The Spirit of the Age

Zeitgeist, the documentary, has a lot of problems. The following are some notes I took:

You don't have to be Christian to realize that Zeitgeist's first premise of the Horus/Jesus connection is inaccurate and over-simplified. If you've read ancient world myth, and I was a big fan of Egyptian, Roman, Greek, and Chinese myth, you will see that the director weaved his own ideas of mythical stories throughout the first section, making the common theme of a Messiah born of a Virgin more ancient and pagan, taking away the foundations of the miracles of Jesus.

The film's premise, most likely influenced by evolutionary thought-processes, states that Jesus is merely the hybridized, higher form of Horus. As the filmmaker explains the Horus myth, error alarms went off in my mind. Any reader of myth (or Stargate fan) would know that Horus is not the sun god, Ra is the sun god. And Set is not the god of the underworld, that would be Osiris. If you look at their heads, Horus is the sky god and is represented by the falcon and Set is the river god and is represented by the crocodile head. That myth of light and darkness clashing daily sounds more Meso-American, or even Babylonian, than it is Egyptian.

From the Christian worldview, it is a given that humans from the dawn of time have had this internal desire for a Savior and that there is this sense that a Savior will come. God even said how He will provide the Way to salvation to Adam and Eve, so as the human race grew and spread, every culture would have had an idea of a Savior. This is true for the Flood account, in that almost every culture will include a flood or some watery deluge as part of their origins stories.

Also, God said from the beginning that the heavenly bodies are to be used as more than just measuring devices: they are to give signs about events that are to unfold. I don't believe in astrology, that's another discussion, but I do believe that the heavenly bodies coincide with many major events that transpired in the Bible, even the arrival of the Messiah. To say that Biblical events are merely the result of an ancient writer's imagination using the stars, moon, and sun as his inspiration is myopia on the grandest scale. Archeology and various historical data are showing with each passing year the reliability of the Bible's historicity.

The quote from Justin Martyr was taken way out of context. What the filmmaker just passed off as cartoonish, that the Devil had the foresight to influence Christ's characteristics in the pagan world, was actually true. Justin believed that demons perpetrated the myths of sons of gods born to virgins after those demons found out what God was planning. God told the prophets hundreds of years before Christ's birth what to look for in the coming Messiah. No myth resembling Jesus' life occurred before 800 BC, which was around the time when the Israelite prophets were becoming a force in their world. Greek myth, for instance, didn't begin or wasn't solidified in that culture until around 800 BC. Most every myth that had any connection whatsoever to Jesus occurred after Jesus' resurrection, which includes the Mithraic myths also.

Wow, and he actually said that not one of the ancient writers in Jesus' time mentioned his existence in any detail and that Josephus had a discredited account of Jesus. Sadly, this documentary is just the rehashing of the outdated and poor scholarship of the Jesus Seminar and other modern research into discrediting the historical Jesus. Also, it's apparent that Joseph didn't read the Bible but parroted others who have used verses in the Bible to give proof of their ideas.

Each point he makes is done logically so it seems to make sense, but there is no credible scholarship and the research is shoddy, much like the child who can prove that Santa exists because he received presents with boxes labeled "from Santa."

The point of this film was to make people seek out the truth for themselves and not allow authority to think for you. For me, I was raised to question authority figures (not directly taught, but my mother told me many times that I was rebellious, so it follows...) which led me to question my beliefs in-depth when I was in college. Maybe it was my dad's influence as well, because he wrote against the Vietnam war and was almost kicked out of his college for it.  Either way, I became one who won't accept assertions at face value unless I've done my own digging. So to me, the point of this film was already a given and it freed me to question the film's assertions. I'm usually skeptical of what skeptics say.  I prefer the truth.  As a Christian I question everything, but I understand that there are absolutes and that those absolutes should be individually applied. As a Christian I listen to authority, but I also speak up when authority is wrong, no matter where it's from or who it is.