Jesusism - Just Another First Century Mystery Cult

[RoadRunner79]

This unwillingness to engage with, ad hominem, and distrust of anyone outside of their group, still reminds me of dealing with cultist groups.

However back to the argument being discussed.  I'm still looking for details on what exactly is being compared. 

The following is from https://historyforatheists.com/2017/05/d...ory-again/ under the category "Jesus was an amalgam of earlier pagan myths, brought together into a mythic figure of a god-man and saviour of a kind found in many cults of the time.”  This is referencing the writings of Acharya S, but I believe they are similar to what is being proposed here.   (Although those proposing them seem to avoid specifics and reasoning, in favor of discussing the person).

Working from late nineteenth and early twentieth century  theosophist claims which exaggerate parallels between the Jesus stories and pagan myths, she makes the typical New Age logical leap from “similarity” to “parallel” and finally to “connection” and “causation”.  Leaving aside the fact that many of these “parallels” are highly strained, with any miraculous conception or birth story becoming a “virgin birth” or anything to do with a death or a tree becoming a “crucifixion” (even if virginity or a cross is not involved in either), it is very hard to make the final leap from “parallel” to “causation”.

This goes along with what I have seen as well.  With the dying and rising gods  tied to the seasons becoming analogous to Christ's resurrection. The connection being so reduced and strained in order to make the connection, that it's meaning is lost.

Further, there is the issue, that history within the early Church, shows that the origin was primarily Jewish,

This is particularly hard because of the masses of evidence that the first followers of the Jesus sect were devout Jews – a group for whom the idea of adopting anything “pagan” would have been utterly horrific.  These were people who cut their hair short because long hair was associated with pagan, Hellenistic culture or who shunned gymnasia and theatres because of their association with pagan culture.  All the evidence actually shows that the earliest Jesus sect went through a tumultuous period in its first years trying to accommodate non-Jews into their devoutly Jewish group.  To claim that these people would merrily adopt myths of Horus and Attis and Dionysius and then amalgamate them into a story about a pagan/Jewish hybrid Messiah (who didn’t exist) and then turn around and forget he didn’t exist and claim he did and that he did so just a few decades earlier is clearly a nonsense hypothesis.

Now if applying the description of "mystery religion" to Christianity, was useful, I don't have an issue with it.  After all, this would just be a short way, of referring to certain aspects of Christianity.  However for the mythicists, it seems to be more ideological, rather than based on facts and rational reason.