Is Jesus a Myth?

One of the claims of atheists and unbelievers on the internet is that the Messiah was a pagan myth. Some even claim that Jesus never existed and that people invented him. Doubters can simply listen to an outspoken agnostic to find that every historian accepts that Jesus did exist and that the Bible’s Messianic prophecies are not pagan in origin. Critical historian and agnostic, Bart Ehrman, wrote in his article, “Did Jesus Exist?” (2012),

“Moreover, the claim that Jesus was simply made up falters on every ground. The alleged parallels between Jesus and the ‘pagan’ savior-gods in most instances reside in the modern imagination: We do not have accounts of others who were born to virgin mothers and who died as an atonement for sin and then were raised from the dead (despite what the sensationalists claim ad nauseum in their propagandized versions). […]

One may well choose to resonate with the concerns of our modern and post-modern cultural despisers of established religion (or not). But surely the best way to promote any such agenda is not to deny what virtually every sane historian on the planet — Christian, Jewish, Muslim, pagan, agnostic, atheist, what have you — has come to conclude based on a range of compelling historical evidence.

Whether we like it or not, Jesus certainly existed” (Huffington Post).

Mythicists who claim that the idea of the resurrected God was pagan do not know the historical origin of pagan gods. In the first century BC, a Greek historian named Diodorus Siculus wrote the book “Universal History” in which he recounted that the Egyptians invented two first gods being in wonder of the sun and the moon. They called the masculine sun-god, Osisis, and the feminine moon-god, Isis. These myths originated more than 4,000 years ago. The Greeks adopted similar gods as Dionysius and Demeter. These gods were also known as Baal and Asherah in biblical Palestine.

Prophecies of the Messiah existed centuries before Jesus as attested in manuscripts of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint. In the Bible, Genesis records the prophecy of the offspring of woman crushing the head of the serpent before Egypt was established as a nation (Gen 3:14–19; cf. 10:6). What does someone do with the alignment of a historical Jesus and numerous prophecies of the coming Messiah in ancient Jewish Scriptures? The Gospel of John depicts Jesus of relying on the evidence of witnesses of John the Baptist, miraculous works, Scriptures, and Moses to attest that He is the Christ. Furthermore, Jesus stated, “If anyone’s will is to do God’s will, he will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own authority” (John 7:17).