Is Christianity based on older myths?

[Minimalist]

A passage from Richard Carrier's "On the Historicity of Jesus" and his discussion of euhemerization:

Element 45: A popular version of this phenomenon i n ancient faith literature was the practice of euhemerization: the taking of a cosmic god and placing him at a definite point in history as an actual person who was later deified. We already noted Plutarch's criticism of the trend (which he frowns upon, but i n so doing concedes its popularity) in Element 14.

Euhemerus was a Greek writer of the early third century BCE, who wrote a book called The Sacred Scriptures in which he depicted an imaginary scholar discovering that Zeus and Uranus were once actual kings. In the process Euhemerus invents a history for these 'god ki ngs', even though we know there is no plausible case to be made that either Zeus or Uranus was ever a real person. Yet the idea caught on; biographies and histories of nonexistent people proliferated, and ancient literature flowered with attempts to assign mythic heroes and gods to real historical periods and places.

Even before that there were attempts to develop a 'historical' Hercules to justify territorial disputes in the Peloponnesus. and afterwards the origin of Rome was explained by appealing to an eponymous godman named 'Romulus'. And many other uses were found for the procedure, as we saw for inventing King Arthur, Ned Ludd, Abraham, Moses, and other national heroes I explored in Chapter 1 (§4). There was nothing at all unusual about doing this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euhemerism

You see, there IS a reason why religious leaders want people only to read their bullshit. If you start the process of examining history, literature and philosophy you quickly start to find how much of their crap is derived drivel from other sources. Poor xtians....jesus is just warmed over shit.