Did Christianity come from paganism?

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vincent10395

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Hey guys,
I just wanted to know how you guys would refute this claim.

Thanks, and God Bless!
 
vincent10395 said:
Hey guys,
I just wanted to know how you guys would refute this claim.

Thanks, and God Bless!
Click to expand...
Define “come from paganism”?

What exactly is the claim? It’s vague as it stands.

If it’s denying the Jewish roots of Christianity, it’s plainly false.

If it’s simply saying that Christianity as we know it owes a lot to paganism and has a lot of parallels with paganism (not the same thing, since Christians typically argue that some of the parallels are there because paganism foreshadows Christianity, not because Christianity borrowed from paganism) then I think it’s uncontroversial and doesn’t need to be refuted.

Edwin
 
vincent10395 said:
Hey guys,
I just wanted to know how you guys would refute this claim.

Thanks, and God Bless!
Click to expand...
I second Edwin’s reply of “What is the claim?” What is the argument? My response if someone said that would be to prompt them to articulate their evidence.

Meanwhile, you may also peruse apologist Jimmy Akin’s Pagan Influence Fallacy article from a few years ago.
 
This claim that seems to be a recurring phenomenon in the internet should merit a place in the snopes directory.
It is an unsubstantianted phallacy rebutted to dust by almost all the top apologists.

It is a testament at the level of misinformation that is rampant in the culture and demonstrates just how poorly educated the great majority actually is.
 
There is some evidence, given some of the writings from the early Church, that some sects of paganism actually mimicked Christianity instead of the other way around.
 
vincent10395 said:
Hey guys,
I just wanted to know how you guys would refute this claim.

Thanks, and God Bless!
Click to expand...
I think that it’s fair to say that we know that Christianity borrowed from existing pagan tradition in the sense that we celebrate some holidays–such as the actual date of the Lord’s birth (Christmas) on what was once a pagan holiday, the Feast of the Sun God. Additionally, All Soul’s Day–the true feast we celebrate and upon which Halloween traditions are founded–is at the same time as pagans once celebrated their autumn or harvest festival. I suspect our church forefathers showed tremendous wisdom and foresight in these areas. They were bringing new pagan converts into Christianity. These pagans had no Jewish traditions to fall back on and rather than simply replace everything they already enjoyed with something new and different just because they could–they made it “fit”. Nobody truly knows what day Jesus was really born. The Feast of All Soul’s Day is a church feast and could have been celebrated on any of the 365 days of the year–or not at all–if the church fathers had so chosen. This does not in any way imply that the Christian religion itself is based on paganism. I don’t even see many if any similarities personally. Though if there are such similarities, I’d enjoy learning of them and when and where they originated.🤷
 
The apostles were martyred proclaiming the resurrection of Jesus. Do you think St. Paul allowed himself to be beheaded because he thought it would be a fun way to start a new religion? And just to make it more believable he convinced St. Peter, st Andrew and a few hundred first century christians to also be crucified and die for this fantasy fiction he was putting together. What is it about, we believe on the blood of the martyrs that people can’t understand?

Many people have died for ideals, but the apostles died for an historical event, the resurrection. If the OP is truly interested in this topic a good start would be to read Jesus of Nazareth by pope Benedict. I’m sure more texts can be suggested.
 
All Saints’ Day is not from anything pagan.

Basically, many Christian communities had a day to remember all the martyrs whose names and “birthdays” (death days) were unknown. These were on all sorts of different days.

When the Pantheon was turned into a Christian church, it was dedicated to All the Saints and the Virgin Mary, and the dedication took place on May 13. For about a century, that was Rome’s All Saints’ Day.

Then, a couple centuries later, the Pope decided to have an All Saints’ chapel at the old St. Peter’s Basilica. He dedicated it on November 1, so that was the new All Saints’ Day.

In 825 (that’s after Charlemagne, in the time of his son King Louis I), All Saints’ Day was spread to all the Latin Rite churches. But many cities and dioceses still kept their own individual city All Saints’ Days, in addition to the universal one.

About a century after that, All Souls’ Day began to be celebrated. In France.

This is soooooo not a pagan holiday. Or even an ancient holiday. It’s an early medieval holiday. And it’s not “Celtic,” either. It’s Italian. Papal Italian. Roman of the Romans.

Yup, the media has lied to us once again. I wrote a report on Halloween back when I was in 3rd grade, and it was all totally wrongggggg, because all my research sources were big fat liars and fakey factoids. I resent being lied to, and I resent having been drawn into the lie as an innocent child. So I’m glad to let you know the truth.
 
vincent10395 said:
Hey guys,
I just wanted to know how you guys would refute this claim.

Thanks, and God Bless!
Click to expand...
Tatian’s address to the Greeks. Brilliant repudiation of the pagans, and philosophers.

He was a student of Justin Martyr, equally brilliant.

Should answer you concerns quite well if you don’t mind the occasional barb of ridicule that he applies with great wit and humor toward the pagans he addresses. 🙂
 
Origen52 said:
The apostles were martyred proclaiming the resurrection of Jesus. Do you think St. Paul allowed himself to be beheaded because he thought it would be a fun way to start a new religion? And just to make it more believable he convinced St. Peter, st Andrew and a few hundred first century christians to also be crucified and die for this fantasy fiction he was putting together. What is it about, we believe on the blood of the martyrs that people can’t understand?

Many people have died for ideals, but the apostles died for an historical event, the resurrection. If the OP is truly interested in this topic a good start would be to read Jesus of Nazareth by pope Benedict. I’m sure more texts can be suggested.
Click to expand...
I agree. If there’s one single thing that should make any reasonable person believe that the apostles truly believed that what they were teaching was the God’s honest truth and incredibly important to spread to all, it is that they were not only perfectly willing to die for it–but to do so in some of the most horrible ways imaginable! Beheading was probably one of the nicer ways that some of them met their end–being crucified upside down, boiled in oil, or literally skinned alive slowly all sound like some pretty terrifying fates to me! Either they were telling the absolute truth as they knew it and knew they had to tell it to save their very souls–or they were the 12 craziest men ever born, with the most masochistic suicide pact ever devised in the history of mankind!🤷
 
Starrsmother said:
I think that it’s fair to say that we know that Christianity borrowed from existing pagan tradition in the sense that we celebrate some holidays–such as the actual date of the Lord’s birth (Christmas) on what was once a pagan holiday, the Feast of the Sun God. Additionally, All Soul’s Day–the true feast we celebrate and upon which Halloween traditions are founded–is at the same time as pagans once celebrated their autumn or harvest festival. I suspect our church forefathers showed tremendous wisdom and foresight in these areas. They were bringing new pagan converts into Christianity. These pagans had no Jewish traditions to fall back on and rather than simply replace everything they already enjoyed with something new and different just because they could–they made it “fit”. Nobody truly knows what day Jesus was really born. The Feast of All Soul’s Day is a church feast and could have been celebrated on any of the 365 days of the year–or not at all–if the church fathers had so chosen. This does not in any way imply that the Christian religion itself is based on paganism. I don’t even see many if any similarities personally. Though if there are such similarities, I’d enjoy learning of them and when and where they originated.🤷
Click to expand...
The Feast of All Saint’s Day, Nov. 1 (All Soul’s Day falls on Nov. 2, which is celebrated as the Day of the Dead in Catholic countries such as Mexico and the Philippines), actually was celebrated on numerous days in the early Church in different locations. November 1, which was considered the 1st day of winter in several monastic traditions, was already considered a holy day, and as the Church in Germany celebrated the Feast of the Martyrs in a Mass on November 1, that was the day that was settled upon for All Saints Day around 800 A.D. There was no Germanic pagan tradition around Nov. 1 (or October 31), so the argument can’'t be made that this was an appropriation of the Celtic holiday of Samhain. All Hallow’s Eve began on the evening of Oct. 31 because many early Christians held to the Jewish tradition that a day (especially a holiday) began at sundown.

Much of what is popularly believed about the Celtic celebration of Samhain isn’t even true, and had little to do with Hallowe’en, although both Protestants and neo-Pagans have both promoted the idea for their own reasons.

Samhain wasn’t the name of a Celtic God, it was the name of the month of November. There is no historical evidence that it had anything to do with the dead, that was just a supposition by the Victorian folklorist Sir James Frazer who believed, based on Protestant traditions, that Catholic holidays originated from Paganism, so since the Catholics had a celebration honoring their dead on this date, it must have come from an earlier pagan religious holiday. He also supposed this was the start of the Celtic New Year, another tradition that has no evidence behind it.

What we know from the textual evidence tells us nothing about what the Celts, a people who had no written language, did before the coming of Christianity, so all our knowledge of Samhain comes from medieval writings by Catholic monks.

Samhain had no religious significance to the medieval Celts. It had no relevance to the harvest time, either, as that was long past. It was based around livestock, as this was the time of the year when cattle were moved from the highlands to the lowlands. It was also the time when cattle that could not be sustained through the winter were slaughtered, so it was a good time for the Celtic tribes and clans to meet, slaughter cows, make bonfires, do some trading, have political meetings, and resolve disputes. There may have been some pagan religious practices, but that was not the focus of Samhain.

So, there is no earlier tradition of a pagan religious celebration at Hallowe’en, and the earliest tradition we have associating this holiday with the dead was a Christian one.

There’s a similar problem with the idea that the Church appropriated the date of Christmas from an earlier pagan celebration of Sol Invictus or a solstice celebration - the main celebration of Sol Invictus was in the summer, and the only record we have of a minor day to honor him was well into the Christian era, and after Christmas was being celebrated on 12/25 by Christians - most likely, an attempt by the Emperor to borrow Christian traditions.

The early Church thought that pagans were not simply wrong, they were actually worshipping demons who masqueraded as gods (such as Moloch), so they would have regarded celebrating a pagan holiday under a Christian guise as repugnant. The Roman pagans liked to have a lot of holidays, so it would be hard to pick any date that did not coincide with some holiday for one of the many pagan traditional holidays.
 
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