Get the entire Tekton site on CD or zipfile. Get a stripped-down copy of this page.

A helpful reader recently passed me some pages from Photius Bibliotheca -- the work of a Christian writer of many centuries ago who wrote a series of, well, "book reports" about things he had read. Of much curiosity was a report Photius wrote of a book titled The Forerunners of Christianity (though that may not be the title; it is a guess by a translator). This book no longer is extant, and it was written by a Christian rather than someone like an Acharya S. But I found it interesting that Photius replied to this work with some of the same criticism that we have used in reply to modern "copycat" theorists. Photius notes:

It is a collection of testimonies and quotations of whole books, not just Greek but Persian, Thracian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Chaldaean, and Roman, by authors highly regarded in each nation. The compiler tries to show that they are in agreement with the pure, supernatural and divine religion of the Christians; that they announce and proclaim the supernatural Trinity of one substance; similarly with the incarnation of the Word among men, the signs of His divinity, the cross, the passion, the burial and resurrection, the ascension, the ineffable grace accorded to the disciples from the Holy Spirit in tongues of fire, and furthermore the fearsome second coming of Christ our God, the resurrection of the dead, judgement and the reward for what each man has done in life.

We will let Photius' major criticism speak for itself:

No person of sound judgment could criticise the man for his efforts and his motive, but the result is another matter. It is not just that he often imposes similarity on texts which have no similarity with our sacred doctrines; but even with myths and fantastic ideas which their authors would laugh at if they had any sense, he has no hesitation in saying that these are in harmony with our sacred wisdom, and he tries to relate the strange ideas of these myths and fantasies to the concepts of holy dogma which are true, worthy of God, not subject to reservation, and pure. True piety does not benefit in any way; he might reasonably be thought to give the captious opportunities to attack it, if they will now be in a position to show some members of our church making efforts to reconcile irrelevant and utterly different doctrines with the fundamentals of our faith. It has no need of this; it alone is pure and true; and this is an attempt to force the interpretation of texts more distant from our beliefs than darkness is from light. The man undertook this great labor, as he says himself many times, in order to show that Christian teaching was announced and proclaimed in advance among all peoples by their intellectuals, and so to leave no excuse for those pagans who have not accepted the divine message. The aim is laudable, yet it should not have been undertaken ineffectually and implausibly, but in an acceptable manner consistent with our faith.

Photius notes that the author of this work "was active after the reign of Heraclius." According to N.G. Wilson, the translator of this selection of Photius, Haraclius ruled from 610-641 AD.

It is intriguing to note that we have laid this charge of false comparisons to copycatters -- so many times before as well. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

"Photius: The Bibliotheca, A Selection translated with notes" by N.G. Wilson. Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd. 1994. Copyright 1994 by N.G. Wilson.