Christs of the New World

In Mexico, according to the accounts of Spanish missionaries and Conquistadores, the religious rites of the Aztecs and Incas had several extremely similar elements to those of Christianity, including some kind of baptism, confession, and communion (Bierlein 267-268). Furthermore, the god of the Aztecs, Quetzcoatl, bears an extremely strong resemblance to Jesus, Osiris, and Dionysus in the story of his rise, fall, and resurrection. Unfortunately, no records of the Aztecs survived their desolation at the hands of the Spanish, and therefore the only recordings of this material come from Conquistadores and the like. Such recordings are possibly spurious. However, Peter James and Nick Thorpe say that though the stories recorded by monks, missionaries, and conquistadores were probably altered by the Indians to "suit the vanity and preconceptions of their Spanish masters," the records are, for the most part, seemingly genuine to the Indians' beliefs (424). Therefore, taking the stories of the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incans as authentic, and discarding any unproven (aamusing) theories about some kind of pre-Christ contact between the old world and new, there are cases of myths very similar to that of Jesus arose in a parallel manner.

So, from this, it is certainly possible that the story of Jesus did not directly originate from Greek Religion and philosophy, and instead arose parallel to it all. However, it would seem incredibly improbable for Christianity to spontaneously arise with all of these ideas in place while other cultures were grappling with the same ideas right on top of Christianity. At worst, the case is ambiguous; at best, it is hardly definitive, but it certainly seems likely that Christianity had both parallelism and heavy borrowings from Greek and Judaic thought.

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