Like every conspiracy theorist, Pikachu needs to contrive an excuse for why this alleged "story" of Christianity's pagan origins hasn't been told. The real reason is that mainstream scholars think of much of it as they do the idea that Yahweh was a space alien and Jonah's whale was a submarine. That is the real reason there are no courses comparing paganism and Christianity: the real scholarship figured out that this was a bust years ago. Pikachu is behind the times and swimming upstream. (That paganism as a whole is a religious dead letter does not help, either.)

On the other hand, it's just ridiculous to say that it's as if a thousand years of western religious history never happened. You can find it readily if you know where to look; not just the smattering of sources Pikachu dug out, but by checking things out. The source material I used for my copycat series wasn't that hard to find. It's all out there. So much for Pikachu's idea of a conspiracy of silence. (As an aside, paganism being a dead letter is a very good reason why there aren't many courses about it -- specializing in dead religions doesn't leave many job openings for potential scholars, and there sure are not going to be any jobs opening for priests!)
Nevertheless, Pikachu needs some excuse to cover his poor homework, so he hauls out the usual canard, which is, History is written by the victors. This excuse has been used by every conspiracy theorist and pseudo-Christian faith you can name; the Mormons say it happened, the JWs say it happened, the author of The Da Vinci Code says it happened, and it sure is funny the way the victors managed to cover up so many different versions of what "really" happened. The problem with such theories is twofold. First, they are patterned to be unfalsifiable: if any evidence found can be twisted to a plus, it is; but if there is no evidence, or it is against what is held, it is taken as further proof that things were covered up and smoothed over. Negative evidence is explained away as positive, and thus there is no way to falsify the theory. Second, time and time again, we find far closer analogues not in Paganism, but in Judaism. Pikachu almost completely neglects this point; it is obviously due to ribald ignorance, since he doesn't even know that Judaism had ritual baptisms! At any rate, the whole "history was written by the winners" shazam is a dodgeball -- it's an excuse for why evidence doesn't cooperate with preconceived and preferred theories, and an admission that the data, as it stands, does not support Pikachu's views. (On the other hand, much of Pikachu's complaint has to do again with his asinine "all or nothing" approach we have already discussed.)

Explaining to you where Pikachu erred is what this project is about. You'll learn how to turn his bull on its ear, and you'll have something to refer people to who throw a link to his site around like it was rock candy. Sorry, Pikachu -- there is no "Pagan God who sent His only Son to earth" who was "heralded by a star, born of a virgin on December 25th" and none that had the titles "Savior," and "Lamb of God"; there were none who were "betrayed and killed" and "rose again from the dead" (in the Jewish resurrectional sense); some few did ascend into Heaven; just as few are said to judge men's souls (though more often at once than "at the end of time").

The meaning of the figure's "life and Sacrifice" was sometimes "Salvation" -- but what that meant in each case was not the same, and the word "salvation" isn't a techincal term as it is today. Some did have a "sacrament of holy Baptism" which signified a "new life"; but the reason for the commonality is not where Pikachu thinks. The same with the sacred meal -- in which no others, actually, ate "bread and wine that are the body and blood" of the figure.

We got 'em all covered. Mithras. Osiris. Attis. Dionysus, Hercules, Krishna. All old news. Pikachu was outdated before he hit the Net.

But what's the point of this distraction? Pikachu says it's because her story helps answer the question you're already thinking: "OK, if Christianity had Pagan origins, how come I never heard about it?" That sure is odd, because last I checked, David Ulansey, Sfameni Gasparro, A. T. Fear, M. J. Vermaseran, Marcel Detienne, and all the other scholars I consulted for my pagan copycat series weren't being reamed with eggshells or anything like that. And if this proves "history is written by the winners" then one wonders why in the world the "winners" didn't blot out the story of Hypatia. It's a pretty stupid theory that takes evidence against itself as evidence for itself.

And due caution about Pikachu's claim that Christians institutionalized the Church starting in the 300s AD, their reaction to Pagan competition was to deny and suppress Pagan teaching. Not quite. Paganism remained the state religion until the time of Theodosius, and even when pagans were persecuted, it was done sporadically and incompletely (see entries here); furthermore, pagans themselves did their part to wreck churches and start riots. There's just no validation for Pikachu's vague and general charge of explusion and "murder" of pagan scholars.

I don't know what paranoia Pikachu has been reading to conclude that the word Pagan is a pejorative. Maybe he thinks Jimmy Swaggart and Texe Marrs represent the best mainstream scholarship Christianity has to offer. Who knows. The bottom line is that most pagan literature was more likely to have been lost not because their material was burned, but because paganism died out and no one wanted to keep making copies of their literature. The sound bite from MacMullen doesn't change that. If the pagan religions were so important to the pagans, then they would have done what the Christians (and Jews earlier) did when they were persecuted: They would have kept making copies in secret, and willingly risked the penalty. They didn't, because ultimately paganism failed to meet the needs of the people and wasn't worth suffering and dying for. To speak of a "Pagan version [that] was suppressed" begs the question of the "version" being any different than what we have now. And what we have now isn't cooperative with Pikachu's view, and is his only reason for claiming a difference. Not evidence.

[I]n late antiquity, both secular and ecclesiastical authorities repeatedly destroyed unedifying texts, in well advertised ceremonies, most obviously in sectarian disputes. . . . Non-Christian writings came in for this same treatment, that is, destruction in great bonfires at the center of the town square. Copyists were discouraged from replacing them by the threat of having their hands cut off.
[Ramsay MacMullen.. Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (1997), pg. 4]