It does sound like someone got hold of Kersey Graves', The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors and plotted it out. Scholarship in the 1870's left something to be desired.
Carrier gives a far more lucid and modern account without the forced "similarities."
Carrier gives a far more lucid and modern account without the forced "similarities."
Quote:To say Christianity was a mystery religion is not to say that Christianity
is exactly like any other mystery religion, any more than any mystery
religion was 'exactly like' any other. Often when scholars deny that
Christianity was a mystery religion, they rea1 1y mean it wasn't just one of
the already-existing mystery religions superficially overhauled with Jewish
concepts. Christianity wasn't 'Osiris Cult 2.0'. Which is certai nly true. But
that's all that anyone's evidence can prove. If instead we define a mystery
religion as any Hellenistic cult in which individual salvation was procured
by a ritual initiation into a set of 'mysteries', the knowledge of which and
participation in which were key to ensuring a blessed eternal life, then
Christianity was demonstrably a mystery religion beyond any doubt.
I f we then expand that definition to include a set of specific feat ures
held in common by all other mystery religions of the early Roman era, then
Christianity becomes even more demonstrably a mystery religion, so much so,
in fact, that it's impossible to deny it was deliberately constructed as
such. Even the earliest discernible form of Christianity emulates numerous
cultic features and concepts that were so unique to the Hellenistic mystery
cults that it is statistically beyond any reasonable possibility that they
all found their way into Christianity by mere coincidence. They formed a
coherent, logical and repeatedly replicated system of ideas in every other
mystery cult. It would be irrational to conclude the same wasn't so of Christianity.
Christianity cannot be understood apart from this fact. And any
theory of historicity that fails to account for it cannot be credible.
On the Historicity of Jesus pgs. 96-97
