It’s been popular in the past ten years (or so) to describe Jesus as nothing more than a “retelling” of prior “dying and rising” gods such as Horus or Osiris. Skeptics who make such claims typically describe a number of shared characteristics in an effort to highlight the similarities between …
Read More »The Reasonable Expectations That Cause Mythologies to Resemble Jesus
While the similarities between Jesus and the “divine” mythological characters that preceded him are grossly overstated, we ought to expect some parallels between Jesus and the imaginative creations of those who lived prior to Christ’s appearance on earth. As ancient people began to consider the possibility of God’s existence, a …
Read More »Those Pre-Christian Deities Aren’t Much Like Jesus After All
I’ve written about how we, as Christians, ought to respond to the claim that Jesus is simply a fictional re-creation of prior “dying-and-rising” god mythologies. The first step in assessing the evidence requires us to closely examine attributes of the mythological character offered in comparison to Jesus. It turns out …
Read More »Why The Pre-Jesus Mythologies Fail To Prove Jesus Is A Myth
I can still remember the first time I took high school students to Berkeley on a missions trip that put them in direct contact with prominent local atheists and atheist students groups on the campus of UC Berkeley. In one of our first lectures with an atheist presenter, the students …
Read More »How to Respond to Claims Jesus Is a “Copycat Savior” (Free Bible Insert)
With the rise in popularity of movies like Zeitgeist: The Movie and The God Who Wasn’t There, skeptical objections to the historicity of Jesus sometimes take the form of comparisons between Jesus and ancient mythologies preceding Him. Skeptics highlight similarities between Jesus and Horus, Mithras, Osiris or other ancient examples …
Read More »Is Jesus Simply a Retelling of the Osiris Mythology?
Over the past two weeks, I’ve examined the similarities between Jesus, Mithras and Horus. Early mythological characters are sometimes offered by skeptics in an attempt to argue Jesus is nothing more than a re-creation and retelling of the ancient “rising and dying” mythologies embraced by a number of primitive cultures. …
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