Those who deny the supernatural character of the Christian religion assert that Christianity, this highest form of religious consciousness of mankind, in its essence did not say a new word to people, but represents to people a natural product of the previous development of human thought and by its origin is directly dependent not only on the Jewish religion of the Old Testament, but also on pagan religions. Christianity, from this point of view, is a simple continuation of paganism, and its entire content can be reduced to borrowings from pagan mythology. Not only is the person of Christ reduced to the level of a legendary, mythical personality, but Christianity itself is declared to be the result of a mass myth-making process. Christianity is the fruit of syncretism, a mixture of various ancient religions, from which it borrowed its rites, its teachings, and the very image of Christ. Christianity is thus pure myth-making, nothing more than a peculiar combination of religious ideas, mythological elements of that epoch.

As a basis for such an assertion, it is pointed out that there is a significant similarity between the basic dogmas of Christianity and the beliefs of the pagans. Thus, Christianity speaks of the incarnation of God, and other religions say the same. Christianity teaches about redemption, and in other religions one can find faith in redemption. The Resurrection of Christ is one of the most important dogmas of Christianity, and pagan mythology knows gods dying and resurrecting.

The idea of a mythological interpretation of Christianity is new in historical science. At the end of the eighteenth century, the French "enlighteners" Volney and Dupuis were the first to try to resolve Christianity into a system of myths. Charles François Dupuis (? 1809), whom modern mythologists consider their ancestor, published a huge (in three volumes) work entitled: "The Origin of All Cults or Universal Religion" (1794), in which he asserted that "the creature sanctified under the name of Christ is the sun... Christians are only worshippers of the sun," and that "the Christian religion, like other religions, is based on the worship of the sun, has preserved the same rites, the same dogmas, the same mysteries that other religions had."

In 1791, Constantine François Volney published his Ruins or Reflections on the Revolutions of States, in which he argued that Christians had borrowed their teachings from the Buddhists, that Christ was "Buddha disguised," and that the Gospels were in fact only "the books of the Persian Mithraists and the Syrian Essenes, who themselves are only modified Buddhists." The ideas of Volney and Dupuy penetrated early into Germany, but there negative critical thought was directed in a somewhat different direction.

David Strauss (? 1874), Bruno Bauer (? 1882), and other nineteenth-century German scholars critically study the New Testament sacred writing, also declaring it to be a collection of legends and fairy tales, but pagan mythology is rarely invoked to explain its origin. In fact, the successors of the "enlighteners" Dupuy and Volney in Germany in the XIX century were the Jewish renegade Nork, who wrote under the name Korn, and Rudolf Seidel. In the 60s, the first published a number of books on mythology and Christianity (according to Nork's theory, the sources of Christianity were the cult of Mithras and the Persian religion), and the second in his book "Buddha - The Legend and Life of Jesus" (1897) asserted that Christ is the image and likeness of Buddha.

The ideas of a mythological explanation of Christianity found ground in England as well. In 1887, an anonymous work "Ancient Mother" appeared, where the Gospel stories about the death of the Savior were compared with the myth of Dionysus. John Robertson (? 1933) wrote especially extensively in this direction. According to Robertson, the entire Gospel story is nothing but an adaptation of pagan myths about a dying and resurrecting god. From pagan elements, mixed with Judaic, the teaching of the Saviour is also woven; for every point of Christian doctrine and almost every fact of the Gospel story, Robertson tries to find a parallel in pagan mythology.

In the 20th century, an extremely large number of works were published in various languages with attempts to give a mythological interpretation of Christianity, in 1904 the Italian Emilio Bossi, under the pseudonym Milesbo, published the book "Jesus Never Existed", in which he proved that Christ is a solar, mythical deity, analogous to Krishna, Buddha, Adonis. In 1906, the American (mathematician by profession) William Bengramin Smith came out with the works: "Pre-Christian Jesus" and "Ecce Deus". In Holland, Professor of Philosophy Bolland, in a series of works, deduces Christianity from Alexandria, from the merging of Greek philosophy and Jewish Hellenism into one whole. At the same time, the works of the so-called "pan-Babylonists" – Assyriologists – were published: Fritr. Delitzsch, Jensen, Gunkel, Jeremias, Winkler and others, who set out to find traces of Babylonian myths in the biblical religion and, in particular, in Christianity.

A major event in the history of the mythological school is the speech of Arthur Drews, a professor of philosophy in Karlsruhe, with the first volume of his book "The Myth of Christ", which appeared around Easter 1909. Drews's book caused great excitement in Protestant circles in Germany, although in essence Drews said nothing new, "except perhaps mistakes." Drews owes his fame to the German "Union of Monists", which took Drews's ideas under its wing, made them the subject of passionate agitation and threw them into the crowd as the "last word" of historical science.

From January 31 to February 1, 1910, a debate took place in Berlin over Drews's book, with the participation of the author and the most prominent representatives of German theological and historical science. Both in the debate and in the vast literature that appeared around the Myth of Christ, Drews was completely destroyed scientifically, and German public opinion never returned to his ideas. Nevertheless, Drews continued his writing activity on the history of the emergence of Christianity. In 1911, he published the second part of his "Myth... ", in which he tried to refute the objections of his opponents. In 1921, Drews published a new book entitled: "The Gospel of Mark, as a Testimony Against the Historicity of Jesus." In 1923, the book "The Starry Sky in the Poetry and Religion of Ancient Peoples and Christianity" was published, where Drews used the astral method to explain the emergence of Christianity, in addition to the mythological method, i.e. he asserted that the Gospel legends presented a description of the "movement of the sun" (Christ is the "solar hero") and "its position at different times in relation to the fixed stars". In 1924, Drews's new work "The Emergence of Christianity from Gnosticism" was published. In addition to these major works, Drews wrote popular works: "The Legend of Peter", "The Myth of the Virgin Mary", "Did Christ Live", "Denial of the Historicity of Jesus in the Past and Present". Drews wrote his last two works by special order of our society "Atheist". In all his works, Drews stands on a decidedly mythological point of view.

The ideas of Dupuy, Robertson and Drews had a strong influence on the Polish writer and novelist Andrei Nemojewski (? 1919). In his book "God Jesus", Nemoevsky, following the example of his teachers, denies the historical existence of Christ, and about the Gospel narratives he asserts that they are partly borrowed from pagan myths, and partly read from the celestial globe. At the same time, the astral method in Nemoevsky is predominant to the point that it caused condemnation from Drews himself.

In our anti-religious literature, the ideas of a mythological explanation of Christianity gained wide popularity in their time. Soviet mythologists, following the Western ones, consider Christ to be a legendary, mythical person, and the Gospels to be collections of myths.

Later, in order to explain the origin of "myths", some people use not only the myths of pagan religions, using the astral method, but in addition to this, they also pay attention to the social environment in which our religion arose, to the socio-economic conditions of life in society contemporary with the emergence of Christianity, i.e., in other words, they try to combine the mythological method with the dialectical-materialistic method.

Is the basic thesis of the mythological school about the syncretic nature of Christianity true, however? Is our religion really a product of the natural religious-historical development of mankind? Are there scientific grounds to talk about a causal genetic dependence or connection between Christianity and pagan religions?