''Bible influenced by others''

Banoodle said:

I came across this site, I'll post the link below, and there was one post called ''10 Ways The Bible Was Influenced By Other Religions'' so this made me wonder. Is this somewhat true, and could the stories mentioned be from the real events? Or was it all made up to mock christianity?

I am not doubting my faith or anything the bible says, I am just curious.

The link:

10 Ways The Bible Was Influenced By Other Religions - Listverse

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Saying that "Object A has something in common with Object B" does not discredit either thing. It simply proves that they have something in common.

You could just as easily say that these other religions/stories have been influenced by the Bible or the history contained within it (like the Garden of Eden story).

A while back I heard that Jesus being born of a virgin was derived from the celts. A while later I hear that the concept of Jesus being the Christ was stolen from Hinduism. Later I heard someone describe the relations between Jesus and the Egyptian god Horus. And now, in this article I see they are making distinct connections with Jesus and Buddha. Can these people not make up their minds...?

banoodle said:

I came across this site, I'll post the link below, and there was one post called ''10 Ways The Bible Was Influenced By Other Religions'' so this made me wonder. Is this somewhat true, and could the stories mentioned be from the real events? Or was it all made up to mock christianity?

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The site raises a lot of issues that would have to be dealt with one at a time.

Concerning the New Testament, there is no reason to believe that anything within it was copied from any Pagan source. The life of Jesus, as described in the gospels, does not contain any striking parallels with any mythology from Pagan sources, and even well-informed skeptics have given up on insisting that it does. There are a lot of clueless sources on the internet who have pushed the "copycat" theory. They will take a character from Pagan mythology, such as Horus or Mithras, and claim that this character had 12 disciples, was born of a virgin, was crucified and rose after three days, &c.. &c.. Invariably these claims are complete make-believe. Utter lies, in other words.

Now regarding supposed similarities between the teachings of Jesus and the Buddha, they are there for those who are willing to see sufficiently tenuous connections. The Buddha lived in India several centuries before Christ. There is no evidence that the Buddha's teachings ever reached western civilization by Christ's time, much less that they had any influence on what Christ taught. If certain moral teachings are, in a cosmic sense, true, and if God has written moral teachings on the hearts of all, then finding those moral principles existing in separate religious traditions should not be surprising.

As far as the claims about the Old Testament, that's a different kettle of fish. Different Christian groups will respond to those claims in different ways. Some of the claims, as for instance regarding the story of Noah's Ark and the Great Flood being shared among many religious groups in the Middle East, are pretty widely accepted among intellectuals in the mainline denominations, while fundamentalists would still reject any claim that any material in the Old Testament was borrowed from other traditions.

The fact that other religions has stories of the garden of Eden and the a worldwide flood only confirms that those things really happened. Stories of the flood are found in many cultures too far from the middle East for them to have had any influence on the Bible.

God revealed his standards of right and wrong long before the Bible was written. For example Joseph knew it was wrong for him to commit adultery with Potiphar's wife even though the ten commandments had not yet been given. Other people besides the Israelites had passed this knowledge along and made it part of their religion.

Obviously he had revealed the truths about such things as Heaven and Hell and the existence of angels and demons and some cultures had preserved these teachings.

The belief that God is a trinity is revealed in the account of the creation. "Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness'". Here is a good explanation of the Trinity which contains a section called "The plurality of the Godhead in the Old Testament."

http://www.arielm.org/dcs/pdf/mbs050m.pdf

Jews today deny the Trinity but that is one of the results of their denial that Jesus is their Messiah.

Many of the things found in the Bible can be found in other relgions but that is because they had been revealed even before the Bible was written.

Digging up the past to find out who Jesus Christ really was can be a struggle and the only true evidence will be revealed when he returns in his Second Coming where our earth-born minds will be replaced with new memory-perfect minds of Christ, so perfect in fact that forgetting where you put your car keys will be an earth-born thing of the past:.
Having faith in our Lord Jesus Christ means evidence is in the future and he could suddenly return anytime soon without any public announcement, which means whatever circumstances that you could be in would not be a privacy one besides work and rest .;'*';.

I agree with AlexBP. The similarities are of varying kinds. It's pretty well-established that some of the early OT stories are based on Near Eastern models. They are, of course, reinterpreted to be consistent with Hebrew understandings of God. Many of of think that's the whole point: that Genesis and Noah, e.g., were intended specifically as answers to the way pagan civilizations conceived of the gods and their actions.

On the other hand, the supposed parallels to the Trinity are far-fetched. I very much doubt that Jesus' teachings are in any direct way based on the Buddha. It's hard to see how that influence would work, and Jewish parallels are a lot better source historically. The similarities are interesting though, and might lead some to suspect that God might have been involved in inspiring others.

There are a lot of clueless sources on the internet who have pushed the "copycat" theory. They will take a character from Pagan mythology, such as Horus or Mithras, and claim that this character had 12 disciples, was born of a virgin, was crucified and rose after three days, &c.. &c.. Invariably these claims are complete make-believe. Utter lies, in other words.

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Actually the ancient world was almost awash with religions that had components of virgin birth, etc. These can be considered by the term "Mystery Religions". It may be that these various religions were fostered by Satan so that the story of Jesus would not stand out or stand alone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mystery_religions

As far as the claims about the Old Testament, that's a different kettle of fish. Different Christian groups will respond to those claims in different ways. Some of the claims, as for instance regarding the story of Noah's Ark and the Great Flood being shared among many religious groups in the Middle East, are pretty widely accepted among intellectuals in the mainline denominations, while fundamentalists would still reject any claim that any material in the Old Testament was borrowed from other traditions.

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There have always been people who attack the Bible (just watch PBS). Those who say that flood stories prove that the Bible was derived from other sources fail to consider that just because something was written later does not mean that it was drawn from an earlier source.

The reason the Bible is attacked (and not just with historical speculation but even pseudo "science" like evolution) is because the adversary wants to cripple faith if he can't stop it. A Christian who has come to accept the Bible as unreliable, inaccurate, or contrived will never be able to fully trust Him whose words they are.

John 17:17 Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.