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CONFLUENCE OF OPPOSITES
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established that all the chief mythical elements of the life of Jesus already existed in that cosmopolitan World. The healing and other miracles do not, of course, require any special study. Such things are not only ascribed to holy mon, in the Old Testament, but they were claimed in every nation and religion of that uncritical age....., The works of the Right Hou'ble J. M. Robertson ...contain an exhaustive and learned study of this important branch of comparative religion. Mr. Robertson has, in fact, traced anythical parallels to the Gospel stories in such minute details that he is convinced that no such person as Jesus ever existed ; that the whole story is a mythical compilation founded on a sacred drama or mystery-play....... The evidence accumulated by Mr. Robertson, and in part repeated and expanded by Sir J. G. Frazer in his Golden Bough, must convince any impartial person that the stories of the birth, resurrection, aud the atoning mission of Jesus are but the application to Jesus of raythy that were widely current in religions of the time......The death and resurrection of Christ are probably to the average believer the central and unique truth of the Christian religion. Now every well-informed theologian has known for ages that in the Roman World in which Christianity arose the appual commemoration of the death and resurrection of a god was the most cominon religious feature. The Egyptian całt of Psiris, the Babylonian cult of Tammuz (or Adonis), and the Phrygian cult of Attis had celebrated this annual solemnity for unknown ages, and had, in the fusion of natious in the Roman Empire spread it over the whole eastern world. The Greeks adopted the festival centuries before Christ was born ; the Persian cult of Mithra also adopted it. It is safe to say that
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