The birth of an incarnate god had been annually celebrated for ages in the ancient world, and particularly where Christianity developed. Then, according to Christians, it actually happened! It is as plausible as Superman arriving today from the planet Krypton. The early Christians obviously attributed to their Saviour the kind of birth that was ascribed to rival gods.

Admittedly, this is a deduction, not a known fact, but the late acceptance of the idea among Christians noted for their gullibility tells against it being known among the first followers of the Christ. It is plausible if later converts from Pagan religions expected that such a god would be born in the conventional way for gods, and eventually so it was.

Paul knows nothing of it. Mark, which on many grounds we know to be the oldest gospel, knows nothing of it. Matthew in its original form knows nothing of it. Luke, the latest of the synoptics, has a long story about it. We reach something like the third decade of the second century before the story appears, though it must unquestionably have circulated in the Churches for some time before Luke could write it.

We are invited to believe that Christ the saviour is really a powerful god merely adopting the cloak of human form so that he can save the human race. A god disguised as an infant is surely still a god with the powers of a god. Why then is it that the powers of this disguised god seem to grow as a human grows? He is vulnerable to human enemies as an infant because he has not yet grown powerful enough. As an infant this saviour of the world cannot even save himself from wicked human beings.

If that is the case why did the hugely powerful Devil, the supposedly evil god, not notice and take advantage of the baby god’s weakness? Millions of human beings were later to die as devils, condemned by the professors of this loving religion, Christianity, yet the Devil was so weak or stupid that he could not succeed even when his enemy deliberately made himself helpless! If murdering innocent people is the criterion of the work of the Devil, then Christianity is the best candidate.

Christians claimed Pagan religions were devilish yet took from them. Some modern Christians think this is an unanswerable refutation of Christian “borrowing”. It is not at all unanswerable or a secure position. Those that think it is, think in terms of Christianity as it is now—complete, as they see it. In the early years of its adoption into the empire, it was not complete, was extremely malleable and church Fathers often used Pagan arguments as arguments for Christianity. They were ready to say, “Our religion is just like yours in such and such a respect”.

Rome, when it forced Christianity upon Europe, deliberately adopted a large amount of Paganism. Bits of ritual, altars, statues, hymns, local deities, were taken into the new religion. Does even the orthodox suppose that Jesus ordered the use of candles, incense, holy water and vestments? Yet these things were adopted by the new religion.

We have little historical knowledge of the Christians of the first century. Between the simple groups of Jesus worshippers of Paul’s Epistles and Acts, and the developed Christian doctrine of the second century, lies a whole world of evolution on which we have no positive light. The reasonable view is that the influence of the Old Testament, the shape given by the Jews to the supposed messianic prophecies, the natural impulse of ascetic and Essenic believers to isolate Jesus from all sexual intercourse and the broad beliefs of the Persians, Egyptians and Greeks about the birth of their saviours, together gave shape to the traditional figure of Jesus.

The impregnation of a woman by a god was a familiar idea, and, if she had been hitherto a virgin, she was held to be a virgin mother. Most prominent of all were the greatest of Egyptian goddesses, Isis, and the greatest of Greek goddesses, Cybele. When at last the Church was forced to permit a veneration of a semi-divine mother, to compete with the most popular feature of Pagan religion, statues of and hymns to Isis and Cybele were appropriated to Mary.

If religious history is to be believed, God had many well-beloved sons, born of pious and holy virgins, besides Jesus Christ. Despite this each is his only begotten, or his first begotten, son. All are as well authenticated as the story of Jesus Christ, that is, not very!