Christ Conspiracy_ The Greatest Story Ever Sold - Acharya S [35]
Eusebius thus admitted not only that Christianity was built upon earlier ideologies but also that the name "Christian" was still "undeniably new" by his time, 300 years after the purported beginning of the Christian era, in spite of the New Testament tales that the gospel had been "preached to all the nations" and that a vast church network had sprung up during the first century.
Regarding these Christian admissions, Doane states:
Melito (a Christian bishop of Sardis), in an apology delivered to the Emperor Marcus Atoninus, in the year 170, claims the patronage of the emperor, for the now-called Christian religion, which he calls "our philosophy," "on account of its high antiquity, as having been imported from countries lying beyond the limits of the Roman empire, in the region of his ancestor Augustus, who found its importation ominous of good fortune to his government." This is an absolute demonstration that Christianity did not originate in Judea, which was a Roman province, but really was an exotic oriental fable, imported from India ... 2
As this exotic oriental fable settled in, it was placed in Judea and based on Old Testament tales as well, as is affirmed by Tertullian in his Against Praxeas, in which he gives the following ludicrous argument, when confronted with the similarities between Christ and a number of OT characters, such as Joshua, or Jesus, as his name is in Greek:
Early Manifestations of the Son of God, as Recorded in the Old Testament; Rehearsals of His Subsequent Incarnation.... Thus was He ever learning even as God to converse with men upon earth, being no other than the Word which was to be made flesh. But He was thus learning (or rehearsing), in order to level for us the way of faith, that we might the more readily believe that the Son of God had come down into the world, if we knew that in times past also something similar had been done.
It is more than a little odd that the "omniscient" God would need to learn how to be a human, especially when humans themselves do not receive such an opportunity to "rehearse." In reality, Tertullian's pitiful "excuse" sounds more as if "God" is acting in a play (and as if Tertullian has a screw loose).
In his First Apology, Christian father Justin Martyr (c. 100165) acknowledged the similarities between the older Pagan gods and religions and those of Christianity, when he attempted to demonstrate, in the face of ridicule, that Christianity was no more ridiculous than the earlier myths:
ANALOGIES TO THE HISTORY OF CHRIST. And when we say also that the Word, who is the first-birth of God, was produced without sexual union, and that He, Jesus Christ, our Teacher, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven, we propound nothing different from what you believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter. For you know how many sons your esteemed writers ascribed to Jupiter: Mercury, the interpreting word and teacher of all; Aesculapius, who, though he was a great physician, was struck by a thunderbolt, and so ascended to heaven; and Bacchus too, after he had been torn limb from limb; and Hercules, when he had committed himself to the flames to escape his toils; and the sons of Leda, and Dioscuri; and Perseus, son of Danae; and Bellerophon, who, though sprung from mortals, rose to heaven on the horse Pegasus. For what shall I say of Ariadne, and those who, like her, have been declared to be set among the stars? And what of the emperors who die among yourselves, whom you deem worthy of deification, and in whose behalf you produce some one who swears he has seen the burning Caesar rise to heaven from the funeral pyre?
In his endless apologizing, Justin reiterates the similarities between his godman and the gods of other cultures:
As to the objection