This is my reply to Roger Pearse's article:
Parallelomania, Bad Scholarship, and Fake History
https://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2021/12/14/parallelomania-bad-scholarship-and-fake-history/#respond
=====================================
Sure, skeptics have overstated their case for the copy-cat savior hypothesis.
But I don't.
Why must the parallels be close? Is there something especially unscholarly in saying a later religion took certain motifs from the older religion and gave them a new twist?
I think all that matters is whether skeptics can be reasonable to accuse NT Christianity of including steals from pre-Christian paganism, such as Luke and Matthew of taking a pre-Christian notion of a god impregnating a human virgin without disturbing the hymen, and giving that story a new twist.
Yes, they can be reasonable to assert this. Some church fathers felt forced to resort to wildly implausible conspiracy hypotheses to explain why certain traits of Christianity appear in pre-Christian paganism.
And you cannot deny the numerous close parallels between Epic of Atra-Hasis/Gilgemesh and the Genesis flood story, with Atra-Hasis being dated at least 500 years earlier than Genesis.
You cannot find a convincing parallel precursor for Medusa, but what fool would argue that her uniqueness means she must have been real? Well then, even if certain claims about Jesus were unique, why do apologists so zealously fight against the notion that they were stolen from pre-Christian myth? The uniqueness doesn't prove anything...but the parallels, if proved, would demonstrate that Jesus was far less unique than layman opinion holds.
Philo believed Sarah’s virginity was restored before she gave birth to Isaac.
Pindar's Pythian Ode # 12 is securely dated more than 300 years b.c., and is rather explicit that after Zeus impregnated Danae, she was still a "virgin" before during and after she gave birth:
“Perseus, the son of Danae, who they say was conceived in a spontaneous shower of gold. But when the virgin goddess had released that beloved man from those labors, she created the many-voiced song of flutes so that she could imitate with musical instruments the shrill cry that reached her ears from the fast-moving jaws of Euryale.”
That is from Pindar’s Pythian Ode 12. See http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0162%3Abook%3DP.%3Apoem%3D12
Everything in Christianity has a parallel in pre-Christian paganism, the most Christianity did was put a new spin on older motifs. Don't you find it the least bit suspicious that Christianity doesn't have many parallels with what the Native American Indians were doing between 500 b.c. and the 1st century, but Christianity has many parallels with concepts in pre-Christian Roman and Greek religion? The notion of influence cannot be denied, which is probably why Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, Schaff edition, Chapter LXIX, says the devil knew the Christian truths were coming, and so in OT days worked through the pagans to retroactively imitate Christian truths earlier than god wanted the world to know such things, so that when God manifested such things later, the world would by then be desensitized to such traits and find them unappealing.
If it was very easy for Justin to assert that the parallels in paganism came later and were only imitating earlier Christianity, he most assuredly would have involved this far more sensible sounding theory. He didn't because he couldn't. Only "the devil' can explain why uniquely Christian concepts show up in pre-Christian religion. I call that a rather acute case of desperation.
I'm not saying the Christian position is wrong or unreasonable. I'm saying the pagan copy-cat hypothesis about Jesus can be reasonable. Contrary to popular opinion, the reasonableness of a belief does not necessarily imply that the opposite belief is unreasonable. Sometimes both opposing positions can be equally reasonable. But even so, that much is enough to refute the apologists who say the copy-cat savior hypothesis is "unreasonable".
If I can't use snake-handling KJV Onlyists to prove Christianity is unreasonable, YOU can't use inept skeptics and outdated scholarship to prove the pagan copycat savior hypothesis is unreasonable. Deal?
Barry Jones
Matthew Firth