Is Christianity unique or not?

[JairCrawford]

Frankly, Id like to know more about these "hundreds" of dying and rising savior gods. I have heard of Mithras as the proverbial elephant in the room but not much information about others.

And do try to remember that the earliest xtians did not deny the similarities but rather invented the absurd concept of Diabolical Mimicry as an excuse for why their godboy seemed so much like all the others.

http://www.holyblasphemy.net/diabolical-mimicry/

Conventional wisdom views Jesus Christ as being a novel and revolutionary person, whose message of love and kindness was rejected by the wicked Jews and Pagans, because they were evil and stupid. This is Christian propaganda of the worst kind, and absolutely untrue; the reason that many could not accept Jesus Christ, was because they saw him as an obvious copy of Pagan spiritual tradition. Those who argue against the historical Jesus point out that the Jesus Christ of the gospels didn’t say or do anything new – how could Jesus be the Word, Truth and Life, if his birth, death, resurrection, and every single detail of his earthly ministry was already recorded in earlier mythological traditions?

There is no question that these similarities exist, and were often pointed out to Christians of the first few centuries of the Church, because Christians were always defending themselves against them. In all of the collected literature of the early Church, however, the similarities between Jesus and other Pagan figures were never denied by Christians. Nor, as they are today, were they called accidents or coincidences. Instead, early Christians formulated the only possible explanation they could think of, an argument referred to as Diabolical Mimicry.

Diabolical Mimicry is a concept that is still alive and well within certain denominations of Christianity today. However it is seen as a strictly theological concept today (and I am not necessarily convinced that it was seen as anything else back then either).

As a person with somewhat Pentecostal beliefs myself, I notice the concept is used a lot in the more charismatic churches when other more cessationist denominations say things like "Look see! Here are some pagan religions today and they 'speak in tongues' too! howdaya explain that?" And the response is, "That is simply a Satanic counterfeit of what the Holy Spirit legitimately does!"

But you can see how this is purely a theological argument here. It has nothing to do with whether pagans engaged in glossolalia before Pentecostals or not. And from what I have read, the early Christian grumblings about Diabolical Mimicry seem similar. There don't seem to be any claims that say, Mithraism's mimicry pre-dated the Christian rituals (unless there is something specific that I have missed).

So I would say that it's perhaps a bit of a jump to insist that Diabolical Mimicry was a last gasp effort to make a rational argument about the similarities of Mithraism to their own faith when it could just as easily have been a reaction out of zeal because similar practices coexisted in the two religions for a time, and that was bothersome to them.