Article Review: The Pagan Origins of Christianity

Although this article is not a scholarly one, what with the missing author's name as well as the blank source under the heading "source," there is actually a reasonable truth in the ideas propounded by said article. For one, a cursory historical reading of the history of Christianity will reveal the influence of various cultures that preceded it. For one, the first five books of the Bible, known as the "Pentateuch" was practically lifted, hook, line and sinker from the Jewish Torah! So there, anyone claiming otherwise is just deluding himself.

Christianity was never an original religion. It has always been and continues to be influenced by various cultures, religious or otherwise, in the development of its ideologies, dogmas and external manifestations. The Catholic "chasuble," worn as the external garment of priests when celebrating religious activities, especially the mass, was lifted from the Roman toga, once a culture that exerted negative pressures on early Christians, but, as explained by the book "The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented the Story of Martyrdom" by Candida Moss, was with, in many cases, with due cause and many such reactions were in fact provoked by the fanatical and deathly propensity of early Christians to be martyred anyway (think suicide bombers of today) but which eventually adopted Christianity as a state religion. The rest is history.

Christopher Hitchen's best described the chronic theft of other religious traditions by Christianity, and not giving due credit for them, when he wrote in his famous book "God is not Great" that "monotheistic religion" and I might add, the Abrahamic faiths,  are "a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few nonevents." Such words captures in so unholy yet true fashion the radical contradictions of Christianity in its claims of originality.

Nevertheless, the article captures the essential tidbits of the origins of Christianity, denied by Christians but clearly and reasonably confirmed by the evidences of history that its claims of originality are mere loose canons, mere loud but empty assertions from the days when Christianity claimed for itself the sole repository of truth, truth it built to legitimize itself amidst a tumultuous first century milieu.