Jesus was a pagan copy, and other Christmas myths
It’s that time of year again when certain groups of people like to share memes and videos that apparently “prove” Jesus to be a carbon-copy of ancient Egyptian gods.
This has been debunked so many times, yet it’s still so pervasive on social media, mindlessly shared over and over again. This myth about Jesus being a copy of other pagan “dying-and-rising gods” doesn’t have its roots in Egyptian legend, but rather in the claims of a film called Zeitgeist.
A quick search online will bring up many websites which have gone through the claims of this film with a fine tooth comb, and debunked each one. Here’s one such example, which lists out the major claims and gives a detailed response to each: Analysis and Response to Zeitgeist Video.
To quote a pertinent part of the above website, Dr Norman Geisler, a Christian systematic theologian and philosopher, gives a good response to the major claims against the resurrection:
Dr. Norman Geisler, author or coauthor of more than 80 books, writes, “The first real parallel of a dying and rising god does not appear until A.D. 150, more than a hundred years after the origin of Christianity. So if there was any influence of one on the other, it was the influence of the historical event of the New Testament [resurrection] on mythology, not the reverse.
