Rejoice ye, for I am unto you an immortal God, and no more mortal.
[Empedocles the Pythagorean, in Philostratus, The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, written over two hundred years after Jesus. Oops. ]

Pikachu describes Pythagoras as an iceberg, but the funny thing is, no one else has ever brought him up as a copycat Christ. Why? It's not hard to find, but it sure did evade Pikachu: While Pythagoras did live in the 6th century BC, the Pythagorean religion wasn't actually "founded" by him at all. As noted here, this was a movement that developed greatly over time, and as soon as the Christian religion came to be recognized as a factor in the intellectual and political life of the Roman Empire, philosophy, in the form of Neo-Pythagoreanism, made active campaign against the Christians, proclaimed its own system of spiritual regeneration, and set up in opposition to Christ and the Saints the heroes of philosophical tradition and legend, especially Pythagoras and Apollonius of Tyana. Darn.

But really, they didn't copy Christianity either; they copied other people. Pikachu says that "Pythagoras founded a religious tradition focused on God -- but doesn't mention about God here: [I]t may, in general, be said that the school placed God, the supremely spiritual One, at the head of all reality. This, of course, was Oriental in its origin. Next, they interpreted the Pythagorean doctrine in a Platonic sense, when they taught that numbers are the thoughts of God. Thirdly, borrowing from Stoicism, they went onto maintain that numbers, emanating as forces from the divine thoughts, are, not indeed the substance of things, but the forms according to which things are fashioned. From Aristotle they borrowed the doctrine that the world is eternal and that there is a distinction between terrestrial and celestial matter. Their cosmology, in spite of this Aristotelean influence, is dominated to a great extent by the belief that the stars are deities and that the powers of air, earth, and sky are demons. Sure sounds like Christianity huh. Right. Pikachu also notes that these guys had a system of morality, as if that were something new and special for any religious system; as it happens, though, the Pyhtagorean system of morals was not quite a Judeo-Christian one: In their theory of conduct the neo-Pythagoreans attach great importance to personal asceticism, contemplation, and the worship of a purely spiritual deity. At the same time, it is an essential part of their ethical system that freedom from the trammels of matter and final union with God are to be obtained only by invoking the aid of friendly spirits and God-sent men and by thwarting the efforts of malign demons. This latter principle led to the practice of magic and sorcery and eventually to a good deal of charlatanry. Wow. Just call both "morality" and claim a parallel. Now isn't that stupid. Pikachu notes they had immortality of the human soul too. Whoope: But in line with the Greek hatred of the material world, that meant no Judeo-Christian resurrection. Scratch that parallel, too.

And it gets worse for Pikachu. Pythagoras performing miracles and his disciples doing miracles in his name is a post-Christian thingy: With this purpose in view the philosophers of this school wrote "Lives" of Pythagoras which are full of fabulous tales, stories in which more than natural wisdom, skill, and sanctity are attributed to the hero. They did not hesitate to invent where exaggeration failed to accomplish their aim, so that they gave only too much justification to the modern critic's description of their biographical activity as representing the "Golden Age of Apocryphal literature". Oh yeah: Pikachu notes that Pythy went to Hades and came back, but I have bad news: Jesus didn't do that. Oops again.

Pikachu says in the ancient world, Real men could become Gods -- did become Gods. Sound familiar? Sure it does. No, it doesn't. Jesus is never said to "become" God. His divinity is proclaimed from his very origin, in the Wisdom paradigm (a real parallel if there ever was one!) and that's not what was said about Pythagoras. And what was said about him was said hundreds of years later than Jesus.

He lived in the sixth century BC, but the writings about him doing this stuff are from the second or third century AD...

...generations before Plato or even Play-doh

Pythagoras may have been a big deal, away back then, but Pythagoras' followers didn't just keep his philosophy/ religion alive for generations and centuries; they added to it over the years, including because of a need to compete with Christianity. Pikachu is so naive that he thinks mere attribution to Pythagoras proves he must have said or done it. I wish The Jesus Seminar were that easy to get along with.

We don't think about him much, because he just wasn't that important religiously. Period.

Pythagoras taught that in heaven there are twelve orders, the first and outermost being the fixed sphere where, according to Aristotle, dwelt the highest God, and the intelligible deities, and where Plato located his Ideas. That's nice. Jews and Christians say nothing about any "orders" or any "fixed sphere," so what's all this for?