It is written:
“And this will be the sign to you: You will find a Babe wrapped in swaddling cloths, lying in a manger.” (Luke 2;12)
The Bible records that Jesus was born of a virgin (Matthew 1:18, 25) in a manger (Luke 2:12) with shepherds on the scene shortly after (Luke 2:12-18).
However, many in our day and age have been told that this telling of Jesus’ birth was actually an example of Christians “borrowing” from the pagan birth story of Mithras! What are the facts?
“”Can we really be so certain? Do these pagan parallels mean that Christian concepts were borrowed from previous religions? Do such parallels disprove the presentation of Jesus’s life that’s found in the New Testament? Not really. In the first place, the supposed parallels are not nearly as parallel as the skeptics suppose. When the original sources of the pagan legends are closely examined, they typically have little in common with the New Testament narratives. For example, there are dying and rising gods in some earlier religions, but these deities died and arose each year, certainly not the same pattern as Jesus’s once-for-all sacrifice for the sake of others!16 The pagan tales of miraculous birth are closer to divine impregnation—a mortal woman conceives a child as a result of sexual relations with a god—than to the virginal conception described in the Gospel according to Matthew and Luke. What about the Mithras legend? The birth in a cave with shepherds in attendance? The birth of Mithras was, to say the least, very different from anything that’s found in the New Testament. In the first place, Mithras was birthed from solid stone, and … well … he got stuck on the way through. (I guess you could say he got off to a rocky start.) So, some nearby folk who may have been shepherds intervened and pulled him from the stone.17 Yet some writers continue to connect his birth in a cave, assisted by some people who might have been shepherds, to the birth of Jesus in a stable with shepherds arriving soon afterward. A few critics even continue to call this birth of Mithras a “virgin birth”!18 I must admit that this vexes me even more at a biological level than at a historical level. I guess that birth from a rock is sort of a virgin birth, but how can you tell if a rock is a virgin, anyway? And how, precisely, do rocks lose their virginity? Parallels of this sort are simply too vague to support the claim that Christians borrowed their beliefs from pagans of previous generations.” (Timothy Paul Jones, Conspiracies And The Cross: How To Intelligently Counter The Ten Most Popular Theories That Attack The Gospel Of Jesus, 2085-2099 (Kindle Edition); Lake Mary, Florida; FrontLine)
How far conspiracy theorists who attack the Bible must go!
Friends, Christianity is not borrowed from any pagan religion. It is based upon eyewitness testimony, veritable evidence, and documented fact. Christians speak words fo truth and reason (Acts 26:25).
Will you not today begin building your life on Jesus Christ?
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