.

But still, that doesn't stop Pikachu from insulting Judaism himself, by claiming that they got theirs from paganism, too. Now watch this.

Bale

Henotheism It's not news that that early Judaism wasn't monotheistic -- both Jewish and evangelical Christian scholars have been questioning the appropriateness of that designation for a while now. On the other hand, Pikachu's designation of the word "henotheism" as best is erroneous. A better word is monolatry. Your dictionary may regard these as synonyms, but as noted here, that's not the always the case: Sometimes, monolatrism and henotheism are distinguished as follows: in monolatry, only one god is viewed as worthy of worship, the remainder viewed as inferior; in henotheism, the other gods are viewed as important and worthy of worship by others, however the henotheists worship only one god. The former is what describes OT Judaism.

You, Judah, have as many gods as you have towns; you have set up as many altars to burn sacrifices to Baal as there are streets in Jerusalem. [Old Testament, Jeremiah, 11:13-14]

Judean Cleanup From here Pikachu strives forth in two directions to turn Judaism into just another pagan variation. The first is a replay of his usual tactic of collapsing everything down to vague common denominators and then standing aghast at the contrived simiarities. Jews had a temple; so did the pagans, so Judaism is just modified paganism. As if the Yahweh would say, "Darn, I can't have my people have a temple. Baal already has one." What's God going to do, have them worship in open air (some pagans did that too)? In houses (yep, pagan gods had that also)? Jews had priests; so did pagans, so Judaism is modified paganism. as if Yahweh would say, "Crap, I can't have priests. Asherah has priests. So does Dagon." Come on, Pikachu, get real. These are the practical constraints of religious practice at work -- not evidence of "borrowing". Even sacrificial animals run back to the far more critical core of, "You don't get something for nothing" that is a universal. Who did the Aztecs borrow sacrifices from? No one. Borrowing is unnecessary as an explanation.

Beyond this Pikachu repeats his prior story of how the Jews conceded to Antiochus sacrificing pigs and uses it to say, all that changed was the animal killed and the name of the God. Tell that to the Maccabeean revolters, whose story Pikachu rather peculiarly omits. They didn't seem too convinced that "all that changed" was the animal and the name of the god. In fact a bunch of them died upon the principle that it was far more at issue than that -- and against Pikachu's absurd claim that "Judaism was continuous with Paganism." Hmmm. Bet Pikachu is hiding those facts for a reason.

Pikachu ignores the Maccabees, but he does dig out other folks he thinks can give the spin he needs. His idea is that the ancient Jews understood that their sacrifices worked just like pagan sacrifices. That's actually more of that generalizing spin-doctoring. Again, what lies behind all sacrifices is a core principle that we live with to this day: You don't get something for nothing. It's the principle that lies behind your paycheck from work; it lies behind the kid who mows your yard every Saturday; it was the essence of Greco-Roman patronage and the ancient suzerainty treaty.

But to the end of proving more than this, Pikachu quotes Philo: >>

Isidorus [the Greek envoy], that bitter sycophant, realizing that Gaius enjoyed being offered titles beyond human nature, said: 'You are going to hate these Jews here, my lord, and their fellow- countrymen more than ever when you hear about their ill-will and impiety towards you. For when all humanity was offering sacrifices of gratitude for your recovery, these were the only ones who could not bear to perform sacrifice. By "these" I mean to include all the other Jews as well.'

Phyllo Tart

So let's put it plainly: By leaving out that crucial point, Pikachu brazenly lies when he says that no one bothered to say they were different -- 'cause they weren't different. They were the same. Gaius didn't agree before (which was why they were there to begin with) and he didn't agree after. Pikachu lies when he says, "Philo said so. Isidorus agreed. Gaius agreed. They were the same." Philo was fudging. Isidorus accused precisely because he knew they were different where it counted. Gaius did not agree with Pikachu. He is a blatant liar here. In fact, while he says the Jews "rioted" he doesn't mention the reason that they rioted -- he says it was because the Jews and Greeks "didn't get along". Baloney! The reason for the riot was that Gaius (Caligula) wanted to set up an image of himself in the Jerusalem temple for Jews to worship. But Pikachu somehow manages to miss that little bit of trivia.

Got that? He's a liar. This shows that Jewish sacrifice was not Pagan sacrifice. It shows that Jewish worship was not Pagan worship directed at the Jewish tribal God. It shows that Judaism was incompatible with Paganism. Judaism was NOT the version of Paganism that developed in Judea. Lies aren't "cool", Pikachu.

At that we all shouted out together, 'Lord Gaius, we are being slandered; we did sacrifice -we sacrificed whole hecatombs. And we did not just sprinkle blood on the altars (as some people do) and then take the meat home for feasting and celebrations, but put the whole offering into the sacred flame to be burned up. We have already done this not just once but three times: the first time was on your accession as emperor; the second was on your recovery from that dreadful illness that the whole world suffered with you; the third was in expectation of your triumph in Germany.' 'It may be true,' Gaius replied, 'that you did sacrifice but you sacrificed to somebody else, even if it was on my behalf. So where's the merit in that? You did not sacrifice to me.' Immediately we heard that, following on his previous remark, we were seized by a violent trembling, such that it was beyond all concealment.
[Philo, Embassy to Gaius, 355 - 7]

So goes Pikachu's first effort; and so it is that it is shown that his quote from Julian and Origen is just an attempt to do more of the same. Which leads to his second effort, which will also be old hat for us.

The second Pikahcu prong has to do with the old, "Jewish myths are just modified pagan myths" routine, exemplified by the quote to the right. Now there is an irony here, because in a sense, what Eliade says is not in conflict with what we would say. No one thinks that the Jews originated these stories; the idea is rather that these stories of creation, cosmogony, etc. are rooted in what actually happened in history, and that the pagan versions are just evidence of this. The Jews, by this paradigm, either had a cleaned-up version revealed to them, or their predecessors preserved the clean version in their own tradition. (And no, you can't say i.e., the Gnostics did the same, because contextually, Gnosticism couldn't have arisen in Palestine -- whereas with a core historical event, there's no such issue.) So no one says that the Israelites "invented" anything here. The issue is, whose story us more likely to reflect the original, and on that, Pikachu has problems he is obviously unaware of. Analysis of the creation stories shows that Genesis could not have been dependent on its pagan forebear in Sumeria. The Flood story in Genesis is superior techincally to it's pagan counterpart (i.e., it has a boat shaped like a barge; Babylon's Noah had a boat shaped like a Borg cube!). That's why scholarship tends to the idea that Genesis recounts a tradition independent of -- not dependent on -- the pagan versions. That will leave us with Pikahcu's quotes from Smith on Yahweh and El being deities in the Jewish pantheon, but there's no need for detail here; Christian theology is quote comfortable with this point. See more about that here.

"...Genesis preserved a whole mythology of the traditional type. It begins with the cosmogony and the creation of man, paints the "paradisal" existence of the ancestors, related the drama of the fall...,which justifies the flood, and concludes with..the loss of linguistic unity....As in the archaic and traditional cultures, this mythology... explains the origin of the world and... the actual human condition.... ...the religion of Israel did not invent even one myth.  [MIrcea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, volume 1 §55]