The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick by R. Crumb

On top of those, the ones I remember relate to the Greeks. For a long time Greek language and culture influenced the Christian church, and their lettering and symbolism still linger in the church today.

Early Christian versions of Jesus were basically copies of Eros, and Late Christian versions of Jesus were basically copies of Zeus, and then in the middle ages everyone got depressed so they turned him into a holocaust survivor on a wooden plank. Eve falling victim to curiosity with a Tree of Knowledge is basically just Pandora's story re-spun for different effect. Great Flood? Zeus did it first. Cain & Abel? Acrisius & Proetus. Satan/Hell? Hades/Underworld. Holy Trinity? Pagan Trinity. Twelve disciples? Twelve elder gods.

Point is, Christianity came along well after the Greeks and Romans had been spinning these tales all over the place. The Christians wanted a religion that everyone could be part of regardless of ethnicity. They're pushing this idea that there's not only one God, but there's a Messiah doing a lot of David Copperfield shit, and a Holy Spirit, and more weird stuff. Of course they're gonna include familiar stories to give some credibility to the new ideas. Plus, the old stories had weight - we still have Zoroastrians today!

A number of parallels have been drawn between the Christian views of Jesus and other religious or mythical domains.[1][3] However, Eddy and Boyd state that there is no evidence of a historical influence by the pagan myths such as dying and rising gods on the authors of the New Testament.[3][4] Paula Fredriksen states that no serious scholarly work places Jesus outside the backdrop of 1st century Palestinian Judaism.[5]

Scholars have debated a number of broad issues related to the parallels drawn between Jesus and other myths, e.g. the very existence of the category dying-and-rising god was debated throughout the 20th century, some modern scholars questioning the soundness of the category.[3][6] At the end of the 20th century the overall scholarly consensus had emerged against the soundness of the reasoning used to suggest the category.[6] Tryggve Mettinger (who supports the category) states that there is a scholarly consensus that the category is inappropriate from a historical perspective.[7] Scholars such as Kurt Rudolph have stated the reasoning used for the construction of the category has been defective.[6]

Scholars such as Samuel Sandmel, professor of Bible and Hellenistic Literature at Hebrew Union College, view conclusions drawn from the simple observations of similarity as less than valid.[1]Sandmel called the extravagance in hunting for similarities "parallelomania" – a phenomenon in which a scholar first presupposes the existence of a similarity and then "proceeds to describe source and derivation as if implying a literary connection flowing in an inevitable or predetermined direction", thus exaggerating the importance of trifling resemblances.[1][4]