>>4461138
The way I see it is that a lot of these similarities come from intrinsic patterns/attributes of reality. I believe that the Creator, Prime Mover, All Source, Uncreated Consciousness, or whatever you want to call what most religions call "God" did live a life voluntarily, and came in the flesh as a human being. That's Jesus.
But He's bigger and infinitely older than "Christianity" or The Bible. If He built the universe with a repeating motif of "12," it makes sense that He'd continue that pattern during His human life-time and take 12 disciples.
It also makes sense to me that such a massively momentous event such as God coming in the flesh might be interesting enough for God to write His story in the universe. Or at least in a way that compliments it. One example being the progression of the zodiac.
I don't see cultural adaptations. I see a common creator and multiple cultures struggling to understand and communicate revelation about that Great Spirit, the reality He created, and what is going to happen in the future.
I believe the most significant event is this Creator coming as Christ, announcing and introducing Himself, revealing His nature, and making plain His will for us. I see it in part as a clarification/unification of our entire history of theorizing, story-telling, guessing, deciphering, etc.
He's told us parts through nature, we've deduced parts through philosophy, moral reasoning, and piecing together private and cultural revelation. But the life and person and story of Jesus is the moment our Creator unified all of our fragments with the ultimate revelation of His true nature, will, and plans, what our relationship is to Him, and what all this is/what we're doing here.
It isn't all brand new, but the truth has been sorted from surrounding myths, contextualized with the big picture, and more importantly: God has given us a pathway and invitation into a personal relationship with Him. The real, living, conscious, communicative God.
So, there may be a lot of truth to those ancient religions. God was still God before Christ and the Bible, so His story/truth/revelation is bound to be all over before hand. But believing the historicity and validity of the accounts of Christ leads me to filter other spiritual truths through that lens and understand how it relates to the actual Creator God.
I don't find it logical to presume that since Christ came after, His story is merely an adaptation. Just a continual revelation of a consistent God of our reality. The same essential truths and baked-in patterns. But now replacing the metaphorical with the literal, cutting away what we got wrong, with all the meat and potatoes of what/why/who/how/when that every culture has been pointing to.