Was Christianity a New Religion?
This is part of an ongoing debate between myself and Benjamin Cain, which started when he wrote this article. The surface topic is the question of whether or not there was a Historical Jesus. Because he rejects on principle Christianity’s theological Christ, Cain says that this question becomes a mere academic puzzle to solve. The underlying, more important, issue is therefore this theological Christ, and by implication the relevance and meaningfulness of Christianity and the New Testament. That will be the subject of my next article. Before I do that, however, I’ll briefly address one of the points that Cain claims strengthens the mythicist claim that there was no Historical Jesus.
He complains that, because Christianity was a new religion, its founder should have been full of new, revolutionary ideas and statements, the like of which had never been heard before. Instead we have sayings which sound like Essenic Judaism, and Hellenistic philosophy — the Cynics, and the Stoics. He therefore wonders whether there ever was a real sage called Jesus, since the sayings attributed to him could have been taken from other communities. This would therefore be evidence in favour of mythicism.
The main point of contention here is whether Christianity actually was a new religion, since there is much evidence that it was not. Even St. Augustine, staunch defender of the faith, says: “The very thing which is now called the Christian religion existed among the ancients also, nor was it wanting from the inception of the human race until the coming of Christ in the flesh, at which point the true religion, which was already in existence, began to be called Christian”¹.
His message is clear, although he does not make reference to any specific traditions in this passage. He is probably not referring to this following idea, but Tom Harpur, having done extensive research, writes:
- “There is nothing the Jesus of the Gospels either said or did… that cannot be shown to have originated thousands of years before, in Egyptian Mystery rites and other sacred liturgies such as the Egyptian Book of the Dead”.
- “There is irrefutable proof that not one single doctrine, rite, tenet, or usage in Christianity was in reality a fresh contribution to the world of religion”.
- “The entire body of Christian doctrine is simply a revamped and mutilated Egyptianism”².
Ahmed Osman had made the same case earlier in Out of Egypt: the Roots of Christianity Revealed³. And it is not just Christianity. Harpur is following on from the work of “a few specifically neutral scholars” who have “been deliberately ignored by churchly authorities for many decades”. (Cain will recognise that phenomenon.) He is referring to Godfrey Higgins, Gerald Massey, and most importantly Alvin Boyd Kuhn, who “have made it clear in voluminous, eminently learned works that the Jewish and Christian religion do indeed owe most of their origins to Egyptian roots” (p8). Christians should not be surprised by this, since Moses, the supposed founder of Judaism, was apparently “instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians” (Acts 7.22).
Cain, as far as I can remember, hasn’t mentioned Egypt yet, but this evidence is more in depth, and therefore more convincing than the Greek connections. (Ancient Greece did acknowledge, however, that it derived its religion and philosophy from Egypt.) The fact that there is nothing new in Christianity can be used as an argument for mythicism, as Cain does. The opposite case can also be argued, however. If what we now call Christianity was originally a revival or renewal of an ancient Egyptian tradition, we would not expect any sage appearing around 30 CE to come out with brand new thoughts; he would obviously be restating ancient ideas, the accumulated wisdom of the ages, with which he was familiar.
In similar vein, Cain seems to suggest that, if Christianity “began as a Jewish version of a Mystery cult”, that it is “essentially a political, literalized or historicized version of the ancient Mystery cults that’s lasted for two thousand years”, or that Paul’s ideas are “Gnostic, Orphic theology”, then this in some way diminishes its importance, and is again an argument for mythicism. Let’s turn that idea on its head, and say that if what Cain says is true, which it indeed appears to be, then that actually strengthens Christianity, reinforces its importance, because it is taking its place in an ancient (and true?) religious tradition going back thousands of years. It all depends on how much one values these Mystery traditions.
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I hope you have enjoyed this article. I have written in the past about other issues in Christianity, also other topics, including spirituality, metaphysics, psychology, science, politics, and astrology. All these articles are on Medium, but the simplest way to see a guide to them is to visit my website (click here and here).
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Footnotes:
1. Retractations, book 1, chapter 12 (3). https://archive.org/details/augustineretractations
2. The Pagan Christ, Thomas Allen Publishers, 2004, p10
3. Century, 1998, reissued as Christianity, an Ancient Egyptian Religion, Bear & Company, 2005
