Excerpt #47 from my book, Religion, An Obstacle to Human Progress
Theologians agree that the unknown gospel authors, each with their own agenda and bias, created stories to match the prophecy of the Old Testament written about a thousand years earlier.
Albert Einstein observed that we can’t solve our problems from thesame level of thinking from which they originated.
The gospel writers attempted to go to the next level of thinking.
The Jewish laws had been around for about a thousand years.
It was time to move on, to advance and evolve.
The writers were radical, progressive, and inclusive.
They reached out to the gentiles.
They sought to help the poor.
To embellish their stories, the writers employed the practice, common at the time, of incorporating fictional elements drawn from ancient writings of heroes and gods from pagan religions, meaning largely rural and often polytheistic religions.
Today, we call this practice plagiarism.
Their followers congregated in homes.
Churches (congregations) formed.
“There was a formula to these sorts of stories. About 200 B.C. mystery cults began to appear in Rome just as they had earlier in Greece. Most notable was the Cybele cult centered on Vatican hill . . . Associated with the Cybele cult was that of her lover, the god Attis (the older Tammuz, Osiris, Dionysus, or Orpheus under a new name). He was a god of ever-reviving vegetation. Born of a virgin, he died and was reborn annually. The festival began as a day of blood on Black Friday and culminated after three days in a day of rejoicing over the resurrection.” – Gerald L. Berry, Religions of the World
In particular, the gospel writers “borrowed” from a major religion in the Roman Empire, Mithraism, based on a fictional character named Mithra, which had existed for hundreds of years.
Mithraism originated in Persia, which is now Iran.
Roman worship of Mithra began sometime during the early Roman empire, perhaps during the late first century of the Common Era, and flourished from the second through the fourth centuries CE.
Mithraism was popular with Roman soldiers and civil servants.
Mithraism and the combined group of imported cults and official Roman cults subsumed under the rubric “paganism” were the major competitors to Christianity for the first four centuries.