Christs of the Old World
Looking just at
Eurasia, some common figures with rites very similar to that of
Christianity who are often quoted to closely resemble
Jesus Christ and
Dionysus are the god
Osiris of
Egypt, the prophet
Zoroaster of
Persia, and
Buddha. The prevalence of such stories seems to bolster the idea of parallelism, but it is not as simple as that. There are many implications that the
myths of several of the aforementioned figures are either directly related genetically to one another or that the
Jews were exposed to them pre-Christ. This means that these
myths may not have arisen in a parallel manner after all, and the
Jesus story could still have derived from one of them, all of them, or a precursor to them. For example, "
Herodotus believed that much of the
Greek Religion of his time originated in
Egypt" and that
Dionysus and
Osiris were possibly the same god (Lister 133). The
Jews were, indeed, exposed to
Zoroasteriasm during their
captivity in Babylonia (Asimov 410). Examining figures in
Europe and
Asia proves fruitless in the quest to determine the validity of the argument for parallelism: By virtue of the
Middle East's historical position as the crossroads of
Eurasia, its populace – specifically, the
Jews – would have been exposed to most major religions floating around the area. It is therefore necessary to look beyond the old world. . .
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