Discover more in these hand-picked books What you think; what others say.
Stuff you need to know before the POCM makes sense. Ideas, rituals and myths Christianity boosted from the Pagans. Some of the Pagan's dying-resurrected godmen The Triumph of Christianity You are here. What did the Christians borrow? So what?
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What ya gonna do? Make a fool of yourself

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Who does it right? To try to impress his gullible readers, Pikachu pomps and puffs that with all the scholars being biased out there and refusing to submit to his obvious genius, it's clear that you need to go right to the source -- ancient books themselves. OK, that's fine. It's not that we don't recommend that you do that -- but if you do, you'd better not pretend it was all written with you in mind. Saying that you can just go "right to the source" here is like thinking you can immediately understand Russian culture just by picking up a book or two or three of theirs and reading it on your own. Please! Do that for some country you plan to visit and you'll get a spear run through your gut for being offensive. It's American audactity like Pikachu's that has us regarded as gai-jin in Japan.

Scholarship  
Scholarship is a discipline in which people who have spent years studying not only the primary documents, but the languages, the social world, the contexts, and all else that defines the primary document. Pikachu knows none of these things, and his alleged "advantage" of not having to "trust a secondary writer" is a bunch of malarkey. You won't get "the straight skinny" from a neophyte like Pikachu who doesn't know these things -- you'll get a badly garbled, prejudiced, "goldurn, I'm an American with a right to my opinyun" heavily distorted picture of what's really going on. If you're lucky.  

It's that sort of hapless clumsiness through primary documents that results in worthless theories like the pagan borrowing one. Even one of the few current scholars who subscribes to some part of it, Robert Price, has acknolwdged that early proponents (mostly freethinkers with other eccentric ideas, like about Atlantis) were bad about this. They had no idea what they were doing, so (for example) they read the 12 signs of the zodiac around Mithra as 12 "disciples"!

The good news is that even secondary writers (i.e., scholars) are not hard to figure out. But at Pikachu's level, "a few dollars and a few evenings reading" is about all that can be handled. Wouldn't want to miss The Simpsons because we were doing research.