” he added, “said Christ

was ‘a savior-god, after the manner of an Osiris, an Attis, a Mithras.

Like Adonis, Osiris, and Attis, he died a violent death, and like them he returned to life.’ ”²⁹

I glanced at my notes. “Albert Schweitzer said that popular writers made the mistake of taking various fragments of information and manufacturing ‘a kind of universal Mystery-religion which never actually existed, least of all in Paul’s day.’³⁰ Do you agree?”

“Yes, there was a widespread view that there was a general, common mystery religion, but upon a closer examination of the sources, nobody believes that any longer,” he replied. “These were quite different beliefs. In fact, by the mid-twentieth century, scholars had established that the sources used in these writings were far from satisfactory and the parallels were much too superficial. It was pretty much of a closed issue in the scholarly community, but it seems to have been revived in recent years among writers on a popular level — sort of like Frankenstein.” Yamauchi’s comments reminded me of the words of the late scholar Ronald H. Nash, the highly respected professor with a doctorate from Syracuse University and author of more than thirty books, who said in The Gospel and the Greeks:

During a period of time running roughly from about 1890 to 1940, scholars often alleged that primitive Christianity had been heavily influenced by Platonism, Stoicism, the pagan mystery religions, or other movements in the Hellenistic world.³¹ Largely as a result of a series of scholarly books and articles written in rebuttal, allegations of early Christianity’s dependence on its Hellenistic environment began to appear much less frequently in the publications of Bible scholars and classical scholars. Today most Bible scholars regard the question as a dead issue.³²

Nash went on to lament the revival of these discredited theories. He said that a few current textbooks, as well as more popular publications, were “repeating claims and arguments that should have been laid to rest decades ago,” circulating “one-sided and misinformed arguments,” and ignoring “the weighty scholarly opinion” that has already been published to refute their assertions.³³ “Efforts to undermine the uniqueness of the Christian revelation via claims of a pagan religious influence collapse quickly once a full account of the information is available,” he insisted.³⁴

That was precisely what I was determined to investigate as I turned my interview with Yamauchi to issues involving the most commonly cited mystery religion: Mithraism.

MITHRAISM AND CHRISTIANITY

To make sure we were on the same page, I asked Yamauchi to provide an overview of Mithraic beliefs. He took a drink of coffee before launching into his reply.

“Mithraism was a late Roman mystery religion that was popular among soldiers and merchants, and which became a chief rival to Christianity in the second century and later,” he said. “The initiates were all men, though one of my students, Jonathan David, recently published a paper arguing that some women may have been involved.³⁵The participants met in a cavelike structure called a mithraeum, which had as its cult statue Mithras stabbing a bull, the so-called tauroctony.” “How much information about Mithraism exists?”

“There are relatively few texts from the Mithraists themselves. We have some graffiti and inscriptions, as well as descriptions of the religion from its opponents, including neo-Platonists and Christians. Much of what has been circulated on Mithraism has been based on the theories of a Belgium scholar named Franz Cumont. He was the leading scholar on Mithraism in his day, and he published his famous work, Mysteries of Mithras, in 1903. His work led to speculation by the History of Religions School that Mithraism had influenced nascent Christianity. Much of what Cumont suggested, however, turned out to be quite unfounded. In the 1970s, scholars at the Second Mythraic Congress in Tehran came to criticize Cumont.”

Yamauchi dug out a large photograph from the papers on the desk, showing a crowd of scholars at the Congress posing with the Empress of Iran on the front steps of a stately building. I surveyed the faces and quickly picked out Yamauchi in the front row.

“The Congress produced two volumes of papers. A scholar named Richard Gordon from England and others concluded that Cumont’s theory was not supported by the evidence and, in fact, Cumont’s interpretations have now been analyzed and rejected on all major points.³⁶ Contrary to what Cumont believed, even though Mithras was a Persian god who was attested as early as the fourteenth century BC, we have almost no evidence of Mithraism in the sense of a mystery religion in the West until very late—too late to have influenced the beginnings of Christianity.”

That was a critically important assessment that would seem to rule out the “copycat” theory. Seeking further clarification, I asked Yamauchi for details concerning when the Mithraic mysteries were introduced in the West. He took another sip of coffee and then answered.

“The first public recognition of the Mithras in Rome was the state visit of Tiridates, the king of Armenia, in AD 66. It’s said that he addressed Nero by saying, ‘And I have come to thee, my god, to worship thee as I do Mithras.’ There is also a reference earlier to some pirates in Cilicia who were worshipers of Mithras, but,” he noted, “this is not the same as Mithraism as a mystery religion.”

Settling back into his seat, he continued. “Mithraism as a mystery religion cannot be attested before about AD 90, which is about the time we see a Mithraic motif in a poem by Statius. No mithraea [or Mithraic temples] have been found at Pompeii, which was destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. The earliest Mithraic inscription in the West is a statue of a prefect under the emperor Trajan in AD 101. It’s now in the British Museum.

“The earliest mithraea are dated to the early second century. There are a handful of inscriptions that date to the early second century, but the vast majority of texts are dated after AD 140. Most of what we have as evidence of Mithraism comes in the second, third, and fourth centuries AD. That’s basically what’s wrong with the theories about Mithraism influencing the beginnings of Christianity.” “The timing is wrong,” I observed.

“That’s correct,” he said, picking up a copy of his hefty Persia and the Bible and leafing through it until he found a reference to Gordon, the senior fellow at the University of East Anglia who has published extensively on history and archaeology. “Gordon dates the establishment of the Mithraic mysteries to the reign of Hadrian, which was AD 117-138, or Antoninus Pius, which would be from 138 to 161,” Yamauchi said. “Specifically, Gordon said, ‘It is therefore reasonable to argue that Western Mithraism did not exist until the mid-second century, at least in a developed sense.’ ”³⁷

Then he picked up a photocopy of an article from a scholarly journal called Mithras, published by the Society for Mithraic Studies in the aftermath of the 1974 Iranian conclave of scholars. He read the words of E. J. Yarnold of Oxford University: “The fervor with which historians used to detect wholesale Christian borrowings from the Mithraic and other mysteries has now died down.”³⁸

Yamauchi looked up at me. “As Ronald Nash and so many other knowledgeable scholars have concluded, the dating disproves that Christianity borrowed its tenets from Mithraism,” he said. Indeed, Nash is emphatic: “The flowering of Mithraism occurred after the close of the New Testament canon, too late for it to have influenced the development of first-century Christianity.”³⁹

Yamauchi loaded me down with copies of academic articles and books by highly regarded scholars who back up that claim. Manfred Clauss, professor of ancient history at Free University in Berlin, said in The Roman Cult of Mithras that it does not make sense to interpret the Mithraic mysteries “as a fore-runner of Christianity.”⁴⁰ In his book Mithraism and Christianity, published by Cambridge University Press, L. Patterson concluded there is “no direct connection between the two religions either in origin or development.”⁴¹

Gary Lease, professor of religious studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz and long-time executive secretary of the North American Association for the Study of Religion, noted in an academic article that such eminent scholars as Adolf von Harnack, Arthur Darby Nock, S. G. F. Brandon, William R. Halliday, and Ernst Benz “have seen little evidence to support claims of such influence and mutual borrowing” between Mithraism and Christianity.⁴²

Lease, who earned his doctorate at the University of Munich and later occupied its renowned Romano Guardini Chair for Theory of Culture and Religion, added:

After almost 100 years of unremitting labor, the conclusion appears inescapable that neither Mithraism nor Christianity proved to be an obvious and direct influence upon the other in the development and demise or survival of either religion. Their beliefs and practices are well accounted for by their most obvious origins and there is no need to explain one in terms of the other.⁴³

The weight of the evidence was heavy: the claim that Christianity borrowed its central ideas from Mithraism has been thoroughly demolished by a close examination of the dates for when it took root in the West. But what about the numerous parallels between Mithraism and Christianity that popular writers, including novelist Dan Brown, have touted as evidence of Christianity’s plagiarism? I was anxious to see how Yamauchi would handle those specific charges.

MITHRAS VERSUS JESUS

I pulled out a list of parallels between Jesus and Mithras. “First, popular writers claim that Mithras was born of a virgin,” I said. “Is that true that this was what Mithraism taught?”

Yamauchi looked pained. “No, that’s definitely not true,” he insisted. “He was born out of a rock.”

“A rock?”

“Yes, the rock birth is commonly depicted in Mithraic reliefs,” he explained. “Mithras emerges fully grown and naked except for a Phrygian cap, and he’s holding a dagger and torch. In some variations, flames shoot out from the rock, or he’s holding a globe in his hand.”

I chuckled. “So unless the rock is considered a virgin, this parallel with Jesus evaporates,” I said.

“Entirely correct,” he said.

“And that means he wasn’t born in a cave, which some writers claim is a second parallel to Christianity.”

“Well, it is true that Mithraic sanctuaries were designed to look like caves,” Yamauchi said. “Gary Lease discusses that in his chapter on Mithraism and Christianity.”

I later examined Lease’s work. He makes the important observation that nowhere in the New Testament is Jesus described as having been born in a cave. This idea is first mentioned in the letter of Barnabas at the beginning of the second century.

Justin Martyr said in the second century that Mithras’s cave was a demoniacal imitation of the tradition that Jesus was born in a cave. Lease pointed out, however, that scholar Ernst Benz “has shown conclusively that this Christian tradition does not come from a dependency on Mithraism, but rather from an ages old tradition in Palestine itself of holy shrines in caves.” Concluded Lease: “There is no doubt that the Christian tradition does not stem from the Mithraic account.”⁴⁴ Returning to my list, I said to Yamauchi: “The third supposed parallel with Jesus is that Mithras was born on December 25.” “Again, that’s not a parallel,” he replied.

“Why not?”

“Because we don’t know the date Jesus was born,” he said. “The earliest date celebrated by Christians was January 6—in fact, it’s still celebrated by many churches in the East. Of course, December 25 is very close to the winter solstice. This was the date chosen by the emperor Aurelian for the dedication of his temple to Sol Invictus, the god called the ‘Unconquerable Sun.’ Mithras was closely associated with Sol Invictus; sometimes they’re depicted shaking hands. This is apparently how Mithras became associated with December 25.” “When did that date become Christmas for Christians?”

“That seems to be in 336, a year before the death of Constantine, the first Roman emperor to embrace Christianity. We know that before his conversion, he worshiped Sol Invictus. We know for sure that Constantine made Sunday, or the Lord’s Day, an official holiday, even though Christians had already been observing it as the day on which Jesus was resurrected. So it’s conceivable Constantine also may have appropriated December 25 for the birthday of Christ. We know that Christian emperors and popes suggested that instead of simply banning pagan ceremonies that they appropriate them for Christianity.”⁴⁵ “What about the fourth parallel that Mithras was a great traveler or master with twelve disciples?”

“No — he was a god, not a teacher,” Yamauchi replied, sounding a bit impatient.

“The fifth parallel is that his followers were promised immortality.” “Well, that can be inferred, but certainly that was the hope of most followers of any religion,” he said. “So that’s not surprising.” “How about the sixth claim, which says that Mithras sacrificed himself for world peace?”

Yamauchi sighed. “That’s reading Christian theology into what’s not there. He didn’t sacrifice himself—he killed a bull.”

“The seventh parallel—and one of the most important—is that Mithras was buried in a tomb and rose after three days,” I said. “Is there any truth to that? ”

“We don’t know anything about the death of Mithras,” Yamauchi said firmly. “We have a lot of monuments, but we have almost no textual evidence, because this was a secret religion. But I know of no references to a supposed death and resurrection.” Indeed, Richard Gordon declared in his book Image and Value in the, Greco-Roman World that there is “no death of Mithras”—and thus, there cannot be a resurrection.⁴⁶

I went on, though I had a feeling I could guess his replies. “Eight, Mithras was considered the Good Shepherd, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, the Logos, the Redeemer, the Savior.”

“No, again that’s reading Christian theology into this.”

“Ninth, there was a sacramental meal in Mithraism that paralleled the Lord’s Supper.”

“Common meals are found in almost all religious communities,” he replied. “What is noteworthy is that the Christian apologists Justin Martyr and Tertullian point out the similarities to the Lord’s Supper, but they wrote in the second century, long after the Lord’s Supper was instituted in Christianity. They claimed the Mithraic meal was a satanic imitation. Clearly, the Christian meal was based on the Passover, not on a mystery religion.”

Yamauchi referred me to Clauss’s book The Roman Cult of Mithras. “This earthly meal is a ritual reproduction of the celebration of his victory [over the bull] which Mithras performed with the sun-god before their joint ascension in the Sun’s chariot,” he said.⁴⁷ “The ritual meal was probably simply a component of regular common meals. Such meals have always been an essential part of religious assembly; eating and drinking together creates community and renders visible the fact that those who take part are members of one and the same group.”⁴⁸ Oxford’s Yarnold said that Cumont’s systematic description of Mithraic liturgy in Christian terms — particularly referring to the Mithraic meal as communion — “is now seen to be misleading, not to say mischievous.”⁴⁹

Lease agrees there is no connection between the Christian and Mithraic ceremonies. “Nothing in any of the sources we have leads to a viable theory that the origin of the Christian meal is to be found in Mithraism, nor for that matter may one derive the Mithraic meal from the Christian.”⁵⁰

He noted that the Christian sacrament “is centered in the Jewish tradition of the Passover feast and the specifically historical recollection of Jesus’s last acts,” while the Mithraic feast “has its origins in Mazdean [that is, Persian] ceremonies.”⁵¹ He concluded: “There is simply no need to link these two events together in terms of derivation or direct influence.”⁵²

I tossed my list of now-discredited parallels on the table. Amazingly, despite so many writers who have tried to discredit Christianity with such charges of plagiarism, the allegations merely evaporated under scrutiny. Still, one related issue remained: whether a gory Mithraic ritual was the source for the apostle Paul’s teaching of redemption through the blood of Jesus.

THE BLOOD OF BULLS

Following the lead of Reitzenstein, French theologian Alfred Loisy, who died in 1940, believed that a Mithraic rite called the taurobolium was the basis for the Christian belief that people are saved “through the blood” of Jesus. He specifically linked this ritual to Paul’s imagery in Romans 6, where the apostle talks about “all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death.”⁵³

To bolster his thesis, Loisy presented evidence of a taurobolic inscription that says in aeternum renatus—or “reborn for eternity”— which he said parallels the Christian concept of spiritual rebirth.⁵⁴

I asked Yamauchi to describe the taurobolium, which he had written about in Persia and the, Bible.

“This rite was practiced by Mithraists only in exceptional cases. It was associated almost entirely with the cult of Attis, which was another mystery religion,” he said. “In its developed form, the initiate was placed in a pit and a bull was slaughtered on a grate above him, drenching him in the bull’s blood.”

He paused before adding a bit of understatement: “It was a very vivid rite.”

This, of course, seemed totally alien to the practices of the Jewish sacrificial system and its foreshadowing of Jesus’ death as “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.”⁵⁵

Yamauchi continued. “Again, the dating of practices like this are the Achilles’ heel of these comparative studies—they don’t pay attention to the dates of the sources and they’re used anachronistically.” “When was the taurobolium instituted?” I asked.

“This rite is reported in the second century AD,” he said, gesturing toward a quote from Swiss scholar Gunter Wagner in an article Yamauchi had written:

The taurobolium of the Attis cult is first attested in the time of Antoninus Pius or AD 160. As far as we can see at present it only became a personal consecration at the beginning of the third century AD. The idea of a rebirth through the instrumentality of the taurobolium only emerges in isolated instances towards the end of the fourth century AD.⁵⁶

“So there’s no way this rite could have influenced Christianity’s theology about redemption,” Yamauchi stressed.

“What about the inscription that mentions being ‘reborn for eternity’?” I asked.

“Ah, that’s an interesting tale,” he said with a small grin. “It turns out the renatus inscription was dated after AD 375. There’s another inscription from about the same time period that says this rite was only efficacious for twenty years. Bruce Metzger from Princeton suggested this may be an example of Christianity influencing Mithraism. That is, Christianity promised its adherents eternal life, and so perhaps in response the efficacy of the blood bath was raised in the Mithraic cult from twenty years to eternity.”⁵⁷

One by one, the grandiose claims that Christianity copied itself after Mithraism had been convincingly swept away by solid scholarship. It was staggering to me that writers could so irresponsibly—or maliciously— make claims about parallels that simply are not accurate.

“Do you see any evidence that Christianity borrowed any of its beliefs from Mithraism?” I asked Yamauchi.

“Not really,” he said. “They were rivals in the second century and later. Sometimes a Mithraic temple was right next to a Christian sanctuary in Rome. When Christianity became the official religion, sometimes the Christians destroyed the mithraeum.”

“In his book The Mysteries of Mithras, Payam Nabarz quotes a historian he identifies as Joseph Renan as saying, ‘If Christianity had been checked in its growth by some deadly disease, the world would have become Mithraic,’” I said. “Do you think that’s true?”

Yamauchi shook his head. “First of all, he has the name wrong. It’s Ernest Renan, an anti-Catholic French scholar who wrote a sen-sationalistic work called Vie de Jesus, or Life of Jesus, in 1863—one of the works Albert Schweitzer criticized in his famous indictment of biographies of Jesus by liberal scholars.”

Yamauchi provided additional background that further discredited Renan, pointing to comments by Stephen Neill and Tom Wright in a book published by Oxford University Press: “Renan confuses rhetoric with profundity____Professing to work as an historian, he does not pursue with the needed seriousness the historical problems of the life of Jesus.”⁵⁸

“Needless to say,” continued Yamauchi, “Renan’s work, published nearly 150 years ago, has no value as a source. He knew very little about Mithraism, and besides, we know a lot more about it today. Yet this is a quote that’s commonly used by people who don’t understand the context. It’s simply far-fetched.”

I consulted my notes for another quotation I’d read. “In his book, Nabarz claims: ‘The assimilation of Mithraism by its rival Christianity resulted in the early decline and loss of true meaning in both religions. The peace-loving message of Christianity, as taught by Christ, was diminished and replaced by the warrior mind-set of Mithraism.’ ”

Yamauchi wasn’t buying it. “Nabarz is a practicing Dervish and Druid who’s a member of the Golden Dawn Occult Society and a revivalist of the Temple of Mithras. Though he has a Ph.D. from Oxford, it’s in science. He lacks credibility as a historian of Christianity,” Yamauchi said.

“There’s no evidence of Mithraism influencing first-century Christianity. Far from assimilating Mithraism, the church fathers — from Justin Martyr to Tertullian—denounced Mithraism as a satanic imitation. Some scholars have suggested Christianity may have consciously or unconsciously borrowed minor practices much later, which could be true. This has no impact on Christianity’s foundational beliefs, however.”

Along those lines, Yarnold suggests Mithraism may have influenced a fourth-century Christian practice of having converts renounce Satan in a special ceremony that’s no longer practiced. But Yarnold warned against reading too much into the scant remnants of Mithraism. “The modern Mithraic scholar,” he said, “is often seduced by apparent lack of evidence to grasp at straws which offer little or no support to his argument.”⁵⁹

THE USUAL SUSPECTS

I turned our conversation to the issue of whether any other gods in antiquity might have provided the prototype for the resurrection stories about Jesus. Essentially, I wanted to see whether Yamauchi would agree with what Licona told me about the matter.

Yamauchi went down the list of the “usual suspects” who appear in popular literature. “First of all,” he said, “there’s no resurrection of Marduk or Dionysus. There is a resurrection that had been alleged for Tammuz, a fertility god of Mesopotamia, known in Sumerian as Dumuzi, but it turns out there was no real resurrection.”

I was confused. “What do you mean?”

“His resurrection by the goddess Inanna-Ishtar had been assumed even though the end of the texts about the myth were missing. Then in 1960, S. N. Kramer published a newly discovered poem that proves that Inanna didn’t rescue Damuzi from the underworld but sent him there as her substitute.⁶⁰ There’s also an obscure and fragmentary text indicating Dumuzi might have had his sister take his place in the underworld for six months of the year.⁶¹ Again, this is tied to the seasons and the vegetation cycles. It’s not a resurrection.”⁶²

“And Adonis?” I asked.

“Tammuz was identified by later writers with Adonis, who was loved by Aphrodite. The worship of Adonis was never very important and was restricted to women. Pierre Lambrechts has shown that there are no indications of a resurrection in the early information we have about Adonis. While there are four texts that speak of his resurrection, they date from the second to the fourth centuries AD — long after Jesus.”⁶³

“What about Cybele and Attis?” I asked.

“Attis was a young man who was loved by Cybele, also known as the Great Mother goddess. Attis was unfaithful, so Cybele drove him mad; he castrated himself and died. That’s why the priests of Cybele were eunuchs,” Yamauchi noted. “But Lambrechts has demonstrated that the supposed ‘resurrection’ of Attis doesn’t appear until after AD 150—more than a century later than Jesus.”⁶⁴

Again, this myth is tied to the vegetation cycle. “Many worshipers of Cybele believed that an annual rehearsal of the Attis myth was a way of guaranteeing a good crop,” Nash said.⁶⁵ He pointed out that “Cybele could only preserve Attis’s dead body. Beyond this, there is mention of the body’s hair continuing to grow, along with some movement of his little finger. In some versions of the myth, Attis’s return to life took the form of his being changed into an evergreen tree.”⁶⁶ I brought up the topic of Osiris, whose body was cut into fourteen pieces and then reassembled—minus one part—by his sister Isis, as Licona described earlier.

“Actually,” said Yamauchi, “there also was an earlier incident where his brother Seth murders Osiris and sinks his coffin in the Nile. It’s after Isis revives him that the dismemberment occurs.”

“Do these accounts pre-date Christianity?”

“They’re found in Plutarch, who wrote in the second century AD, but they seem consistent with statements made in early Egyptian texts — so, yes. It’s misleading, however, to equate the Egyptian concept of the afterlife with a resurrection in the Christian tradition. The Egyptians believed that to attain immortality, the body had to be mummified, nourishment had to be provided, and magical spells had to be used. The Egyptian concept didn’t entail rising from the dead; instead, separate entities of the individual’s personality—called the Ba and the Ka—hover around his body.”

“So this isn’t a resurrection?”

“Not in the same sense that Jesus was resurrected,” he emphasized. “Osiris was brought to life but he’s the king of the underworld.”⁶⁷

Metzger agrees. “Whether this can be rightly called a resurrection is questionable, especially since, according to Plutarch, it was the pious desire of devotees to be buried in the same ground where, according to local tradition, the body of Osiris was still lying.”⁶⁸

French scholar Roland de Vaux, who was director of the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem, said Osiris “will never again come among the living and will reign only over the dead.” He concluded that “this revived god is in reality a ‘mummy’ god.”⁶⁹ Wagner concurred. “Osiris knew no resurrection, but was resuscitated to be a ruler of the Netherworld,” he said.⁷⁰

The contrast with Jesus, said Yamauchi, couldn’t be more stark. “All of these myths are repetitive, symbolic representations of the death and rebirth of vegetation. These are not historical figures, and none of their deaths were intended to provide salvation,” he pointed out. “In the case of Jesus, even non-Christian authorities, like Josephus and Tacitus, report that he died under Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius. The reports of his resurrection are quite early and are rooted in eyewitness accounts.

“They have the ring of reality,” he stressed, “not the ethereal qualities of myth.”

CLAIMS OF OTHER VIRGIN BIRTHS

Matthew, a follower of Jesus, and Luke, a first-century physician who said he “carefully investigated everything” about Jesus “from the beginning,”⁷¹ both report that Jesus was born to a virgin. It’s an extraordinarily improbable claim—unless the resurrection of Jesus is true, in which case his divinity was convincingly established and a virgin birth becomes not only believable but inexorably logical.

One of the most popular objections to Jesus, however, is that his virgin birth was not historical but was stolen from earlier mythology and therefore is as fanciful as the outlandish stories about Zeus or Perseus.

“The notion that Jesus had no human father because he was the Son of God . . . was originally a pagan notion,” said Robert J. Miller, associate professor of religion at Juniata College.⁷² “Gentiles in a pagan culture expect a man whose life embodied divinity to have a divine father and a human mother. The virgin birth thus corresponds to what Gentile Christians expected in a biography of Jesus.”⁷³

Walter E. Bundy, who started writing about the synoptic gospels in 1919 and taught at DePauw University, agreed that “the idea of a supernatural or virgin birth is pagan” and that “it must have found its way into the story of Jesus through Gentile-Christian channels.”⁷⁴ Similarly, skeptic Tom Flynn wrote in Free Inquiry magazine that if Jesus were a man “just remarkable enough to trigger the myth-making machinery of his time,” then it would be expected that “such formulaic and derivative claims” like the virgin birth should result.⁷⁵

I asked Yamauchi for his assessment. “The idea of the virgin birth of Jesus is distinctive because it’s based on ancient prophecy, specifically the Septuagint translation of Isaiah 7:14,” he began in response. “As you know, Isaiah uses the Hebrew word ‘almah, which means a ‘young woman’ would give birth, and the Septuagint makes her virginity more explicit by using the Greek word parthenos, which specifically means ‘virgin.’ Of course, it should be said that a young maiden in those days was assumed to be a virgin; we can’t necessarily say that in our contemporary society.”⁷⁶

“What about the parallels that are often cited between Jesus’ virgin birth and mythological gods?” I asked.

“Some of these supposed parallels break down upon close examination,” he said. “Some of those that are often cited—like Zeus, for example — are anthropomorphic gods who lust after human women, which is decidedly different from Jesus’ story. The mythological offspring are half gods and half men and their lives begin at conception, as opposed to Jesus, who is fully God and fully man and who is eternal but came into this world through the incarnation. Also, the Gospels put Jesus in a historical context, unlike the mythological gods. On top of that, even if a story of an extraordinary birth in mythology predates Christianity, that doesn’t mean Christians appropriated it.”

That last point is also made by Robert Gromacki, a professor at Cedarville University, in his 2002 book The Virgin Birth:

This is a perfect example of the logical fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc (“after this, therefore, because of this”). Plato wrote about the existence of God long before Paul authored his epistles, but the latter was in no way dependent upon the Greek philosopher. The argument of pagan derivation assumes too much in the way of parallelism and overlooks the radical differences.⁷⁷

I pulled out a list of the most commonly mentioned parallels to the Jesus account. “What about Dionysus, the god of wine and fertility who’s also known as Bacchus?” I asked. “He’s frequently cited as being the product of a virgin birth.”

“No, there’s no evidence of a virgin birth for Dionysus,” Yamauchi said. “As the story goes, Zeus, disguised as a human, fell in love with the princess Semelg, the daughter of Cadmus, and she became pregnant. Hera, who was Zeus’s queen, arranged to have her burned to a crisp, but Zeus rescued the fetus and sewed him into his own thigh until Dionysus was born. So this is not a virgin birth in any sense.”⁷⁸ “What about the story of Zeus impregnating Danae through a shower of gold and her giving birth to Perseus?” I asked.

“There are many stories about Zeus and his liaisons with human women. Here’s the big difference: The Jewish God—Yahweh—could be anthropomorphic, but these were metaphors not to be taken literally, whereas in Greek mythology, the anthropomorphism was taken quite literally. The gods were very human — they lusted after mortal women. That’s the focus of these myths. Although Yahweh is sometimes expressed in human imagery, he is utterly unlike human beings. So these parallels break down on a very fundamental level. You’re talking about two very different concepts of God.”⁷⁹

The prominent scholar J. Gresham Machen, who taught New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary for twenty-three years, makes a similar point in his magnum opus, The Virgin Birth of Christ:

Zeus may have union with Danae not in human form, but in a shower of gold, but all the same the union is a satisfaction of his lust for the human maid. Everywhere it is the love of the god for the mortal woman, and not merely the exclusion of a human father of the child, which stands in the forefront of interest. . . . Could anything be more utterly remote from the representation in Matthew and Luke than these stories of the amours of Zeus?⁸⁰

Machen also notes that Christian apologist Justin Martyr, writing in the middle of the second century, argues that Jesus has a virgin birth “in common” with Perseus. Some have cited Justin’s writings as evidence that the two are, indeed, linked. Machen points out, however:

We should never forget that the appeal of Justin Martyr and Origen to the pagan stories of divine begetting is an argumen-tum ad hominem. “You hold,” Justin and Origen say in effect to their pagan opponents, “that the virgin birth of Christ is unbelievable; well, is it any more unbelievable than the stories that you yourselves believe?” . . . When Justin . . . refers to the birth of Perseus as a birth from (or through) a virgin, he is going beyond what the pagan sources contained. There seems to be no clear evidence that pagan sources used the word “virgin” as referring to the mothers of heroes, mythical or historical, who were represented as being begotten by the gods.⁸¹

Claims about extraordinary births of mythological gods were one thing, but quite another are the allegations that certain pre-Christian historical figures—from Buddha to Alexander the Great—are the products of virginal births. I planned to pursue these parallels next.

OTHER REPORTS FROM HISTORY

My first question along these lines involved the conception of Alexander the Great. Several stories swirl around his birth, and some writers have claimed he was immaculately conceived.

“There’s no question that Alexander’s mother was Olympias and his father was Philip of Macedon,” Yamauchi explained. “It was only as Philip’s son that Alexander inherited the throne when his father was assassinated in 336 BC. The story about Olympias being impregnated by Zeus according to her dream was later propaganda designed to support Alexander’s demand for worship.”

Indeed, there’s a report by Plutarch that Olympias explicitly rejected the story of Alexander’s conception by Zeus, saying in reference to Zeus’s wife, “Will not Alexander cease slandering me to Hera?”⁸² Actually, said historian Peter Green, “The truth of the matter is that we have surprisingly little direct evidence about Alexander’s childhood from any source, and what does exist is of very limited historical value.”⁸³

Yamauchi continued. “Buddha’s birth is often called virginal, but that’s not accurate either,” he said. “Sources for the life of Buddha do not appear in written form until five centuries after his death, so they’re not very reliable historically. According to legend, Buddha’s mother dreamed that he entered her in the form of a white elephant— fully formed! In addition, she had been married for many years prior to this, so she certainly wasn’t a virgin.⁸⁴

“The later sources for Buddha, coming five hundred to fifteen hundred years after his life, exaggerate the supernatural elements of his life. It’s even possible that some of the supposed parallels to the life of Jesus may have been borrowed from Christianity.”⁸⁵

As an aside, his reference to Buddha reminded me of a figure tied to another Eastern religion. “Some authors mention the Hindu god Krishna as having been born of a virgin,” I said.

Yamauchi quickly dispatched that claim. “That’s not accurate,” he replied. “Krishna was born to a mother who already had seven previous sons, as even his followers readily concede.”⁸⁶ “What about Zoroaster? ”

“Zoroaster lived before 1000 BC, according to Mary Boyce, or in the sixth century BC, according to other scholars,” Yamauchi said. “The idea that his mother conceived him by drinking the sacred haoma drink appears in the Denkard, which dates to the ninth century AD. That’s an extremely long time later—and far after Jesus.”

“What’s your opinion, then, of this allegation that the virgin birth of Jesus was copied from these other stories? ”

“No, there are too many differences,” he said. “I don’t think anyone can make a convincing case that the virgin birth of Jesus—which was reported quite soon after the fact and in documents that are sober in their reporting—was derived from any pagan or other sources.” Raymond E. Brown agrees. One of America’s premier New Testament scholars, he taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York for twenty-three years and was awarded honorary degrees from two dozen universities in the U.S. and abroad.

He stressed that the supposed virgin-birth parallels “consistently involve a type of hieros gamos where a divine male, in human or other form, impregnates a woman, either through normal sexual intercourse or through some substitute form of penetration. They are not really similar to the non-sexual virginal conception that is at the core of the infancy narratives, a conception where there is no male deity or element to impregnate Mary.”⁸⁷

His conclusion was that “no search for parallels has given us a truly satisfactory explanation of how early Christians happened upon the idea of a virginal conception unless, of course, that is what really took place.”⁸⁸

Even Thomas Boslooper, a liberal professor who wrote a book on the virgin birth although he rejected its historicity, nevertheless scoffed at the suggestion that it was derived from pagan myths. I found his scathing conclusion to be astute:

Contemporary writers invariably use only secondary sources to verify such claims. The scholars whose judgment they accept rarely produced or quoted the primary sources. The literature of the old German Religiongeschichtliche schule, which produced this conclusion and which has become the authority for contemporary scholars who wish to perpetrate the notion that the virgin birth in the New Testament has a non-Christian source, is characterized by brief word, phrase, and sentence quotations that have been lifted out of context or incorrectly translated and used to support preconceived theories. Sweeping generalizations based on questionable evidence have become dogmatic conclusions that cannot be substantiated on the basis of careful investigation.⁸⁹

In the end, allegations about Christianity stealing its belief about the virgin birth fared no better than the claims that it copied Jesus’ resurrection from dying and rising gods in antiquity. In the words of the University of Chicago’s renowned historian of religion, Mircea Eliade: “There is no reason to suppose that primitive Christianity was influenced by the Hellenistic mysteries.”⁹⁰

Efficiently and authoritatively, Yamauchi had dismantled the plagiarism case that has been hyped by so many critics of Christianity. With Boslooper’s blunt critique in mind, I decided to wrap up my interview by asking about ways that unsuspecting readers can protect themselves from fiction masquerading as fact.

WILL TRUTH WIN OUT?

My final line of questions triggered a strong response from Yamauchi. “Do you find that people are writing on these topics of mystery religions who lack the appropriate academic background and are often sloppy in the way they make generalizations?” I asked him.

“Very much so,” he said sternly. “They don’t have the languages, they don’t study the original sources, they don’t pay attention to the dates, and they frequently quote ideas that were popular in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but have already been refuted. Reputable and careful scholars like Carsten Colpe of Germany, Gunter Wagner of Switzerland, and Bruce Metzger of the United States have pointed out that, number one, the evidence for these supposed parallels is often very late, and number two, there are too many generalizations being made.

“People see parallels and then jump to conclusions that one religion influenced another. Of course there are going to be some parallels — most religions talk about some sort of salvation, practice certain rituals, or have a common meal. But that doesn’t mean there is dependence.

“Christianity is quite distinct in that it rose from a Jewish background, which is monotheistic, and it centers around a historical figure who was put to death in a barbaric manner, which is attested in non-Christian sources. Jesus’ followers were eyewitnesses in the first generation. Paul was converted by encountering the risen Christ and had access to eyewitnesses such as Peter and James. Christianity flourished and expanded in spite of persecution from the Roman authorities. It was a new message of love and God’s intervention in the world, and it incorporated all people, including slaves and women, the educated and noneducated—unlike Mithraism, which was confined primarily to soldiers.

“So this new message was universal, yet it was rooted in an ancient tradition, fulfilling prophecies that had been foretold for many centuries. And it was exclusivistic. It wasn’t comfortable, as were the polytheistic pagan religions, in being eclectic or syncretistic — that is, enfolding beliefs and practices from other religions. That’s why, in fact, Christianity was persecuted. The mystery religions were inclusive — you could worship the emperor and you could still adhere to more than one of these at the same time.”

“Do you think that in this age of the Internet, where half-truths and misinformation keep getting recycled, scholars are doomed to forever be responding to overblown claims that have long been answered?” “Yes, unfortunately, probably so,” he said, his tone resigned.

“Do you think in the end the truth will win out? ”

“For some people,” he answered. “For others—they’re looking for what they want to find.”

I wanted some guidance for those interested in pursuing the truth. “What advice would you give to people looking for reliable information?”

Yamauchi put down his cup of coffee. “First, be careful of articles on the web. Even though the Internet is a quick and convenient source of information, it also perpetuates outdated and disproved theories,” he said. “Also check the credentials of the authors. Do they have the training and depth of knowledge to write authoritatively on these issues? And be sure to check the dates of sources that are quoted. Are they relying on anachronistic claims or discredited scholars? And finally, be aware of the biases of many modern authors, who may clearly have an axe to grind.”

All of that made sense. At the same time, however, I was feeling a rising sense of indignation toward writers who either purposefully or carelessly confuse readers by making sweeping “copycat” allegations that sow unwarranted seeds of skepticism towards the real Jesus.

Many of their claims are so outlandish — like the author who likened the sinking of Osiris’s coffin in the Nile to the Christian rite of baptism—that they would be laughable if the damage they wrought wasn’t so serious.⁹¹ Yet in many cases, people are believing them—a great illustration of the old saying that falsehood can make a trip around the world before truth can even get its boots on.

I thanked Yamauchi for his help in setting the record straight. Battling the rain and wind again, I climbed into my rental car and began the long trek to the Cincinnati airport. The whole time, however, I couldn’t shake the frustration I felt over the proliferation of misleading information that has confused so many people. It was the same emotion that launched Nash on a crusade to expose the illegitimacy of the “copycat” argument prior to his untimely death in 2006.

THE TIDE OF SCHOLARSHIP

Ronald Nash, the author of such books as Faith and Reason and The Meaning of History, took truth seriously. He was a plain-talking professor with little patience for scholars or popular writers who took intellectual shortcuts or twisted the facts to support their own preconceived beliefs.

His students quickly learned what it meant when Nash would mockingly sway his hips from side to side while quoting from a book. “It meant he believed what he was reading aloud was at best ridiculous and at worst heretical,” said a colleague. For Nash, he said, truth was more than an ideological parlor game: real lives were at stake.⁹²

So Nash was understandably intolerant of books that repeated worn-out Christian “copycat” claims that had been thoroughly answered decades ago. Offended by the blatant misrepresentations, sloppy logic, and trumped-up “parallels,” he sat down to write The Gospel and the, Greeks as an antidote in 1992. When the onslaught didn’t stop, he updated his book in 2003.

With facts, logic, and clarity, he counters the “careless language,” “massive amounts of oversimplification and attention to detail,” and “flights of fancy” found in so many “greatly overstated” works on the topic.⁹³

“It is clear that the liberal arguments exhibit astoundingly bad scholarship. Indeed, this conclusion may be too generous,” he said with characteristic candor.⁹⁴ His passion bleeds through the pages:

Which mystery gods actually experienced a resurrection from the dead? Certainly no early texts refer to any resurrection of Attis. Attempts to link the worship of Adonis to a resurrection are equally weak. Nor is the case for a resurrection of Osiris any stronger. And of course no claim can be made that Mithras was a dying and rising god. French scholar Andre Boulanger concluded: “The conception that the god dies and is resurrected in order to lead his faithful to eternal life is represented in no Hellenistic mystery religion.”⁹⁵

Nash summarized seven succinct arguments against Christian dependence on the mystery religions.⁹⁶First, “copycat” proponents often illogically assume that just because two things exist side by side, one of them must have caused the other. Second, many alleged similarities are exaggerated or fabricated. Writers frequently use language borrowed from Christianity to describe pagan rituals, then marvel at the “parallels” they’ve discovered. Third, the chronology is wrong. Writers cite beliefs and practices that postdate the first century in an attempt to argue that they influenced the first-century formation of Christianity. Just because a cult had a belief or practice in the third or fourth century AD doesn’t mean it had the same belief or practice in the first century.

Fourth, Paul would never have consciously borrowed from pagan religions; in fact, he warned against this very thing.⁹⁷Fifth, early Christianity was exclusivistic; any hint of syncretism in the New Testament would have caused immediate controversy. Sixth, unlike the mystery religions, Christianity is grounded in actual historical events. And seventh, what few parallels remain could reflect a Christian influence on pagan beliefs and practices. Pagan attempts to counter the growing influence of Christianity by imitating it are clearly apparent.⁹⁸

One thing was for sure. “The tide of scholarly opinion has turned dramatically against attempts to make early Christianity dependent on the so-called dying and rising gods of Hellenistic paganism,” said Nash.⁹⁹

Two millennia ago, the apostle Peter was equally unambiguous: The accounts about Jesus in the pages of the New Testament weren’t distilled from fanciful stories about mythological deities. Peter wasn’t reporting rumors or speculation, and he certainly wasn’t trusting his future to the likes of Zeus or Osiris. He was only interested in the real Jesus.

“We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ,” he declared, “but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.”¹⁰⁰

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