Are you listening Bill Maher, Raphael Lataster, Richard Carrier, Dan Brown, AronRa, et al.?!?!
When Cracked Magazine is more scholarly than thou, you may want to rethink your position.
Amanda Mannen wrote the article, “6 Famous Documentaries That Were Shockingly Full of Crap,” Cracked Magazine, August 12, 2013 AD
The contextually relevant portion for our consideration is “#4. Religulous — The ‘Jesus Is Fake’ Evidence Is Fake
The Film.” The original article is peppered with expletives so I will relate some nuggets of truth from it herein.
In Religulous, Bill Maher sets out to make you question what you think you know about God, telling you everything church leaders don’t want you to know…poking holes in their beliefs by pointing out things like…how the Christ mythology is eerily similar to other ancient religions — at one point, a Tumblr-ready slideshow informs us of the many similarities between Jesus and the Egyptian god Horus…Man, that’s some incriminating evidence right there. How come the entire Catholic church hasn’t collapsed under the weight of this one documentary?
Well, the Catholic Church has not collapsed even due to centuries, in fact over a millennia, of scandal so sadly now, Bill Maher could not manage that feat.
However, his Jesus mythicism views are very popular with personages (pseudo-skeptics) who think that “research” means opening up a search engine and typing some such thing as that which they know will return only those items that the presuppose are true: Jesus never existed and is a compilation of Pagan mythology, etc.
They are not skeptical enough, and therefore do not conduct enough research, to ask for actual proof such as primary source quotations and citations rather than a game of telephone from one discredited assertion to another, to another, to another. In fact, every few years such claims are popularized regarding Jesus, they are considered and refuted, they quietly go away only to rear their ugly heads again by someone who thinks that they are on to something and who’s BFF says, “Yeah maaaan, you just debunked Jesus, the Bible, Christianity, God,” etc.
Amanda Mannen notes that, in certain circles I might add, “All this ‘Jesus was copied from earlier religions’ stuff…will make you look awesome…but none of it is true.”
One issue is that pop-“researchers” will categorize various and sundry things under a single term and then turn around and claim similarity. For example, “virgin birth,” “resurrection,” “Trinity,” etc., etc., etc.
Thus, the Cracked article notes:
Let’s start with the “virgin births” part: You’ve gotta make some pretty big logical jumps to claim that any of those earlier gods were born from virgins, having come from a mother seven times over (Krishna), some freaky necrophilia (Horus), and a [****]ing rock (Mithras).
And we could add others such as Buddha’s mother dreaming that a white elephant came out of her side.
The article also notes:
Then there’s the resurrection thing. Contrary to Maher’s claims, Mithras was never resurrected, and the older versions of the guy’s story don’t have any of the Jesus similarities — those came about in the first or second century A.D. (that is, after Jesus was born). Horus, like Mithras, was also never resurrected, didn’t have 12 apostles, and didn’t raise Asar from the dead (which doesn’t translate to “Lazarus” even a little bit).
I wonder why Atheists have not written books, presented lectures, made (pseudo) documentaries, etc. about Mithras mythicism, claiming that Mithras begged, borrowed and stole from Jesus. By the way, even though the Buddha lived circa half a millennia before Jesus, the main texts about him, including stories of miracles, were written when? Also “about in the first or second century A.D. (that is, after Jesus was born).” Buddha mythicism anyone?
But wait, there’s more!
There isn’t even any record of a figure call Anup the Baptizer; the closest we come is Anubis, the god of embalming, which astute readers will note is a leeeeeetle different from baptism.
It is also noted:
The Egyptian links have been debunked by actual Egyptologists.
Lastly:
…and you’d be hard-pressed to find a scholar who disagrees with the overwhelming evidence that a person (not necessarily a divine being) matching Jesus’ description existed during his purported lifetime.
So where did Maher get all this crap? Probably from the viral “documentary” Zeitgeist (which doesn’t cite any sources) or, and this is a serious possibility, the [****]ing Da Vinci Code (which is about as historically accurate as the movie Splash).None of this means the Christian Bible is right or that it represents the one true religion. But if you think something is bull[****], the answer is not more bull[****].
Now, one of the hyperlinked citations within the Cracked article referenced an article by W. Ward Gasque, Ph.D., “The Leading Religion Writer in Canada … Does He Know What He’s Talking About?,” History News Network, August 17, 2004 AD.
The “Leading Religion Writer in Canada” about whom it is asked “Does He Know What He’s Talking About” is Tom Harpur who, after all, is yet another in a long line of pop-pseudo-“researchers”—I posted a separate article on titled Jesus mythicism in Tom Harpur’s “The Pagan Christ”
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