Catholics tried to recruit people to their religion using pagan traditions around the 4th century or so. That's literally the reason. You can close the thread.
Amusing you want to close the thread on something that you "literally" have zero historical evidence for whatsoever. Did you read the link I already posted on that? The evidence in favor of the other conclusion (that pagans were copying Christians) isn't air-tight either, but its slightly stronger than any evidence you have for your position.
probably more than i can remember, but jesus, the holy trinity, noah, etc. are all from pre-existing concepts from north africa and the middle east.
you can google guys like anthony browder to hear more about that.
"Jesus", "the holy trinity", and "noah" are three ridiculously different things to lump together. You're talking about 3 concepts with 3 completely different origins spread out over 1000 years!
"
Noah", if the idea is true, obviously would have been shared all over the Middle East....you know, with it being a huge-ass flood and Noah's family being the only survivors and all. If not true, then of course flood stories are found across the Middle East - but since the stories were circulating 3000-3500 years ago in a mostly pre-literary time, it would be enormously difficult to prove that the Jewish story originated from a pre-existing non-Jewish concept, and not the other way around.
The idea that "
Jesus" was from some "pre-existing concept from north africa and the middle east" is completely ridiculous. Even athiests, Jews, skeptics, etc - every serious historian at nearly every level - all agree that Jesus really existed. We're talking about the consensus of 99.99% of academics, not even talking about the Christian world. Universities have become notoriously anti-Christian, but you'd have to look far and wide before you found a history professor at any accredited university who thought Jesus didn't live. Not only do we have ample literary sources from the first, second, and third generations after Jesus, the entire Christian movement is nonsensical when it is not proposed to have started among a living Jesus figure. That's why every two years a new opportunist (with no historical creds at all but a lot of dollar-signs in their eyes) comes out with a new "this was how Christianity really started and there was no Jesus!" book...except every 2 years it's a brand-new theory with no relation to the previous theories...since every "Jesus didn't really exist" theory is so bunk that there's never anything worthwhile to build off of.
It's pretty easy to trace the development of "
the holy trinity" concept in Christianity since we have a strong literary tradition in that period, from the first hints in Paul's writings to the form put forth in the 4th century creeds. It's also possible to see the Jewish roots of the concept, in the ideas of how the presence of God works in the world in the Jewish concepts of "Wisdom" (the personified breath and word of YHWH), the "Spirit" of God, and "Shekinah". It's true that the way it was eventually described in the 4th century was defined in a way indicative of Greek thought, as it was people whose thought patterns were much more Greek than Jewish who were now describing it. But you can trace its origins and development through the entire 300 years prior to that, and you'll see that you're always dealing with a fundamentally Christian concept that develops a fundamentally Jewish conception of God. There's literally no evidence for pagan/non-Jewish sourcing anywhere in there unless you have a completely naive, ignorant view of what "trinity" actually means in Christianity.
These fake zeitgeist-like theories are all over the place among conspiracy theorists - you can see them ridiculed by
athiests,
skeptics,
Christians, and
academics easily.
Noah is not the only one who experienced the worldwide flood, because Archaeological findings found writings all over the world talking about the flood. But the Bible records a flood did occur.
Abraham also took what he learned about God in Africa and shared it with the world, this is something that Pan Africans like John Henrick Clarke feels should be more well known. The concept of God was not an invention of Abraham like Scientology, he took what his African host knew and shared it with the world. So pre-existing concepts from Africa should only be a surprise to people who think Jesus is white.
yup
Holy Trinity is not in the original Gospel which is the Gospel of Mark, and the Holy Trinity, virgin birth are Gnostic concepts (Gnostics are from Alexandria, Egypt) which is influenced by both Greek/Egyptian mythology and not found in the original Gospel. Nicean Creed was convened specifically to address the Gnostic Bishops in Alexandria, Egypt.
Mark 1:10 makes it clear, and the Gospel of Mark doesn't confuse the issue. Gospel of John is considered to be written by Gnostics and is so radical that it is not grouped with the other 3 Gospels.
You have to be way out on the fringe to say "Gospel of John is considered to be written by Gnostics". Christian gnosticism didn't even develop until the mid-2nd century, so there weren't any "Christian gnostics" around to write the Gospel of John, which had to come from 100 or earlier. You may be confusing it with the Gospel of Thomas, which is quite obviously either Gnostic or proto-Gnostic. The Gospel of John is in open conflict with many gnostic concepts left and right.
There was an old academic theory from the early 20th century that "the Gospel of John has gnostic elements", but that was before modern historians even understood what Gnosticism really was. When the Nag Hammadi documents were discovered and actual Gnostic writings were found in bulk for the first time, it was clear that they didn't have any similarity to the Gospel of John at all and the theory was debunked.
And who were the "Gnostic bishops" in Alexandria Egypt that the Nicean Creed was convened to address? Patriarch Alexander of Alexandria and Athanasius, the most prominent Egyptian bishop in the formulation of the creed, both proclaimed a strongly non-Gnostic interpretation, which was adopted. The main opposition for which Nicea was convened was Arias and his followers, who were Literalists, not Gnostics. Arias argued that Jesus was simply a created human, which is the polar opposite of what gnostics argued. The mainstream Christian argument, that Jesus is both human and divine, was the dominant view in the church from NT times onwards and flies in the face of both gnosticism and Arian's literalism.
If the 3 wise men were from the East, which way we're they traveling and why?
The best theory I've heard for the wise men (no mention of "3" in the original stories) is that they were Zoroastrian priests from the area of present-day Iran.
