The Bible Is Fiction: A Collection Of Evidence

By Daniel Miessler on May 13th, 2007: Tagged as Atheism | History | Mythology | Religion

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The similarities between the stories and characters in the Bible and those from previous mythologies are both undeniable and well-documented. It is only due to extreme the extreme religious bias that pervades our world today that people rarely get exposed to this information.

In this short piece I’ll attempt to show blatant similarities with regard to two of the most important Biblical narratives: the Genesis story and the character of Jesus Christ.

The Book of Genesis’s Flood Story Mirrors The Epic Of Gilgamesh From Hundreds Of Years Earlier

Here are a number of elements that both Gilgamesh and the flood story in Genesis share:
  1. God decided to send a worldwide flood. This would drown men, women, children, babies and infants, as well as eliminate all of the land animals and birds.
  2. God knew of one righteous man, Ut-Napishtim or Noah.
  3. God ordered the hero to build a multi-story wooden ark (called a chest or box in the original Hebrew), and the hero initially complained about the assignment to build the boat.
  4. The arc would have many compartments, a single door, be sealed with pitch and would house one of every animal species.
  5. A great rain covered the land with water.
  6. The arc landed on a mountain in the Middle East.
  7. The first two birds returned to the ark. The third bird apparently found dry land because it did not return.
  8. The hero and his family left the ark, ritually killed an animal, offered it as a sacrifice.
  9. The Babylonian gods seemed genuinely sorry for the genocide that they had created. The God of Noah appears to have regretted his actions as well, because he promised never to do it again.
Keep in mind the level of detail in these similarities. It’s not a matter of just a flood, but specific details: three birds sent out, resisting the call to build the arc, and a single man being chosen by God to build the arc.

Then consider that the first story (Gilgamesh) came from Babylon — hundreds of years before the Bible was even written. Do you honestly think, based on the similarities above, that those who wrote the Genesis story had not heard the Gilgamesh story?

And if they had heard it, and they were simply rehashing an old, very popular tale, what does that say about the Bible?

Jesus’s Story Is An Obvious Rehashing Of Numerous Previous Characters

Perhaps even more compelling is the story of Christ himself. As it turns out it’s not even remotely original. It is instead nothing more than a collection of bits and pieces from dozens of other stories that came long before. Here are some examples.
  1. Asklepios healed the sick, raised the dead, and was known as the savior and redeemer.
  2. Hercules was born of a divine father and mortal mother and was known as the savior of the world. Prophets foretold his birth and claimed he would be a king, which started a search by a leader who wanted to kill him. He walked on water and told his mother, “Don’t cry, I’m going to heaven.” when he died. As he passed he said, “It is finished.“
  3. Dionysus was literally the “Son of God”, was born of a virgin mother, and was commonly depicted riding a donkey. He healed the sick and turned water to wine. He was killed but was resurrected and became immortal. His greatest accomplishment was his own death, which delivers humanity itself.
  4. Osiris did the same things. He was born of a virgin, was considered the first true king of the people, and when he died he rose from the grave and went to heaven.
  5. Osiris’s son, Horus, was known as the “light of the world”, “The good shepherd”, and “the lamb”. He was also referred to as, “The way, the truth, and the life.” His symbol was a cross.
  6. Mithra’s birthday was celebrated on the 25th of December, his birth was witnessed by local shepherds who brought him gifts, had 12 disciples, and when he was done on earth he had a final meal before going up to heaven. On judgment day he’ll return to pass judgment on the living and the dead. The good will go to heaven, and the evil will die in a giant fire. His holiday is on Sunday (he’s the Sun God). His followers called themselves “brothers”, and their leaders “fathers”. They had baptism and a meal ritual where symbolic flesh and blood were eaten. Heaven was in the sky, and hell was below with demons and sinners.
  7. Krishna had a miraculous conception that wise men were able to come to because they were guided by a star. After he was born an area ruler tried to have him found and killed. His parents were warned by a divine messenger, however, and they escaped and was met by shepherds. The boy grew up to be the mediator between God and man.
  8. Buddha’s mother was told by an angel that she’d give birth to a holy child destined to be a savior. As a child he teaches the priests in his temple about religion while his parents look for him. He starts his religious career at roughly 30 years of age and is said to have spoken to 12 disciples on his deathbed. One of the disciples is his favorite, and another is a traitor. He and his disciples abstain from wealth and travel around speaking in parables and metaphors. He called himself “the son of man” and was referred to as, “prophet”, “master”, and “Lord”. He healed the sick, cured the blind and deaf, and he walked on water. One of his disciples tried to walk on water as well but sunk because his faith wasn’t strong enough.
  9. Apollonius of Tyana (a contemporary of Jesus) performed countless miracles (healing sick and crippled, restored sight, casted out demons, etc.) His birth was of a virgin, foretold by an angel. He knew scripture really well as a child. He was crucified, rose from the dead and appeared to his disciples to prove his power before going to heaven to sit at the right hand of the father. He was known as, “The Son of God”.
The problem, of course, is that these previous narratives existed hundreds to thousands of years before Jesus did.

Logic Sets In

Many are familiar with Occam’s Razor, which states that, all things being equal, one should not seek complex explanations when more simple ones are available. No one disputes that these other stories predate the Judeo-Christian Bible, so we really only have two options:
  1. The religious explanation is that while the other stories were very much the same as those in the Bible, they are all false. But when they occur in the Bible (despite it being much the same content), this time the stories are true. One explanation of the resemblances to the earlier myths is that Satan created them to lead people astray from the true Messiah that would come much later. So essentially, an ultra-powerful and evil being (Created by God) influenced humanity to create deceptive stories — thousands of years before the real version — so that people wouldn’t believe the real thing when they saw it.
  2. The alternative explanation is that the nature of storytelling during the period was such that central themes propagated through time. This combined with the natural tendency to have certain repeating elements in human stories, and the fact that the Bible stories came after the other ones, explains the similarities to previous myths. And since the stories of worldwide floods, virgin births, and people rising from the dead that the Bible is based on were false to begin with (which everyone agrees on) — they are also false in the Bible. In short, the Bible is simply another iteration of the same themes that came long before it.
Which of these two explanations makes more sense to you?

–

References and Additional Reading

Jesus: Original or Fake? http://www.bandoli.no/nooriginaljesus.htm

Comparison of Babylonian and Noahic Flood Stories http://www.religioustolerance.org/noah_com.htm

An Easter Blessing http://www.ebonmusings.org/atheism/blessing.html

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Viewing 35 Comments

    • ^
    • v
    .. or perhaps God just doesn't have a very good imagination? ;-)

    aid
    • ^
    • v
    ... or perhaps god finally got a winner in Jesus? Better salesman than say, Buddha or the various Greek myths. I think they got the point that the whole man animal thing just creeps people out. What's the old saying, "If you tell a lie over and over, the people will believe it"? Something like that. Maybe they just kept changing the lie until one finally stuck.
    • ^
    • v
    Of course if we are to rely on Occam’s Razor we have to discount String Theory. Acyually, we have to discount quantum. But these are only approximations.

    Maybe there is an alternate to your explaination? Maybe these are stories, mythology to explain a complex world in a time before science.

    In the case of the middle east there is a wide history of story telling and verbal history. Over time, people swapped tales and they grew. All of these tales have a history many years prior to the advent of writing.

    Most of the tailes in the early bible started being written in the time of David. The predated tales until then are verbal representations.

    As for the last comment and thes text, Buddha is in effect an Atheist. Buddist religion is nontheistic.

    Prometheus did not sacrifice himself and the theft of fire was to spite the Gods - not to aid man. He was punished for this, but he did not do it out of anything "nice".

    You need to try to avoid the Wiki versions of things they are too trite and democratic. They are about the equal of a golden book encyclopeadia. For a simple introduction to Myth before a real academic text, try Bulfinches Mythology.

    Regards,
    Craig
    • ^
    • v
    As a Post Script, you need to take into account another legand before you can make your assertions.

    If you are going to use Occam’s Razor you need all the facts. The First Chinese dynasty has a flood legand that predates that of Gilgamesh.

    The Miao Legend relates a story were a single human couple escaped the flood in a wooden drum, and then gave birth to the first members of post flood civilization. From Shu King, China's first "history":

    "destructive in their overflow are the waters of the inundation. In their vast extent they embrace the hills and overtop the great heights, threatening the heavens with their floods"

    Yu, a mythological Noah figure in Chinese Myth predates Gilgamesh. Though he has a lot of similarities with several Sumerian myths there are also key distinctions.

    So some more reading for you. Again, do not trust all you read on Wiki.

    Regards,
    Craig
    • ^
    • v
    Craig,

    We all know not to trust everything on a Wiki. The stuff being linked to isn't controversial; it's well-established mythology that resides on bookshelves all over the world.
    • ^
    • v
    About Prometheus: my understanding is that it was a little of both -- both spite and a sacrifice for human knowledge. But I admit I'm no expert in mythology.

    Taylor, The Diegesis, pp. 192-4. Taylor indicates that the following stanza is found in "Potter's beautiful translation" of Aeschylsus's play: *"Lo, streaming from the fatal tree, His all-atoning blood! Is this the Infinite? 'Tis he - Prometheus, and a God! Well might the sun in darkness hide, And veil his glories in, When God, the great Prometheus, died, For man, the creature's sin."* However, this stanza apparently does not appear in modern translations, including Potter's. It is well-known that the Christians mutilated or destroyed virtually all of the works of ancient Greek and Roman authors, such that we might suspect this stanza has either been removed or obfuscated through mistranslation.
    • ^
    • v
    You're preaching to the choir, baby, and it sounds great!
    • ^
    • v
    just wanted to say I read the text up there, and each of the words taken individually were fine. maybe next week you could do gwb: not really an intellectual?
    • ^
    • v
    Actually there is a great amount of academic disagreement surronding
    the Greko-Romanic myths.

    This is an area I know well, by doctoral dissertation was "Gnarled
    roots of a creation myth". In this I campared and contrasted the
    Pandora and Eve mythos.

    Pandora being the first woman in Greek mythology. I would also state that the commonly believed story of Pandora opening the box and letting evil into the world is not the original. In the original myth, Pandora was given a gift from Zues
    as a dowry. This contained gifts to mankind. She opened the box allowing
    these to escape into the world leaving man-kind with only the greatest
    gift, hope.

    On a different note, the original or at least the earliest Genisis
    stories have a toad in the garden, not a serpent. Satan and Hell were
    not a part of the early jewdacia story and had been added later. I
    would guess that a toad was not "scary" enough?
    • ^
    • v
    The link between traitors in Buddhism and Christianity is a rather long shot. I mean stories about traitors are always in the news. One day it's a Chinese American who passed on secretes, another day it's a black sheep of a family who shames himselfs and harms others, at other times you have politicians who challenge their party leaders. C'mon, having traitors in tales is pretty common.
    • ^
    • v
    Before you can contend the argument that you are putting forth, there other concerns that you need to address.

    You state that the association of Gilgamesh and Noah are similar enough that the bible must be associated with this text. I would argue this. These are a number of swapped stories, but I would rather see a common regional heritage in pre-historic times. There is also a possibility of mirrored experience from pre-historic events – such as the melting of the ice.

    As for evidence of this hypothesis, I have mentioned a flood myth in Chinese mythology. This can be explained through Sumerian trade. What can not is The Inca, Maya, Teotihuacán and Aztec myths.

    The Inca for instance had a myth where Mama Qoca punished the wicked leaving the Inca people and the lama on the highest mountains as a flood covered the earth. Eventually Illapu relented and Inti brought the sun and Cuichu the rainbow and the world dried up.

    There was no trade in the timeframe that accounts for this myth. As the same myth is in the America’s, there needs to be another way to account for your supposition. This is a contradiction to shared local stories as an idea (and there are others).

    My supposition as stated is a shared story dating to about pre-migration times told through verbal memory as the ice melted and peoples where separated which would be a verbal myth carried to explain a changing world following the end of the ice age. However, there is little proof as there are not any 11,000 year old written records.
    • ^
    • v
    I prefer God's earlier work - "Creation of the Universe" ...
    • ^
    • v
    The bible is an assertion. And as with any assertion, it's fiction until it is proven by independent observers and objective proof or evidence. If my neighbor says there's a unicorn in his backyard, it doesn't mean the unicorn exists until I disprove it.

    But logic, evidence, facts, and rationality means nothing to believers who want to believe. They've created a massive cult around a unicorn.
    • ^
    • v
    This is silly, there are many atheists that believe the Bible is not fiction and its fact! To me the silly thing is being an atheist.

    Pointing to a whole stack of wikipedia articles doesnt mean anything. The meaning of truth is deluded on the internet as there is no truth - anyone can contribute anything without having logical facts or whitenesses

    To be an atheist means that you have assesed everything out there and concluded that there is no God. To be able to asses everything out there, would mean you would need to have infinite knowledge on every topic and proposal of the notion of God. Thus to be an atheist cannot be logically true - it doesn't make sense. No one can have infinite knowledge on any topic - unless they are God themselves.

    I think those people who worship idols that dont do anything have more logic in them then an atheists.

    Just my thoughts
    • ^
    • v
    re: Sherif

    I can't prove that I didn't pop into existance just this instant with all my memories pre-made either.

    But I find the chances so remote as to be mathematically disharmonious.


    There's something you should know about atheists. Most of us play along with religious people and their god myths the same way most of us play along with children and their love of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Not because they're real but because you're not ready for the truth.
    • ^
    • v
    I would agree with Craig that the Genesis myths are leftover interpretations from the end of the last ice-age.

    As far as the Christ myth goes, the primary driver for this was St Paul - who never met the central character of his mythology. Paul came from the birthplace of Mithras, whose own mythology parallels the Catholic record of the Christ myth. Combine this with the popularity of Mithraism in Rome and its easy to see how it would have been convenient in creating a new religion to steal sections of an existing mythology. Given the dearth of independent historical references to a Jesus character - and the glaring innaccuracies in the new testament record, it is doubtful whether even a basic historical figure existed, at best it is likely to have been an amalgam of one or two zealots of the time.

    This alone does not "disprove" all religion, but it does give grist to the application of Occam's razor. The results of scientific endeavour push any deity into the gaps - and ultimately to be merely one possible progenitor of the universe. Science, emasculates deities by taking away their necessity in the orderly running of the universe - i.e. there is a vague possibility they may have struck the cue ball, but there is no evidence that they are running around the universal pool table altering the ongoing course of things.

    What is clear, is that Christianity was a convenient method of command and control for populations that no longer lived a subsistence and nomadic lifestyle, but was more suited to the needs of a settled urban population - much as the core tenet's of Judaism before it were best suited to the middle eastern nomadic lifestyle.

    Ultimately though IMO it would be better if we didn't have "religion" there seems to be a core need for the explanation and disassociation of events in the human psyche which forces many people to reach for a collective mental crutch.

    Sadly for those who "believe" - even most vaguely, it would appear that no amount of rational argument can persuade them.
    • ^
    • v
    I recognize that as a believer in God, my opinion may not be welcome here, but there is a third, plausible option (if you are willing to accept the existence of God, at least hypothectically for the sake of argument):

    3. The Flood occurred before story of Gilgamesh was created. According to the Bible's internal history, the Flood occurred several thousand years before the Book of Genesis was written (remember, Genesis was written as a history of past religious events). Thus, Gilgamesh and other myths are modified accounts of the same world event. In this light, myths of the flood from all of the world (viz. Gilgamesh, Miao Legend) serve to corroborate the biblical account. It's natural that specifics would vary through time and across cultures.

    The same reasoning above applies to myths similar to Jesus Christ. What if, like the flood, the knowledge of a savior was general to the world's earliest inhabitants via revelation from God? If this were the case, it would be reasonable that stories of a Christ-figure would propagate throughout the myths of history and share similarities.

    My faith, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (i.e. Mormonism) teaches this very thing.
    • ^
    • v
    Tony,

    Your opinion is very much welcome here. We're a meritocracy. :)
    • ^
    • v
    Tony,
    You can of course take the fact that all continents have a flood myth as I stated above in this manner. The choice of belief is one that I believe to be personal. I do however believe that it has to be made on rational judgement and thought. Contrary to both Atheist and Theist belief, there are in fact holes with both. IT could be logically argued that agnostic thought is the only logical answer, but I do not like to sit on a fence – I like discourse and controversy. I am also not agnostic.

    My only issue is with fundamentalism in any of its guises. This is fundamental Christian or fundamental atheist. None of us have proof and none of us can categorically prove that the belief structure that is held by others is valid or not.

    Sion has the idea that we do not need to believe, but all creative thought is a type of madness and belief. Believing in rationality and what you see is still belief.

    Faith and fact are both necessary tenants to the human condition. As droll as it seems, respect in belief is a valuable idea. In fact, the rational world of science works on belief. There are many things we can not explain and we have only added more.

    My only tenant is that one should be able to rationalise and justify their belief and not just accept it as it seems about right.

    Regards,
    Craig

    PS - this does not mean that I think we should all just get along either. It just means that an organised disagreement is best ;)
    • ^
    • v
    I am an atheist, just to be clear from the start.

    Daniel,
    We're great friends who debate often. I've struggled with a response to this post, but have finally decided to go ahead with it and be blunt. Though you're on a great track with juxtaposing Christian stories with that of other cultures, I'd strongly suggest that these similarities do not disprove the Bible. Although I wouldn't take the track that Tony Vance has and say these stories have common roots in real events (perhaps the flood does, but it's irrelevant to my stance), I do believe they share a common thread, but it's something embedded in the human psyche. I like the term psyche, but it's certainly not scientific. I like it as a nebulous, ambiguous term and use it to reference all that is the human mind and experience, both from a scientific analysis and from a more philosophical perspective. To me, the psyche is more of a question than an answer, I guess.

    I am an avid proponent of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, and these guys have performed much better treatments of these themes than I ever could. The points you raise about the similarities of stories are explored not as proof of the Bible being false by guys like them, but from the perspective these stories exist, in many forms, across many cultures, because their themes are relevant to our experiences and existence. Though I suppose you can take the avenue of their commonalities as evidence of falsehoods, I think it's a misappropriation of very valuable tool. I could write a book on this point, but better men than me already have.

    Craig,
    I won't reply to any further posts you make, just to be clear from the start.

    Please, just stop. You're embarrassing yourself--hell, I'm embarrassed for you. You're regurgitating stories that, while it's cool you can do that, you obviously have little ability to understand them or