British theologian Robert Beckford investigates remarkable parallels to the Jesus story in other faiths; some that predate Christianity by thousands of years.
Depending on how strongly you understand the word investigate (and parallel) I suppose that this could be an accurate summary of The Hidden Story of Jesus which Compass (ABC) broadcast last Sunday night.
Unfortunately, Beckford’s argument was limited to the lines of ‘notice exhibit A from non-Christian religion, notice exhibit B from the life/teaching of Jesus. These two are extremely similar (really, in what way?) therefore Jesus is the same as Krishna/Buddha and Christianity is indisputably just a modification of the Egyptian God X’.
The evidence presented ranged from ’some Indians pronounce Krishna as Krista, which sounds a bit like Christ’ to ‘there is an Egyptian religious festival where a statue of Osiris “dies” and three days later “rises to life”‘.
From this investigation, Beckford arrives at two conclusions. Firstly that all religions are the same and secondly that Paul stole stories from Egypt and Rome to make the Christian religion.
Key to Beckford’s flawed argument is the mistake that similarity means sameness. Just because there may be a few points of similarity (and just how similar they were was impossible to tell in the documentary) in the events of Jesus and, say, Buddha’s lives, or the ‘vibe’ of their teaching, does not mean that they are the same. This line of reasoning is a bit like saying that since triangles and squares both are closed figures with edges and corners, that therefore a square is a triangle.
Because I can’t leave things undone, I’m going to watch the second (and fortunately final) part of this series on Sunday night, but I’m not expecting to see earth shattering evidence nor hear any profoundly convincing arguments.
