"K Mart is your savings place." [K Mart jingle, 1970s]

Was Christianity new?  Was Christianity unique? Here's a better question: Is people asking for help new? Is people asking for help unique? Of course not. And once you realize that the word "salvation" was used for rescue from any difficult situation, Pikachu's asinine attempt to make Christian "salvation" a copy of other religions drops dead like the rest of his parcels.   Not amazingly, Pikachu's wrong again.  Sure, it's true that by the time of Jesus the tradition of Gods who save was at least six or seven hundred years old.  "Wow!?" Nuh uh. Put it this way: Death and what happens after it is a problem, right? We'd all like a little help with it, wouldn't we? Nuff' said. The rub is not in that gods were called on to "save" but how and why they did it, and what happened after they did it. And in that respect, Christianity's emphasis on personal sin, and rescue from its consequences by means of the brokerage of Jesus, is unique (beyond the foreshadowing of the sacrifices in Judaism).

So when Pikachu blatters out all this rap about Orpheus in the sixth, maybe the seventh century BC, and refers to a religion of morality and salvation, he's trying to fool you with yet more equivocation. Pikachu just throws out the word "salvation" as though that proves a parallel; but check this item which makes use of reputable scholarly sources: According to Nonnus it was customary in feasts for Orphics to daub themselves with white clay as the Titans did when they kill the God to conceal their identity – wearing masks menas in all iniciative systems the annihilating the profane personality for acquiring a new sacred one. Purification was an important idea as well for an Orphic, like the Pythagorean sought to pure away the taint of his bodily nature, the 'ancient woe' inherited from Titans. But participation in rituals of iniciation even was not sufficient to guarantee final salvation for the Orphic. There are certain postmortem rules which had to be kept according to the mystic geography of netherworld. For example the Well of Forgetfulness at the left of the House of Hades had to be avoided by the soul but he had to drink of well-spring flowing from the Lake of Memory. The dead had to say in asking for a drink from this Memory Lake: 'I am a child of Earth and Starry Heaven'....Death and initation are able to restore the primordial state of human being to become completely divine by annihilating the mortal part which was originated from the sin of the Titans.

Does that sound like Christian "salvation" to you? If it does, please tell me what church you heard it in, as Watchman Fellowship will want to investigate. Christianity does not have you follow rules, or go through extended rites of initiation (baptism, we will note later, is a reaction to your salvation, not a requirement for it); there is no "well of forgetfulness" to drink from in the hereafter; no secret passwords (well, unless you are a Mormon!); no masks; no disposal of the impure body (it is revitalized in resurrection instead). Do you hear any of this from Pikachu's quarter? No, he covers it all up under the general heading of "salvation" and points to that word with frenetic gusto, hoping you won't look any further than the tip of his finger. (A little later, we'll give an example of the word "salvation" from an ancient source used in a general sense.)

Sabazius He doesn't tell us the date of it, but Pikachu tells us of a fresco in Rome shows one of the God's faithful, now dead, banqueting among the immortal blessed. That's nice. Someone forget to tell Pikachu that Sabazius was just another name for Dionysus in Rome. So there we go again -- by isolating a tiny portion, Pikachu draws an illicit parallel.

Jesus saves with dignity -- Pagan Gods save green stamps

Osiris Generalizing as usual, Pikachu notes that Osiris' followers found salvation in his rebirth. Um, well, no, not exactly. Osiris' "rebirth" was more like a reassembly of his constituent parts, which rendered him a "dead God" unable to return to the land of the living. Obviously he couldn't just sit there doing nothing, so he became the judge of the dead. Not exactly a "rebirth" to "find salvation" in. In the meantime Pikachu once again tries to abuse ancient texts, in part because he doesn't realize that what is "specialty" Christian language today was "common" language yesterday. Here's what I mean...and by the way, both Apulieus (124-170 AD) and Maternus (4th century) seriously post-date Jesus...

"The keys of hell and the guarantee of salvation were in the hands of the goddess, and the initiation ceremony itself a kind of voluntary death and salvation through divine grace."  [Apuleius, Metamorphosis, Book 11, 21] Big deal, huh? That's all it is. Remember, "salvation" is a general purpose word at this time, as noted above; so is "grace" -- which was a common word meaning any unwarranted gift, of the sort that would be given in any client-patron relationship in the ancient world.

And, "Be of good cheer, O initiates, for the god is saved, and we shall have salvation for our woes."  [Firmicus Maternus, The Error of Pagan Religions, 22.1] Ditto on above. You may as well find parallels in the use of, "Please help me" to refer to anything from being "saved" from a burning building by a fireman to getting "help" doing the dishes.

Here we go again This inscription in a Mithraeum (temple of Mithras) in Rome is from 200 AD:

Enough said.

"reborn and created for delights," and "you have saved us by the shedding of eternal blood."

And here we go again, again: The Festival of Joy -- the celebration of Attis' death and rebirth, is not testified as having existed until centuries after Jesus -- and all the evidence indicates that the Attis cult worked up a lot of this stuff to compete with Christianity

"... suddenly a light shone in the darkness; the tomb was opened; the God had risen from the dead...[and the priest] softly whispered in their ears the glad tidings of salvation. The resurrection of the God was hailed by his disciples as a promise that they too would issue triumphant from the corruption of the grave." [for more see Frazer, Attis, chapter 1 -- for more up to date info, see Fear and Gasparro]