Excerpt #49 from my book, Religion, An Obstacle to Human Progress
“Virtually all of the mythical accounts of a savior Jesus have parallels to past pagan mythologies, which existed long before Christianity, and from the Jewish scriptures that we now call the Old Testament. Amazingly, we have not one Jewish, Greek, or Roman writer, even those who lived in the Middle East, whoever mention Jesus during his supposed lifetime. This appears quite extraordinary, and you will find few Christian apologists who dare to mention this embarrassing fact.
“The Egyptian mythical Horus, god of light and goodness has many parallels to Jesus. Osiris, Hercules, Mithra, Hermes, Prometheus, Perseus and others compare to the Christian myth. According to Patrick Campbell of The Mythical Jesus, all served as pre-Christian sun gods, yet all allegedly had gods for fathers, virgins for mothers; had their births announced by stars; got born on the solstice around December 25th; had tyrants who tried to kill them in their infancy; met violent deaths; rose from the dead; and nearly all got worshiped by “wise men” and had allegedly fasted for forty days.” (Excerpted from Jim Walker’s “Did a Historical Jesus Exist?”)
“Jesus is a mythical figure in the tradition of pagan mythology and almost nothing in all of ancient literature would lead one to believe otherwise. Anyone wanting to believe Jesus lived and walked as a real live human being must do so despite the evidence, not because of it.” — C. Dennis McKinsey, Bible critic (The Encyclopedia of Biblical Errancy)
“It is important to recognize the obvious: The gospel story of Jesus is itself apparently mythic from first to last.” — Robert M. Price, professor of biblical criticism at the Center for Inquiry Institute (Deconstructing Jesus, p. 260)
“Whether considered as the God made human, or as man made divine, this character (Jesus) never existed as a person.” — Gerald Massey, Egyptologist and historical scholar (Gerald Massey’s Lectures: Gnostic andHistoric Christianity, 1900)