Jesus is just a reinvention of Mithras and other pagan religions!!

   Well first I want to say I took a serious break from blogging, but over the last few months I have still been collecting many stories to share about the interesting encounters I have as a Christian in Vancouver a city with one of the lowest rates of Church attendance in North America.

  So last week I was having coffee with a young Christian friend of mine, who's faith was rocked by the accusation of this idea of Jesus Christ just being a reinvention of the Gods of the mystery religions.  He was specifically impacted by a picture that he saw on reddit. 

So as you can see this was some kind of advertisement taken out by people trying to refute Christmas and the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Personally Ive never seen the ad, but it looks a little funny to me so I actually think its Photoshop, but Im sure someone will help me out with this. I'm amazed how much I run into this issue, its been dead for 100+ years but it still pops up on the internet mainly because a lie can travel half way across the world on the internet before the truth can even get ready.  What amazes me most is when in conversations with Atheists who say they prise critical thinking, peer review, evidence etc will then throw out this mystery religions idea when their only source is an internet based movie like Zeitgeist.  So lets have a quick look at these claims on this advertisement.

First Ill say that Mithraism was one of the major religions of the Roman empire.  It was very popular within the military and Mithra was Mithra was the god of war, battle, justice, faith, and contract.

Mitras was born of a virgin on December 25th...Just like Jesus?  False
Mitras was born from a mountain or a cave, and there is no record at all of the Date of his birth.  Also everyone knows Dec 25 is not the date that Jesus was born, it is the date that we celebrate his birth.

Mithras had 12 disciples...Just like Jesus?  False
Mithras is said to have had one to two disciples, but not twelve.  There is a stone carving though that shows Mithras killing a bull while 12 people watching.

Mithras was known as the Son of God...Just like Jesus?  I'm not sure
I did really look for this one, but all I could find was that Mithras was of course the son of a god.  But when Jesus referred to himself as son of God this was not his claim to divinity.  This is something that Christians mix up quite a bit.  Many people referred to themselves as son of God.  It was actually the claim of being the Son of Man from chapter 7 of the book of Daniel that Jesus used to claim divinity.

Mithras was resurrected three days later after his death...Just like Jesus?  Absolutely false
Actually there is absolutely zero mention of Mithras death or anything about a resurrection in Mithraic texts.  In fact there is no reference, none at all of any dying and resurrected Gods before the first century. 

So really, I feel sorry for the atheist that chooses to spend money on an ad like this.  Also for the atheist who uses this in a debate.  But what breaks my heart is when I see Christians have their faith challenged because they never decided to educate themselves on what they believe and why they believe it.