Richard Carrier, in his book On the Historicity of Jesus gives some of the more outlandish mythicists a hard time for making unsubstantiated links between xtianity and Mithraism, The Isis Cult, The Eleusinian Mysteries, The Cult of Attis, etc.
Trying to cram every facet of the xtian myth into the various mystery religions is as pointless and facile as when xtians make idiotic statements such as "there is more evidence for 'jesus' than any other ancient figure.' Stupid comments, easily refuted and which cast doubt on the scholarship of the person making them. Instead, Carrier notes these four similarities with the Mystery cults.
Trying to cram every facet of the xtian myth into the various mystery religions is as pointless and facile as when xtians make idiotic statements such as "there is more evidence for 'jesus' than any other ancient figure.' Stupid comments, easily refuted and which cast doubt on the scholarship of the person making them. Instead, Carrier notes these four similarities with the Mystery cults.
Quote:Christianity also conforms to four universal trends distinctive of the Hellenistic mystery religions, and is therefore unmistakably a product of these same cultural trends:
1. syncretism of a local or national system of religious ideas with distinctly Hellenistic ideas (and the ideas of other nations and localities whose diffusion was facilitated by Hellenism);
2. a monotheistic trend, with every mystery religion evolving from polytheism (many competing gods) to henotheism (one supreme god reigning over subordinate deities), marking a trajectory toward monotheism (only one god);
3. a shift to individualism, placing the religious focus on the eternal salvation of the individual rather than the welfare of the community as a whole;
4. and cosmopolitanism, with membership being open and spanning all environments, provinces, races, and social classes (and often genders).
That all four features were universal to all the known mystery religions has been abundantly demonstrated in current scholarship, as has the enormous popularity of these new religions, and the rise of these features and their popularity centuries before Christianity. Christianity
fits exactly within this trend and in that respect looks exactly like every other mystery religion developed during this period - indeed it is a relative latecomer. It is thus an expected phenomenon of its time and evinces an unmistakable transformation of the very different Jewish
religion in to something more palatably identical to popular pagan religious movements arising from every other 'foreign' culture under the Roman Empire.
