Misrepresentation #4

Christianity is a religion that has stolen its ideas from other religions.

This particular post will be a work in progress because though I have heard and read about this argument before, not many of those have given specifics.

One such "stolen" idea is that of the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. If we look at Isaiah 7:14 which states, "Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel." The book of Isaiah is one of the books found in the dead sea scrolls. It was written around 700B.C. Jesus was born around 10A.D. This gives us about 710 years for intercultural mingling. This means the prophecy of the virgin birth could have easily circulated into other religions as well and not the other way around.

The idea of a God that is triune seems to fall under speculation as well. If we look at Genesis 1:2 which states, "Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters." Here we see God the father and God the Holy Spirit, 2 out of the three. If we move over to Genesis 3:15 it says, "And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel." Its true that this is a very vague reference to Jesus Christ, but it was Jesus' purpose to to redeem mankind from the beginning. Jesus puts enmity between humans and satan through obedience to the father. James 4:7 "Resist the devil and he will flee from you." So at the very beginning of the Bible we see this holy trinity formed. Who copied who?

In Genesis 18:1-2 God appears to Abraham in the form of three men: "The LORD appeared to Abraham near the great trees of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day. Abraham looked up and saw three men standing nearby. When he saw them, he hurried from the entrance of his tent to meet them and bowed low to the ground." Yet another trinity reference. Gods triune nature is a foundation for Christianity going back to the beginning of creation.

Another book I am reading is called 101 Myths of the Bible by Gary Greenberg. In this book he tracks the origins of many stories we now see in the Bible. Most of whom track back to Egypt. This should be no surprise seeing as Judaism began in Egypt with Abraham being called out of Egypt by God. One of the things that appears contradictory to the stories is the fact that the Egyptians wrote down the stories first, but the Jews were known for their oral tradition. The stories are not exactly the same. The Egyptians were Polytheistic and Jews Monotheistic. An interesting thing that the author notes is that the people of those times thought of these stories as true and not myth. Part of the reason for the delay by the Hebrews to write down these stories could be the fact that they were not as technologically advanced as the Egyptians and were also slaves to the Egyptians for 400 years. Now because of this intercultural mixing and the oral tradition of the Jews it is hard to know who in fact the stories originally belonged to. The main idea that I have come up with so far to these alleged stolen stories is the fact that despite the disadvantages that the Hebrews had it was their history, their stories of these accounts that survived into the 21st century and now have over 230 million followers and reached almost every corner of the world. Not Egyptian, Babylonian, or Canaanite religion. This could only be the working of a God who has given his people the power to defy the odds of this world.

more to come...