Christs of the New World
In
Mexico, according to the accounts of
Spanish missionaries and
Conquistadores, the religious rites of the
Aztecs and
Incas had several extremely similar elements to those of
Christianity, including some kind of
baptism,
confession, and
communion (Bierlein 267-268). Furthermore, the god of the
Aztecs,
Quetzcoatl, bears an extremely strong resemblance to
Jesus,
Osiris, and
Dionysus in the story of his
rise,
fall, and
resurrection. Unfortunately, no records of the
Aztecs survived their desolation at the hands of the
Spanish, and therefore the only recordings of this material come from
Conquistadores and the like. Such recordings are possibly spurious. However, Peter James and Nick Thorpe say that though the stories recorded by
monks,
missionaries, and
conquistadores were probably altered by the
Indians to "suit the vanity and preconceptions of their Spanish masters," the records are, for the most part, seemingly genuine to the Indians' beliefs (424). Therefore, taking the stories of the
Aztecs,
Mayans, and
Incans as authentic, and discarding any unproven (aamusing) theories about some kind of pre-Christ contact between the
old world and
new, there are cases of
myths very similar to that of
Jesus arose in a parallel manner.
So, from this, it is certainly
possible that the story of
Jesus did not directly originate from
Greek Religion and
philosophy, and instead arose parallel to it all. However, it would seem incredibly improbable for
Christianity to spontaneously arise with all of these ideas in place while other cultures were grappling with the same ideas right on top of
Christianity. At worst, the case is ambiguous; at best, it is hardly definitive, but it certainly seems likely that
Christianity had both parallelism and heavy borrowings from
Greek and
Judaic thought.
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