Maybe some facets of pagan fantasy, such as the good vs evil theme, but I'm not familiar with a pagain fantasy where the hero of the story sacrifices himself to open the gates of heaven to all mankind.
Now you are familiar:
From article on Mithra...
Mithra was believed to have been the son of God (Ahura Mazda). According to Persian tradition, Ahura Mazda sent his son Mithra to defend humanity from evil and from the Adversary, Ahriman. Mithra was also believed to have been incarnated in human form, born from the immaculate conception of his Virgin Mother, Anahita, around 200 BC had a last supper with his 12 apostles before he died for the sins of humanity.
That's pretty tight on isn't it? Here is its history as a religion...
Mithraism entered Europe after the conquests of Alexander the Great and spread rapidly throughout the Roman Empire in later years. The Hellenistic and Roman god Mithras, worshipped by male initiates from the 1st century BC to the 5th century AD, combined the Persian Mithra with other Persian and perhaps Anatolian deities in a syncretic cult.
Of course that is not the only one, there are more but I am not going to go through them all. Here is another entry from
the Wiki page of Jesus discussing comparable myths. Interestingly enough CS Lewis was aware of these and had some ideas of what happened...
...there are many similarities between stories about Jesus and contemporary myths of pagan godmen such as Mithras, Apollo, Attis, Horus and Osiris-Dionysus, leading to conjectures that the pagan myths were adopted by some authors of early accounts of Jesus to form a syncretism with Christianity. Some Christian authors, such as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, believed that such myths were created by ancient pagans with vague and imprecise foreknowledge of the Gospels. While these connections are disputed by many, it is nevertheless true that many elements of Jesus' story as told in the Gospels have parallels in pagan mythology, where miracles such as virgin birth were well-known.
Surprisingly they didn't even mention bacchus, so there are others not in that list.
On top of Lewis' fantastic method for denying the obvious conclusions (heck maybe they simply foresaw the box office success of the Narnia films?), some theologians argue that the devil seeded history with similar stories so as to create doubt.
You are free to come up with your own revisionist scenario, but don't let me know, it's depressing enough to know that two great minds could be so foolish.
In any case you are no longer uninformed. Pagan myths of almost the exact kind of story predate the Christ story. Narnia owes as much to Xianity as Xianity owes to pagans.
This message has been edited by holmes, 12-12-2005 01:50 PM
holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)
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