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The Berean · Issue 04

Did Christianity Copy Pagan Myths?

Reviewed by Jude 3 Project·2 min read· Members

Jesus is Horus with a new name. Easter is Ishtar, respelled. Christmas is a Roman winter feast that the church took over. That is the claim as it circulates in videos and memes, and it is often paired with a larger one: Christianity is a copy of an older African faith, passed back to Black people in European dress. Each part of that claim can be checked against sources. When it is checked, the borrowing does not hold. One narrow fact does hold, and it needs careful handling: the English word Easter probably does come from the name of an Anglo-Saxon goddess.

What follows is a course of checking, not a debate script. Each movement takes one part of the claim, asks what evidence would settle it, and then looks at what Jude 3 Project's guests found when they went to the sources. Those guests are a pastor who read the books that launched the theory, a scholar who read the Egyptian texts, a theology professor who traced the word Easter, a New Testament scholar who reconstructed the church's reasoning about December 25, a historian of early African Christianity, and a Nigerian priest who works where traditional religion is still practiced. Their historical statements remain their own. Part of the work is learning to separate what a source documents from what a speaker asserts.

The movements build on one another. The first traces a claim to its origin and reads the primary text. The second separates a shared word from shared worship. The third tests dates and the order of events. The fourth weighs the African Christian record and carries everything into a real conversation. By the end, a reader should be able to take a version of the claim they have never seen and run the same tests on it.

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This Berean study continues with four full sessions — the Scripture to sit with, the scholars in their own words, and questions to work through together. Members read every study in the library.