so uh the gospels are myth and their myth influenced by dying and rising gods that come
from other different religious groups that were known at the time it's just a jewish version of
a greco-euhemorization where you you uh you or you well excuse me that'll come with paul paul's
well anyways however they put it basically the dying and rising gods it's all a myth um what
would your response to that be well even if the gospels were doing that you got paul and you still
have to deal with tacitus and josephus and lucian who who mentioned in jesus so you still have that
um but here's a here's the thing think of who these earliest christians were
they were pious jews who debated over matters of the jewish law such as whether
christians could eat meat that had been sacrificed to idols
whether jewish christians whether it was permissible for jewish christians to even
eat in the same room as gentile christians whether gentile male christians needed to be circumcised
whether jewish christians still needed to maintain temple purification rights now if you're going to
debate over the minutia of the jewish law to that extent do we really still imagine that
these same jews are going to engage in wholesale borrowing from pagan myths to form the foundation
of their own religion i mean really and then you think about this you can find parallel
details in just about anything i mean right now i'm i'm thinking of of a plane that took off of
massachusetts just after nine o'clock one morning and just after 10 it flew into one of the tallest
skyscrapers in the world in new york city between the 78th and 80th floors killing everyone on board
of course you think i'm referring to the 767 that flew into the south tower on 9
but i'm actually referring to the b-285 that flew into the empire state building on july 28
1945 the same floors in fact as this as the 767 flew into the south tower
now i suppose someone could come along a little bit later and say well 911 never happened
because look it's copying off of that earlier incident it's too much to say it's too
similar and besides i mean they're just uh there's too many clues here to to see that uh
it makes it simple to recognize that it's just a copycat i mean 9-1-1 who who do you call when you
have an emergency 9-1-1 what was the emergency well the u.s was going through its greatest
recession ever at that period and that was symbolized by the tumbling of the world
trade center the crash into the pentagon was symbolic that the u.s government had declining
influence around the world at that point and the plane that was crashing in the pennsylvania farm
field showed that all of this impacted the average american so see you can modern mythologize just
about anything but you've got to show there's a causal connection and that's something mythicists
haven't been able to do here's another thing um and why historians aren't uh persuaded by
the the the parallels and pagan myths um because the parallels themselves aren't
that similar so for example the closest parallel that predates jesus is a guy named
asclepius a mythical figure lived i mean he's mentioned in the homeric epics so we're talking
hundreds and hundreds of years before jesus uh probably a mythical character maybe there's some
colonel of his maybe he was a historical character of some sort but all instead of asclepius
is that he uh healed people one occasion he raised someone from the dead that's it the closest figure
to jesus that post dates jesus is apollonius of tiana and apollonius was a traveling itinerant
philosopher he didn't believe in resurrection he believed in disembodied existence there's i think
he might have raised someone from the dead he really didn't do many miracles or anything like
that what's similar about him is of course there are conflicting accounts uh some say that he died
others said no he he didn't there was some sort of a apotheosis where he was just disappeared
coming kind of like romulus did so but those that say he died there's one account one account
that says that he came back to life but only it's known because he appeared to one of his disciples
in a dream and we don't know if that was one of his original disciples or someone a hundred
years later there were other people in the room they didn't see him because he was in a dream
and that's supposed to be like jesus so what you have to do in order to make the
um pagan parallels uh interesting is you've got to combine a bunch of them so you take dionysus
who is said to have divine paternity and who made wine and you combine that with a thor whose life
was threatened at birth and you combine that with his clepius and then with apollonis of
tiana and then you combine that with hercules who is said to ascend it into heaven of course
it's because he was losing his powers as a hero so he built a big fire jumped into committed suicide
and there's a report that he was seen ascending to heaven on the horse pegasus but we'll get rid
of all these details that are so different than jesus and we'll only take those ones that are
similar and we take all these figures and make a composite figure to kind of resemble jesus
and the reason historians aren't impressed by that is because that would be similar today by saying
abraham lincoln was a tall lanky politician from illinois who became president who served uh who
was elected the two terms uh abraham i'm sorry john f kennedy was a u.s president who graduated
from harvard and then there was a character in the popular television series 24 named david palmer
who portrayed the first black u.s president and so you put all three of these together
and what do you have barack obama a tall lanky illinois senator who was elected the two terms as
u.s president he graduated from harvard and was the first black u.s president therefore barack
obama was a myth and you'd say well that's insane you've got to take three people one of which is
fictitious over a 150 year period and so wait what are you doing with jesus you're taking
fictitious and some historical characters even more than three that span over a thousand
years to get somebody that even partially resembles jesus so it just hasn't convinced
historians it only seems to convince those who want to discredit the thought that jesus
existed
you