Paganism

C-Far

Some claim that Christianity came from Paganism and that the story of Jesus is just a copy of the stories of the Pagan gods. They also say that our holidays like Easter and Christmas also came from them as well and against Scripture. Any help to refute these claims?

kokiie

wow i never heard of that before.. we know for a fact that Jesus existed and that he was crucified.. its down in history

spr418

SOME!! you just said some..we are not from those SOME..we believe that jesus for a FACT came and existed and was crusified for us..plz don't let anything weaken your faith or believe in anything thats againest the church!

GBU
sandra

C-Far

ya but it's nice to have reassurance and not to have lingering doubts from what other people say. i'm trying to find evidence to defend our faith from those claims cause a friend of mine brought it up in a book The Jesus Mysteries: Was the "Original Jesus" a Pagan God? so i want to give him proof.

Unknown

[quote author=C-Far link=board=4;threadid=4582;start=0#msg62710 date=1162569294]
ya but it's nice to have reassurance and not to have lingering doubts from what other people say. i'm trying to find evidence to defend our faith from those claims cause a friend of mine brought it up in a book The Jesus Mysteries: Was the "Original Jesus" a Pagan God? so i want to give him proof.


In short, no.

There are those who say Jesus is taken from the story of Mithra. However, all the stories about Mithra that are similar to Jesus came after Christianity - so they prove nothing.

The other stories are so vague they bear no wheight what so ever.

It is true that both Christmas and Pascha occur on the same times as pagan festivals.

In the case of Christmas, this is deliberate. The Church chose this date to celebrate Christmas in order to get rid of the pagan festival. But this does not mean Christmas is itself pagan - it isn't.

As for Pascha, this has no relationship with the pagan festivals that occur on this date, but rather in the existing Jewish festival of Passover (Pesach in Hebrew, Pascha in Greek), during which our Lord was crucified.

Unknown

C-Far,

You haven't really presented us with anything to respond to. The onus is on the one making the claim to present and argue the substance of their claim first; once that is done, then the defence can begin its attempt to prove the prosecution's case to be untenable.

Proponents of the pagan parallel claim have two elements they need to establish: 1) That similarities actually exist, and 2) that there is a causal relationship accounting for these similarities between X and Y where X is believed to have copied Y

Once that is done, then the onus shifts to us to disprove either 1) or 2) by either a) rebutting the idea that similarities exist, b) proving that despite the existence of certain similarities there exist strikingly more significant disimilarities, and c) proving that there is no causal connection between X and Y.