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What about the religions before Christianity?

Luke Sweeney

The questions we must first ask in relation to our question:

  1. Are there similar ‘resurrection’ stories that predate Christianity?

  2. Are such things as Sunday worship taken from Pagan traditions?

  3. Who holds the burden of truth?

A more modern objection to Christianity is that the faith is simply a copy of other religions and mythologies that predate it, stealing from their stories to make up a new religion.

 

Perhaps the most commonly cited example of this is that of Mithras, the ancient mythological deity worshipped in Persia 400 years prior to Jesus. As the story goes, this was a saviour-like figure who was born of a virgin, had 12 disciples, performed many miracles, and then sacrificed himself before rising from the dead three days later.


On the surface, this seems like an exact description of Jesus’ life; however, upon further scrutiny, we understand most of these claims to be false. Mithras was actually said to of been born of a rock, with no indications or evidence that he was a teacher of any kind. The 12 disciples are discerned from murals, and such imagery was post-Christianity, with two of the disciples being the sun and the moon. The sacrifice also has little to no evidence, and the idea that he is dead at all is not one that the followers even believed—there was no indication he had ever died.


Christian traditions, especially Sunday worship, are also said to have derived from pagan traditions. Dan Brown’s "Da Vinci Code" not only mentions Mithras but has dialogue from the main character stating:

Christianity honoured the Jewish Sabbath of Saturday, but Constantine shifted it to coincide with the pagan’s veneration day of the sun

Indeed, Constantine decreed, "On the venerable day of the sun, let the magistrates and people residing in cities rest, and let the workshops be closed." This, however, was decreed in the year 321 A.D. This was close to 300 years after the first Christians came to be, and we know from the book of Acts, written within the first century, that Paul explicitly speaks of meeting on the first day of the week, which would have been a Sunday; Sunday worship therefore was not adopted hundreds of years later.


Conclusion

While many mythologies mention dying saviours, none have a genuine, significant relationship to the story of Jesus. The evidence to support such stories is very much non-existent too, and the sources of ‘evidence’ online must hold the burden of proof, meaning that they are to provide empirical and unbiased data to support whatever claims they have made.

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