A Zeal For God Not According to Knowledge

CHRISTIANITY DID NOT DEPEND ON PAGAN RELIGIONS FOR ITS DOCTRINES: A SUMMARY Above, Judaism's claims that Christianity got its doctrinal content mainly from pagan religion have been weighed and found wanting. To pursue all the specifics of this subject would be surely mind numbing and exceed space limitations. Enough of the specific points the defenders of Judaism raise when trying to tie together Christianity and "pagan savior gods" have been refuted above to prove how weak their case really is. Their fundamental error is to use outmoded and/or biased scholarship, such as Frazer's, and make superficial and/or anachronistic comparisons between pagan and Christian ceremonies and doctrines in order to conclude the latter came from the former. Ominously for these claims, the general tide of scholarship in the fields of classics and Biblical studies in recent decades has turned against their validity. Even in 1952, A.D. Nock realized the weakness of the alleged parallels between paganism and Christianity: "To argue as I have done is not to suggest that pagan mysteries had no influence on the development and acceptance of Catholic Christianity; the surprise is that on the evidence they had so little." The Jewish critics of Christianity repeatedly will make generalizations about the beliefs of the mystery cults being like Christianity for which they cite no direct evidence from primary sources or which only support their case very inadequately. One discovers, upon the specific examination of the evidence, time and time again the supposed “dying then resurrected savior gods” in many renditions of the myths about them didn’t die, didn’t die for the same reasons Jesus did, weren’t really “resurrected” (i.e., made bodily alive again to a state equal to or superior to their pre-death state), weren’t made alive again at all, and/or weren’t made alive on the third day after their deaths. The cults’ initiates, to the extent their beliefs are really known, had a different definition of “salvation,” didn’t believe their gods removed sins from their accounts (i.e., justified), didn’t live or try to live a transformed moral and spiritual life, practiced different rituals with meanings wildly variant from those the New Testament gives to baptism and the Eucharist, didn’t believe in reenacting the god’s death and resurrection ceremonially, didn’t believe they would be resurrected themselves, didn’t have a mystical union with their god, and/or didn’t believe the god’s death or resurrection gave them eternal life. The defenders of Judaism also systematically ignore or discount the fact that various Christian doctrines and ceremonies had Jewish precedents, such as the Qumran sect’s multiple lustrations resembling Christian baptism, the Old Testament's animal sacrifices prefiguring Jesus' sacrifice, and the Seder Passover meal serving as a forerunner for the Eucharist. C.S. Lewis's insights can't be casually dismissed: Whatever pagan religions and Christianity may have in common may reflect what highly limited religious truths human reason and emotion can find on their own. The pagan rites then merely are a pale shadow of Christian truths, which are the ultimate revelation from God in this age. Anyone disturbed by the case the defenders of Judaism mount for the alleged direct dependence of Christianity on pagan religion, in which the former took its teachings from the latter, should put their minds at ease. Those still doubtful should consider pursuing the references in Nash, Machen, Yamauchi, and Wagner, not to mention Drazin and Maccoby, back to translations of the original primary sources (not the secondary works) of the myths themselves, and check whether the anti-Christian case can withstand close scrutiny. So it's time now to haul to the junkyard the Werde/Loisy/Bousset/Reitzenstein thesis that Christianity depended on the Mysteries for its doctrinal content or liturgy, upon which the defenders of Judaism have hitched a ride, a thesis only sustainable through shallow, obsolete, irresponsible scholarship making frivolous, superficial, anachronistic comparisons. CHRISTIANITY'S DEPENDENCE ON GNOSTICISM REMAINS UNPROVEN For all the learned tomes alleging primitive Christianity's dependence on a pre-existing Gnostic movement's teachings, little real proof of the latter's existence has ever been produced. Chronological reasons alone render unprovable Maccoby's claims that Paul derived many of his teachings from Gnosticism. All the primary sources used to prove that a pre-first-century non-Christian Gnosticism existed actually post-date the New Testament's dates of composition. In addition, Gnosticism's eclectic nature undermines assertions that it originated solely from various pagan gentiles' encounter with, and rejection of, the claims of Judaism. Nor can it be assumed that because Judaism's antiquity greatly exceeds that of Christianity that Gnostic documents featuring quotes and/or allusions to the Old but not New Testament must have been originally written before the first century A.D. "Gnosticism" could only be proven to exist before A.D. 100 by using an expansive definition, such as Maccoby's, that excludes key parts of the fully developed Gnostic systems as they were known from the second century A.D. onwards. Furthermore, it's the purest linguistic sophistry to conclude Paul's teachings resemble Gnosticism's after deliberately describing both in ways to make them like each other by generalizing, excluding, and misinterpreting texts. Maccoby's arguments that Paul believed the angels wrote the Torah have to misinterpret key texts to be effective. Similarly, all Jewish precedents for Paul's or John's beliefs are either ignored or discounted, such as for Satan's great and evil influence on humanity or a dualistic view of humanity's moral condition as documented in the Dead Sea Scrolls or the intertestamental pseudepigrapha. As always, Maccoby's method consists of maximizing superficial similarities between Christianity and Gnosticism (here) or some other Hellenistic religious movement by ignoring or minimizing the actual differences between the two, while simultaneously producing sharp dissimilarities between Judaism and Christianity by denying or minimizing the precedents for the latter's doctrines as found in the former. Ultimately, there's no "there" there in the attempts of the defenders of Judaism to show a preexisting Gnosticism supplied early Christianity with many of its doctrines. SUMMARY: JESUS OF NAZARETH IS THE MESSIAH PREDICTED BY THE OLD TESTAMENT Above, the counter-explanations of the messianic texts by the defenders of Judaism have been weighed and found wanting. Since many of the Old Testament messianic prophecies are types, not prophecies that will be verbally fulfilled literally and directly, this or that New Testament citation of the Old Testament can be shown to not be "out of context." The Christian belief in the New Testament as an additional revelation of God is also partially founded on a base independent of the Old Testament, such as the miracles Jesus performed or participated in (culminating in His resurrection from the dead), His supreme moral example, and His profound religious teaching. Through such data as archeological evidence and correlation with pagan historical documents and writings, it can inferred that what can't be checked in the New Testament is reliable since what can be verified directly has repeatedly confirmed it. The defenders of Judaism have failed to understand that the Christian interpretation of the Old Testament’s messianic texts, of one Messiah with widely separated comings, is based on the insight that the Old Testament’s prophets sometimes suddenly without warning telescope together widely separated events. By misunderstanding Biblical Hebrew’s tense/state system, they falsely accuse Christians of converting completed states into future tenses for unfulfilled . . .