Last night I attended an event at which one of the attendees promoted “Zeitgeist: The Movie.” I was prompted to finally watch this piece of pernicious nonsense back in January when a commenter at this blog made reference to it, and I forced myself to sit through the whole thing. The movie is in three segments–the first is on the origins of Christianity, in which it argues that Jesus was a myth derived from Egyptian myth, based on the work of Acharya S. The second is 9/11 conspiracy theory. The third is an argument that the U.S. Federal Reserve is a scam. It’s almost entirely garbage, dependent on crackpot sources.
I posted a series of comments about the movie as I watched it, but I’ll summarize those here and add a bit more.
The first part argues that Christianity is derived from Egyptian myth, primarily by pointing out parallels between them. The arguments are apparently derived from the self-published “The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold” by Acharya S (Dorothy M. Murdock) and perhaps also from Tom Harpur’s The Pagan Christ, both works of pseudoscholarship based on the work of other pseudoscholars like 18th century archaeologist Godfrey Higgins, 19th century amateur Egyptologist and poet Gerald Massey, and Alvin Boyd Kuhn, a high school language teacher and promoter of Theosophy) and entirely ignores actual work in Egyptology. For example, the film draws a list of comparisons between Horus and Jesus that is just fabricated–Horus wasn’t born of a virgin, he was the child of Isis and Osiris, though Isis was impregnated by Osiris through some magic after he was dead. There have been parallels drawn between Isis and Mary that are more plausible (especially in iconography), but the movie exaggerates them, too, and fails to note the considerable areas of dissimilarity. A quick look at the Wikipedia entries on Horus and Isis is sufficient to show that the comparison is strained. The significance of a December 25 birthdate is nonexistent–Christianity did acquire attributes of pagan religions later in its history, and it has clearly been a syncretistic religion, but while this is evidence of falsehood in Christian traditions, it is not a clue to its origin.
For accurate information about Christianity and the formation of the Christian tradition, virtually any mainstream academic work will be more reliable. There has been a lot discovered since the work of 19th century Theosophists, both in the form of document manuscripts and archaeology, that sheds light on the early history of Christianity. In discussions at the James Randi Educational Foundation Forums, poster GreNME wrote:
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