Biblical & Theological Issues

by Craig Branch –

One of the many things that apologists do is show how non-Christian religions are false because they are not based on historical fact. Instead, they often contain myths or are built on legends. Paul instructed Timothy to “remain in Ephesus so that you may command certain people not to teach other doctrine or pay attention to myths and genealogies” (1 Tim. 1:3-4). He also wrote that false teachers “will turn away from the truth and will turn aside to myths” (2 Tim4:4). These passages refer to Jewish rabbinic embellishments and anecdotal folklore added to the Scriptures, as well as prophetic warnings of future myths such as those concocted by new age gurus attempting to merge Christian revelation into their framework.

Interestingly, the category of myth is now being applied to Christianity by some of its critics. It has become all the rage in recent years to charge that the Old and New Testaments, including the record of the life of Jesus, are heavily indebted to myths borrowed from pagan religious legends. This issue of Areopagus Journal focuses on some of the more popular versions of these charges by skeptics and other deniers of Jesus Christ. In the three articles in this issue, you will see that the claims that ancient myths influenced the message of Christianity are shallow, irrelevant, forced, and dishonest.

The article by Eugene Merrill, “The Bible in Light of the Ancient Near East,” begins by pointing to the Age of Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries which “spawned a spirit of human rationalism.” The foundational belief of the Enlightenment era was that science, reason and logic are the ultimate basis of truth. Miracles and the supernatural are superstitious nonsense. With this philosophy in mind, Enlightenment scholars assumed that Moses did not write Genesis (or any of the first five books), and that whoever wrote it was just repeating versions of ancient myths circulating during that period.

Merrill acknowledges that nearly every culture has creation narratives involving gods and humans. But he demonstrates that the biblical account is “starkly different” from the others. Merrill then proceeds to the biblical accounts of the worldwide flood, genealogies, the Tower of Babel, and lives of the patriarchs, and demonstrates that, even though one may find some similarities with pagan beliefs and myths, these biblical accounts too are unique and historical.

We should mention in this connection that whatever commonalities actually exist between the pagan religions and the Old Testament are logically consistent with the revelation of Scripture. After the flood (Gen. 9-10), the families began to migrate, reproduce, and develop their own languages and nations for hundreds of years. This is especially true after the dramatic judgment of God at the Tower of Babel (Gen 11) when God “confused their language” so that they could “not understand one another’s speech” and He “scattered them over the face of the whole earth.” Certainly vestiges of these ancient events continued to exist in the historical memories of these newly forming nations. There is also the innate knowledge of God that Scripture speaks of, though suppressed and distorted by sin (Romans 1:18-23). So, it is understandable that there would be some similarities between their legends and the true accounts recorded in the Bible. Archeology, though not an exact science, has continually substantiated the credibility of biblical places and events. For example, many earlier skeptics argued that there was no evidence of the fall of Jericho (Joshua 6). But in the 1950’s, British archeologist Kathleen Kenyon excavated the suspected site and found the ruins of the collapsed walls of Jericho, consistent with the biblical account.¹ This and other archaeological corroborations underscore the historical reliability of the Old Testament and put the burden of proof upon the skeptics. The Bible is not like the Book of Mormon which claims that Jesus returned after His resurrection and appeared to the “lost tribes of Israel” who had allegedly relocated into the Americas and were the ancestors of current native Americans. The problem is that there is no evidence for any of the events recorded in the Book and Mormon, and we know for a fact that the DNA of native Americans is not Semitic.

C.S. Lewis, in his book Mere Christianity, posed his famous trilemma to the skeptic claiming that Jesus must be either a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord. But today there is a widespread belief that there is a fourth option, namely, that the Jesus story is primarily a legend. Members of the infamous Jesus Seminar are well-known for their assertion that most of what the church has believed about Jesus is simply a fabrication of the post-Easter church. However, a variation on this theme is that many of the key beliefs about Jesus—his virgin birth, his sacrificial death and resurrection—are borrowed from pagan myths that circulated before and during the first century.

The second article in this issue is “Christianity Among the Myths” by Mary Jo Sharp. She responds to these “increasingly popular arguments” of pagan influence on the Gospels put forth by Robert M. Price, Joseph Campbell and others. The bulk of Mrs. Sharp’s article focuses on the “most commonly compared myths to the story of Christ—Osiris, Horus, and Mithras—and the doctrinally important alleged parallels for death, judgment, resurrection, and salvation.” After a detailed comparison of the Person and Work of Jesus Christ with the legends and myths of the mystery religions, she concludes, “Rather then showing how Christianity borrowed from the myths, comparisons between Christianity and the myths demonstrate all the more, the profound uniqueness of Christian beliefs.”

This journal’s third article, authored by ARC staff member Clete Hux, takes on the claim that the revelation of God as a triune Being (one God in three distinct and eternal persons), is also influenced by and borrowed from pagan religions. This claim is especially found in anti-Trinitarian groups like Jehovah’s Witnesses, Oneness Pentecostalism, and Islam. Hux demonstrates that the trinity doctrine did not originate at the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D., but was a clarification and response to the heretical movement begun by Arius who denied the deity of Christ during that time. He also explains how the alleged parallels with Egyptian and Babylonian “divine triads” are not at all compatible with the biblical revelation of the triune God. And he shows how the Hindu triad of gods—Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva—not only appeared on the scene in the 4th–7th centuries after Christ, but also bore no real semblance to the Christian God.

There are additional examples of the “pagan myth” theory being circulated today, but most of them are easily answered by the articles in this journal. But in case you encounter people whose rejection of Christ is being fed by other stories or claims not mentioned here, or they need even more evidence, let me recommend several books which we offer on our website. These works are: Reinventing Jesus: What the DaVinci Code and other Novel Speculations Don’t Tell You by Ed Komoszewski, James Sawyer, and Daniel Wallace; Lord or Legend? Wrestling with the Jesus Dilemma by Gregory Boyd and Paul Rhodes Eddy; The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition also by Boyd and Eddy; The Gospel and the Greeks, by Ronald Nash; The Historical Jesus by Craig Keener; Resurrection of the Son of God by N.T. Wright; and Myth Conceptions: Joseph Campbell and the New Age by Tom Snyder.

Let me note that Reinventing Jesus has a poignant response to The Laughing Jesus by Freke and Gandy who alter and even invent parallel between pagan myths and the Biblical claims of Christ. They claim that the pagan parallels include a father god and a virgin-born son, a god-savior made flesh as the son of god, a humble birth on December 25th, twelve disciple-leaders, salvation through baptism (which is not even true in the Bible), death at Easter and resurrection on the third day, and a sacrament of the Lord’s Supper or communion! None of this, however, accurately describes the pagan mystery religions.

We find nothing in the literature of history prior to or after the historical first-century Jesus movement which aligns with the facts and message of biblical Christianity. Many Jews came to worship a fellow contemporary, Jesus, yet they still retained an obvious commitment to monotheism. The bottom line is again laid out in Romans chapter one:

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For His invisible attributes, namely, His eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. (vv. 19-23).

Craig Branch is the director of the Apologetics Resource Center, Birmingham, Alabama. He is also the co-author (with John Ankerberg and John Weldon) of the book, Public Schools: The Sorcerer’s New Apprentice?

NOTES
¹Bryant Wood, “Did the Israelites Conquer Jericho?” Biblical Archaeology Review (March/April 1990), pp 44-58; E.M. Blaiklock and R.K. Harrison, The New International Dictionary of Biblical Archeology (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1983), pp 258-260.