Pagan Origins of the Christ Myth

John G. Jackson

• Verlag: Echo Point Books & Media
• Jahr: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781648371110
• Thema: Theologie & Religion
• Thema: Christliche Theologie

A classic resource that connects the cardinal doctrines of Christianity to their origins in the ancient civilizations that preceded the religion.

Sources of The Christ Myth

There are two principal types of savior-gods recognized by hierologists, namely: vegetation-gods and sun-gods. The vegetation theory has been brilliantly developed by Sir James George Frazer, in his Golden Bough,¹ and by Grant Allen in The Evolution of the Idea of God.² This viewpoint is concisely summarized by the noted psychologist Dr. David Forsyth:

Many gods besides Christ have been supposed to die, be resurrected and ascend to heaven. This idea has now been traced back to its origin among primitive people in the annual death and resurrection of crops and plant life generally. This explains the world-wide prevalence of the notion. Among still more primitive tribes, as Grant Allen showed, it is not yet understood that sown corn sprouts because of the spring sunshine, and they attribute the result to divine agency. To this end they are accustomed at seed time to kill their tribal god – either in human or animal form – and scatter the flesh and the blood over the sown fields. They believe that the seeds will not grow unless the god is sacrificed and added to them in this manner. When, therefore, the crop appears, they never doubt that it is their god coming to life again. It is from this erroneous belief of primitive tribes that Christianity today derives its belief in Christ’s Death and Resurrection.³

According to the advocates of the solar myth theory, the ancient crucified saviors were personifications of the sun, and their life-stories were allegories of the sun’s passage through the twelve constellations of the Zodiac.⁴ The astronomical elements in the Christian Epic are pointed out by Edward Carpenter with characteristic lucidity:

The Passover, the greatest feast of the Jews, borrowed from the Egyptians, handed down to become the supreme festival of Christianity, … is, as well known, closely connected with the celebration of the Spring Equinox and of the passing over of the Sun from south to north of the equator, i.e., from his winter depression to his summer dominion. The Sun, at the moment of passing the equinoctial point, stood three thousand years ago in the zodiacal constellation of the Ram, or he-lamb. The Lamb, therefore, became the symbol of the young triumphant god…. At an earlier date – owing to the precession of the equinoxes – the Sun at the spring passage stood in the constellation of the Bull; so, in the older worships of Egypt, and of Persia and of India, it was the Bull that was sacred and the symbol of the god. … In the representation of the Zodiac in the Temple of Denderah (in Egypt) the figure of Virgo is annotated by a smaller figure of Isis with Horus in her arms; and the Roman Church fixed the cele bration of Mary’s assumption into the glory at the very date (15th August) of the said constellation’s disappearance from sight in the blaze of the solar rays, and her birth on the date (8th Sept.) of the same constellation’s reappearance…. Jesus himself … is purported to have been born like the other sungods, Bacchus, Apollo, Osiris, on the 25th day of December, the day of the Sun’s rebirth, i.e., the first day which obviously lengthens after the 21st of December.⁵

Vegetation cults, it seems, are older than stellar or solar cults, but were later blended with them. In the primitive vegetation-god sacrifice, the victim was, it is believed, originally the king, or head-man, of the tribe or clan. It was believed by ancient man that the prosperity of the tribe depended on the well-being of the ruler. If the king became old and feeble, it was considered a foregone conclusion that the nation or tribe would suffer a similar decline. So the king, who was usually regarded as a god in human form, was sacrificed, and replaced with a younger and more vigorous man. After much passage of time, the son of the king was substituted in the sacrificial rite, and being also the offspring of divinity, he was properly called the son of the god. At a still later period, a condemned criminal was chosen in the place of the royal victim. This culprit was given regal honors for a time, then put to death. He was generally slain while bound to a sacred tree, with arms outstretched in the form of a cross. After being entombed, he was believed to rise from the dead within three days; the three-day period representing the return of vegetation. The question naturally arises: Why three days? The answer is, that the three-day period is based on the three-day interval between the Old and New Moons.⁶ It is still believed by certain persons of a superstitious type that there is an intimate connection between the phases of the moon and the growth of crops.

According to the Chaldean historian Berosus, there was a religious festival celebrated annually in ancient Babylon, known as the Sacaea. The duration of the fete was five days, and for that length of time servants and masters exchanged places in society, the servants giving orders and the masters obeying them. The king temporarily abdicated the throne, and a mock-king called Zoganes reigned in his place. But after the five days were over, the mock-king was dethroned and scourged, and then either hanged or crucified. An eminent Egyptologist has noted that:

The victims of these human sacrifices were generally crucified, or else killed and then “hung on a tree,” until the evening. In this regard it is interesting to notice that in Acts the writer mistakenly speaks of Jesus as having been slain and then hanged on a tree, as though this were a common phrase coming readily to his mind; and the word “hanged” is frequently used in Greek to denote crucifixion.⁷

Among the advocates of the non-historicity of Jesus, John M. Robertson and L. Gordon Rylands are widely known. In his Evolution of Christianity⁸ Mr. Rylands contends that the name Jesus is the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew Joshua. Joshua, it seems, was an ancient Hebrew sun-god, who was demoted to the status of a man by the priests of the Yahweh cult. However, the worship of Joshua was continued in secret by his devotees, until the fall of Jerusalem. After that event, secrecy was no longer necessary, so that the Joshua cult again came out into the open. The sacrificed Jesus, or Joshua, according to Robertson and Rylands, was not a histor...