.

We gotta explain not just the narrow fact Christianity began, but the wider fact Christianity began in the middle of ancient western culture where lots of people had similar ideas.
Greg

Up till now POCM has simply laid out the facts. You've seen the evidence, directly from the pens of the ancients themselves. Before slavery, demons, godmen, heaven, hell, miracles, prophecies, and God, sons of God, salvation, etc. became part of Christianity, they were all parts of other ancient religions.

's Reasons section is about what those facts mean, Christianity-borrowing-from-Paganism-wise. I know you don't care what I believe, so the point is not for me to type out my opinion. Instead, we'll use the work of scholars and Jesus' apologists to list the possible explanations of all those Pagan Christian similarities. Then we'll see which explanations are comprehensive and consistent.

Why "comprehensive and consistent"? Because if an explanation isn't comprehensive, it can't explain all the facts. And if it isn't consistent, then it contradicts itself. Theories that can't explain the facts, or that contradict themselves are not to be believed.

1. Comprehensive: explaining all the facts
Chances are, back when you started POCM, the only ancient religion you knew any definite facts about was Christianity. Because you had nothing to compare it to, Christianity naturally looked unique. Now you've read POCM's Facts sections and you know lots of stuff about lots of ancient religions. Now you know ancient religions, Christian and Pagan, shared ideas.

We want to explain all the facts. We want to explain more than just Christianity had a miracle working, prophecy fulfilling godman, and salvation, and heaven and hell, and initiation rituals, and dreams, and demons, etc.; we want to explain how lots of religions back then had those things. We want to explain how Christianity and Dionysus-ism, and Isis-ism, and Mithras-ism, and Adonis-ism, and Eleusis-ism had miracle working, prophecy fulfilling godmen (and goddessgals), and salvation, and heaven and hell, and initiation rituals, and dreams, and demons, etc.

Explanations that are not comprehensive can not explain all the facts. Theories that are unable to explain the facts are not to be believed.

2. Consistent: not contradicting ourselves
We're looking for an analysis that gives the same answer every time it's applied to similar sets of facts. If we reason that this fact about Jesus implies that conclusion about Jesus, then a similar fact about Osiris should imply the same conclusion about Osiris. Otherwise the difference between Jesus and Osiris is not the facts about J and M, the difference is that we rigged our analysis to make similar facts lead to different conclusions.

How this works is maybe not clear. Let me 'splain...

Does the need for consistency sound far fetched? It isn't. It comes up a lot. Checking for consistency is a good way to spot reasoning that sounds good at first, but that when you think harder turns out not to work. Take for example the apologists' Difference Proves No Borrowing Rule: Christianity is different in some detail from Paganism, therefore Christianity did not borrow from Paganism.

Judgment before Osiris, c. 1400 BC

The DPNB rule is the go-to argument filling up many famous "refutations" of Christianity's Pagan origins. It works like this: The religion about Jesus--the walking, talking, miracle working godman who died and came back to life and lives in heaven where he judges the dead—didn't borrow from the older religion about Osiris--the walking, talking, miracle working godman who died and came back to life and lives in heaven where he judges the dead—because those forty days Jesus came back to life on Earth, before he went to heaven, are missing from the Osiris story. That one difference proves no borrowing happened at all, not one teensy bit. That's what "scholars" say. I am not making this up.

To be clear, apologists say the DPNB rule works like this:

eg
AD Nock
BM Metzger
Ron Nash
JZ Smith

Let's see if the apologists believe their own DPNB rule. We'll test the rule by applying it not to Christianity and Osiris-ism, but to Christianity and Judaism. Lets list the first few facts that come to mind:

By the way

Apply the apologists' difference-proves-no-borrowing rule to these facts, and you reach this conclusion:

Now, people argue about how much Christianity inherited from Judaism, but no one argues it got nothing from Judaism. The DPNB rule has taken us to a conclusion that is wrong.

Let's recap. Our search for consistency led us to apply the DPNB rule to a different pair of ancient religions, and when we did that we discovered the DPNB rule gives an answer that is wrong. Silly. The DPNB rule itself does not work. The rule does not work. The conclusions suggested by the rule can not be trusted.

In the apologists' DPNB analysis of Jesus and Osiris, the real difference between Jesus and Osiris isn't the basic facts about the two walking, talking, miracle working godmen who died, came back to life, and now live in heaven where they judge the dead. The real difference comes from the simple fact that the DPNB analysis is rigged so that overwhelmingly similar sets of facts are imagined to be unrelated.

When someone gives you a "reason" that only works in the one place it has to work for their theory to be true, and that on other situations gives a completely different answer, you should not believe their analysis.

This need for an analysis to be consistent is a key feature of POCM's theory. I flat don't know of any non-magical analysis—any set of criteria for deciding what they-all-had-'em ancient religious ideas are original and which aren't—that can give an answer other than that Christianity and Paganism are the same, where-their-religious-ideas-came-from-wise. This may be the most convoluted sentence I have ever typeulated.

You'll see later that my guess is that like other ancient religions, Christianity had daemons, miracles, Gods, godmen, heaven, hell, etc., and that that means Christianity picked those ideas up from the culture around it.

I say it, but you shouldn't believe it—unless my reasoning also works in other similar situations. Unless, for example I say the other ancient religions, Dionysus-ism, Mithras-ism, Attis-ism, Osiris-ism, etc., all picked up their similar ideas from the culture around them, rather than that they all invented heaven, hell, godmen, daemons, etc., all on their own.

POCM's analysis does say each of these religions borrowed—absorbed—their ideas from the culture around them. POCM's analysis is comprehensive and consistent.     Hurray Greg! Hurray!

	The history of how middle eastern Gods (the Great Mother, Cybele, Ma-Bellona, Men, Judaism, Sabazius, Anahita, etc. ) came to worshiped in Rome..
	Why they came to Rome.

SEE! how religious borrowing actually happened in the Roman empire!

< YOUR brainiac opinion here! >

Can you KPA?