4.7. On the Incarnation........................................................................... 48

4.8. Salvation in Paganism and Christianity..............................................52

4.9. The Essence of the Savior's Sacrifice......................................................... 64

5. Church...................................................................................... 68

5.1. Theocentric and anthropocentric understanding of the Church.................. 68

5.2. Christian Sacraments...................................................................... 68

6. Holy Scripture. His inspiration....................................... 76

7. Holy Tradition and Traditions......................................................76

8. The Church and Other Religions...............................................................78

9. Spirituality and pseudo-spirituality........................................................ 80

10. The Truth of Christianity............................................................ 81

A Brief Historical Review of Attempts at a Mythological Explanation of Christianity

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.