The more I study and teach mythology, the more I start to unpack the confusion and misdirection that is the story of Jesus Christ. The birth of Christ is a particular puzzle for me. Mithras, who is the Persian Sun God was born on the 25th of December, which Christian syncretism leads us to believe is a particular day of importance for Christ. Easter, which is meant to celebrate the ‘rebirth’ of Christ was et to a specific date when, “The Council of Nicaea in 325 decreed that Easter should be observed on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox (March 21). Easter, therefore, can fall on any Sunday between March 22 and April 25.” (cite and cite). Now, this is where Easter gets weird for me. The holiday’s name is derived from Eostre and or Ostara, The later being the festival of the spring equinox, which is to be celebrated on–you guessed it–the first full moon following the equinox. So, there is some obvious overlap there. Eostre is the Anglo-Saxon goddess of fertility and spring, so there is more overlap there.
All of this adds up to a bit of confusion. This also defines the very concept of religious syncretism, whereby we see the “blending of religious belief systems into a new system, or the incorporation of other beliefs into a religious tradition.” (cite). This leads to a series of questions about what Christianity is and what the truth and origins of it actually are. Was there a real Jesus? I don’t know. Was the story shaped to make it more appealing to those of other pre-existing faiths–perhaps to help them ease the transition into this particularly aggressive form of monotheism? Yeah. No doubt.
Mythology teaches us that we’ve believed in certain key things all along. Christianity teaches us that it is the root of all of those things, even though it arrived much much later than all of them.