It is easy to run into some strange stuff while checking out the world of anti-Christian nonsense on the internet. One of the oddest is the set of websites run by Craig Lyons, a former megachurch pastor who has moved from his Baptist background to move toward what one might call a “Hebrew Roots” perspective. He currently holds views of the history of Christianity along the lines of the Zeitgeist/Acharya S/Jordan Maxwell astrotheology stream that holds Jesus story to be a metaphor for the solar cycle.

From examining Lyons’ material, he seems to have posted his work on a number of sites of the “freeweb” variety and the aesthetics are less than pleasing. Already saddled with prominent ads and clumsy web editors, Lyons compounds the annoyance level with the random use of large color print and all caps for emphasis. One immediately is drawn to compare it with low budget fundamentalist websites with similarly random insertions of all caps and color print and perhaps an animated gif of flames at the bottom of the page just to remind you of your future home.

If such aesthetic issues were the only problem with Lyons’ work, this might be overlooked. However, most of his websites contain “evidence” culled from the work of crackpots of this and earlier periods. His list of recommended sources contains such fringe notables as Acharya S, Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy, Gerald Massey, Albert Churchward, and T. W. Doane among others. He even includes Charles Francois Dupuis, one of the early supporters of the astrotheology thesis, as evidence of links between Christianity and the religion of Egypt. At least Dupuis was dead before the Rosetta Stone was deciphered and we found out his ideas were pure nonsense. Lyons has no excuse for his ignorance.

All of these little details will be given in time, but today I want to focus on one laugable little page by Lyons titled Disturbing Quotes about the Christian Faith: Could This Possibly Be True and We Not Know It?” In this article, he compiles a collection of quotes, primarily from Church Fathers, supposedly arguing the existence of direct parallels to Jesus prior to the New Testament period. Of course, once you actually read the quote in context and not with the sensationalistic comparison provided by Lyons, they turn out to be references to something else entirely.

None of this is terribly surprising. The Evangelicalism from which Lyons emerged is unfortunately known for rather superficial analyses of texts and when former Evangelicals turn against the Christian faith, the methodology often remains the same even as the desired conclusions are quite opposite. You can take the boy out of the fundies, but you can’t always take the fundie out of the boy.

The evidence of Lyons’ shoddy scholarship appears quite early in his misuse of Colossians 1:23 as he writes:

We find Saint Paul, the first Apostle of the Gentiles, avowing that he was made a minister of the Gospel which had already been preached to every creature under heaven…

Col 1:23 If ye continue in the faith grounded and settled, and be not moved away from the hope of the gospel, which ye have heard, and which was preached to every creature which is under heaven; whereof I Paul am made a minister; (KJV)

Answer for yourself: Did you catch that?

Paul is stating that he, the Apostle to the Gentiles, is preaching a message that HAS ALREADY BEEN PREACHED TO EVERY CREATURE UNDER HEAVEN! This bears some deep thought. I did just that. This opened my heart and mind to considerable in-depth study to fathom out the depths of what this one verse alluded.

Simply said, Saint Paul was preaching a God manifest in the flesh, who had been believed on in the world before the commencement of his ministry. Dear one, this could not have been Jesus of Nazareth, who had certainly not been preached at that time, nor generally believed on in the world till ages after.

This is complete nonsense as anyone with any familiarity with the passage would understand. While Paul may be engaging in a bit of hyperbole with his “every creature under heaven,” it certainly does not refer to a Gospel other than that of Jesus Christ. It is a reference to the preaching of the Gospel of Jesus in Paul’s day and the creatures are those alive to hear this gospel. This point is made clear by reading the passage in its full context wherein the exact “gospel” being preached is clearly identified:

We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, 4since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. Of this you have heard before in the word of the truth, the gospel, which has come to you, as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and growing—as it also does among you, since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth, just as you learned it from Epaphras our beloved fellow servant. He is a faithful minister of Christ on your behalf and has made known to us your love in the Spirit.

And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God. May you be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy, giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by[f] him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him, if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, became a minister.

Thus the gospel referred to in the passage is quite clearly that of Jesus Christ and not some other figure and the creatures under heaven are those alive at the time of this first generation of the preaching of this gospel and not past references. That Lyons could get this passage, understood perfectly well by both Christian and secular scholars, so blatantly wrong is indicative of the depths of his eisegesis of passages. He merely takes an isolated phrase or sentence and reads into it what he seeks.

Moving to his next quote, he then calls upon Justin Martyr for further evidence of a pre-Christian Christ as the real subject of Christianity:

Eusebius, in his Church History, tells us that Justin, in his Dialogue with Trypho, says “there exists not a people, civilized or semi-civilized, who have not offered up prayers in the name of a crucified Savior to the Father and Creator of all things” (Hist. Eccl. lib i. ch. iv).

The honesty of Justin Martyr as portrayed here is the heart of the subject matter of these web pages. I intend to show you that from the beginning of time the pagan nations had their “crucified Sun-gods” and much recorded about Jesus of Nazareth in the New Testament is nothing more than the “re-telling” of the same Sun-Myths; the only difference is that now they are applied to the life of Jesus the Jew.

Unfortunately, for Lyons, this one only demonstrates he has never bothered to check his sources in context. First of all, one immediately has to wonder why he bothered to quote Eusuebius quoting Justin when he could quote Justin directly. After all, the Dialogue with Trypho is a well known text readily available on the internet and yet he seems to avoid looking at the direct quote rather than what might well be a paraphrase.

Indeed, when one turns to Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho, Chapter 117, the passage does not quite say what Lyons infers above. First of all, there is no doubt Justin is speaking of the state of events in his own day and not past generations. But more importantly, he does not refer to a general “crucuified savior” but one specific individual:

For there is not one single race of men, whether barbarians, or Greeks, or whatever they may be called, nomads, or vagrants, or herdsmen living in tents, among whom prayers and giving of thanks are not offered through the name of the crucified Jesus.

Thus Justin specfically is referring to the crucified Jesus and not to some other prior crucified figure. The sheer amateurishness of Lyons’ efforts here is quite embarassing for someone claiming to have done all this research but couldn’t bother to check the original context of a quote he paraded as some sort of “smoking gun.”

But it gets even worse when one tries to find the reference in Eusebius’s Church History. Lyons gave Book I, Chapter IV as the reference but there is no reference to Justin Martyr in that chapter. Even more interesting, one of Lyons’ favored sources, a piece of pseudoscholarship titled Aryan Sun Myths: The Origins of Religion by Sarah Elizabeth Titcomb, makes the exact same reference with the exact same abbreviations and the exact same mistake. Thus, Lyons not only never bothered to read Justin, he never even bothered to read Eusebius! He merely regurgitated nonsense from a crackpot of a century ago without ever bothering to check the cited sources.

Lyons follows this incompetence by providing two more quotes by Eusebius and openly inferring a connection to prior pagan myths:

Eusebius says that “the names of Jesus and Christ were both known and honored by the ancients” (Hist. Eccl. lib. i. ch. iv). How could this be?

Eusebius, the great champion of Christianity, admits in his book: “that which is called the Christian religion is neither new nor strange, but-if it be lawful to testify the truth-was known to the ancients”
(Hist. Eccl. lib. 2, ch. v.). How could this be?

At this point, the kindest thing one could say is that he should read the sources he quotes rather than relaying the distortions of crackpots. If he did, he just might well understand how this could be.

The first quote, referring to the names Jesus and Christ, is given as appearing in Book I, Chapter 4 but again it does not appear there. Once more, we find the same source as the last quote (Titcomb) being used and the same mistake being made. Again, Lyons has never bothered to read the text itself to check this quote. It actually does appear elswhere (Book I, Chapter 3) but even a surface reading destroys Lyons’ interpretation.

Anyone familiar with patristic theology, something with which Lyons obviously has little background, would understand the Church Fathers saw the Christian Church as the true successor of the religion of the Old Testament. Thus, for them, the Old Testament and New Testament are the Old and New Covenants of the same religion and the earlier was interpreted as giving types and being fulfilled in the latter. Furthermore, their references to “the ancients” usually referred to the figures of the Old Testament and not some pagan past. Now one is free to question their beliefs or interpretations but there is no doubt that is what they believed and we must understand their wrtings in that context.

When we turn to this particular quote, Eusebius is referring to is not some past crucified figure in paganism but to places in the Old Testament (remembering they would have used the Greek Septuagint) where someone had the name “Jesus” or the title “Christ.” In fact, Eusebius is quite explicit about what he has in mind. In refernence to “Christ,” he writes:

Moses was the first to make known the name of Christ as a name especially august and glorious. When he delivered types and symbols of heavenly things, and mysterious images, in accordance with the oracle which said to him, “Look that you make all things according to the pattern which was shown you in the mount,” Exodus 25:40 he consecrated a man high priest of God, in so far as that was possible, and him he called Christ. And thus to this dignity of the high priesthood, which in his opinion surpassed the most honorable position among men, he attached for the sake of honor and glory the name of Christ.

That is, the priests of the Old Testament were called annointed which was translated “Christus” in the Septuagint. As for the name “Jesus,’ Eusebius writes:

And the same one foreseeing, under the influence of the divine Spirit, the name Jesus, dignified it also with a certain distinguished privilege. For the name of Jesus, which had never been uttered among men before the time of Moses, he applied first and only to the one who he knew would receive after his death, again as a type and symbol, the supreme command.

His successor, therefore, who had not hitherto borne the name Jesus, but had been called by another name, Auses, which had been given him by his parents, he now called Jesus, bestowing the name upon him as a gift of honor, far greater than any kingly diadem. For Jesus himself, the son of Nave, bore a resemblance to our Saviour in the fact that he alone, after Moses and after the completion of the symbolic worship which had been transmitted by him, succeeded to the government of the true and pure religion.

Hence, the “Jesus” he refers to here is Joshua who had the same name in Hebrew (and transliterated the same in the Septuagint) as Jesus. Thus it is quite obvious Lyons has never bothered to verify the context of the original quotations but merely has relied upon crackpots like Titcomb.

The same applies to the second quote of Eusebius. Again this seems to orginate with Titcomb, again the location is incorrect, and once again the context is mangled. The actual location for anything similar is not Book II, Chapter 5 but instead Book I, Chapter 4. Moreover, the context is, as was common with patristic writers, to argue Christianity was the true successor of the religion of Old Testament Judaism.

The title of Chapter 4 from Book I is “The Religion Proclaimed by Him to All Nations Was Neither New Nor Strange” and Eusebius argues for Christianity as fulfilling the religion of the Old Testament:

That the Hebrew nation is not new, but is universally honored on account of its antiquity, is known to all. The books and writings of this people contain accounts of ancient men, rare indeed and few in number, but nevertheless distinguished for piety and righteousness and every other virtue. Of these, some excellent men lived before the flood, others of the sons and descendants of Noah lived after it, among them Abraham, whom the Hebrews celebrate as their own founder and forefather. If any one should assert that all those who have enjoyed the testimony of righteousness, from Abraham himself back to the first man, were Christians in fact if not in name, he would not go beyond the truth.

In ending the chapter, Eusebius writes the ascribed quote but it is quite obvious it again has nothing to do with past pagan practices but asserting the continuity between the Old and New Testaments. Hence, once more we find Lyons’ “scholarship” quite deficient.

Lyons also points to a quote similar to the last one by Eusebius but given by Augustine of Hippo:

That in our time is the Christian Religion, which to know and follow is the most sure and certain health, called according to that name, but not according to the thing itself, of which is the name; for the thing itself which is now called the Christian Religion really was known to the ancients, nor was wanting at any time from the beginning of the human race until the time when Christ came in the flesh, from whence the true religion, which had previously existed, began to be called “Christian;” and this in our days is the Christian religion, not as having been wanting in former times, but as having in later times received this name

The source Lyons gives is from Diegesis by the nineteenth century anti-Christian firebrand Robert Taylor who quoted it from a collection of Augustine’s works (Opera Augustini, vol. i. p. 12). It is quite obvious Lyons has merely taken Taylor’s inferred meaning for granted and never bothered to check the source in its original context. For example, from what exact work of Augustine’s was the quote taken? Unless you have access to the same collection of Augustine’s works, you need to do independent research. Lyons has not.

It turns out the quote is from an early work of Augustine’s titled On True Religion and he does argue that true religion has an ancient past. But he never claims the true religion in his day, Christianity, had precedent in paganism but rather that it had its precedent in the religion of the Old Testament. In fact he makes clear the division between true and false religion earlier in the same work and where the true religion prior to Christianity could be found:

Similarly the entire human race, whose life, like the life of an individual from Adam to the end of the world, is so arranged by the laws of divine providence that it appears divided among two classes. In one of these is the multitude of the impious who bear the image of the earthly man from the beginning to the end of the world. In the other is the succession of the people devoted to the one God. But from Adam to John the Baptist they live the life of the earthly man under a certain form of righteousness. Their history is called the Old Testament having the promise of a kind of earthly kingdom, which is nothing but the image of the new people and the New Testament, with the promise of the kingdom of heaven.

It is quite obvious Augustine had no connection with pagan imagery in mind.

There are other quotes in the post all of the same “quality”: Some are ancient authors, both Christian and pagan, taken completely out of context. Others are worthless diatribes by anti-Christian crackpots. While Lyons’ merely regurgiates fringe to crackpots theorists not taken seriously by any scholar, he is a perfect example of the sort of nonsense one finds repeated throughout the anti-Christian net. Such webpages are not “rational” or even “skeptical” in any meaningful sense. They are unidirectional skeptics – every Christian claim must meet an impossilble standard of proof while any anti-Christian claim, no matter how dubious the source, is accepted without any examination necessary.

This is a perfect example of the reason for Christian apologetics. While apologetics can never produce faith, it can remove stumbling blocks based in misinformation and misunderstandings. Lyons has clearly done no research whatsoever apart from dubious sources who told him what he wished to hear. Any examination of the sources discussed above would have made clear his folly. It is Christians who need to clear the way of such objections and remove obstacles that are rooted in distortions and lies. Unfortunately, Lyons is just one of many making similarly ridiculous claims.